Here then is eP's Best and the Rest wrap up for 2001.

2001 has been an interesting year. Earlier in the year Seattle lost several clubs from the effects from an earthquake. Following that incident, I lost my day job--another statistic in the many layoffs in this region. With that I became less inclined to seek out or purchase new music. Going out to clubs to support local bands and check out new ones became less of a priority. Then September 11 happened and a somber silence became a universal sentiment. Out of fear came the concept that music and other art forms were trivial in the grand scope of things. As time goes on I am learning the importance of all art forms and, especially, music. Music is not trivial. Music provides a way to connect deeper with others. Music's outreach is infinite. Thanks to all the music makers listed below. Think peace.

1. Björk, Vespertine (Elektra). Lush, sublime, beautiful. Björk again breaks new grounds with her fascination of sound and technology while maintaining its organic source.

2. Ursula Rucker, Supa Sista (!K7 Records). Ursula Rucker is loved. This spoken word artist has worked with the likes of 4Hero and Bahamadia and packs an extra punch with her poetry. Profound, prolific flow with lots of heart.

3. Julien Jacob, Shanti (WEA France). Tracking down this CD might be difficult but it's worth it (I found it from a Canadian online store). I saw Julien Jacob at WOMAD this year. This vocalist/writer from Benin (now resides in France) utilizes space in his music. Meditative. Simplistic, urbane sounds.
   Click here to read eP's coverage of WOMAD this year.

4. Radiohead, Amnesiac (Capitol). What else can I say, other than, it's Radiohead!

5. Bill Wolford's Head, Exposure to Living (Go-Kustom Records). Lots of heart put into this record. Displays the lost art of well-crafted rock songs. More cohesive than the first self-titled release (Innova, 1998), this continues Wolford's mission to educate the world on "Middlewestern Ethnic Music." This offering provides quirky, eccentric, and eclectic down-home sounds from this Seattle musician.

6. Sheila Chandra, This Sentence Is True (Indipop/Shakti Records). Check out "Is" and you'll know why Sheila Chandra made my list.

7. Nikka Costa, Everybody Got Their Something (Virgin/Cheeba). Didn't want to like this record because of Ms. Costa's image, but this album is fun, light-hearted and most of all, the girl can sing!

8. The Blind Boys of Alabama, Spirit of the Century (Real World). Another WOMAD find but oh, so worth it. Charles Gatemouth Fountain and the Blind Boys have been preaching for over 3 decades and now are collaborating with secular artists like Ben Harper, Lou Reed, and Jimmy Page/Robert Plant. Not for everyone, but if you ever need to get your church on, grab this record.
   Click here to read Hope's interview with the Blind Boys of Alabama.

9. Aiko Shimada, Blue Marble (Tzadik/New Japan). Aiko's music is reminiscent of Joni Mitchell and David Sylvian introspective yet delicate. She's another great find from Seattle.

10. Various Artists, Hold The Vocals: A Tribute to the Instrumental Hits of the '50s, '60s, '70s (Go-Kustom). Fun and interesting takes on songs that we all grew up with. It's a strange confirmation that certain songs are part of our collective unconsciousness.

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There are those who are bound to disagree, but 2001 was a profoundly disappointing year in music. Built to Spill and Death Cab for Cutie released experiments in mediocrity, the Afghan Whigs split up, and I moved away from the live show Mecca of the Pacific Northwest to Hamburg, Germany, which if I'm not mistaken can only claim the Beatles and house music as peaks during its long and otherwise unspectacular musical history.

Against the odds, I managed to catch great performances by Juno, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones [Click here to read Eric's interview with the Flecktones.], Bluetip, and The Weakerthans. I did, however, have misfortune of missing the Cuban improv pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, as well as the sultry vocal stylings of Diana Krall. Shit happens.

But live performances are only a small part of the equation. Recordings are the real meat and potatoes of the music scene, because I can't invite, say, Modest Mouse or Pedro the Lion to play whilst I'm cooking dinner or trying to figure out how to get through another rainy Sunday. Long after a stunning set has disappeared from memory, I've got the album to spark a nostalgic foray into the past. And that's why my 2001 top picks, made easy by the abundance of garbage that was peddled off as music, are all recordings.

Here goes:

• Swell, Everybody Wants to Know (Beggars Banquet). The most underrated band in operation. This full-length and the Feed EP marked the anticipated return of the ex-San Francisco indie scenesters, now pared down to a solo act by front man David Freel.

• Fats Waller, Ain't Misbehavin' (Dreyfus Disques). A remastered issue with new cover art on the French Dreyfus label, and one of the most delightful re-releases since they stopped pressing 78s.

• Fugu, Fugu 1 (Minty Fresh). Another French export. If it hadn't been for eP, I might never have come across this retro pop masterpiece.
  Click here to read the review.

• C, DEP (Minority Records). Eclectic, instrumental post-rock from the indie hotbed (no kidding) of Tábor, in the Czech Republic.

• Radiohead, Amnesiac (Capitol). These avant-garde Brits were hoping to alienate us entirely. Imagine their surprise when they looked behind and saw we'd decided to come along.

• Cannonball Adderly, Cannonball Adderly's Finest Hour (Verve). Another superb Verve compilation. These recordings are by no means the whole of his abbreviated career, but rather a rapturous dip into the highlights.

• Spoon, Girls Can Tell (Merge). Two days before I got this CD in the mail, I'd been complaining that nothing good had come out of Texas in years. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

• Burning Airlines, Indentikit (DeSoto Records). R.I.P. Jawbox. Your spirit lives on in Burning Airlines.

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1. Godflesh, In All Languages. A two-CD Best Of release, what can one say about the monstrous innovators of industrial metal? Around 1990, I was introduced to Godflesh by a friend who is no longer here (R.I.P., Chewy).

2. Godflesh, Hymns (Koch Records). Again, Godflesh continue with their brand of industrial metal. This is a very good album.

3. Electric Frankenstein, The Buzz of 1000 Volts. Electric Frankenstein again come through with a monster of a punk rock album.

4. Killing Joke, No Way Out but Forward Go. This is a live double album from a 1985 performance (with a couple from 1986) . The second disc is a CD-ROM with videos from the songs.

5. Columbian Neckties, Abrance (Bad Afro). I was very surprised by how tight these guys play music. Fast, tight-as-an-asshole, rock.

6. Mortiis, The Smell of Rain. This release just grew and grew on me. I thought this was going to be some cheesy industrial mix, but it turned out to be a very good album.

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The paragraph right before this one, the one that started me off but has just been deleted, went on and on about the need to organize a music buyers strike. The list of shitty albums I've purchased this year is very long. Sometimes you have to wonder whether the A&R folks are not hard of hearing. But that was the paragraph I didn't think you should read. For one, I would be the first to break a buyers strike. I'm curious about the new Hood album and the Piano Magic compilation Seasonally Affective. I've saved up for the Stars of Lid's new release and remain hopeful about Michael Gira's collaboration with Windsor for The Derby's Dan Matz, What We Did.

Nonetheless, this year more than others I care to remember has brought one musical disappointment after another. Here are the latest entries in my list of Shitty Albums of 2001:

345. Aereogramme, A Story in White. This shitty album almost makes me sad. I reckon Matador was hoping Aereogramme would pick up where Mogwai had left off, now that the Scottish foursome has developed a deep affinity for the cello. Here's another English band with a knack for explosive guitar riffs and exaggerated dynamics. Here's another band on the well-regarded Chemikal Underground label just waiting for its big stateside release. If Mogwai made it big playing infinitely long instrumentals, just imagine far Aereogramme could go with Craig B.'s vocals and vocals and songs no longer than five minutes. Just imagine the airplay. Woo-wee! But really, Aereogramme is a fraud. During "Post-tour, Pre-judgment," Craig sounds like a pre-pubescent pop singer one minute and a raging punk rocker the next. The guitars may well be mean, but they're also invariably plastic. The dynamics are startling, but you never take your hand off the volume dial. And I won't get into the half-dozen sappy ballads that litter this album.

344. The Frames, For the Birds. Apparently, The Frames are almost ten years of old, but you'd never guess that from this album. However, much the band has matured since its first release in 1992, For the Birds is a confused collection of poppy songs that seems outright amateurish. I hold frontman Glen Hansard personally responsible for most the damage here. His lyrics are naive and his vocals intolerable. Take the chorus to the ballad "Disappointed": "I'm not sad, just disappointed / I'm not mad, just disappointed." What's more, Hansard's voice on this song is filtered to sound as if they came from an old record. The conceit and self-importance behind this three-minute ballad pervade the album. Hansard yodels in the peppy "Lay Me Down," whispers in the theatrical "Santa Maria" and almost reverts to spoken word in the philosophical "Friends and Foe." His affectation is all the more astounding because the rest of the band consistently delivers interesting arrangements and Steve Albini is credited with recording. To this day, I resent purchasing this shitty record.

343. Four Tet, Pause. It's with deep sadness that this album gets inducted in this year's shitty list, but Kiernan Hebden simply should not have settled for the straightforward tunes on Pause. Up until this album, Four Tet had been something of a revelation. Dialogue is England's answer to Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Die. In fact, it is twice as good and about five times as rockin' as anything Chicago's finest have ever done. Hebden use to pile off-kilter drum loops with demented bass lines and all sorts of unsuspected things, but his bag of tricks seems to have run empty in 2001. You just can't run a sample backwards and pat yourself on the back for a song well done, as he seems to have done with "Tangle." And for the long seven-minute songs like "You Could Run My Dad," he should have made at least an effort to play something other than a straight scale. This shitty album is just deadly boring.

342. The Red House Painters, Old Ramon. Wow, what in the world happened to Mark Kozelek? Many a high school day was spent brooding to his languid strumming, and this seemed like just the thing to offset my purchase of the 340th shitty album this year (Sigur Ros Ágætis Byrjun). I thought Old Ramon would at least take me back to the bitter-sweet days of junior year in college, after all lore has it Kozelek recorded this album in the fall of 1997. But from the first track to the very last one of them, Old Ramon is not just a shitty album, it's an assault to the senses. Take the opener, the cruelly named "Wop-a-Din-Din." What kind of self-respecting crooner sings with a full choir about a cat?

1. Capitan Onboard, Capitan Onboard. Before you write a furious letter to the editor, I'll have you know I did a little investigation on this one. Although Joe Goldring's solo outing is dated 2000, the album hit the stores in 2001, March 16 to be exact. This four-song EP (clocking in at 33 minutes) is an understated affair that grows on you the more you listen. Goldring has somehow managed to make his guitar twangs sound like the muffled humming of a soul singer. During "Picnic," it sings along to the steady raise and fall of a hypnotic piano loop. Imagine yourself on the deck of a small ship taking the sun, bobbing up and down and up and down. Goldring pulls the same trick in spades during "Arms," which surprisingly is a coherent, fully developed song with a melody and all. Unlike his peers, Goldring keeps his experiments at a level where the innovation and daring don't detract from the simple pleasures of music. Here's a cheer to Capitan Onboard: Yay!

2. Unwound, Leaves Turn Inside You. I'm willing to crown this as the best album of the millennium, and this is not just an indefensible hyperbole. After TK years of working away at their music, Unwound must have thought they really had something this time round. How else could it allow itself the indulgence of a lavishly packed double CD? I concur with the band's judgment wholeheartedly. In fact, I think I'm a better person for recommending this album to my friends--it'll teach us about ambition and follow-through. Take the average song, say track five, disc two. Clocking in at almost ten minutes, "Terminus" is really three songs wrapped in one; a Shakespearean drama in three acts with a mad king, a clairvoyant jester and a cunning woman with a tragic flaw. Sara Lund's tight drum rolls bring Justin Trosper to the very edge during the first three minutes of the song. His fit culminates with an oblique threat, "Hold me I'm a gun, six shots and I'll be gone." For the mid-section, a pithy cello alternates with Trosper's more ebullient guitar, and both eventually rally for a climax of Greek proportions. Sara Lund, who until this point had only added wood to the fire, now turns sentimental. She lays down a straight beat and rides the song through its elegiac final minutes. A long cheer for this one: Yee-pee yay!

3. This Heat, Deceit. This was originally released in 1986 and just re-issued by the folks at These Records. I've had less than two weeks with the album, and it's already clear that Charles Hayward and Co. still stand head and shoulders above the pack. (It also comes to show how shitty this year's crop was.) In a sense, Deceit is no different than other This Heat albums: It's charged, dark, idiosyncratic and flawless. Every album is like an hour-long ritual to a pagan god, a series of chants, dances and ceremonial sacrifices. Listening to Deceit is like a watching a procession of priests thanking the gods for a bountiful harvest. I'd cheer, but it seems sacrilegious.

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In particular, this year was a mixed bag of super sweet pop combined with a classic savage inner struggle. Not since the '60s have we had a year that gave us as much simple, elegant rock 'n' roll than we got with new bands like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Strokes, and The Shins. Electronic music mutated into much embraced new animal with the likes of Oghr, Air, Björk, Arling and Cameron, and the colossal Radiohead. Snoop Dogg and the venerable Dr. Dre managed to take funk and hip-hop to another chevy level with an album that gives the era of George Clinton and P-Funk, and Sly and the Family Stone, a nod of religious proportions and a serious run for its money. The nine headed freak called Slipknot made sure that no one, and I mean no one, was going to challenge their reign atop the metal scrap heap. And Greyboy showed up in 2001 with the best downtempoish hip-hop record I've ever heard. So here it is, in some particular order.

1. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, B.R.M.C.
   
2. Oghr, Welt.
   
3. Air, 10,00Hz Legend.
   
4. The Strokes, Is This It?
   
5. Björk, Vespetine.
   
6. Arling and Cameron, We Are A & C.
   
7. Snoop Dogg, Tha Last Meal.
   
8. Greyboy, Mastered the Art.
   
9. Slipknot, Iowa.
   
10. Radiohead, Amnesiac.
    
11. The Shins, Oh, Inverted World.

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