the 25 most 2004 albums, as ranked by someone who could get a ride to the mall’s FYE most weekends in the mid- to late-’00s
“remembering some guys”? brother, i never forgot them
as you may have heard, 2004 was 20 years ago. i think most people who look at music blogs every day have already processed this, given the number of anniversary pieces i’ve seen and definitive rankings of records from this year shared by individuals within the blogosphere on social media who were alive and aware of what was going on in indie rock at least by the end of the decade. unfortunately, it is my duty to share with you that all of those lists are wrong.
i think we can all agree that 2004 was a uniquely great year for music (and movies), which makes the idea of revisiting it—and, more importantly, writing about our revisitations of it—so appealing for the nostalgic 30-somethings among us. i’m very conscious of the role nostalgia has in all of this, which is why i made the decision to factor that into my own ranking of albums from 2004. since college, i’ve warmed up to the weirdo hip-hop of clouddead and local-icon heavy chicago acts like airiel and isis who released important records that year, but it feels a bit disingenuous involving them in all of this. plus, i don’t want to lead anyone to believe that i was actually cool in high school. also, i’d rather be all, “hey, remember the fucking zutons?”
this is first and foremost an autobiographical exercise for me rather than any sort of professional evaluation which, yeah, was initially inspired by seeing some pretty glaring omissions to people’s lists (granted i still haven’t haven’t heard a good chunk of the indie canon from 2004). just remember that if you’re planning on insulting the pool from which i pulled these releases, you’re basically bullying a teenager.
anyway, brace yourselves for some extremely lo-res album artwork.
25. the decemberists, the tain i’m sure my initial impression of the decemberists was largely tainted by the fact that i absorbed them (specifically her majesty and picaresque) in the midst of my oldest brother’s high school theater-kid phase, but it somehow took until a few years ago to fully process the fact that this band made a hard pivot from churning out completely unreasonable, um, shanties to pretty tolerable prog-rock with the crane wife in 2006—only after testing those waters with this five-act, nearly 20-minute single a few years prior. if you can overlook colin meloy’s very specific accent that—for me, at least—immediately invokes tedious nine-minute accordion ballads (i swear to god this is not taken from a john carney movie, but my brother and his friends had “mariner’s revenge” memorized word for word and would belt it out it in the car), the tain weaves into some of the more interesting territories the band would explore in the next decade. then again, yeah, there is a little shantying. and accordion. sailors take warning.
24. the vines, winning days arguably the peak of the aughts garage-rock revivalist ploy to present young audiences with recycled sounds from two completely different and totally incompatible eras of rock music because we won’t know the difference—and you know what? it worked! classic sophomore slump album drained of the baseline unhingedness of their debut (you see them play letterman?) and leaning into fellow-countrymen jet’s bizarre balancing of beatles (well, specifically their y2k revival stressing the most insufferably hippie aspects of the band) and nirvana (eh, something like that) with the commercial-fodder “ride” buoying the project in case both polarities disappointed. like interpol they bounced back again with their somewhat edgy though still severely corny third album, but man, every time they dip into the acoustic ballads here it feels to me like when my family had to read passages from the new testament before opening presents on christmas morning. turns out “rainfall” is kinda just a CCR song.
23. mates of state, all day the american eagle to matt & kim’s urban outfitters. somehow never heard anything else mates of state did aside from this EP and weirdly recall not being particularly interested in exploring their discography despite playing the first two tracks on this release (lord knows i didn’t know the bowie cover, even after i saw life aquatic) to death—which in retrospect, yeah, wow, sounds a lot like theater-kid matt & kim, albeit with more than a whiff of twee-pop whimsy guiding their connecticut ass cardigan ass pre-sleaze aesthetic. can still appreciate the complexity of these songs and the fact that they’re pretty distinct from just about any of their RIYLs but i would still beat their ass if they transferred to my high school. in case you were wondering they retired in 2011 but reformed four years later to soundtrack and star in a movie that is quite literally called the rumperbutts?
22. straylight run, straylight run still not entirely sure how a limb on the taking back sunday family tree got sucked into my indie-rock-purist slipstream but i do remember feeling guilty-pleasure-y about being hooked by the “makedamnsure”-lite chorus on “tension and the terror.” like most people it was “existentialism on prom night” which first got me interested in the band, a track which i feel like spoke to my newfound nostalgia for christian rock after i’d recently been weaned off a pretty strict diet of jars of clay, and also a track which led me to google the title term and balk at the infinite vagaries of philosophy for the first time. then and now i feel like the prominent use of plastic-sounding piano sinks a lot of these tracks, which makes the opener pretty tough to sit through and songs like “another word for desperate” a welcome respite. i remember my brother’s friend bullying me when he picked me up from the mall after i bought this. he was all “what’s this [homophobic slur probably—it was the ’00s] shit” and i paused and was like “oh it’s a new rap group called tha straghtlight runnaz.” he nodded thoughtfully.
21. the living end, modern ARTillery first secular CD i ever bought with my own money and also remarkably the only album on this list by a band i discovered from a THPS soundtrack, though there’s a year-long free subscription to gbogn in it for you if you can tell me what other two albums on here feature songs from that franchise. it’s kind of funny to me now that i initially heard this album and considered it an obscure australian version of green day in part because i only knew green day as the american idiot band (song about some ambiguous jimmy? check!) at this point, and because TLE similarly had built a fairly different reputation prior to this as a like….stadium rockabilly band ultimately worthy of guitar hero song placement. looking past the punning album title, silly guitar solos, a bit of domestic violence fantasy, and a back half which is nearly indistinguishable, there’s some pretty memorable hooks on here. i remember telling my next door neighbor that there was an 8-minute song on here, thinking it was possibly the longest track ever recorded, and he told me his mom had a classical recording that was like an hour long. i did not believe him.
20. the von bondies, pawn shop heart something very “2004” about a band whose only claims to fame are (1) providing the theme song for a relatively popular network drama series and (2) getting their shit rocked in a bar by jack white, whom they were protege to. upbeat songs about being a broken man set to watered-down blues rock and utterly middle-of-the-road (aside from the drummer going weirdly nuts on nearly every track) garage-rock revivalism that would feel right in place as the band playing at a venue michael cera goes to in one of his teen romcoms later in the decade. i think part of the appeal for me was that a lot of these songs were what i’d hoped get born would be, albeit with a much more american—specifically motor-city, not that “MC5” meant anything to me in the aughts—muscle to it. you better believe i eventually convinced myself i’d discovered this group through some more real-heads means than coming across “c’mon c’mon” on the myspace page of a friend who watched rescue me by the time these guys dropped their next album five years later.
19. xiu xiu, fabulous muscles the fact that i was somehow deeply spiritually drawn to “i luv the valley OH!” the moment i first heard it at the tender age of 16 feels like an early beacon of the freak shit made by miserable people i’ve slowly been aligning myself with over the past decade and a half—just something about a guy actively having a panic attack while enunciating french like a tourist really did it for me. nothing else on the album really hit for me at the time (i will say “support our troops” is fun to revisit—seems like a good companion piece to anco’s “college”), though i think i’d have a difficult time making a case against it when “valley,” a song i still love, sounds like, uh, that. i also remember thinking it was odd that WHY? and xiu xiu covered each other around this time, but now it makes sense to me that jamie would be a member of the extended anticon crew between the unpredictable glitching and occasionally yoni-tier taboo lyrics found across this album, not to mention “valley” being kind of rapped. damn remember her space holiday? i can’t believe they heard “valley” and were like “how can we make this kinda of jolly?”
18. les savy fav, inches let’s stay friends is easily in my top five albums of all time as long as you don’t give me over a minute to think about it, but for some reason nothing else this band has ever done full-length-wise has ever hit for me. i’m not sure whether the condition that this is technically a singles collection helps its case (it’s nearly 20 songs recorded over the course of a decade) more than it hurts it (building nothing out of something is my favorite modest mouse album), but mining these 70 minutes of music for their best moments (“dollar bin” and “sweat descends,” objectively; the final track—weirdly equal parts tokyo police club and fucked up—subjectively) always feels like a bit of a chore hardly worth the payoff. tons of demo-quality (derogatory :/) monotone post-punk, brutalist turn-of-the-millennium post-hardcore, and apparently-actually-fairly-ubiquitous-at-the-time sasscore along with curios including the longest and most nautical-court-martial-themed skit ever recorded. in glass-half-full terms, though, i guess it’s my favorite release among any of those qualifiers to be released in 2004.
17. grizzly bear, horn of plenty epitome of albums i love but don’t particularly like in being obviously way less good than veckatimest while also existing as some wisp of dour energy completely missing from that album which made it fall short of yellow house. i know this one’s technically a solo release but it’s still fascinating to revisit as the first in a trilogy of LPs that saw this band transform from some eerie, cavernous, vaguely aquatic, and nearly-ambient neo-folk project into the maximalist production that earned shouts from jay-z and das racist and was sampled by childish gambino and chiddy bang just five years later. some genuinely endearing moments among the spooked-out song shambles that feel like the inspo for what woods was doing before they transformed into a neo-psych jam band themselves, and it’s the type of album you can learn to appreciate once you realize you’re not supposed to like it for the same reasons you like the band’s other work. it’s like the smoldering ash of the vibrant bonfire that was sung tongs.
16. ted leo + the pharmacists, shake the sheets i’m as totally clueless as to how this album found its way onto my fifth generation ipod video in 2007 as i am unsure why no other ted leo album has ever connected with me. in terms of contextualizing my future taste this feels especially outlier-y, as i never really dove into the hold steady or weakerthans discographies (i’d place ted leo in the category of bands i’d anticipate seeing on the bill for that music fest AV club used to host outside the hideout with like…archers of loaf and superchunk and other bands that always felt a few years too old for me—a fest i’d go to to see, like, telekinesis perform at noon and then go home after blending in with a patchy crowd of dudes with the least interestingly patterned plaid snap-button shirts you’ve ever seen, sambas, extremely rectangular glasses, early male pattern baldness, and maybe a cabbie hat or something to hide it, all of them nursing green lines). i guess at this point in my life i’d realized i needed some punk in my diet, as even something as indie-coded as fucked up felt too abrasive for me. maybe as an adult the indie-codedness of this album could help me get into ska and post-petty late-’90s radio pop-rock.
15. interpol, antics got really, really, really into turn on the bright lights again over the past year or so, as well as a couple of the loose singles interpol released around the time of that record, which only makes it more heartbreaking to return to what may be the slumpiest sophomore release i have ever heard. i think they manage to retain some of that sense of enigma that makes their debut so powerful across the first two tracks, and return to it on the closer, but from the start paul’s so-bad-they’re-actually-kind-of-really-good lyricism loses its appeal, and “narc” kicks off a lengthy series of songs i can never remember the difference between, which all feature too-dance-punk drum and bass and the exact same guitar sounds—all of which may vaguely or explicitly be about being a pervert at sea. “slow hands” is…..fine? but also really feels like a beacon of the band swinging for soundtrack placement, as many of the artists on this list began doing at this point, while both that single and “evil” introduce a staccato vocal style that feels at odds with the moodiness of TOTBL. bought this CD around the time i got spider-man 2 for gamecube and it appears those two things will forever be linked in my head.
14. green day, american idiot crucial counterpoint to the year’s other Big Rock Album (with the same color palette) made by some folks who seemed way less interested in being bush’s buddy, to say nothing of the fact that it accomplished the impossible bipartisan achievement in being music for hot topic kids that was so good that it reached across the aisle to patrons of the mall’s most male-fragrance-heavy stores. as someone who both literally and existentially just kinda wandered around the mall (maybe at some point stopping to buy one of the many CDs on this list), it appealed to me, too—each single was so undeniably engaging that it giuliani’d our middle school social groups, while the remaining album tracks all hold up surprisingly well despite their song lengths being grating to anyone not yet initiated to prog (not to mention hairpin turns perhaps grating to anyone how has been initiated to prog) and the fact that together they constitute a rock opera. i’m still not entirely sure how progressive the lyrics are since i still can’t be bothered to follow whatever’s going on with jimmy or whatever.
13. modest mouse, good news for people who love bad news i have an entire friendship completely structured upon me and a guy i went to high school with texting each other once a year to say “if it’s good news for people who love bad news, does that make it good news?” as someone who isn’t especially precious about lonesome crowded west and moon and antarctica i feel more susceptible to the emotional pull of the obviously-emotional tracks on here rather than being repulsed by their schmaltz within the context of being written by the band that did “shit luck”—i feel like it was even a graceful transition to a wider audience to merge that jagged edge with a more earnest and dare i say mature worldview. “ocean breathes salty” is still among my favorites of their songs, “bury me with it” makes me wish we’d gotten a whole album of that, “devil’s work day” makes me wonder why i didn’t feel deja vu the first time i heard tom waits. guess i never really considered this but “horn intro” into “world at large” may be one of the strangest song transitions to open an album i’ve ever heard.
12. the national, cherry tree might be important context here to note that i’m exclusively a fan of the national’s alligator through high violet run, with the early nearly alt-country stuff doing very little for me outside of a few lo-fi cuts in the vein of “29 years.” this EP feels pretty foreshadow-y of what was to come (it introduces the sad songs for dirty lovers-y alligator track “all the wine” and an early tribute to swarms of vengeful winged insects), though it notably eases that transition from adult-contemporary-esque americana to brooding cocktail-lounge chamber-pop with a microscopic shift as the song which features some of the band’s most absurd lyrics about being a perfect piece of ass (and which feels like a more-perfect “the perfect song,” come to think of it) slowly sinks into a title track expressing the band’s newfound talent for tension-building. later they even preview the feral “abel” and “mr. november” with a live recording letting us in on how matt can get when all the wine on stage is all for him. interesting choice keeping that pac-man ass font on the cover when they reissued this a few years back.
11. the hives, tyrannosaurus hives in addition to seemingly suffering interpol’s initial fate of being reduced to their all-wearing-suits gimmick, i feel like the hives fell victim to having such ubiquitous soundtrack-ready hits that the nuance of their non-“hate to say i told you so” tracks gets lost in our recollection of the band. i don’t think this album really takes flight until “no pun intended,” and pretty much every song after that raises the stakes in surprising ways—from the warped take on brill-derived vintage sounds of “little more for little you,” to the surf-rock violence of “b is for brutus” and “love in plaster,” to the completely-nuts rampage that is “dead quote olympics.” aside from feeling more over-produced than i’d remembered, it really seems like they hit their stride by committing to the demented take on rockabilly here (and the howling) after a couple fairly undercooked records and before walking the “walk idiot walk” walk all the way to soundtracking an episode of WWE, if i recall correctly. i don’t think they even need the suits, man. their whole thing could’ve just been “the swedish band with the guy who goes full werewolf at unexpected moments.”
10. animal collective, sung tongs animal collective is probably the only band i’ve ever been bullied into being a fan of despite never connecting with any of their full albums. i was 100% behind them when “my girls” and “summertime clothes” dropped, though even MPP as a whole lost me occasionally in the gaps between its undeniably great singles—an experience i’d frequently revisit as i continued to push into their prior discography of really great and innovative recordings interspersed with some of the least appealing aspects of freak folk that kept me at arm’s length from the movement at the time (with the exception of le loup—le loup was a perfect band that did no wrong). sung tongs contains some of anco’s highest highs and lowest lows for me, and i feel like i don’t need to tell you which songs belong to which category.
of course now i understand a little better that the album’s “leaf houses” and “winters loves” (not to mention “we tigers”: freak folk at its most tumblr-backed) preceded my earnest love for mouth-sound-heavy, freak-shit pop music just as much as “visiting friends” (which part of this song am i supposed to like?) predicted my inability to conjure the patience for any of their still-active primitivist/jazz/free-folk peers collaborating on album-length projects for drag city or thrill jockey that my otherwise-disparate timeline seems to consensually praise every time another album’s announced. speaking of college and whether or not you should go to it, my first memory of a stranger getting mad at me on the internet was when i said (probably unprovoked, in their defense) i didn’t love sung tongs on my friend’s FB status and his wesleyan classmate normie-shamed me. i clicked on their profile and the only musician page they liked was le loup’s.
9. the killers, hot fuss can’t remember if this album was what launched my years-long anti-synth agenda or merely fortified it, but i think the killers were the first quote-unquote indie band i pretended not to like—if not due to their crossover appeal than because i was already on whatever brain-dead wavelength we, culturally, found ourselves on when auto-tune became a needlessly controversial artistic statement (i certainly remember being vein-forehead-meme guy while pretending not to like “mr. brightside” for some reason). upon revisiting this i do feel a little vindicated in realizing all the unmemorable tracks here (the final boss of which, of course, being “somebody told me”) are the synth-heaviest, while all the other tracks still slam despite their synth lines struggling to find meaningful work in an already-tight composition (on “jenny,” for example, the star of the instrumental is clearly the bass).
but something i got wrong was the indie-rock-ness of it all—i think i could’ve stomached this album better if i’d put it on par with american idiot and how to soundtrack an ipod commercial as capital-Rs rock record, which it most certainly is (this also shines a new light on “glamorous indie rock & roll,” a track which was probably cut from the album so as not to hurt the feelings of dinguses like me). it’s a major-label stadium-rock album with, like, one guy trying to resituate it as electroclash. even the quieter back half is somehow more broadway-scaled than either the green day musical or spider-man: who turned out the lights. there’s nothing inherent to this music that suggests that its creators want you to know that they have, in fact, faced hardships in their lives before presenting us with this music—and that’s fine! the tracking on this thing still weirds me out, though. open with a spooky song, drop your three singles, then the most grand-finale song of all time as track five?
8. tv on the radio, desperate youth, blood thirsty babes i’ve felt a little bit disingenuous rooting so much for this album among everyone’s “actually”-ass revisionist lists of the most iconic indie albums of 2004 both because my interest in this band definitely spiked with cookie mountain and because i don’t really even see how their evil-ambient soul-punk really fits into the landscape that wrought all those interchangeable article-noun bands in the first place, even if they were integral to that meet me in the bathroom scene. but TVotR’s eerie, drumless (and occasionally fully instrument-less), abstract-expressionist take on the same grimy NYC neighborhoods immediately before they were overrun with even more interchangeable article-noun bands feels like an important counterbalance to the commercial optimism of vampire weekend and white-boy sadness of the national.
this album really delivers on the promise inherent in the band’s development from the lo-fi goofiness of ok calculator’s “freeway” to the equally a cappella yet deeply haunting “mr. grieves” a year later on the young liars EP, which in turn gets taken a step further on the demented love song “ambulance” here—a trajectory of near-comical layered vocal harmonies being used less as a gimmick and more as a honed instrument upon which many of their most unsettling (and, in my opinion, best) moments are built. it’s funny how a lot of us were surprised to learn that wolf parade had two different singers considering how different their voices actually are once you notice that distinction when tunde adebimpe managed to find the one guy on earth who sounds almost identical to him to sing backup. also remember when dave sitek did that solo track on dark was the night and his voice also managed to sound remarkably like that?
7. arcade fire, funeral i don’t wanna further extoll the values of an already very-extolled band that wound up having terrible ideas about what to do with synthesizers and exponentially worse ideas about the boundaries separating them from their fans, but funeral, unfortunately, was one of those albums that helped me understand why gen x says all that dumb stuff about nirvana—it was such a mind-expanding experience hearing arcade fire for the first time (“neighborhoods #2,” weirdly) after assimilating to indie rock with fairly same-y post-punk revivalists (the american kind, the british kind, the american kind playing the british kind) and shying away from anything orchestral within this orbit because, frankly, it sucked.
i think that was a broader draw for funeral, too: that it landed right as returns were about to diminish with sophomore releases from all these guitar-bass-drums-maybe-keys bands giving us more of the same at best, experimenting with new and unwelcome production values at worst. barring a few snoozers and what now feels like a terrible omen foreshadowing the band’s attraction to big music (genre) and desert-festival-hippie amity, “wake up,” every individual track on here is so colorful and transfixing in ways that inspired my creativity even beyond the poorly-done colored pencil reproductions of the album cover i fear are still tucked away somewhere at my parents’ house. canada really surpassed us when this album dropped shortly after we sired the decemberists into the world.
6. the faint, wet from birth the late-2000s equivalent to artists releasing too many singles ahead of the album in the lesuer household was when a handful of monumental albums were ruined for me when between myself and both of my brothers we wound up downloading a ton of songs from them before any of us bought the CD. as a contrast to plenty of the prior blurbs, wet from birth is maybe the only time that happened where the remaining non-single cuts were equally as powerful as the songs i’d previously played to death, with the band’s hard pivot from the electroclash of danse macabre taking the form of surprisingly playful mutant disco on opener “desperate guys” (whose boney m strings immediately curdle to horror-score shrieks on track two) before closing the narratively and musically abrasive (more specifically the word “sloppy” comes to mind—and not as in “poorly made”) 10 tracks with a visceral post-rock fantasy of experiencing childbirth. like, as the child. a child with a tragically large brain.
setting aside the overwhelming air of horndog punk and unexpected nods to biafra, beasties, and boners, i can’t get past the fact that “i disappear” got swept up in the indie-rock-to-sports-video-game-soundtracks pipeline considering just how freakish it is in comparison to, like, razorlight. i guess it’s nowhere near as threatening as “worked up so sexual,” or literally anything else on this album, but i can’t imagine its hookiness was enough to not baffle every preteen fan of extreme sports at best, keep them up at night at worst. 15-year-old me on the other hand? belting along to the chorus of “paranoias” on “paranoiattack” for some reason, having never heard a beastie boys track in my life shouting “cops!” after the line “pay off the jockeys then call the” on “dropkick the punks.”
5. franz ferdinand, franz ferdinand seems a little ironic to think about this as i’ve since often been made to feel like “guy who’s only ever seen boss baby” when drawing comparison between musicians in my writing, but as a kid who grew up almost exclusively on christian rock and talking heads, i was completely in denial that my favorite band roughly throughout all of middle school had anything in common with david byrne besides their scottish origins. maybe it was some form of youthful rebellion against my parents who put me on a near-exclusive diet of WoW compilations, unconsciously leading me to deny that the other sanctioned household music provided structural DNA to the first favorite-artist i claimed as my own. or maybe i just assumed that all guys who fronted secular rock bands weirdly invert their enunciations on lyrics at unexpected moments.
obviously this wasn’t the simple copy-paste job the band’s peers were carrying out around them. from the beginning franz ferdinand was designed to be a much easier listen than their clipped-guitar art-rock forebears, with their debut album embracing the heads’ eccentricities while keeping the lyrics grounded in the literal (and usually english) and maintaining a fanbase balanced between hooligans, romantics, and children on the internet desperate to escape their parents’ taste in music. which lends itself to a pretty diverse listen (and, in my probably-unpopular opinion, one that was improved upon with the more cohesive you could have it so much better) featuring a bold beat switch midway through its lead single and an even more breakneck mood change between its tender-longing ballad and a subsequent upbeat evil-beatles cheating confessional. last two tracks really knocked me out when i first got into this album, but i remember the biggest surprise being the end of “take me out,” which very sloppily faded out on the limewire version i’d been listening to for years.
4. the walkmen, bows + arrows the “fight” to the national’s “flight” in the great debate as to who is the superior sweater-rock band. the walkmen, like tv on the radio, seemed like an outlier in the scene, as most of their music felt a little too mature for me—i kind of assumed this was what dads listened to before i found out about ELO. the exception to that, notably, was “the rat,” seemingly a spiteful you-want-a-fucking-hit? statement to an A&R figure trying to tap into the indie-punk craze, which accidentally became the heliocenter around which the rest of their sophomore album (and their career, and the MLB 2K7 soundtrack, and the childhoods of anyone who played that game) eventually revolved. which makes for a bit of an uneven listen (they really just throw you in the deep end after the subdued opener), as the freaked-out energy of that track struggles to counterbalance an uncertainty as to where to take the slower songs (“siobhan” and the title track get passes, as they sound like b-sides from their debut).
but to pitch it as the antics to their debut’s bright lights is vastly underselling it. in addition to being a deeper exploration of inappropriate moments for matt barrick to exhibit olympian drumming techniques and an opportunity for hamilton to disambiguate the setting of his lyrics (to say nothing of the album being an important building block in the development of the band’s odd beatnik’s-christmas aesthetic), bows + arrows feels like the beginning of a much-needed teenage phase for a group which was born grown-ass (which briefly extended into the bayou-wading and further spotty hundred miles off) before tucking in their shirt tails again on you & me. “north pole,” “new year’s eve,” and “thinking of a dream i had” make this a memorable listen even without the inclusion of a perfect yet somewhat sore-thumb single to buoy it.
3. the comas, conductor you may think you know how many devastating indie-rock breakup albums michelle williams has inspired over the years, but you’re probably wrong! a decade and a half before phil elverum released his way breakup-album-ier pseudo-sequel, andy herod lamented his split with the then-dawson’s-creek-star with an album that’s equally lo-fi yet way more psychedelic and, frankly, kind of petty—it opens with him level-headedly laying some hexes on her before the storm-siren opening of the symphonic O.C.-core “tonight on the WB” signals a complete meltdown: he accuses her of being unable to feel “real love” before the tantrumy swelling focal point of the entire album at the song’s end. i wonder if he had any reservations about writing this literally a year later when she bagged her first oscar nom.
instrumentally, though, it feels the way a bad breakup does as it traverses a pretty broad spectrum of sounds, all of which are fairly miserable. potshots at dead-end jobs with miserable benefits get caught in the crossfire, while “invisible drugs” feels like an oddly placed fuzz-punk ode to phil k. dick before the hook ends with herod chasing his high back into his ex’s arms. yet the breakup narrative seems to rein in the too-out-there instrumental concepts and i-am-the-walrus-esque lyrics of their previous album for a lo-fi inner-space odyssey that still feels fairly unmatched in its scope and vision today. well, before it resolves itself with the more conventional jealous-guy dirge “dirty south” and oh-god document of certain realizations, “oh god.”
side note: remember how myspace only allowed bands to upload four songs to their profile at a time, so that users, in turn, could only add one of those four songs to their own profile? well i made a fake account for the comas sometime around 8th grade in order to embed the song i wanted on my page. i guess because the band had such a small following it wound up gaining a few followers who also assumed the band was small enough that that follower count made sense until that number balloned to, like, a hundred. i think at a certain point i just went ahead and began actively trying to keep up that facade, like that seinfeld episode where kramer gets whisked into a meeting in some random office building and proceeds to get in over his head at this fake job.
2. the thermals, fuckin A i know i didn’t hear this album until college because in high school most of my CDs came from the awkward and infrequent request that my dad buy me a bunch of used titles on his amazon account which i’d pay him back for, and i was too scared to ask him to check out with anything donning a parental advisory sticker, let alone a “fuckin” in the title. but at that point i already knew that “a stare like yours” and “keep time” hit a certain sweet spot between the literal tape-hiss garage-punk of the thermals’ debut and the cleaned-up, narrative-heavy, indie-scene-welcomed body, the blood, the machine—the latter of which i’d already deemed to be perfect, the former of which i’d later have similar opinions on.
in a way fuckin a seemed like a different beast entirely—neither requiring you to read the lyrics sheet (it might’ve even been discouraged on several of the tracks, though the occasional incisive political songs felt like a must for a bush-era punk record) nor encouraged to strain to find the beauty through the dense sheet of noise. led off with a quite-literal we-don’t-give-a-shit anthem devolving into unraveling guitar feedback, by track two you already get that legs-moving-faster-than-the-body-can-manage effect that defines the album with an otherwise very tolerable “how we know” serving as a bit of a disappointing speed bump (it’s an anxious propulsion created by hutch harris’ pitch-neglecting vocals and a constant guitar sound running like an unpredictable motor on its final legs that, against all odds, makes the band’s formula work so well). with the exception of the slacker-rockabilly of “let your earth quake, baby” and a couple other eurosteps just outside of their lane, this was the pinnacle of pop-shitgaze (not gonna link the article again)—a short-lived movement that got swallowed up by an invitation to the indie-rock big kids table.
the thermals disbanded after a handful of unremarkable albums in the 2010s, and there’s some pretty valid speculation as to why: at this point it seems to be an open secret in the local PNW scene that hutch has a history of grooming (there’s at least one album about it written by one of his exes), while his dumbass black-lips-esque antics during the group’s heyday always felt obnoxious, if not beyond the edge of edgelordom. then again i know it’s a lot to ask that the white male rock musicians granted a fairly significant platform i looked up to at an impressionable age and at a time before repercussions existed within the music scene don’t tweet evil, pedophilic shit and also manipulate women.
1. death from above 1979, you’re a woman, i’m a machine for some reason when my oldest brother was in grade school and deep in a beatles phase, he would vehemently deny any allegations that his favorite band ever did drugs—as if that fact were even up for debate. we laughed at him for it a few years later, but at that point i was making similar claims deluded by denial about my favorite band at the moment, death from above 1979, refusing to believe that they had anything to do with dance music. the band was deeply embedded in my personality between 8th grade and early college—my myspace picture was a surprisingly decently photoshopped version of you’re a woman, i’m a machine with my face swapped for both band members, while i was insufferably eager to share with everyone the fact that DFA released a cumulative total of precisely one hour of music before breaking up, between this album, their debut EP, and a handful of B-sides.
of course in 2024 two things are abundantly clear: the first being that genre is less consequential than the fact that these guys are misogynists at best, alt-right (and also misogynists) at worst, and that (unrelatedly) they trainwrecked their previously-perfect musical legacy in 2014 when they decided they didn’t hate each other anymore and released 36 more minutes of music which, i swear to god, only gets remotely interesting in the final minute (this was a tough year for me: arrested development, the other primary influence on my personality, had also just returned with equally disappointing results). the other thing that’s clear is that this album is obviously the pinnacle of indie’s mid-aughts dance-punk movement, even if there’s plenty here to draw attention away from that fact between the woozy speed-metal bass riffs the album opens with and the chronically sexy and deeply post-daft-punk french-guy-music closer, which fluently spells out the duo’s connection to justice.
if death cab was the begrudging handshake between emo and indie, DFA was the equally concessional act of amity between indie (they had a split with the futureheads) and post-hardcore (just look at both members’ haircuts, man). i guess it was hard to place this band on the genre map in 2004 because it doesn’t really sound like any of their peers in any of those circles; it occasionally feels like a distant cousin to math-rock if 50% of the instruments weren’t emitting pure sludge, while “cold war” outros with some take on dub that reflects the there’s-only-two-genders futurism of the record’s title. as with the faint, even the singles feel a little too out-there to comprehend as soundtrack material, while the rest of the record (which, in my opinion, is its real lifeblood—the title track and “pull out” in particular—mostly feels like a frantic counterpart to the confusingly sexy pop-sasscore of “romantic rights” and “blood on our hands.”
i guess you can dance to any of it if you want, but meanwhile i’ll be over here overanalyzing every facet of its deeply music-journalist-unfriendly sheen.