The most relevant fact about music in the '00s was the sheer volume of it that came out, as digital technology democratized recording and distribution down toward individual-artist level. Most conservative estimates cite a figure somewhere in the 30,000-albums-per-year range in the U.S. alone, which computes to 300,000 over the entire decade. Add in countless bands who never graduated past five songs on MySpace, and the quantity turns astronomical. Given that only a tiny fraction of this music has inspired lasting adulation outside performers' immediate families, that means the overwhelming majority has long since slipped through the cracks of history. That said, here's a representative, genre-spanning sample of 10 great albums unlikely to make many other best-of-decade lists: if you knew about any of them in the first place, chances are you forgot them already. Until now.
10. The Exploding Hearts
Guitar Romantic, 2003
The decade's most tragic rock story: on July 20, 2003, a bus carrying Oregon powerpop-punk foursome the Exploding Hearts overturned on the Interstate while returning home to Portland from San Francisco. Three members -- vocalist and guitarist Adam Cox, bassist Matt Fitzgerald, drummer Jeremy Gage -- died. Only four months earlier, the band had put out its only album: 10 songs -- seven of them less than three minutes long -- about modern kicks and modern chicks and sleeping aides and razorblades. No other album in recent memory has come so close to matching the sweet-and-sour relentlessness of the Buzzcocks' Singles Going Steady; most likely, no album ever will.
9. Skye Sweetnam
Noise From The Basement, 2004
Where pop-punk -- or at least cool old Pat Benatar chords -- lived on was Radio Disney. But where Avril reached a mass American audience, her fellow Ontario native Skye Sweetnam only crossed over to Canadians, and maybe some Cheap Trick fans in Japan. Underground tween-pop from its title on down, Noise From The Basement -- released when she was just 16 -- peaked at a humble #124 in the U.S. But that didn't make its impudence any less precocious or self-aware, from the single about skipping school to avoid Shakespeare to the subterranean homesick "Hypocrite": "Bubblegum braniac! Baby girl ultra brat! Angst schmangst! No thanks! Hope my record doesn't tank!" Sigh...
8. Wolf
Evil Star, 2004
In a decade wherein heavy metal never stopped mutating, but did so within a tighter and tighter perimeter, in increments indiscernible to most humans unschooled in the art of experimental composition, this Swedish trio stubbornly stuck to the pre-thrash leather-jacket-full-of-zippers basics: Power anthems distinguishable as actual songs, with ice-blue riffs as hooks, and words about ominous objects in the sky and werewolves going bump in the night -- all howled in a high register melodic enough for a layman to actually decipher them. And the Blue Oyster Cult and Ramones covers sure didn't hurt.
7. Collin Raye
Never Going Back, 2009
As metal and rock radio abandoned old-school blues-based hard rock, country picked up the ball -- so much that, by decades end, Bad Company riffs were even sounding stale in Nashville. So nobody much noticed when this longtime journeyman, who hadn't taken a single into the country Top 40 since early 2000, kicked off his last-year-of-the-decade album with some Grand Funk Railroad cowbell, then loaded the thing with butt-rocking couples smuggling contraband across the border and heading west for Vegas dancing jobs only to wind up on a riverboat outside Cincinnati. Plus remakes of Nilsson and Stealers Wheel classics, and Eagles-worthy ballads that frequently mention Jesus.
6. ZZ Top
Mescalero, 2003
Talk about your blues-rock journeymen making runs for the border: These ancient Texas beardos had been stuck in the boogie mud ever since their hightly lucrative mid '80s sellout-to-MTV era, then they suddenly took a sharp left turn on this largely unheard platter full of Spanish words, warped funk, screwy electronic effects, and flatulent jokes about alley-gators and intelligent quotients and punk-ass boyfriends. If a more entertaining hard rock album emerged this decade, it surely wasn't by guys in their 50s (all three born 1949!) who'd been grumbling like old men since they were in their 20s (excellent long-range business plan!) Their weirdest since El Loco in 1981, if you're keeping score.
5. Field Mob
From Tha Roota to Tha Toota, 2002
Not hard to imagine ZZ Top and Field Mob enjoying the same barbecue: This album's title refers to feasting on the entire hog, from snout to tail. And give or take Bubba Sparxxx, it's doubtful that the decade produced more countryfied rappers than these hick-town Georgians, who lyrically trace their Southernness back to the plantation their ancestors were sold and hung on. So while they revel in a comedic trickster spirit their genre mostly abandoned, it's run through with sadness -- soul, in other words, the red-clay variety, yet spiked with melodic beauty from classical Europe and the Far East.
4. Koffee Brown
Mars/Venus, 2001
And here's a path that r&b in the '00s sadly managed not to follow: From a man and woman named Fonz and Vernall, a grown-folks gender battle, in the time-tested tradition of Womack & Womack or Ashford & Simpson, "retro" only in the sense that it's not emotionally stunted by ice-queen restraint or melismatic bombast or strip-club crotch-grab. The fugue-like "Weekend Thing," setting its anticipatory upscale summer scene in beauty parlors and barbershops, gave up as warm a groove as any soul track this decade. But that single only charted #71 r&b; the duo never made another album.
3. Oneida
Steel Rod EP, 2000
Checking it at 31 minutes, this record is misnamed -- while admittedly containing only six songs including an untitled four-second closer, it's more a short album than an EP. And a half-hour is just about perfect for this dirty-twanged, keyboard-tempered breed of Brooklyn science-lab sludge, tossing Link Wray, MX-80 Sound, Pere Ubu, and Devo into the choogle-metal blender while obsessing on loaded weapons and hellbound trains. You'd have a hard time finding any other '00s guitar rock so convoluted and repetitious that also kicks so hard. In 2000, Oneida could've almost passed as Queens of the Stone Age's nuttier cousins; later on, QOTSA got more commercial as Oneida got artier. And they both kicked less.
2. Fannypack
See You Next Tuesday, 2005
"Do it now, turn around, get off like a wedding gown, people on the pitcher's mound, turn it up and lock it down, fast ball, curve ball, workin' on your nerves ya'll " -- Three impossibly sassy and accented Brooklyn girls, two hipster NYC club producers life-affirming enough to opt for freestyle jump-rope chants over electroclash bondage gear, a skit revolving around one svengali's hatred of reggae leading into a dancehall guest-spot by Mr. Vegas, what else do you need? From M.I.A. to "Chicken Noodle Soup" to Kid Sister, the '00s weren't a bad decade when it came to channelling the spirit of "Iko Iko." But nobody gave it more bounce than this oddball outfit from the 718, who seemed like a novelty but were more.
1.Various Artists
Bring It On: Music From The Motion Picture, 2000
If you need documented evidence that the decade kicked off with a great girl-group wave, look no further. Irish fiddle-gum flirts B*Witched revive Toni Basil; Left Eye discoveries Blaque get sarcastic then collaborate with an unknown named 50 Cent; fellow post-TLCs 3LW keep things light; bizarre Jersey expats Daphne And Celeste -- whose own album never even came out in the States -- inform you that you ain't got no alibi for being U-G-L-Y. Mere males like the Jungle Brothers and 95 South stay on the sidelines, leading cheers. R&B in the '00s never got giddier, teen-pop never got funkier, and where such good-natured energy disappeared to is a history that has yet to be written. If you don't miss it, you missed the boat. Or, as Liverpool's Atomic Kitten put it, "See ya. I wouldn't wanna be ya."
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