Texas “post-hardcore” band At the Drive-In formed in 1994 and released three albums before splitting in 2001. The third of those, 2000’s Relationship of Command, received widespread critical acclaim and is considered one of the best examples of its genre.
I call bullshit. I couldn’t make it through half of any of the songs from this album that I sampled. Do critics and fans out there really find value in this stuff? I guess I’m just wired differently.
After all the electronica and ambient pop, it’s nice to get back to a straightforward alternative rock album. My next critically-acclaimed record from the year 2000 is PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea.
This was the English singer-songwriter’s seventh album and remains her most successful commercially and critically. It was nominated for multiple Grammys and won the coveted Mercury Prize, given to the United Kingdom’s best album.
Critics in 2000 fell for some pretty weird shit. Maybe it was a reaction to the boy band explosion, but many of the albums I’m digging up that were critically acclaimed that year seem like an overcorrection, a deliberate attempt to celebrate the unconventional.
Case in point: The Avalanches, an Australian electronic band, whose album Since I Left You shows up on scores of critics’ year-end lists.
My choice for Counting Crows’ best album is a close contest between their 1993 debut August and Everything After and their fourth release, 2002’s Hard Candy. Forced to choose, I would likely side with Hard Candy.
Today’s random SOTD, ‘Carriage,’ is a big reason why. This is a beautiful and poignant song that plays to Adam Duritz’s strengths as a lyricist and vocalist and gives the band plenty of space to fill a rather sparse song with moments of musical grace.
Of all the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series releases, volume 11 (The Basement Tapes Complete) is definitely the most impressive.
Spanning six discs and 138 tracks, this volume contains all of the unreleased tracks recorded by Dylan and The Band in the basement of a house called Big Pink between May and October of 1967.
Meet Me In Montauk 