I’m three for three this week on bands I’ve surprisingly never featured before. I would have sworn that I’d at least blogged about Modest Mouse’s 2004 hit ‘Float On,’ but alas, I have not.
Like Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse hails from Washington state. I guess something about those Pacific Northwest bands really struck a nerve in the year 2000.
Like Sleater-Kinney, Yo La Tengo is a band I would have sworn I’d featured on the blog before. I’ve certainly heard the band name enough to have thrown a post their way out of curiosity sometime in the last ten years.
But no, this is the first Yo La Tengo song on Meet Me In Montauk. It comes from the 2000 album And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, the band’s ninth studio release and one of their best received.
My exploration of the year 2000 in music continues with two weeks of songs from some of the year’s most celebrated albums. To come up with this list, I cross-referenced a bunch of year-end top ten lists and looked for titles that popped up multiple times.
While I’m focusing on the year’s most critically-acclaimed albums, not necessarily the most popular, I will throw a bone next week to one of the best sellers of 2000.
The best album of 2000 comes courtesy of Aimee Mann and her third solo album, Bachelor No. 2 (subtitled The Last Remains of the Dodo).
This pop rock masterpiece almost went unheard, as the record label didn’t hear a hit and held up its release. Mann bought back the rights and released it herself online, making it one of the first ever albums to find success with strictly digital distribution. Eventually she expanded the release to retail stores (how quaint that seems now) and the album went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.
My second favorite album of 2000 is the last record Elliott Smith released before his 2003 suicide. Figure 8 was Smith’s fifth album and possibly his best (though I have an even softer spot for 1997’s Either/Or).
Figure 8 was Smith’s second album with major label Dreamworks, and the baroque instrumentation on much of the record stands in stark contrast to his ultra lo-fi beginnings.
Meet Me In Montauk 