Flashback to the Oughts: 2005

Every year since I started this blog, I put myself through a soul-wrenching struggle to create a satisfying “best-of” list.  I don’t have too much trouble coming up with representative entries.  That aspect is mostly a matter of record-keeping, which kind of takes care of itself in the process of writing.  Ordering these titles in a way that will stand the test of time, however, is a bit more difficult.  Occasionally, some albums that I have ranked very highly in their respective years have not come off of the shelf much since, while other lower ranked entries and honorable mentions have proven to be more durable.

Creating a “best-of” list retroactively for a year gone by is no less problematic, but the issues of accuracy and durability seem to be inverted.  This is especially the case in the early oughts, as record stores were still kind of a thing.  If I did not purchase an album on Amazon back then, I have few definitive calendrical references for what I was listening to and when.  The slippery nature of memory resists definitive sequencing, making accuracy a primary concern.  Once I can sketch out a clear picture of what was in rotation during a given year, however, hindsight allows these selections to fall into order relatively easily.  

The list for 2005, however, has been probably the biggest struggle yet. The records from that year hang in between online purchases and record store walk-ins. Stitching these together with my memory episodes was particularly difficult because I was existing at the crossroads between being a band director, a graduate student in ethnomusicology, and being increasingly involved in my "significant other's" world.

10. Green Carnation - Light of Day, Day of Darkness: I listened to this hour-long track a whole lot in 2005 on my old Zen player as I walked to Cross-Cultural Ensemble rehearsal with my Stick strapped across my back.  Although I have not listened to it much since, upon revision I found it pleasantly familiar, if a bit thin in the production department.

9. Porcupine Tree - Deadwing:  Although it may not be apparent from Lazarus, which is included above, Deadwing was Porcupine Tree’s heaviest album to date.  It also followed their most commercially successful album and I have always felt that the writing, which is still more nuanced than most, suffered a bit under the burden of following its standard.  

8. Panjabi MC - Beware: By 2005, my ethnomusicological studies had given me a deepened appreciation for intercultural popular music and a growing interest in the music of India.  Not only did Beware sit at the intersection of these two fields, it was catchy enough to win over my significant other.

7. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema: Although I had been introduced to The New Pornographers during my late 90's power pop jag, it was 2005 before I wandered into a record store in Massachusetts and picked up Twin Cinema. I have been a staunch advocate ever since.

6. Frank Zappa - Studio Tan:  Zappa’s music was always finding its way from used CD bins into my collection during the oughts, so although his music was ever-present, it is nearly impossible to unravel specific dates.  I do know for certain, however, that I took a Summer class on the music of Frank Zappa in 2005 and Studio Tan was in heavy rotation during that time, along with Broadway the Hard Way and several volumes of the You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore series.

5. Fountains of Wayne - Utopia Parkway:  Perhaps one of the best post-Jellyfish power pop albums in my collection, mostly because it is stylistically distinct.  For the most part, Fountains of Wayne relies on outstanding songwriting more than overt semiotic nostalgia for their success.

4. Ramnad Krishnan - Vidwan: Music of South India: Songs of the Carnatic Tradition: On the suggestion of my Indian music teacher, this was the first album of Indian classical music that I ever purchased. Although I started unpacking it in 2005, I am still unraveling its nuances.

3. Rumah Sakit - Rumah Sakit: To this day, the details about Rumah Sakit remain vague - they are references to them everywhere, but it is difficult to pin down their origins and history. Nevertheless, my expanding appreciation for rhythmic complexity in Indian music allowed this album to spark my interest in so-called "math rock."

2. The White Stripes - Elephant: In direct contrast to all of the deeply complex stuff I was into in 2005, Elephant's focus on low-technique rock songwriting rose to the top of the heap. Pardon the video in the playlist, by the way - I will always remember showing that to the Pop Music and American Culture class I was TA for a couple of years later.

Album of the Year: 2005

1. Brendan Benson - The Alternative to Love: Although I was a fan of Brendan Benson's since One Mississippi, this album convinced me that he could do no wrong as a songwriter. There isn't a single dud in the bunch.

Flashback to the Oughts: 2002

Music often connects to experience in strange, sometimes unpredictable ways, and its capacity to become vividly associated with times and places is, I feel, a given. In this blog, I have recently referred to these flashes of recollection that arise when listening to music from one’s past as “memory episodes,” but I don’t know that I have ever clearly defined what that means or why I think that it happens. As an organizing principle of this series in particular, it seems like that is an oversight worth addressing.

One could argue that recorded music is a phenomenological abomination. A recording tears music from the musical act and flattens it, which results in only half of a full experience for the listener. I theorize that when we listen to recorded music, the untethered aspects of the musical experience latch on to the things we are feeling, thinking, and doing as we listen. Later, if this tethering is strong enough, listening to music can trigger recollections through this association.  As I reconstructed 2002 for this best-of list, my memory episodes were somewhat painful to travel through.



This was the year that I experienced the end of a marriage and desperately sought out a new path for myself.  As a result, my recollections are a jumbled mess of crushing sorrow, indulgent escapism, and, later in the year, self-discovery tinted with desperation.

10. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven: My introduction to the problematic sub-genre “post-rock” also served as the soundtrack to my inner struggle with a friend’s suicide. Its melancholic mood swings still bring back sadness and rage.

9. Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head: Before they became pigeonholed as the darlings of the new adult contemporary, Coldplay resonated with me as a reinterpretation of what was once good about U2. A Rush of Blood to the Head is brimming over with well-crafted melodies and arrangements.

8. Oysterhead - The Grand Pecking Order: Although the material on the album felt a little slipshot at times, listening to Stewart Copeland lock into a groove with Les Claypool made the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks to the influence to Trey Anastasio, The Grand Pecking Order also marks the beginnings of Claypool’s interest in the jam band format, and laid the seeds for his current work with Sean Lennon.

7. Brendan Benson - Lapalco: Benson followed up his criminally good One Mississippi debut with the merely excellent Lapalco. Jason Falkner’s co-writing presence firmly adjoins Benson to the Jellyfish Family Tree.

6. Glass Hammer - Chronometree: A self-aware and somewhat satirical concept album about the pitfalls of reading too much into concept albums. Glass Hammer has made many recordings since this cautionary tale, but it remains my favorite.

5. Happy the Man - Crafty Hands: For a time this year, I was so emotionally devastated that I could barely listen to music with lyrics without twisting their meaning to suit my addiction to self-pity. This mostly instrumental release was in rotation a lot during that time, and actually served to later inspire me to play the Stick, even though there is no Stick on the album.

4. Rush - Vapor Trails: After a significant hiatus, Rush returned to the studio and produced Vapor Trails, which was a great improvement upon its predecessor Test for Echo. Although the album was slightly uneven as a whole, the band’s playing and concept was stronger than ever.

3. Spock’s Beard - Snow: Neal Morse’s final album with Spock’s Beard ended up being a career-defining rock opera with no small amount of religious overtones. Like any rock opera, Snow has its share of filler, but by and large the material is so amazing and is executed with such exhilarating chemistry that this shortcoming can be easily overlooked.

2. Peter Gabriel - Up: In retrospect, there is the nagging sense that parts of this album seemed geared toward radio airplay. These moments are fleeting, however, revealing Gabriel to be at a creative zenith in terms of orchestration and arrangement.

Album of the Year 2002

1. Porcupine Tree - In Absentia: After the relatively polished songwriting approach that Porcupine Tree had been operating with since Stupid Dream, In Absentia represented the first step in a heavier direction. While the guitar riffs were thicker than before, there was no loss of the nuanced melody and texture that had come to be the band’s trademark.

Flashback to the Oughts: 2000

In my last roundup, I described how using Plex as my primary music portal in the house has subtly changed my listening habits. Most prominently, I compiled some playlists using the year-end “best of” postings on this blog - one for each year since I started posting in 2011. Although I still prefer listening to full albums, making these lists was pretty satisfying and provided me with a plan of attack for expanding the library on my computer.

Then, dangerously, I got to thinking: would it be possible for me to reconstruct my listening history and memory episodes well enough to retroactively create a top ten list for a year without a formalized "best-of" list to go by? If so, how far back could I go?

Well, the blog started in 2011 as a way to satisfy the writing addiction that I had generated during my master's thesis. Its seeds, however, were actually sown way back in the early 00’s, when I was a decently ranked Amazon reviewer. Using these prototypical postings as a starting point, I was able to assemble pretty satisfying lists that stretch all the way back to 2000.

To set the stage, it is worth mentioning that the progressive rock “supergroup” Transatlantic released their debut album SMPTe in 2000. Although it did not make the top 10, the album had a huge impact on my listening habits that year. My investigations into Transatlantic led me down a virtual prog rock rabbit hole. The list reveals that I was clearly in the throes of this “progressive rock renaissance” in 2000. There was also a smattering of power pop, local, and alternative music, which were the primary strands I was following at the turn of the century.

10. Spock’s Beard - V: By 2000, I had already ordered all of Spock’s Beard’s back catalog from progressive rock websites. In some ways, V felt like a culmination of all of their work, and served as the template for Neal Morse’s contributions to Transatlantic.

9. Radiohead - Kid A: For a good portion of 2000, I theorized that if The Bends was Radiohead’s Joshua Tree, and if OK Computer was their Achtung Baby, then Kid A could be their Zooropa, which was not intended to be a compliment. Time has shown this analogy to be foolhardy, however, and Kid A ended up launching the band on a creative trajectory that informs their path even today.

8. The Flower Kings - Flowerpower: This was one of the albums that Transatlantic led me to, and was my introduction to the group. At over two hours of music, it’s a lot to take in at once, but in terms of quality material it stands as one of my favorite Flower Kings releases.

7. King Crimson - The ConstruKCtion of Light: The detuned vocals that opened lead track “Prozac Blues” clearly announced that this would be a unique iteration of Crimson. Once the initial shock wore off, however, The ConsctruKCtion of Light proved its legitimacy in the band’s catalog.

6. Aimee Mann - Bachelor No. 2: I admit that my reception of this album was a bit lukewarm in 2000, mainly because I was disappointed that Jon Brion’s (whose work I was obsessed with thanks to The Greys) fingerprint was not as prominent as it had been on its predecessor I’m With Stupid.  Time has been incredibly kind to it, though, and although clearly being associated with the year 2000 in my mind, Bachelor No. 2 has also transcended this time, earning “classic” status.

5. Kevin Gilbert - The Shaming of the True: This is an incredibly heartfelt rock opera by one of the industry’s most tragically unrecognized musicians. Gilbert passed on before it was completed, but Nik D’Virgilio of Spock’s Beard compiled and released it posthumously, allowing Gilbert’s unique genius to shine brightly one last time.

4. Porcupine Tree - Lightbulb Sun: I was gobbling up Porcupine Tree during this period, and I know that I also was into The Sky Moves Sideways, Signify, and Voyage 34 in 2000. Lightbulb Sun, the immediate successor to the pristine Stupid Dream, was the standout.

3. Dream Theater - Scenes from a Memory: This still stands in my mind as Dream Theater’s finest moment, where it seemed as if they might evolve into something beyond prog-metal. Alas, they fell into the trap of their own nostalgia and have never quite recapture the magic of this great rock opera.

2. The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin: In 2000, this album was nothing short of magical. I spent a whole summer driving around Denton with this gleefully blasting out of my car windows.

2000 Album of the Year

1. Chomsky - A Few Possible Selections for the Soundtrack of Your Life: If you were around me at all in early 2000, I guarantee that I tried to get you to listen to this album. I loved everything about it - its energy, its angularity, its quirkiness, its intelligence, and its surreal album art.

Steven Wilson's "Grace for Drowning" in the Real World

The death of the record store is a tragic loss for the music fan as a site for cultural exchange, especially as we become increasingly specialized in our listening tastes. I was fortunate to pick up Grace for Drowning at the closeout sale of a local record store. When I brought it to the counter, the clerk's face lit up.  I stuttered through a conversation about Steven Wilson's genius that I never thought I would have with a living, breathing being, distracted by the knowledge that encounters like this are irreplaceable in the virtual realms.

Like the clerk, I am astonished by the amazing breadth of Wilson's work, but his sprawling output is somewhat challenging to my listening categories. I was introduced to Wilson through his prog band Porcupine Tree, so historically I have viewed everything else he has done as a side project. In truth, Porcupine Tree is a relatively small component of Wilson’s oeuvre. Nevertheless, whatever he touches seems immediately essential to understanding his overall concept.

In recent years, however, Wilson has taken a further step – cultivating a solo career. Cut free from the confines of collaboration or expectation, Grace for Drowning spills free of the boundaries set by a singular project. Its broad, orchestral palate pits choirs against grunts and orchestras against post-industrial studio manipulations, and its dissonance overlaps harmonically advanced metal with jazz fusion. On a Porcupine Tree album, these extremes might be cause for alarm, but within the context of a solo album, they reveal the breadth of Wilson’s imagination.



Wilson is probably one of the only progressive rock artists out there that is able to avoid cliché and nostalgia in major doses, but whose work is identifiably in the genre. It’s true that there are many progressive rock bands out there that are infatuated with the sound of their predecessors, but not as many capture the ideology of exploration that lies at the roots of the prog tree. Steven Wilson, however, gets it, and although he shows hints of his influences to those that are in the know, overall is work is distinctively moody and intellectual.



When I gave Grace for Drowning its first serious listen a couple of weeks after picking it up, I was on my annual trip to San Antonio to attend the Texas Music Educator’s Association convention. TMEA is usually a conflicting combination of inspiration and frustration for me, and despite being surrounded by like-minded people and networking opportunities, it can sometimes be a lonely experience.

The album's gently self-flagellating melancholy empowered my introverted mood. With Grace for Drowning on headphones, I meandered out of the showroom floor onto the Riverwalk on that overcast February afternoon and, while I ate lunch and watched the bustling crowd, I took that time to appreciate the movement of pigeons begging for food and boats full of people lazily floating down the canals. Perhaps a good number of them were feeling isolated and aloof in the crowd as well, but I doubt that any sought out the odd comfort of Wilson’s resigned loneliness.

Porcupine Tree's Early Work: "Stupid Dream" and "The Sky Moves Sideways."

Beginning in high school, I very rarely listened to the radio and I only purchased mainstream music after special consideration. I propelled my listening habits by reading liner notes, articles and reviews, taking recommendations, and, thanks my long-term involvement in record retail, I sometimes test-drove something new in the event that it would present itself. I rarely ran into any serious ruts or dead ends. Still, there was a huge amount of music going on that danced outside of the horizons of these resources, so the internet had a pretty significant impact on my listening when it began to emerge in the 90s. To my amazement, I found out that progressive rock was alive and well, and a cornucopia of incredible music came to light. This is when I found out about Porcupine Tree.

Porcupine Tree began as a joke: a studio-only band fabricated by guitarist and producer Steven Wilson. The first couple of albums were almost entirely Wilson working solo, using drum machines and sequencers to fill out his psychedelic experiments.  Since then, Porcupine Tree has gained a bit more visibility, and with good reason. In my opinion, Steven Wilson is maybe the most consistent artist in recent history. In the last fifteen years, he has created more good quality work than nearly anyone in a similar span of time. Porcupine Tree began to receive a bit more notoriety in the mid-00’s, so if you are just becoming familiar with the band, it is likely that at first, more recent albums like The Indicent or In Absentia will be suggested as places to start. Porcupine Tree’s mindblowing consistency makes purchasing nearly any of their albums a good bet, but it was their pre-2000 work that initially caught my attention. I think that it would be a shame if these incredible albums were lost in the shuffle, because they are fantastic works in their own right.

By the third album, it became apparent that the hypothetical band, which had garnered some underground interest by virtue of their early releases, should evolve into a live, performing group. Wilson made this transition in 1995 on The Sky Moves Sideways, which was my entry point for the band. This album really grabbed my attention in 1998 when I put it in rotation. Thanks to Wilson’s breathy delivery, melodic atmospheres, and long-form compositions, Porcupine Tree was hailed as the “Pink Floyd of the 90s,” a label that Wilson apparently resented. By Porcupine Tree’s towering standards, The Sky Moves Sideways is a bit outdated, but it is still a masterful album that laid the groundwork for what the band would become.  I had never seen early clips of this work until I found this one yesterday.



The album that really put the group on the map for me, however, was 1999’s Stupid Dream. Wilson refocused Porcupine Tree for this album, and began applying the melancholic atmospheres he developed in his early work to more succinct songwriting. Stupid Dream was still identifiably progressive and it provided a foundation that allowed me to rethink the genre as forward looking rather than incestuously retrospective.  Among all the new and exciting music I was getting into at the time, this album was distinctive, and with incredible songwriting, amazing lyrics, and unbelievable musicianship, it sat very comfortably in my post-power-pop-era prog listening tastes.



Today it is still my favorite album from Porcupine Tree, and easily ranks among my all-time favorites alongside Discipline, Frengers, and a short list of others. This clip is from a later incarnation of the band, but Even Less is an indispensible favorite from Stupid Dream.



Porcupine Tree has always evolved subtly from one album to the next, so from album to album, the band's progression seems logical.  Over a larger arc, however, the band's beginnings hardly seem to match their most current work.  Following their evolution from a psychedelic studio project to a performing group with a profound influence on contemporary progressive rock is the most rewarding way to experience their oeuvre, in my opinion, and these albums are compelling places to start.