When Mike Skinner’s debut album as The Streets surfaced in 2002, we weren’t really sure what to make of him. Original Pirate Material was a winning introduction to Skinner’s brand of UK garage, but it wasn’t until his second album, 2004′s A Grand Don’t Come For Free that The Streets really hit his stride.

Often during these throwback features, it can be a real drag to revisit old albums buried beneath years of new memories. This was not the case with A Grand Don’t Come For Free. I’m not sure if it’s that The Streets’ more recent output has put a damper on the record, or if I just plain forgot about the guy. Either way, Skinner’s concept album about losing 1000 quid makes for a completely refreshing listen in 2010.

Before “Gold Digger” there was “Fit But You Know It.” Before Chris Martin and Jay-Z became best buds, Martin sang the hook on Skinner’s wonderful breakup ballad “Dry Your Eyes,” though that version was never officially released. On Original Pirate Material, Skinner fancied himself a layabout, but his second LP offered a wiser, more reflective persona.

2006′s The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living found The Streets rapping about the ins and outs of fame, something that his middle-class fans weren’t particularly expecting, while 2008′s Everything Is Borrowed was equally innocuous and featured an almost-sermonizing Skinner.

Listen:

The Streets ft. Chris Martin – “Dry Your Eyes”

The Streets – “Fit But You Know It”

Released at the height of my high school infatuation with Pearl Jam, Binaural was the dreary follow-up to 1998′s Yield and a first glimpse of the sound Eddie Vedder and company would pursue over the next decade.  Having just been exposed to Ten, Vs., Vitalogy, No Code, and the aforementioned Yield a few months previously, I was under the impression that anything Pearl Jam released would be solid gold.  The grunge-punk sound that had defined previous albums was little heard on Binaural, with the band instead giving us a layered blend of folk, psychedelics, and art rock.

Binaural is an unavoidable signifier of the shift between grunge and political folk-rock that Pearl Jam endured around the turn of the century.  You could call it a midpoint in the band’s career, as the albums that followed Binaural, especially 2002′s Riot Act, have been similarly themed.

Maladroit could go down in history as the last Weezer album worth taking seriously.  Released just a year after their comeback “Green Album,” Maladroit was the last stop on the “Hey it’s Weezer, let’s give ‘em a break” train.  Revisiting the album, how did we not see the signs of the forthcoming train wreck that was Make Believe?

Running thirteen tracks, but only 33 minutes long, Maladroit is not an easy listen in 2010.  Those songs you remember liking(“Dope Nose,”"Keep Fishin’,” and “Burndt Jamb”) are still admirable Weezer cuts, but the rest of the album is a real drag.  Rivers Cuomo had always stated his affinity for bands such as KISS, but Maladroit was the first time he actually attempted to sound like them, combining metal riffs with the broad choruses that made Weezer so likable to begin with.   Critical reception for the album was mostly positive, and it has laughably been called underrated in the years since its release.

In 2005, Weezer released the loathsome (but secretly enjoyable) “Beverly Hills” as the first single off Make Believe, and followed it up with 2008′s “Red Album” and 2009′s Raditude, which featured Kenny G and Chamillionaire.

Buy Raditude with your very own Weezer snuggie right here. Wow.

Pearl Jam’s eponymous eighth album benefitted from anticipation borne out of a four year gap in studio albums, and the two interesting if altogether disappointing albums directly preceding it–Binaural and Riot Act. Eagerly hailed as a return to form by critics and fans, Pearl Jam does in fact deliver riffy-rockers like “Life Wasted” and “World Wide Suicide,” and earnest ballads “Parachutes” and “Come Back,” ably replicating the two modes most fans seem to want. The album also capitalized on an apropos late spring/early summer release. However, in light of the politically charged Riot Act and the expansive Binaural, Pearl Jam is conciliatory instead of redemptive. It’s as if the group threw their hands up, opting (at the behest of fans and critics) to cede some of the headier ground they staked on the two previous albums.

Written and recorded over seven years, All The Roadrunning is a warm and generous collaboration between two veteran recording artists still capable of putting down music with strong, grounded narratives and plausible emotions. Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler share and trade vocal duties with such an organic touch it’s easy to forget they recorded the album when they had time. Further, Knopfler lends his production and guitar expertise, imbuing the songs some rock leanings. For an interesting counterpoint in the sub-genre of all-star country collaborations, consider Van Lear Rose, which initially benefited from the buzz generated by the incongruity and notoriety of the duo (Loretta Lynn & Jack White) but has lost some of its luster since release, whereas All The Roadrunning appealed on first listen and endures still because Knopfler and Harris make for a much better pairing in several respects.

Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris – “All The Roadrunning” (live)

When it was announced that Jack White was producing Loretta Lynn’s upcoming album, one couldn’t help but think “What the fuck?” White was at the top of his game, having just toured behind Elephant and making appearances in Coffee & Cigarettes and Cold Mountain. Lynn on the other hand had just become a Kennedy Center honoree and was preparing for the release of her tantalizing new book, You’re Cookin’ It Country. The country music legend meets the newly minted rock superstar, it was a match made in heaven.

Critical praise for the album was embarrassingly hyperbolic, with writers young and old wetting themselves over the interplay between White and Lynn. Cruise on over to Metacritic.com, the entertainment crit Mecca, and you’ll find Van Lear Rose rubbing shoulders with Brian Wilson’s Smile and Led Zeppelin’s How The West Was Won atop the All Time High Scores list, meaning it is essentially the best reviewed album of the last decade. Just let that one sink in for a few.

Regardless, Van Lear Rose is a very good album, and Lynn putting out a record of this caliber at sixty-nine years old is a truly impressive feat. White, with the help of future members of The Raconteurs, proved to be the Rubin to Lynn’s Cash, and gave her the resurgence that she undoubtedly deserved.

In 2002, you would have been hard pressed to find a bigger rising star than Damon Gough, or Badly Drawn Boy. Having released the Mercury prize-winning The Hour of Bewilderbeast just two years earlier, Gough’s next move was a fairly bold one: scoring a Hugh Grant film directed by those American Pie guys. About a Boy is based on the 1998 Nick Hornby novel of the same name, and as with most adaptions, many liberties were taken with the printed version. The most apparent being the exclusion of Kurt Cobain as a central plot figure, but that’s a completely different discussion. The point is, who in there right mind would read About a Boy and think to themselves, “The smooth brit-folk of Badly Drawn Boy is perfect for the film adaption?”

But somehow it worked. Gough’s soundtrack helped turn a decent film into a good one, and provided an album that didn’t simply fit into the confines of “film score” territory, meaning that it was entirely enjoyable on its own, without imagining Hugh Grant and the kid from Skins going on about ducks. Depression and loneliness were the central motifs of the novel, and Gough proved that those themes were right in his wheelhouse. Tracks like “Something to Talk About,” “Silent Sigh,” and especially “A Minor Incident” are some of the best tracks Badly Drawn Boy has put to tape, while album closer “Donna & Blitzen” has become a staple for those obnoxious Indie Christmas mixes.

Just a few months after About a Boy, Gough released the divisive Have You Fed the Fish?, another fine album that sits in the trinity of “good” Badly Drawn Boy efforts. In 2004 however, Gough decided his listeners needed a long nap and he provided the soundtrack with One Plus One is One and its follow up, 2006′s Born in the UK. 2009 marked a return to film scoring for Gough when he released an album inspired by the ITV film The Fattest Man in Britain, and the results were Badly Drawn Boy’s best album since 2002. Sure, it’s no big budget studio feature, but Is There Nothing We Could Do? is a step in the right direction for a talented singer/songwriter who hopefully has a few great albums left in him.

Listen:

Badly Drawn Boy – “A Minor Incident”

Also, check out Nick Hornby’s take on the above track from his 31 Songs collection.

At some point Bruce Springsteen and his audience (critical and listening) took to taking his music way too serious, a phenomenon reaching its nadir with The Rising, which was billed as a post-9/11 salve and works well enough as an album, it’s just unfortunately saddled with certain expectations eclipsing the reach of even the best rock albums. The trend continued with the 2005 release of Devils & Dust for which Springsteen dropped the E Street Band and affected his okie singing-voice for a collection of folky songs that cover the Iraq War and Springsteen’s personal travails. Again, a solid album married to the expectations of a “voice of a generation.” In 2006 Springsteen ditched all expectations implicit and explicit by recording without the E Street Band an album of someone else’s music (Pete Seeger covers) for 2006′s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. The decision counts as an unqualified success, resulting in Springsteen’s most enjoyable album in some time, and probably his best since Nebraska. Springsteen is obviously having a blast on these songs, singing and playing with abandon that verges on jubilation when appropriate. We Shall Overcome… is a complete album in the truest sense, not because of any interwoven narrative, rather the infectious energy that abounds from start to finish.

High praise greeted the 2004 release of Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands, much of it warranted, the message is endearingly simple, and Banhart and producer Michael Gira scatter enough music craft and invention throughout the album to elevate the songs from folk to freak folk or whatever tag the post-millenial folkers prefer. Album opener in particluar, “This Is The Way,” is not only a pleasant ode to optimism at a time of cynicism, but an immediate litmus test as to whether or not you will enjoy the album. In retrospect buying too much into Banhart’s folk motif musically and personally is maybe not the greatest idea. Listen too the albums, enjoy them for the simpler pleasures at a time of entrenched cynicism and often fruitless derivations, and move along, hopefully a little better for it.

Devendra Banhart – This Beard is For Siobhan (live)

Growing up in a southern town, I generally ignored anything labeled “Country” for years, even when an “Alt” preceded it. For those reasons, I turned my nose up at Wilco’s first three albums, due to their association with that venomous tag. By 2002 however, I had just discovered The Velvet Underground, Ryan Adams, and The White Stripes, artists whose country undertones were not immediately identifiable to me, save for Adams. After hearing from several sources that the leaked version of Wilco’s latest, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a must-have, I begrudgingly logged into Limewire and had it within the hour. I remember cycling through the tracks to see what the buzz was about, skipping over opener “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” because it took a tad long to get going. Track two “Kamera” sounded good enough, I figured I would go ahead and burn a CD for some class-walking.

I didn’t take that CD out of the Discman for at least three months.

I would say that there are maybe 5 albums that I know every word to, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of those. Jeff Tweedy’s hushed vocals forced me to really listen, something that an 18-year old college freshman wasn’t necessarily good at. I even spent 1/5 of my monthly stipend on the physical album once it hit stores, funds that had been previously earmarked for a case of Keystone Ice. YHF was the soundtrack to countless formative memories, and I’m almost positive that I didn’t make a single mix CD from 2002-2005 that did not include “Heavy Metal Drummer.” Perhaps it was the timing. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic albums that have been released since YHF, albums that I truly love and consider to be among the best ever. But I can’t say that any have had the effect that Wilco’s masterpiece had on me. An album like that doesn’t come around too often.