Five Years 2000-2005

The turn of a new century bought with it many artists pushing at the boundaries of music, both technically and emotionally. And, while this could rightly be seen as just further musical progression, there was something about the boldness and enthusiasm with which the artists of this period made their advances that really stands out.

The pop of the early noughties glimmered and shone, and indie moved in a direction of earnestness and heartfelt emotion. Other genres mixed and collided with glorious aplomb, giving the era a wealth of wonderful new sounds.

At the forefront of this musical change was the Toronto music scene, and that was Godspeed You! Black Emperor with part 1 of Storm; Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. Canada is famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for their many indie acts and thriving hipster scene, but Toronto is especially well known for its avant garde post rock, where violins and horn sections coexist with synthesisers and distortion in compositions well over 20 minutes.

An interesting project these musicians came out with was Broken Social Scene, a loose collective of ever changing musicians drawn from the area around Toronto, only playing more traditional pop music, or atleast, their take on traditional pop music. This is Almost Crimes off of their seminal 2002 album You Forgot It In People

Easily the most famous band to come out of Canada in the early 2000s was Arcade Fire. It amazes me how for every Arcade Fire fan there is another person who despises the band, but when I think about it, it makes sense.

Win Butlers skinny voice and incredibly earnest, heartfelt and raw lyrics makes the band sound whinier than it is, but the way the marching band drums and soaring string section hurtles each moment of the song giddily into the next gives their music breath-taking energy.

When Funeral came out in 2004, Arcade Fires rallying cry against apathy, depression and hate found itself a home in the bedrooms of wide eyed teenagers across the world, becoming an instant classic, while at the same time drawing fire from the older generations who saw it as no more than shallow emo drowning in pretence. I’ll let you make your mind up for yourselves about it.

The influence of classical music on pop and rock also showed up on a number of other brilliant albums. Artist like The National, Regina Spektor, Iron and Wine and Joanna Newsom became synonymous with chamber pop or baroque rock in the early noughties, all paving the way for the absolute explosion in this genre in the second half of the new decade.

Perhaps the apex of chamber pop was Sufjan Steven’s Come On & Feel The Illinoise!, a delicate and beautiful concept album about the people, history and geography of the state of Illinois. This is the albums centre piece about the state capital. 

While some artists were utilising classical arrangements to portray the confidence and hope going into a new millennium, others were torturing samplers and synthesisers to represent the anxiety and fear the uncertain, globalised future holds. 

I struggle to explain the surge in severely depressed, introverted music that came out around the start of the millennium. Obviously, the link between depression and music stretches back way, way, way farther than the 2000s, but the ubiquity of albums that talked candidly about the black dog was certainly unprecedented.

Perhaps it was fear of the future, or perhaps it was a response to the substance-less angst of the 90s. Maybe websites like Pitchfork.com were redirecting listeners from rock to bands that filled a more personal niche, or cynically maybe a wave of bands were just inspired to borrow the formula from Radiohead.

Perhaps, the internet and headphones were altering peoples listening habits, allowing music to become more personal.

Or, as I like to hope, society had progressed to a point where it was acceptable to talk about these feelings. 

That track was off of the brilliant Emergency & I, where the Dismemberment Plan portray depression as a distorted, alien mess with gurgling moogs, oddball synths, panic stricken guitar attacks and deliberately clumsy and a little unhinged lyrics.

On the other hand, Modest Mouse portray the illness as an endless freezing expanse devoid of life on The Moon and Antarctica, the tracks bleeding into one another in a continuous piece. The genius of the album is the way this sonic landscape glimmers and shines. Using a huge variety of instruments, Modest Mouse create beautiful vistas of sadness.

It would be wrong to say these bands wallowed in their sadness. More, they communicated the experience through their music. Other bands though put forward an antidote to their problems. I strongly suggest tracking down the documentary Fearless Freaks, which heart-breakingly captures the disintegration of The Flaming Lips circa 1999.

An eccentric bunch of goofball artists; drug addiction, dying parents, member walkouts and commercial failure pushed the group to the edge. The scene where the bands resident genius, Steven Drozd, explains the effects his heroin addiction has had on his life while shooting up is frankly one of the most moving scenes I’ve ever seen committed to film.

The resulting albums, 1999s The Soft Bulletin and 2002s Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, fight back against turmoil and mortality with bright, kaleidoscopic aural gymnastics and go for broke optimism.

In pop music, bands explored technology to incredible results. In Australia, 2 DJs and their collaborators poured themselves into an absolute labour of love. Utilising an estimated 3,500 samples, Since I Left You by The Avalanches is an achievement by all possible benchmarks. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Georgia, in just 5 short minutes, one band would take the rulebook of music and blast it into outerspace at a million miles an hour.