E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Alan Baban on the Music of the 00s Culturally we inhabit the margins. If the major movement in pop music over the last ten years was stealing other people’s ideas, we’re now in a position to see exactly what we got away with. What did we get away with? We got away with wholesale theft. Many of the decade’s most lauded bands did double-up as penciled-in, papier-mâché versions of older (always better) acts. You can footnote The Strokes at Marquee Moon . The National did a fairly risible REM. Our own Libertines tried to do The Strokes, then they did The Clash, then they did The Strokes again. Too many bands copped Talking Heads. Not enough copped Pavement— not even the band’s erstwhile frontman Stephen Malkmus, who shot off into acid-psyche territory with his new band The Jicks, and in the process put out this decade’s best guitar album (2005’s utterly loopy Pig Lib ). Sidenote: too many people played guitar, then again, too many people didn’t. Radiohead did and didn’t. (I liked them bett...

In no order, the following ten albums were the ones that Eyewear found themselves returning to most often, in the pop/rock category. The Priests have a new album that's worth checking out, for those inclined that way. The Pope does as well. Both rise above schmaltz to be genuinely moving at times, if obviously not for all. Anyway, here are the ten: Fever Ray , eponymous; Grizzly Bear , Veckatimest ; Yeah Yeah Yeahs , It's Blitz!; Animal Collective , Merriweather Post Pavilion ; The xx ; eponymous; Lady Gaga , The Fame ; Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions , Through the Devil Softly ; Echo and the Bunnymen , The Fountain ; U2 , No Line on the Horizon ; White Lies , To Lose My Life . Others were close, but no cigar. A few were strictly guilty pleasures, like the latest Ah-ha , or Depeche Mode , or Simple Minds . The new La Roux , and the new Little Boots etc., the synth pop gals, were good but really rather limited. On another front, the best film of the year was Let ...