The only 2000s album better than ‘Is This It’, according to science
As a musical era, the 2000s was already fighting with one hand behind its back. Culture’s incessant need to romanticise any year beginning with 1, in the name of nostalgia, meant some of the finest records of this new millennium would likely be viewed with subtle disdain.
But with retrospect at our disposal, we can now wholeheartedly confirm that this decade brought with it some of the finest music in history. Societally, the world was still immersed in its state of ignorant bliss, launched by the culturally diverse ’90s and fuelled further by digitalisation, consumption and steroid-induced capitalism of this new millennium.
Underneath the colourful shadow of booming commercial pop, grew some of the finest alternative records of all time. On domestic shores, Radiohead continued their journey of innovation with the captivating Kid A, while Amy Winehouse redefined the role of a singer-songwriter with her 2006 record Back To Black.
But alternative music thrived, largely at the hands of the Arctic Monkeys and their debut album
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. It was lyrically refreshing and rhythmically energetic, but not wholly without influence. No, the Monkeys were unashamed in admitting that their seminal debut record was a rehashing of the formula set out by the New York band, The Strokes.
Their debut album, Is This It, captured a mood at the turn of the millennium. Rather than embrace what many thought would be an age of kaleidoscopic colour and innovation, their monochromatic album hinged on lo-fi, DIY soundscapes that captured an obscure sense of modern nostalgia. For many, it became the soundtrack of this new decade, but according to science, it wasn’t the number one album.
So what was the best album of the decade?
Well, according to science, which is Henrik Franzon’s Acclaimed Music website, compiling an aggregated list of all critics’ best album lists and ranking them into one definitive pile, The Strokes’ Is This It sits at second, just behind Arcade Fire’s Funeral.
The 2004 record is seen as the magnum opus of the band, for its unique blend of instrumentation sure, but more for its lyrical content of a life in transition. There was a huge cultural shift in society at that point, and the band’s uplifting lyrics about a life battling through grief and change seemed to capture that zeitgeist.
“My dad died when I was 17,” Richard Reed Parry explained of the album’s sentiment. “I wouldn’t have started playing music in a real way. I wouldn’t have joined a band and been screaming and wanting to break stuff and get in front of people and sing and harmonise – I wouldn’t have been doing that if that hadn’t happened. I think probably the same for Regine in a similar time period… You don’t have a name for it, but you do have this feeling of ‘I just wanna open up the heart chamber and put it out there’. It does plant something in you that needs to find a place in the world.”
It felt like a euphoric celebration of this emotional release through music, and ushered in a new era of cultural sentimentality. Something about Is This It perhaps feels more aesthetically and sonically representative of the time, but Funeral undoubtedly spoke to the heart of the attitude in a more subtle, but impactful way.
