Pitchfork's Top 200 Albums of the 2000s

If there's anything the happy New York kids in this band have learned from listening to African music, it's the difference between "pop" and "rock": Vampire Weekend's debut album announces straight off that it's the former. The first sound on the first song, "Mansard Roof", comes from Rostam Batmanglij's keyboard, set to a perky, almost piping tone-- the kind of sunny sound you'd hear in old west-African pop. Same goes for Ezra Koenig's guitar, which never takes up too much space; it's that clean, natural tone you'd get on a record from Senegal or South Africa. Chris Baio's bass pulses and slides and steps with light feet, and most of all there's Chris Tomson, who plays like a percussionist as often as he does a rock drummer, tapping out rhythms and counter-accents on a couple of drums in the back of the room. And yet they play it all like indie kids on a college lawn, because they're not hung up on Africa in the least-- a lot of these songs work more like those on the Strokes' debut, Is This It?, if you scraped off all the scuzzy rock'n'roll signifiers, leaving behind nothing but clean-cut pop and preppy new wave, tucked-in shirts and English-lit courses.

I've heard Dave Longstreth cursed at length, and I've heard him compared to some of the lesser deities. In the Dirty Projectors frontman we have a fellow who fancies himself not so much a songwriter as a modern composer, a Yale comp-school dropout with one of indie rock's most divisive voices. Early DPs records carry with them ambitions so grandiose it's no wonder they range from wildly inventive to practically unlistenable-- occasionally in the span of the same song.

For better or worse, Cut Copy swim in the same pool as those electro, French touch, and new wave revivalists for whom fashion, irony, and self-consciousness represent swords to live and die by. In a scene as self-reflexive as this, backlashes are the order of the day, but even still, there are signs-- such as the increasing use of "blog house" as an eye-rolling pejorative, recent records by Calvin Harris, Does It Offend You Yeah?, and Ghostland Observatory, and the parallel rise of Balearic-feeling dance as a worthy substitute-- that this world might be slipping under the weight of its own ubiquity. Based on their patchy and rainbow-chasing 2004 debut, Bright Like Neon Love there was every reason to believe that a new Cut Copy record this late in the cycle would only accelerate the meltdown; after all, there are only so many ways to arrange and re-arrange vibrant art direction, moneyed aloofness, and the right kinds of sounds before the party heads to a new venue altogether.

Can you resist a girl who calls you a bum before offering to knit you mittens and make you pie? Who sings like a Pound Puppy while agreeing to push your bail bonds when cash was tight? Who compresses the entirety of this year's Fannypack record into one 2:35 track? Who exudes so much offhand sass she might strip the chrome off your bumper if she parked her "gifted, all-natural, and bursting the seams" keester on it?

Can an album really be a departure if it's the first thing a group's released in 11 years? It ideally would be for a genre-bound band turned brand name like Portishead: As much as there is to miss about the mid-late 1990s, the time for any trip-hop revival is far into the future, and picking up right where they left off in 1997 would make Portishead some kind of sad cipher coasting on the fumes of an exhausted trend-- something they've always been above. If the voice of Beth Gibbons wasn't so ingrained in the consciousness of a whole generation of indie kids, you could look at Third as a sort of re-debut; it posits that the sound of Portishead can actually exist even after the group excises every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.

It's disingenuous to talk about Los Angeles' New Yorker-profiled, vegan-snacks-serving, book-lending, all-ages venue the Smell with the same high-art vocabulary you'd use to dissect other creative collectives, like Andy Warhol's Factory-- the Smell's constituency (L.A.'s optimistic experimental art pack) appears un-fixated on fame, self-aggrandizement, or furthering its nascent mythology. To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic, a stroller-friendly, cheap-haircut-hock ing haven that's as functional as it is fruitful. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands.