It’s fair to say that the last ten years have been the most influential years musically in my life so far and it’s possible they may be the most influential ever.
10 years ago, as the world was facing the Millenium bug, the introduction of a pan-european currency and broadband was becoming commonplace in homes, I was approaching my 13th birthday.
Now approcahing my 23rd birthday is probably scarier than all of those things. If I were to look back on the last ten years, I have accomplished things and failed in probably equal measure. University has been and gone, friends have been made and loss, relationships have been forged and destructed, lessons learnt and many im still failing on, but that’s the way life is. And I like it like that.
Being able to chart my musical progression through the last decade as a teenager is of course a coincidence but a useful one nonetheless. So many of these albums thrive on teenage rebellion, optimism, disillusion and often naivety but they were still investigated on the strength of one or two songs. Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia was bought on the strength of still brilliant single, Bohemian Like You. That album has maintained it’s freshness and though I’ve never investigated Dandy Warhols any further, I still love the album’s ebbs and flows and its various nodds to Americana, southern drawl and straight up pop rock.
The experiment didn’t always work out so well, sometimes because of a poor album and sometimes because I just wasn’t ready for the ensuing chaos. The prime example of this is a story known to just one person as far as I know but here goes.
I can’t exactly remember the first time I heard Aerials by System of a Down but it was around the same time I fell for Hybrid Theory and I remember loving the smooth strings juxtaposed with Tankian’s angst ridden vocals, built around a song that switched in dynamics quickly with incredible creativity.
But that’s not how I saw it at the time. The rest of the album was relentless in its anger, I couldn’t sing along and there were no melodic guitars and I took it back. For Vanessa Carlton.
Hey, I never said I was perfect.
Anyway, the ensuing albums were all albums that I listened to intensively during the 2000s, not necessarily released this decade but ones that have shaped me into the slightly more enlightened muso I wrongly think I am today.
Oh, and I flat out refuse to call them the Noughties.
