2. Weezer, Weezer Unlikely as it may have seemed that a band that had only released their debut album seven years earlier was in dire need of a comeback, that was exactly the situation Weezer was in when they released their third album in late spring of 2001. Following a surprising smash with the oddball pop of their self-titled debut in 1994, Weezer’s sophomore effort, 1996’s Pinkerton was widely seen as a failure, although admiration for the record has swelled in the years since. Rivers Cuomo, the main creative force behind the band, put Weezer on hiatus while he toyed … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 2 and 1

6. Stereolab, Sound-Dust Stereolab was just starting to rattle college radio’s proverbial cage at about the time I secured my undergraduate degree, a task undertook in concerted foot-dragging fashion, I assure you. The album Mars Audiac Quintet was released about a year after I graduated, its lead single, “Ping Pong,” nicely mapping out the new path noncommercial radio stations might take now that their profit-driven counterparts further up the dial had fully and completely appropriated grunge rock. The music was poppy and light but also archly different, introducing oddity through the casualness of its mildly disenchanted deconstruction of traditional songcraft. … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 6 and 5

12. Low, Things We Lost in the Fire The first time I realized I may be falling out of step with the prevailing taste of college radio kids came fairly early in my post-collegiate years, when a breathless rave in the pages of CMJ New Music Monthly inspired me to go out and purchase The Biz, the third album by the Chicago band the Sea and the Cake. The jazz-inflected collection of languidly thoughtful songs was deemed smart, intricate and artistically challenging. It found it incredibly boring, maybe because I had inclinations towards neither bongs nor headphones. So it was … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 12 and 11

20. Daft Punk, Discovery Daft Punk is comprised of French musicians Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, but early editions of their 2001 sophomore release, Discovery, essentially welcomed all interested listeners into their unique, electronic beat-driven, border-free nation. The album came with a Daft Punk membership card that allowed online access to all sorts of material, including music that wouldn’t show up on proper releases for years. The robot helmets the band members wore gave the whole endeavor a futuristic, almost otherworldly sense, as if they’d slipped over from another timeline where the wildest futuristic predictions of the nineteen-fifties had … Continue reading College Countdown: CMJ Top 50 Albums of 2001, 20 and 19