76. My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge
(Eyeball/Reprise Records, 2004)
They got bigger but not better on The Black Parade, trading in all the hooks and humor that made them great on their breakthrough album for some kind of goth Up With People bullshit rock opera. But for a minute there, My Chemical Romance was a pretty amazing storm of histrionic power emo, with as much classic rock in their riffs as there was punk and enough blood-soaked imagery to momentarily make emo almost as scary to parents as metal used to be.

77. Avec - Lines
(Civil Defense League/Doghouse, 2007)
One of the frustrating things about covering indie rock in Baltimore the past few years is that it’s never been a better time for a band to be from here, in terms of what kind of buzz and conntations that can produce, but it’s still more often than not certain kinds of bands that do well, and a lot of great ones outside that type that get ignored no matter how great they are. Avec are this great brooding proggy quartet with male/female vocals who are amazing live and made a really strong album a couple years ago, but pretty much nobody noticed it seemed like, at the peak of the whole Wham City excitement. There’s so many weird grooves and brilliant melodic and rhythmic ideas in this record that sometimes it makes my head spin.

78. The Diplomats - Diplomatic Immunity
(Diplomat Records/Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, 2003)
The half decade since this album have somewhat warped my perception of it, from the giddy embrace of Dipset among goofballs who treat rap like internet memes, and the questionable deification of Cam’ron and the fake classic status of Purple Haze, to Juelz and Jim’s respective phases of depressing ubiquity, to the diminishing returns of an army of 2nd and 3rd degree weed carriers that would put peak era Wu Tang to shame. But back in ‘03, all we knew was that Cam was having a good run and taking the Roc sound and kinda bringing it together with a different new vibe, and that even though his crew didn’t seem too promising and it was totally unnecessary for them to drop a double album, somehow that ballsy gamble paid off and they had so many joints that it became the soundtrack of the summer.



79. Usher - 8701
(Arista Records, 2001)
Sandwiched between the six times platinum My Way and the diamond-certified Confessions, the measly four million units that 8701 moved mark it as one of Usher’s lesser blockbusters. But in a way it might be his defining statement, the most mature and resonant album in a career full of constant calculated displays of emotional catharsis and declarations of adulthood. There’s a reason he keeps rewriting “U Got It Bad” over and over.

80. Firewater - Psychopharmacology
(Jetset Records, 2001)
Using music as a jumping off point to talk about or draw parallels to 9/11 is one of the most pervasive rock critic cliches of the decade (you could base a drinking game off of unnecessary 9/11 mentions in Pitchfork’s P2K list) and one I’d rather avoid. But pretty much everybody had at least one record they listened to obsessively that fall and started overanalyzing in that context, and for me it was Firewater’s third album, released in July ‘01. In particular, “The Man With The Blurry Face” opens with “it started off like a regular Tuesday” before outlining some vague disaster scenario, and the next song is titled “Black Box Recorder,” and the rest of the record features enough of a general air of dread and catastrophe, along with the usual droll black humor and wordplay of every record Tod A has ever made, that it became kind of my go-to record around that time. But beyond that, it also features some of Firewater’s best songs ever, including “Woke Up Down” and the surprisingly moving ballad “Seventh Avenue Static.”

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