26. Trick Daddy - Thug Matrimony: Married To The Streets
(Slip-N-Slide Records/Atlantic Records, 2004)
Trick’s made so many good albums, but this is the one that has a perfect balance of filthy sex raps (“J.O.D.D.”), fight music (“Fuckin’ Around”), bass jams (“Down Wit Da South”), pop singles (“Sugar”) and adorably gruff inspirational songs with children singing the hook (“I Wanna Sang”).

27. Sloan - Never Hear The End Of It
(Yep Roc Records, 2007)
Given that Sloan have at least a couple records that dragged at just 12 songs, there was no guarantee that an ambitious 30-track opus would fly at all, especially on album #8 after a long downward slide in quality control. But the band’s four songwriters rallied together and came up with the best they had, while still staying within their own “just plain old power pop” wheelhouse, and made one of the best White Album-meets-Abbey Road epics any wannabe Beatles has come up with in decades.



28. Raphael Saadiq - Instant Vintage
(Universal Records, 2002)
For a long time, Voodoo would’ve occupied this spot on the list. But at some point I realized that three of my favorite songs D’Angelo’s been involved in were co-written by Raphael Saadiq (those being “Untitled,” “Lady” and Instant Vintage’s lead single “Be Here”) and that I really just prefer the latter’s songwriting, voice, and aesthetic choices. I mean this guy is just a genius.

29. Blaq Starr - I’m Bangin’
(JB Starr Productions, 2006)
This is a shaky analogy, but I really feel like Blaq Starr’s impact on Baltimore club music about halfway through this decade was similiar to Timbaland’s on hip hop and R&B in the mid-’90s. His initial hits, including “Get My Gun” and “Get Your Hands Up,” as collected on here, were so huge with local DJs, and his approach to arranging drums (pummeling kick drums, sometimes with no snare at all), samples (wordless voices chopped into percussive loops) and vocals (his own airy falsetto) was so utterly original that the producers that followed him couldn’t help but be influenced by it. Though subsequent mix CDs and EPs, including I’m Bangin’ 2, have been better distributed and heard by more people, this first mix with no artwork or tracklist that Blaq Starr gave me when I interviewed him a few summers ago remains, to me, his single best release, in 27 relentless minutes compiling nearly all of his amazing early hits, including the original versions of “Ryda Gyrl” and “Slyde” and “Hands Up, Thumbs Down” before he remixed them for local rappers that only dragged the songs down.

30. Ted Leo/Pharmacists - Shake The Sheets
(Lookout! Records, 2004)
Shake The Sheets is kind of the dark horse of Ted Leo’s big four Pharmacists albums, the one that followed the year after the breakthrough Hearts Of Oak and made almost none of the big year-end lists that its predecessor did. But Hearts was a couple great songs padded out with filler and bad production, whereas Sheets is by far his tightest and best-sounding (if not outright best) album, with laser-focused songwriting and a road-tested rhythm section.

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