Best of Music 2001

Scott Wilson

Top Ten Albums

1. Ben Folds
Rockin' the Suburbs (Epic)
What a relief. Missing only the manic energy and harmonies of Robert Sledge and Darren Jesse, the other two-thirds of Ben Folds Five, Folds' solo debut refines his former group's formula rather than starting from scratch. He's his own remarkably effective power trio, playing all the bass and drum parts -- and most of the guitar -- in addition to his primary instrument, the piano. The songs, a mix of Don't Shoot Me-era Elton John and medium-strength Randy Newman, are marvels of compact character analysis set to foolproof hooks.

2. Elton John
Songs From the West Coast (Universal)
It's no surprise that Elton still has songs like these up his Versace sleeves or even that lyricist Bernie Taupin still remembers how to be blunt when it counts. What's brilliant about Songs goes beyond the reconvening of these writing partners to fashion their tightest songs in 25 years; the playing, production and, especially, John's singing jell perfectly and refuse to yield to the studio frippery that marred post-1983 albums of otherwise strong songs. And in "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore," John has a "My Way"-like career-capper good enough to warrant forgiveness for his every Disney excess.

3. Bob Dylan
Love and Theft (Columbia)
Is it lowered expectation that makes Love and Theft -- on the heels of 1997's Grammy-winning Time out of Mind and last year's deserved Oscar for "Things Have Changed" -- feel like a hot streak? Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde came out less than a year apart, for crying out loud. Or is it possible that the AARP-model Dylan is not only worth the wait but an improvement? Splitting the difference between the dryly witty World Gone Wrong and Time's sepulchral heartsickness, Love and Theft is as playful as that ridiculous vaudevillian's pencil-thin mustache Dylan sports on the back cover and as permanent as the black-and-white image on the front.

4. Bjork
Vespertine (Elektra)
The biggest challenge to pop culture's deceptively conservative sensibilities since Reagan-era Prince, Bjork has become such a household name that Ellen DeGeneres earned the night's biggest laugh during this year's Emmy Awards telecast just by wearing a knockoff of a certain goose-neck gown. She remains mannered and precious and easily lampooned (DeGeneres, not Bjork; well, both). And fearless (just Bjork). Plays like art, tastes like sugar.

5. R.E.M.
Reveal (Warner Bros.)
Reveal's superficials are laughably ironic: The cover artwork is a blight on the music and the song titles ("Saturn Return," "Beachball") are dumb. By now, though, such camouflage is useless. Every step that the now-three-member R.E.M. takes toward admitting it cannot and should not rock is a positive one. Every attempt to fend off the perception that it's a corporate-music icon is a stumble. From this point on, the fewer records R.E.M. sells, the better its music will be.

6. Radiohead
Amnesiac (Capitol)
Who says Thom Yorke is no fun? The Radiohead singer cheerfully showed up this year on cable's Space Ghost and, with the band, bolstered South Park's sagging credibility with a similar appearance. Yorke's I'm a reasonable man; get off my case mantra on Amnesiac's opening cut isn't unfathomable irony or chilly non sequitur; it's a you've gotta fight for your right to party for people (Radiohead, its fans, its detractors) who, bless 'em, rightfully dread being labeled postmodern. Amnesiac is party music, slow-burn Motown for eggheads.

7. Tori Amos
Strange Little Girls (Atlantic)
Just when a suddenly Tolkien-obsessed world might be looking to stock its refrigerator with Tori Amos' faerie-goddess mead, the self-consciously ethereal singer leaves her enchanted forest to walk on blood-stained pavement. Her misfired version of the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" could have scared John Lennon straight out of sonic collage, but the rest of the disc is unerring in its instincts, turning the murdered harpy of Eminem's "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" into Banquo's ghost and recasting Slayer's "Raining Blood" as a solemn epitaph. A covers disc, concept album and product of Amos' overambitious but inarticulate imagination, Strange Little Girls should have been a disaster. It's her best album.

8. Joe Henry
Scar (Mammoth)
That this is Henry's worst album in a decade only goes to show that Madonna's brother-in-law (and the author of her "Don't Tell Me") lives up to the clichéd boast that one artist's dregs are better than the empty foam most other acts serve their fans. It's hard not to feel warmly tipsy listening to the stunning Ornette Coleman-adorned opener, "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation," a watermark the rest of the disc honorably fails to surpass. Where 1996's Trampoline and 1999's Fuse thrillingly bastardized Tom Waits' hellish kling-klang-king-of-the-rim-ram-room sonics and cranked up the electron microscope of Henry's lyrical observations to make something innovative, Scar just settles into the groove those discs etched; on first listening, it might be called Scraps. It was a nice place to revisit, but he shouldn't live there.