Pop Albums of the Year

While this year's crop of albums did not live up to the high standards of 1999, the state of music is better than might be imagined from a glance at the bland fare in the charts. The Independent's critics nominate their albums of the year

EMINEM | The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope) Head, shoulders and extended middle finger above the year's other releases, Eminem's second album brought a new kind of intelligence and wit to rap, its author assuming, in the process, an ambivalent moral authority reliant less on good thoughts and good deeds than on remaining true to his own self - even to the point of graphically dramatising the rage he felt towards his adulterous spouse in "Kim", the most shocking of latter-day murder-ballads.

EMINEM | The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope) Head, shoulders and extended middle finger above the year's other releases, Eminem's second album brought a new kind of intelligence and wit to rap, its author assuming, in the process, an ambivalent moral authority reliant less on good thoughts and good deeds than on remaining true to his own self - even to the point of graphically dramatising the rage he felt towards his adulterous spouse in "Kim", the most shocking of latter-day murder-ballads.

With Eminem battling demons at every turn, the result was an almost repellently self-aware account of the hip-hop mind-set, depicting an Eminem struggling to deal with the psychic payback of his chosen profession. Time and time again, in tracks such as "The Way I Am", "I'm Back" and the irresistibly infectious "The Real Slim Shady", he is forced to confront the fall-out of playing an outlaw icon in a world where the line between fantasy and reality has become irrevocably smudged.

With Eminem's insights cunningly interwoven into his unrepentant celebrations of sex, drugs and violence, The Marshall Mathers LP built up a powerful, thought-provoking portrait of the psychopathology of antipathy, of someone who just cannot help being mean and selfish. And smart, too: where most rappers respond to criticism with bluster and threats, Eminem faces it down with surprisingly coherent arguments, demanding the same latitude for his violent fictions as is accorded Arnold Schwarzenegger's movies, reflecting guilt back on negligent parents - "... don't blame me when li'l Eric jumps off of the terrace/ You shoulda been watchin' him - apparently you ain't parents" - and, more broadly, commenting on America's love affair with guns. "How much damage can you do with a pen?" Eminem asks rhetorically in "Who Knew"; "... I just said it, I ain't know if you'd do it or not."

Eminem's most articulate defence of his supposed influence comes in the current No 1 single "Stan", a track impressive both for its formal dexterity - an epistolary exchange between the rapper and an increasingly deranged fan - and its tone of tragi-comic fatalism. The two-way power-play relationship between artist and fan is summarised and satirised in a few dark lines, which cast the rapper as cautiously concerned but fiercely protective of his privacy: "You got some issues, Stan; I think you need some counselling/ To help your ass from bouncing off the walls when you're down some/ And what's this shit about us 'meant to be together'?/ That type of shit'll make me not want to meet each other."

But for sheer gall, you have to admire the way in which Eminem has it both ways in "I'm Back", simultaneously boasting about and ridiculing the very notion that he might actually wield influence over impressionable kids: "I take each individual degenerate's head and reach into it/ Just to see if he's influenced by me if he listens to music/ And if he feeds into this shit he's an innocent victim/ And becomes a puppet on the string of my tennis shoe."

Ironically for such an avowed misanthrope, Eminem may be the most moral of contemporary American artists, using an engaging black humour to grapple with contentious issues such as sex and drugs, and confronting the essentially pornocratic nature of American pop culture with his obscene pokes at manufactured teen icons such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, N'Sync and Jennifer Lopez.

Compared with the blatant sexual provocations of the mainstream entertainment industry, he suggests, his own influence provides a corrective counterbalance that's more accurately reflective of American street life - and more genuinely entertaining, too. Andy Gill

LAMBCHOP | Nixon (City Slang) Age seems to have mellowed these salty purveyors of alt.country. Swoon to the shimmering melancholy of "The Old Gold Shoe" or the joyous, funk-inflected tribute to procreation "Up With People". This wondrous collection of songs reveals a softening in the band's songwriter, Kurt Wagner, who has toned down his trademark distemper and allowed his careworn vocals to animate such musings as the physical distance between him and his wife as he strolls around his backyard ("The Distance from Her to There") and the sights and sounds of his front porch ("Nashville Parent").

Lambchop's fifth album fulfils all the promise of its predecessors and shows the ever-growing Nashville collective at the peak of its powers. The spirit of Curtis Mayfield looms large in the flourishes of string and brass and Wagner's tender falsetto.

But fear not - it isn't all romance and good cheer. The album is still studded with old-style Wagnerisms, such as when, in the track "Grumpus", he observes: "Part of the process is sifting through the piles of shit." You gotta love him. Fiona Sturges

PRIMAL SCREAM | Xtrmntr (Creation) Sixteen years since the band's inception as fey janglers, and a decade after their reinvention as the chemical generation's favourite rock band, Primal Scream's sixth album dropped the vowels and proved their most consistent effort to date. It's always entertainingly unedifying when men in their late thirties behave as if they've discovered the true source, yet Xtrmntr's unholy blend of brutal grooves, all-out noise and unspecified politicisation frequently managed to outdo the Scream's avowed inspirations. You don't have to listen too hard to spot elements from Joy Division, Suicide and the hallowed MC5, yet the addition of Mani on bass and the sonic flair of Kevin Shields (clearly now forgiven for My Bloody Valentine's near-bankrupting of Creation) have added a real edge. Entrusting knob-twiddling duties to a stellar line-up including David Holmes, the Chemical Brothers and Dan the Automator, the band have, with their hands-off approach, redefined the very nature of a rock outfit yet never lost sight of the genre's eternal appeal. They were shamefully overlooked for the Mercury Prize, but the public thankfully took this often extreme collection to its heart, a fitting response for the last album Creation would ever release. Steve Jelbert

RADIOHEAD | Kid A (Parlophone) It was the most talked-about album of the year and, by default, the one most likely to fail to live up to expectations. Indeed, critical reaction to the album was muted - too experimental for its own good, not enough guitars/tunes/use of Thom Yorke's soaring vocals - as if the Radiohead brand was wantonly refusing to play to its core strengths. But it's exactly that refusal to pander to corporate image (and live off past success) that is the album's strength: its starting-point may be the themes of alienation of its predecessors, but it then unashamedly embraces more avant-garde concerns, abandoning the cathartic song structures of old that tempered the paranoia. Kid A is all about the quality of sound for its own sake, from a delight in shimmering texture that recalls Brian Eno and Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, through bricolage and machine noise to exuberant, unrestrained free-jazz work-outs. Self-indulgent? Probably. But also imaginative and brave, an antidote to the Radiohead-by-rote wannabes that have proliferated since OK Computer. It's not an easy album to like but it's one that more than repays the listening. Mark Wilson

BJORK | Selma Songs: Music from the Motion Picture Dancer in the Dark (One Little Indian) Though reviews of the movie itself were largely either ecstatic or scathing, Dancer in the Dark's soundtrack was almost universally acclaimed. Its ability to be both playful and emotionally affecting is typically Bjorkian, but given that much of it was composed in the few waking hours when the singer wasn't filming, the level of quality-control is remarkable.

Throughout the record, sounds, eras and genres are brilliantly juxtaposed. Thus, the stark, symphonic brass of "Overture" soon segues to the cartoonish musique concrÿte of "Cvaldo", Bjork's gleeful "Clatter! Crash! Clack!" a key ingredient in a sound-scape designed to evoke the factory where her character, Selma, works.

In the hands of a lesser talent, such eclecticism could have led to a fragmented-sounding work, but Bjork always has one eye on her overall vision. Whether duetting with Thom Yorke ("I've Seen It All") or drawing on the dark, Icelandic folk of her childhood ("Smith & Wesson"), she convinces you that she's simply emptying out the contents of Selma's head. Her assumed character's inner dialogue joins the dots, and the overall effect is magical. James McNair

CAROLYN HUME, PAUL MAY | Zero (Leo Lab) Although there were great jazz albums this year by Don Byron, Charles Lloyd, DD Jackson, Andy Sheppard, Uri Caine, Dave Douglas, Georgie Fame, Brad Mehldau and Annette Peacock, this piano-and-drums duo-set by two British musicians completely unknown to me continues to resonate more than most. Over nine original compositions, all credited to both players, the pianist Hume and the drummer May create a beguiling soundscape whose delicate shifts of mood and texture are simple but extraordinarily effective. Typically, Hume plays hard, repetitive, widely spaced chords, while May fastens on to edgy, often drum'n'bass-derived rhythms. It's not about instrumental virtuosity, and in a sense nothing much happens, but the music is all of a piece and sounds completely contemporary. There's more than a touch of Keith Jarrett's limpid lyricism about the piano-playing, but because the accompanying rhythms look to the present rather than the past, the music works on its own terms. That such a sweet-sounding record has come out on the Russian émigré Leo Feigin's often confrontational avant-garde label makes it an especially pleasant surprise. Phil Johnson

THE WATERBOYS | A Rock In the Weary Land (RCA) In a year when the giants of rock and pop worked to convince us of their finely honed banality, Mike Scott (aka The Waterboys) came outta nowhere to unleash a poky little thing full of guts, passion and ultra-daring literacy. The sound alone was vicious, a juggernaut of distorted synth, clever dub, alienated gospel and funereal piano with, rising over all, the sinister moan of a shrieking post-nuclear wind. On several tracks, the drum-track was reversed to give a warming soupçon of something made in hell. As for lyrics - well, anyone for existential unease? And if not, why not? London's decay was the focus (" 'Behold the lights of London,' the skipper said as his hands shook"), but the Scott rage broadened to cover the modern world's greed and stupidity, from the violence to which we're growing accustomed to the dribbling laddism and sexism so cheerfully embraced by those who've got bugger all else going for them. There was, finally, a hint at redemption, but nothing you could call a happy ending. Excessive, intelligent stuff. And about time. Glyn Brown

STEELY DAN | Two Against Nature (Giant Records) The much-anticipated studio reunion of Walter Becker and Donald Fagan, Two Against Nature carries on where Steely Dan's last album, Gaucho, left off at the tail-end of 1980. Twenty years on, they are as sharp and bright as a new pair of scissors. Becker's guitar still snaps, Fagan's Fender Rhodes twinkles like a city skyline, the horns bob and weave as if it were only yesterday. We're on familiar ground. Dan songs usually sound like vignettes from a dimestore novel, and these are no exception. Our characters pick up the pieces, run out of small talk and dream of summers by the sea, just like they always did. We learn that Bobbie Dakine won the Bunsen Prize, Cousin Dupree has a "skeevy" look in his eye (not in my dictionary, but we know what's meant), and only Janie Runaway brightens a dreary Sunday. "I'm worrying about the future now," sings the protagonist in "What a Shame About Me". "Or maybe this is it." This is no Seventies retro. Steely Dan have come back, Jack, and done it again. Robert Webb

OUTKAST | Stankonia (BMG) In a boon year for black American music - De La Soul, Erykah Badu, R Kelly and Wyclef Jean all delivering solid works - the fourth album from the Atlanta duo Big Boi and Andre 3000 and their awesome collective stood out. Inspired by the cosmic agenda of George Clinton but rooted in hard urban reality, the incendiary "Gasoline Dreams" set the scene: "The highway to heaven got a crook on the toll/ I hear Mother nature is on birth control." With blistering electronica, audacious freestyle rap and a sinuous, dirty funk, they give a revelatory look at America's sexual, political and racial make-up. Gangsta playa stereotypes are subverted in "I'll Call Before I Come"; "B.O.B" attacks the Gulf war the way Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" attacked Vietnam - tearing it apart, screaming at the madness - and "Toilet Tisha" is a soul-sick requiem for a pregnant teenage suicide. All told, an embarrassment of riches - the 21st-century Sly and the Family Stone are here, 67 years ahead of schedule. Gavin Martin

RUBEN GONZALEZ | Chanchullo (World Circuit) OK, a blindingly obvious choice, since all the world loves Ruben, the pianistic mainstay of Buena Vista Social Club, and his sales have gone through the roof. But this is a wonderful disc by a remarkable man. He's 82 and crippled with arthritis, but after Ry Cooder hoicked him out of retirement, he has been as though reborn. His technique is impressive even by classical standards, but what he does with it is dazzling: chromatic octave runs that are exhilaratingly off-key, and fusillades of chords going all over the piano. His key weapon is surprise - he knows when to lurk in the shade and when to burst forth. And he builds up his tapestries of sound like a sorcerer with a willing group of apprentices. Take the sixth track, a slow "son guajira": the trumpet flies high over soft percussion and a muted choral refrain, then in comes Ibrahim Ferrer's wild vocal, then we hear the Senegalese singer Cheikh Lo, while Gonzalez weaves his spell all round them - sometimes the sinewy foundation, sometimes the brightest star. Michael Church

ALLISON MOORER | The Hardest Part (MCA) Country and soul have common roots in the sweltering deeps of the American south. They've shared a landscape, a moral and economic climate, elements of style and, on occasion, players. It's frustrating, then, that history hasn't given us more good soulful country records or soul records with twang. But there it is. There are sound reasons for that. Ray Charles and Gram Parsons were always going to be high-profile exceptions that prove an awkward rule.

However, you can add Allison Moorer to that short list of cross-over transcendentalists. That is not speciously to claim greatness for her; only to point out that if there has ever been a real Nashville album that cleaves closer to the hot spirit of soul, then I'd like to hear it. The Hardest Part is about love and nothing else, delivered not from the moral perspective but from the one you get when you cop love as a force of human nature. I don't know a more passionate country record, nor a more grown-up one. Moorer's warm contralto is a mixture of low desolation and high intensity, her band is chunky-sparse and her songs are the deep dredgings of real life, not melodrama. I haven't stopped playing it yet. Nick Coleman

THE MIGHTY WAH! | Songs of Strength & Heartbreak (Castle) Liverpool's Pete Wylie, aka The Mighty Wah!, was a forgotten, frustrating figure at the start of the year: responsible for one of the great protest songs, "The Story of the Blues", in the Eighties, but reduced by bad breaks and self-destructive tendencies to the sidelines. News that Sony had pulled the plug on an extremely expensive, last-ditch comeback record just before release added to the sad head-shaking. But Songs of Strength & Heartbreak, eventually released on an independent label, proved Wylie was far from finished. Musically it was a kitchen sink, strings, brass and guitar Scouse Wall of Sound. Though many songs wrestled with a recent, calamitous relationship, the ghosts of Elvis Presley and The Clash were also evoked. "The Return of Rock and Roll" was its anthemic cornerstone: a restatement of the communal virtues of rock, in a year when such music seemed unsure what it was for. Wylie's lyrics restored its romantic conviction: "Till the truth cannot be sold, the return of rock and roll/ You say it has to end. But I still need a friend." Nick Hasted

MADONNA | Music (Maverick) This year, Madonna's Music is probably the biggest hit in our house. But only 70 per cent of it ever gets a play: the first three tracks are genuinely fab, and then it's all downhill from there. (Mind you, 14 years ago I only ever liked half of the tracks on her True Blue album.) But is Music really Madonna's album anyway? Rich and polished it may be, but - and I'm sure she could relate to this - really it's a case of all fur coat and no knickers. It's a triumph of style over substance and technique over talent, with all those frills and twiddly bits from William Orbit. Jonathan King said of this year's Mercury Awards: "All albums are crap. They consist of only one or two good singles, and the rest is filler." He may have a point. Of course, there have been LPs down the ages stuffed with great songs, but this year we've had some right turkeys. Liz Kershaw

JOHNNY CASH | American Recordings III: Solitary Man (Colombia) Johnny Cash's deadpan delivery of the line "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" established the blueprint for gangsta rap; and the mythological self-awareness of the three albums he's made under Rick Rubin's watchful ear seemed to inform much of the most vital pop music made in the year 2000 - from Eminem, at one end of the spectrum, to Daphne and Celeste, at the other. Cash's vocal range was never exactly in the Celine Dion bracket, and age and illness have narrowed it to the point where the average jackdaw would have a better shot at the high note in "The Star-Spangled Banner", but with this extraordinary third instalment in his stripped-down American trilogy, he turned that limitation to his advantage by either picking out songs whose meaning might seem to be set in stone and chiselling dusty AOR monoliths into extraordinary new shapes (Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down", U2's "One") or grappling with more gothic material - Will Oldham's "I See A Darkness", for example - in the manner of a man locked in an epic struggle with the grim reaper. There's no doubt which man in black will come out on top in the end, but the one whose name isn't Johnny will certainly know he's been in a fight. Ben Thompson