Best Music of 2003 | #31-35

35	LUCINDA WILLIAMS World without Tears (Lost Highway)

There is nothing funny about this most recent release from brilliant-artist-with-troubled-soul Lucinda Williams. Yet on an album marked by harrowing loss, Williams demonstrates her unique artistry in turning vomit, cancer and perdition into the property of powerful poetry. But Williams is not only interested in the violent side of life; Lucinda sings exquisitely of lavender, lotus blossoms, sugar canes, sweet sides, John Coltrane, and Prince Charming as with the sugary innocence passionate kisses. Teamed with a strong backing band who play the blues as a tight unit, Lucinda fills her record’s world with plenty of tears, joy and just about every other emotion. World Without Tears is as complete an album as there can be: from the lacerating rocker “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings” to the broke-down Gospel of “Atonement” to the stark ballad “Minneapolis”, there is never a let-down. Out of a most painful time in her life, Lucinda has crafted some of her best work in years.
      — Seth Limmer :. original PopMatters review

34	ME’SHELL NDEGEOCELLO Comfort Woman (Maverick)

Like many folks, after 9/11, Meshell reconsidered. Unlike many folks, she conjured a singular beauty. Rich, undulating, pulsing with her usual heavy bass, the new album is one of the few to emerge this year that repays re-listening. There’s always something new to savor, in the layers it constructs and investigates, at once self-referential and also, carefully, stretching out: “Love Song #1” is sweet and thick, while “Liliquoi Moon” (from the Biker Boyz soundtrack) is contemplative and generous. The album, as many listeners have noted, is “peaceful,” a coming to terms with the impossibility of containing chaos, a consciousness of limits and also, their uses, as motivations and self-preservations. Later tracks, “Thankful” and “Fellowship,” offer readings of systems, and such reading, in its way, brings hope.
      — Cynthia Fuchs :. original PopMatters review

33	SUPER FURRY ANIMALS Phantom Power (XL/Beggars Group)

Gruff Rhys knows that the world is going to shit, and tells you why in the most beautiful way possible. This is a hugely ambitious concept record about the deep huge mess our country has made of the post-9/11 world, where the Liberty Belle is also the ninja jihad that sneers, “Suck my oil.” The only escape is to disappear into music, and SFA has done nothing to lessen their Beach Beatle Aphex Orchestra image except to hone it and polish it to a high glossolalia — hard to tell if “Venus and Serena” and “Cityscape Skybaby” melt the mind or the heart first.
      — Matt Cibula :. original PopMatters review

32	THE DECEMBERISTS Her Majesty, the Decemberists (Kill Rock Stars)

Portland, Oregon’s newest lit-rock sensations defy the perpetual late season slump with the release of Her Majesty, the Decemberists. Led by bookstore clerk Colin Meloy, the songs on this album hearken us back into history, beyond the 1917 Decemberists Revolution, weaving tales of scurvy pirates lost at sea, teenage infantry men fighting for more than a faded patriotism, and a former spelling bee contestant with a religious vision from the novel Bee Season. Musically, the band evokes memories of the greats of late-’80s college radio, the wit and poignancy of the Smiths, the expansive “Americanism” of REM, as well as the quirky story stylings of groups like They Might be Giants and XTC. To describe Her Majesty in a phrase, it’s like PBS with music videos.
      — Jason Korenkiewicz :. original PopMatters review

31	BASEMENT JAXX Kish Kash (Astralwerks)

If the next-big-thing-of-2003-that-wasn’t is the mashup (“A Stroke of Genius”, I’m listening to you), then this album is the bastard offspring of the mashup; this is pop music that’s been mashed together, held only by a remarkable grasp of the history of pop music. As such, it’s both like and unlike any pop music anyone on earth (besides Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe) has ever heard. With a platoon of hot (Dizzee Rascal, Me’Shell Ndege’Ocello) or not (JC Chasez?) guest vocalists on display, we get some Electro-Northern Soul (“Good Luck”), Mutant Big Beat (“Supersonic”), Middle Eastern Garage (“Lucky Star”), Ambient Quiet Storm (“Feels Like Home”), and Fractured Chartpop (“Plug It In”). And while this record runs out of steam three-quarters of the way through, it’s breathtaking when it’s on. Why hasn’t any track on here hit mainstream radio?
      — Anthony C. Bleach :. original PopMatters review