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A lot of good things came in pairs in 2003 — so here are the 20 Top 10 artists and/or albums of the year.
BY MATT ASHARE
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1) White Stripes/The Strokes One of the key lessons the industry learned from bands like Nirvana in the ’90s was that underground artists like, say, the Replacements didn’t have to conform to the polish of mainstream pop to succeed as mainstream pop. White Stripes and the Strokes were both benefactors on their major-label debuts, Elephant (V2) and Room on Fire (RCA), respectively. Both went from dingy club gigs to heavy rotation with remarkable speed, and that sent A&R scouts out looking for similar bands. But nobody ever really stopped to figure out just what to call this new sound with its roots in the old. Can White Stripes be garage punk and Zeppelin disciples at the same time? Can a band with a rhythm section as dynamic as the Strokes’ really owe that much to the Velvet Underground? Both questions get to the heart of each band’s appeal. Yes, there’s something familiar in their sound. But the more you listen, the harder it is to pin down. Which is what good bands do. 2) Coldplay/Radiohead Coldplay may owe their initial US breakthrough to Radiohead’s steadfast refusal to include hooks and choruses on Kid A and Amnesiac back when the melancholy falsetto and ringing guitars of Coldplay’s "Yellow" hit the airwaves. But with Radiohead back in the songwriting saddle on Hail to the Thief (Capitol), the year’s best album title and an album that was challenging rather than just frustrating, Coldplay had their work cut out for them. To say they rose to the challenge on A Rush of Blood to the Head (Capitol) is to understate just how far they’ve come in two years. Chris Martin has become a powerful live presence — and best of all, he and the band seem to be enjoying the spotlight, the one hurdle it took Radiohead two albums to get past. 3) The Donnas/The Distillers It’s been a long time since we’ve had not one but two grrrl-punk voices with hooks to match their attitude and that special gift of making being pissed off sound like fun. Brody Dalle is Kathleen Hanna without the grad-school socio-political baggage, Courtney Love without the checkered past, and a pretty good example of what Penelope Houston and her Avengers might have been able to do back in ’77-’78 if they’d been given the chance. It may take a while to sink in, but the Distillers’ major-label debut, Coral Fang (Sire), is too explosive to ignore, and Brody radiates so much barbed charisma, it’ll jump out of the speakers and grab you by the throat if you’re not careful. The Donnas are as horny as Liz Phair but would rather play dumb than hard-to-get, as in big, fat, buzzsaw guitar hooks that split the difference between Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers and Kiss’s Love Gun. Their Spend the Night (Atlantic), a late 2002 release that didn’t really break till 2003, is just polished enough for all the grit in those guitars to reach out and touch someone. 4) 50 Cent/Bubba Sparxxx Eminem can rap all he wants about "dead presidents," but 50 Cent shocked the world with the first-week sales of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Shady/Aftermath) and his vivid tales of the gangsta life delivered in a cold-steel slurred voice that made you believe every word. And if being a felon of sorts is okay, then what’s wrong with a rapper who ain’t ashamed to cop to his rural redneck roots? That’s Bubba Sparxxx in a nutshell — if there were only a way to fit all 200-plus pounds of him into a nutshell. His Deliverance (Beat-Club) is as much Timbaland’s triumph as it is Sparxxx’ — but I wouldn’t want to have to be the one to tell Bubba that. 5) Lucinda Williams/Paul Westerberg They couldn’t have planned it, but how fitting that the same year Lucinda Williams penned one of her most moving songs about her passion for rock and roll, "Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings," the subject of that song, a former Replacement named Paul Westerberg, rediscovered the muse that inspired Replacement greats like Let It Be (Twin-Tone). Even odder, all those great pre-major-label Replacements albums got reissued. That’s almost too much Westerberg for one year, but it made up for a lot of lost time. Williams too is making up for all that lost time between albums in the ’90s, when her perfectionism kept the soulfulness that comes so naturally to her at bay, by following up 2001’s Essence with World Without Tears (both Lost Highway). It would take an equally great album to make up for Westerberg’s sketchy track record over the past decade. But he did it with Come Feel Me Tremble (Vagrant), which seems to have benefitted from the limbering up he’s done using the alter ego Grandpaboy. 6) The Rapture/Peaches Electroclash? Guitartronica? There have been a few courageous attempts to throw a label on what the Rapture do with their synths on their major-label debut, the Cure-inspired Echoes (Universal), and Peaches does with nasty beats and dirty rhymes on her Fatherfucker (Kitty-yo), but it sure sounds like new wave synth-pop to me. And there’s a burgeoning underground of reasonably like-minded artists to suggest that a new wave of new wave is on its way. Peaches even brings the best out of Iggy Pop on "Kick It," a tune that proves she can do more than talk dirty, though she does that awfully well. 7) Liz Phair/Avril Lavigne One has to wonder whether Phair’s homonymous Capitol comeback would have sounded half as polished and required the services of the song doctors of the year, the Matrix, if Avril Lavigne had never existed. Then again, Lavigne herself went through a radical makeover between the release of her chart-topping debut, Let Go (Arista), and the tour she embarked on to support it — from teeny-bopper with guts to all-out pop-punker backed by a band who sounded like Green Day. In any case, Phair returned fire with a polished, punkishly pop, new-wavy-sounding collection of songs that once again proved she can talk dirty without being trashy. The kids all went for Avril, which is fine — if I had a daughter, I could think of much worse role models (Britney, Christina, etc.). And us older folks got our dose of rebellion from the Liz, who’s still the Phairest of them all. 8) Led Zeppelin/Rolling Stones Two of rock’s super-heavyweights flexed their muscles in 2003 and broke new ground in the process. Yes, Zep’s three-CD live album, How the West Was Won (Atlantic), was a nice treat. But the real bonanza came in the form of the two-disc DVD set Led Zeppelin (also on Atlantic), which brings together priceless archival footage of the band at the height of their powers both on stage and off. The Stones hit back with a greatest-hits comp, Forty Licks (Virgin) — but again, the real treat was the four-disc DVD box set Four Flicks (Best Buy), which features a full-length documentary packaged with three full concerts from their recent US tour. The future of audio is video, and these are two very good reasons why. 9) The Raveonettes/Black Rebel Motorcycle Club On their homonymous debut, the SF trio Black Rebel Motorcycle Club asked, "Whatever Happened to My Rock ’n’ Roll?", and they answered with a wall of Jesus and Mary Chain white-noise guitars. A better question might have been, what was Virgin doing signing an untested band who looked and sounded like a British band who never broke through in the US, or why did the label stick with them for a second album, this year’s Take Them On, On Your Own? But it worked. Add to that a Danish duo with a hip name, Raveonettes, and a Sony full-length, Chain Gang of Love, that brings to mind the J&M Chain’s collaboration with Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval and B.R.M.C. can stop wondering what ever happened to the stylized brand of fuzz-guitar garage rock they love so much. 10) Rancid/AFI Joe Strummer may be gone, but his spirit lives on in Rancid and AFI — punk-rockers who make music that matters. If the punk renaissance had been left in the hands of Offspring and Green Day, it would be played out by now. But Rancid have kept the fires burning by stoking their passion for punk, though they loosened up a bit on Indestructible (Epitaph) and sounded as if they were having a bit more fun than on 2000’s furious Rancid. And though their concerns on their major-label debut, Sing the Sorrow (DreamWorks), are more personal than political, AFI rise to the challenge of staying true to their inner punk.
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