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the Aughts Poll winners - aka It's Win's World, we just live in it

Posted at 2:16 PM on January 19, 2010 by Jim McGuinn

Thanks to the more than one thousand of you that voted in our Aughts Polls over the Weekend. Even during a holiday weekend, nothing stops us music fans from participating in a little good natured arguing, er, polling. Being forced to only vote for one record makes it tough - do you go for the album that resonated most with you, or with culture at large? Or that impacted and influenced the couse of music? The voting was spread out quite a bit - almost every album we nominated got at least 5 votes, there were another 75 or so write-ins that found favor. But the clear winner for Album of the Decade was Funeral, the debut full-length from The Arcade Fire, which garnered nealy 10% of the votes.

My 2005 was shaped musically by The Arcade Fire - seeing that band live that for the first time that January might have been the best show of the decade for me. Although they were amazing on the Neon Bible tour, seeing them early was akin to catching Springsteen in '73 or accidentally walking in on The Clash at a London pub. You could feel your entire internal history and perspective on music shifting. I went from hype-suspicion to full-fledged worship in the course of a 75-minute set. After that Funeral became the soundtrack of the year, and for many, the decade. Think about how many bands since have taken from The Arcade Fire's sonic blueprint - the large collective sound, leader Win Butler's David Byrne-esque vocal inflections, and the urgently strummed folk-rock. Good luck on album #3 gang - you know there'll be quite a few folks waiting to hear where the new record takes us.

Emblematic of the lessening grip the major labels held over rock as the decade rolled on, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a career highlight that Reprise Records didn't even think we'd like to hear - dropping the band from their roster rather than release what would become Wilco's biggest breakthrough album. Pretty much entirely abandoning their alt-country roots by then, Jeff Tweedy and co created a record that hung in the air like a ghost. Lyrically impressionistic and themed around loss (hmm, as most of these albums seem to be), with YHF Wilco raised their game sonically, and began to be called "the American Radiohead." Which brings us to...

Radiohead. Next up were the albums that Radiohead entered and exited the decade with - Kid A and In Rainbows. In some respects, it's taken us 10 years to catch up to Radiohead. When Kid A was released, quite a few people wished they'd followed up Ok Computer with The Bends pt 2 instead of the challenging, more electronic and experimental sounds that emerged on Kid A. By the time of 2007's In Rainbows, the music was nearly overshadowed by the band's "pay-what-you-want" release method, while the music brought the band back from an artistic precipice to offer what Thom Yorke referred to as his versions of "seduction songs," delivered with a grace, beauty, and strength seldom heard in indie rock.

Below the two Radiohead releases are a pretty good cross section of any music fans' collection and a nice look at the decade that just was, The Aughts. Here's our baker's dozen - thanks to all who voted!

1 - Arcade Fire - Funeral
2 - Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
3 - Radiohead - Kid A
4 - Radiohead - In Rainbows
5 - Sufjan Stevens - Illionois
6 - The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
7 - The White Stripes - Elephant
8 - Postal Service - Give Up
9 - The Strokes - Is This It?
10 - The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
11 - Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
12 - Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News
13 - The White Stripes - White Blood Cells

In our other Poll categories, it was The Arcade Fire again for Breakout Artist (followed by The Decemberists and the Hold Steady), the iPod as music's Game Changer of the decade, and "Any Attempt at a Comeback by Creed, Third Eye Blind, Candlebox, or Sugar Ray" barely beating out "Anything Lindsay Lohan recorded" as our Aught-Not of the Aughts. Thanks to all who voted and enjoyed the All-Aughts Weekend of music on The Current!

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