Mortal Coil

I was looking at Pitchfork’s Top 200 Albums of the 2000s […] I was immediately struck by the fact that seven of the albums were from 2000 and 2001, with one other record from 2002 and another from 2004. The only album from after the mid-decade point was Panda Bear’s Person Pitch. Now what significance can be derived from this dense clustering (eight of the ten) of “greatest albums” in the first three years of the decade? You could interpret it two ways: firstly, music deteriorated as the noughties went on, or secondly, it grew harder and harder for people to reach consensus about which groups mattered, what records were important. The first scenario seems unlikely, so I’d have to go with the second. It resonates with how the decade actually felt: diasporic, scenes splintering into sub-scenes, taste bunkers forming, the question “Have you heard X?” increasingly likely to meet a shake of the head or a look of incomprehension.

Great stuff – this is a spot-on analysis of the indie music scene of the noughties and how it splintered under the sheer quantity of quality.

I doubt you will see a better run-down of the music scene of 2000-2010 until decades from now, when critics will be able to judge it in perspective of what came before and after it.