The 10 Best L.A. Albums of the ’00s

6. ELLIOTT SMITH, FIGURE 8 (DREAMWORKS, 2000)

Autumn de Wilde

Beck released the best breakup album of the decade.

The late J Dilla, master producer

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More About

• Staten Island
• Silver Lake (Staten Island)
• Elliott Smith (Musician)
• Underground Hip-Hop
• Hip-Hop and Rap

Figure 8 opens with the simple, clean melody of “Son of Sam,” and Smith’s voice jumps in. “Something’s happening, don’t speak too soon,” he opens, and it’s clear that this won’t be easy, but it will be special. The sheer focus and crispness that follow belie the aggressively sad, yet hopeful songs. They dig repeatedly at the heart: In “Wouldn’t Mamma Be Proud,” Smith warbles, “If I crawl to keep it together like you say you know I can do/to transmit the moment from me to you,” it’s enough to not swallow your tongue. The album arrived amid a musical transition. Two of the most prominent musical subgenres that flourished during the ’90s, grunge and hip-hop, felt like they had run their course. Grunge had given way to something called “nu metal” and hip-hop had taken on a cartoonish, materialistic/obsessed quality that seemed to mock its original antiestablishment roots. It’s hard to imagine, but there were no Strokes, except maybe in a dingy practice basement in Brooklyn. Then, like some zombie clawing his way to the surface, Elliot Smith arrived, fresh from Portland and putting down stakes with Figure 8. Its honest beauty inspired a decade of sad “emo” kids who took from him the pathos needed to snub their noses at mom and dad and any other bummer oppressors they’d encountered along the way. But Figure 8 also locked into the true tragic/magic quality of L.A., the way you walk among palm trees in the sun but feel like the loneliest person alive. Smith captured what it was like to be on the brink of the unknown, an unknown into which we are all tossed. With Figure 8, L.A. received a hometown masterpiece, and Smith had taken his place as a gifted son. (Nikki Darling)

5. FLYING LOTUS, LOS ANGELES (WARP, 2008)

It’s true that more people have heard Flying Lotus’ work in seconds-long blips bookending Adult Swim’s late-night lineup, but 2008’s Los Angeles should be catching up as word spreads of the movement its maker represents. In the last year and a half, this city’s beat music scene has ballooned outward from its weekly home at Lincoln Heights’ Airliner club to become an internationally heralded happening and a profound local force — easily one of the most exciting homegrown phenomena to emerge this decade. While folks like Nosaj Thing, Ras G and Shlohmo have released some excellent albums, no record better encapsulates the cold electronica, warm fuzz, synth wizardry and bass-heavy broken beats of the Low End Theory crew than FlyLo’s. Even without the backstory, his music sounds like the future — a place where jazzy grooves and heady percussion drift through fields of trance and spacey effects. And true to Los Angeles’ beatwise roots, what is almost certainly the best headphones record of our last 10 years is also a cone-exploding banger when sent coursing through a worthy sound system. Flying Lotus, a.k.a. Steven Ellison, is the Winnetka-raised great-nephew of Alice Coltrane. Much has been made of that connection. But though the young producer openly borrows from a progressive past (he even samples Alice on “Auntie’s Harp”), Los Angeles opens a window onto the sounds of an era we haven’t yet reached. (Chris Martins)

4. JENNY LEWIS WITH THE WATSON TWINS, RABBIT FUR COAT (TEAM LOVE, 2006)

Considering her band Rilo Kiley’s alt-Americana roots, the lush rustic instrumentation and lilting stomp of Jenny Lewis’ debut solo outing didn’t exactly come as a surprise. What did, however, was the ginger-locked front woman’s transition from blog-beloved indie babe to bona fide Laurel Canyon songstress. Rabbit Fur Coat opens with the one-two punch of “Run Devil Run” and “The Big Guns,” the former introducing the world to the beauty-blaring harmonies of Lewis backed by the Kentucky-born Watson Twins, and the latter showcasing a subtler twang-laden vocal comeliness buttressed by a fantastic array of picks and plucks. With assistance from M Ward, Mike Mogis and Jonathan Rice, Lewis positions herself front and center, pushing that familiar fragile quaver to deeper, more depressive lows and yet higher, more swooning highs. “Rise Up With Fists!!!” brings to mind Emmylou Harris, while “Happy” checks Lucinda Williams. Lewis’ lyrics seem fashioned to fit a country perspective: steeped in God, love and wide-open spaces but tempered by life in L.A. That last point is particularly salient on the titular song, wherein Lewis seems to explain her days as a child-actor by way of her mother’s lust for finer things. “She was waitressing on welfare, we were living in the Valley,” Lewis breathily croons. “A lady says to my ma, ‘You treat your girl as your spouse / You can live in a mansion house’/And so we did, and I became a hundred-thousand-dollar kid.” The ends may never justify such means, but Rabbit Fur Coat proved Lewis’ worth in spades. (Chris Martins)