3. NO AGE, WEIRDO RIPPERS (FAT CAT, 2000)
Richard Burbridge
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One could argue convincingly for the inclusion of No Age’s first studio album proper, Nouns, instead of Weirdo Rippers, which collects the band’s early songs from 2007 and 2008. Nouns is better-produced, has richer, thicker washes, and sounds like a band on the cusp of greatness. It’s just that Weirdo Rippers shreds, is a primal scream born in the belly of L.A. rock at the end of the ’00s: the punk club the Smell. It’s the album that planted a flag in downtown Los Angeles, the kind of claim-staking rock & roll cry that occasionally pops up in cities all over the world. After much so-called D.I.Y. community-building, No Age’s arrival was the two-man embodiment of something cool. You could make an argument for releases from Mika Miko, HEALTH or Abe Vigoda — or to go completely off the board, John Wiese’s masterful Soft Punk — as the most exciting bursts from the 2nd and Main, but No Age’s first CD release drew the most attention and became a ready-made classic. Now signed to Sub Pop, the band sounds sweet like My Bloody Valentine, messy like Treble Kicker–era Pavement, melodic like Husker Du, and funnels energy through Randy Randall’s thick, distorted Fenders and drummer Dean Spunt’s loose-limbed arm frenzy. All that potential, currently being realized, hisses through Weirdo Rippers. (Randall Roberts)
2. J DILLA, DONUTS (STONES THROW, 2006)
Incapacitated at Cedars-Sinai, racked by complications from lupus, hip-hop producer J Dilla exhausted his fast-fading cells to finish his requiem, Donuts, a melancholic masterpiece of vinyl hiss and tape loops, soul samples, air-raid sirens and unstinting groove. Released in 2006, three days before his death, both Dilla and Donuts now reside in the realm of myth: His work has prompted countless tributes from his peers, inspired an orchestral adaptation, and became an instant influence, stretching from the local tastemaker club Low End Theory to London and beyond. Reinventing instrumentalism like no album since DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, Donuts has in the past three years become the blueprint for every beat head with a copy of Ableton attempting to re-create Dilla’s alchemy of the supernal and the sorrowful. Imbued with a magician’s legerdemain, Donuts is so seamless that it feels effortless, like the sort of thing that anyone with a full crate could replicate. But they can’t. Though the samples are seldom esoteric — Lou Rawls and the Temptations, Dionne Warwick and the Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder and a whole lot of Mantronix break beats — Dilla on Donuts transforms the familiar into the fantastic, even if it’s via but a series of fragments. Only a single song exceeds two minutes. Celestial voices fade in and out like an angelic choir, reminding us of our fragile, fleeting existence, part meditation and part miracle. Only an album made by someone on the verge of death could be so full of life. (Jeff Weiss)
1. BECK, SEA CHANGE (GEFFEN, 2002)
The opening lines of Beck Hansen’s eighth album, 2003’s Sea Change, offer the kind of hope that’s uniquely L.A.: hands on the wheel, moonroof open, cruising with the breeze, rolling toward the future. “Let the golden age begin,” sings Beck, and you think, “Oh, this is going to be a nice album.” Then he drops the chorus, and the song turns brown: “These days I barely get by/I don’t even try,” he confesses, minus the requisite lyrical curlicues that the self-proclaimed Loser had once been known for. Recorded in the spring and summer of 2002 after the dissolution of a relationship, Sea Change is Beck’s most personal album, a sad, sorrowful conduit into the singer’s lonesome heart. It’s the best breakup album of the decade, for sure, from L.A. or otherwise, up there with PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire? in the ’90s, Elvis Costello’s Blood & Chocolate for the 1980s and Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks of the 1970s. It’s messed up, pitiful, wallows in its own misery, and every once in a while offers some salve. Musically, it’s got that feel. Produced by Nigel Godrich, who at that point was becoming known for his work with Radiohead, Sea Change nails quintessential Southern California, thanks in large part to a team of musicians who understand the city and the sound: Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., Smokey Hormel, Jason Falkner and Joey Waronker, among others. A few of Beck’s earlier records, One Foot in the Grave and Mutations, had hinted at the singer’s melancholia, but Sea Change went whole hog, conjuring helter-skelter mornings, sorry eyes that cut through bone, and cinders in the sky. It’s aimed not only at love but the loss of innocence (he was writing this a few months after September 11) — and alienation from L.A., too: “This town is crazy/Nobody cares,” he sings on “Lost Cause.” I know people who have a hard time listening to the album because it touched them at such a difficult moment in their lives. It seems like a lot of people were breaking up or freaking out in 2002, and Sea Change helped us endure it. (Randall Roberts)
