Doves – Lost Souls (April 3rd 2000, Heavenly Records)
The first of many debut longplayers in this top 50 of sorts, Doves made their breakthrough with a downbeat yet beautiful record that still managed to evoke the same sense of euphoria as their Sub Sub days. Dedicated to Factory Records partner and Manchester musical luminary Rob Gretton, who died the year before the album was released, Lost Souls is a aural love letter to Manchester. The whole album carries an air of stately grandeur that reels you in, even on the more radio-friendly tracks like Catch The Sun. As a complete piece, it works perfectly.
Best track – The Cedar Room
Idlewild – 100 Broken Windows (May 9th 2000, Parlophone Records)
100 Broken Windows is Idlewild’s coming of age album, and perhaps their most complete offering. It takes the best of the band’s petulant and punky early output (the marvellous Idea Track) whilst hinting at the more measured direction the band would later take on The Remote Part and Make Another World (one could maintain that the below-par Warnings/Promises was a mere blip in their copybook). Of the standout tracks, Actually It’s Darkness is textbook Idlewild, showing off Roddy Woomble’s unique sense of rhythm’n’rhyme, Roseability is gorgeous yet still urgent, and the album’s tender conclusion, The Bronze Medal, is a captivating work of understated beauty.
Best track – The Bronze Medal
Goldfrapp – Felt Mountain (September 11th 2000, Mute Records)
With Felt Mountain, Goldfrapp paved the way for adventurous, ethereal electronic pop from Natasha Khan and Florence Welch, to name but two who owe a great deal to the dynamic duo. In contrast to the more limited range of their subsequent albums, Goldfrapp display a wide range of moods from overblown cabaret (Human and the quite bonkers Oompah Radar with its mighty fine brass section), to barely-there ambient ballads like Pilots and Horse Tears. It’s the callsign of a musical national treasure – and Alison Goldfrapp’s truly remarkable voice.
Best track – Utopia
words: Kate Goodacre
Coming up soon on Albums That Made The Decade…Queens Of The Stone Age, The Walkmen and Ryan Adams…
Kate Goodacre is a freelance writer and photographer, and the founding editor of The Fugitive Motel. Her taste in music has been broadened greatly by her co-contributors over the years that the site and the Motel collective has been in business. Kate likes pink lady apples, recycling, open-wheeled motorsport, the smell of a well-kept park, the Today Programme and that strangely invigorating stillness you get in a city early on any weekend morning.