Moving into the 20s with a diverse assortment of entries and probably the only place where R. Kelly and Taylor Swift need to be hanging out.
30.
Album: Fever to Tell — Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Interscope, 2003)
I like all their albums, but I still hear that sense of becoming on this one. From my initial year-end write-up:
On the debut full-length from the best of the current batch of New York rock bands, Nick Zinner’s attention-deficit-disorder guitar spars with Karen O’s Tourette’s syndrome vocals in a race to finish each song — before someone cuts off the electricity or the world ends, whichever comes first — while drummer Brian Chase tries (successfully) to keep it all from flying apart. The result is a sad, sexy, desperate, open-hearted insta-classic and also the rare CD-age album that picks up momentum as it goes — becoming more confident, more expansive, and more vulnerable as spontaneous noise-tunes evolve into full-fledged songs.
Song Sample: “Y Control”
