Skeleton Crew Quarterly's Top Fifty Albums of the 00s

I’m pretty sure I was lying when I initially wrote that I’d be compiling a Decades’ list; at the very least, I doubted my ability and patience to pull one off. I can’t be bothered to count how many records I listen to in a year, let alone a decade, and besides, with the way hindsight recreates our past, who’s to say it doesn’t equally manipulate the albums that got us to the present?

So it’s with small doses of pride and a moment’s pause to recognize how easy SCQ’s Top Fifty Albums of the 00s came together. Over the course of a week, I dug through the SCQ Vault and heard records that weren’t nearly as great as I remembered, and albums that remain as thrilling as ever. I scratched out important releases I thought would make the cut and rubbed my temples over whether record A was better than record B, but at no point did any of the final choices elicit surprise in me. I didn’t listen to these releases so much as live through them, and their presence on this list is as assured as the impact they cratered in my last decade. If only I had the patience for a Top 100…

Where applicable, I’ve quoted original SCQ reviews for my own embarrassment but otherwise each record receives a quick impression, unnecessary justification, or little anecdote of how a shiny piece of plastic can save one’s life.

To everyone I’ve shared any of these records with and Penny, the little kitten who just caught up on all of them…