best FOUR ALBUM RUN of the 2000s (aka the Stevie Awards)

--This is NOT about your personal pet favorites.
--This is NOT about LOL answers

Think of this more about CANONICAL artists, etc., etc.

Real answers not bullshit, thanks.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm gonna have to say:

Supreme Clientele
Bulletproof Wallets
The Pretty Toney Album
Fishscale

followed closely by:

White Blood Cells
Elephant
Get Behind Me Satan
Icky Thump

unless someone can convince me otherwise

I can't disagree with GhostFace, but I'm going to have to nominate/mention The Clientele's run of discs:

• Suburban Light
• The Violet Hour
• Strange Geometry
• God Save The Clientele

Of course there's:
Kid A
Amnesiac
Hail To The Thief
In Rainbows

Probably either

Carrying On (2001)
My Town (2002)
You Do Your Thing (2004)
Some People Change (2006)

or

Unleashed (2002)
Shock'n Y'all (2003)
Honkytonk University (2005)
White Trash with Money (2006)

• Sung Tongs
• Feels
• Strawberry Jam
• MPP

As much as I don't like Radiohead, that is a pretty solid run.

I would say Animal Collective might even be better than Ghostface if Bulletproof Wallets wasn't >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Strawberry Jam

I'll give AC over Stripes though for a lean second place imho

Almost Killed Me
Seperation Sunday
Boys and Girls in America
Stay Positive

Man if only Luda's 4th album wasn't shite.

Ditto T.I. v. T.I.P. ruining everything.

Girls Can Tell
Kill the Moonlight
Gimme Fiction
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

cosign Spoon

i second both yr selections whiney. may i also suggest:

Ride The Skies
Wonderful Rainbow
Hypermagic Mountain
Earthly Deilghts

Sunn O))):

White 1
White 2
Black One
Monoliths & Dimensions

Does it need to be uninterrupted?

Blackwater Park
Deliverance
(Damnation)
Ghost Reveries
Watershed

Remission
Leviathan
Blood Mountain
Crack The Skye

ellen allien.

stadtkind
berlinette
thrills
orchestra of bubbles

this is v hard tho.

it's Ghostface by a mile.

Girls Can Tell
Kill the Moonlight
Gimme Fiction
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

― Mr. Que, Monday, September 28, 2009 3:38 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

if rebirth brass band had released one more real album in the 00s, it would be that.

you could make an argument for r kelly too (tp2/chocolate factory/happy people/tp3).

Hold Steady, probably my "rock band" choice, though this might come close:

Blackwater Park
Deliverance
Damnation
Ghost Reveries

or maybe:

Come On Everybody Let's Rock
Steel Rod
Anthem Of The Moon
Each One Teach One

Also not bad (though not a rock band):

Can't Take Me Home
Missundaztood
Try This
I'm Not Dead

(xp on the Opeth; typed that before I saw fastnbulbous's post)

Dylan (if you include the upcoming x-mas album)!

didn't Try This kinda suck, tho.

This is actually kinda hard. I dig Longwave's 4 albums but they're hardly "the best". The first 3 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club albums are great and then the 4th took a dive. Not too many people know who The Black Watch are but their 00 albums have been consistently great. Camera Obscura's been fun, too. I'd love to offer The Fall but there hasn't been 4 straight excellent albums this decade. Everything Hem's done has been in heavy rotation for me. New Model Army continue to release one great album after another. There are other candidates - Pernice Brothers, Grant Lee Phillips, Plus Minus, TV Smith (yes, really), They Might Be Giants kids albums, but in terms of sheer volume of play when they came out, it's these two:

Ryan Adams: (excluding odds and sods _Demolition_)
Heartbreaker (2000)
Gold (2001)
Rock N Roll (2003)
Love Is Hell (2004)

Neko Case: (excluding live album)
Furnace Room Lullaby (2000)
Blacklisted (2002)
Fox Confessor (2006)
Middle Cyclone (2009)

missy elliot could be up in there, if you like 'the cookbook'.

If Thug Motivation 103 is the nuts (and released by the end of the year), Jeezy wins this hands down imo.

Deerhoof's been pretty consistent all decade long

Reveille
Apple O'
Milk Man
The Runners Four
Friend Opportunity
Offend Maggie

that oneida list above is good, but I'd go with Each One, Teach One and onward. secret wars and the wedding are can't miss releases of theirs.

Does it need to be uninterrupted?

it's the stevie awards! of course it does!

oooh Oneida yeah

mass romantic
the electric version
twin cinema
challengers

I'm hoping I can say Broadcast once I've listened to '...Witch Trials Of The Radio Age', following The Noise Made By People, haha sound and Tender Buttons (not counting Microtronisc)...and the three EPs were all great too

Hip-hop, strangely enough I'd probably go with:

500 Degreez
Tha Carter
Tha Carter II
Tha Carter III

Dunno if anyone will agree with me but this is a pretty great run:

Ghetto Pop Life (w/ Jemini)
The Grey Album (w/ Jay-Z and The Beatles)
The Mouse and The Mask (w/ DOOM)
St. Elsewhere (w/ Cee-Lo).

xp Or

Book of Thugs: Chapter AK Verse 47
Thugs Are Us
Thug Holiday
Thug Matrimony: Married To The Streets

xhuxk otm re trick daddy

The Tyranny of Distance
Hearts of Oak
Shake the Sheets
Living with the Living

hahaha, glad I actually looked at the thread title again before I started posting about the 60s and 70s.

I haven't heard the newest album, but Yoko Ono's two remix albums in the 2000s were killer, and Blueprint For A Sunrise very beautiful:

Blueprint for a Sunrise (2001)
Yes, I'm a Witch (2007)
Open Your Box (2007)
Between My Head and the Sky (2009)

Pretty good for a woman a few days older than my Grandma!

Murray Street
Sonic Nurse
Rather Ripped
The Eternal

Another pretty good rock one:

Black Lips! - 2003
We Did Not Know the Forest Spirit Made the Flowers Grow - 2004
Let It Bloom - 2005
Good Bad Not Evil - 2007

Furnace Room Lullaby
Blacklisted
Fox COnfessor Brings the Flood
Middle Cyclone

I'm Serious
Trap Muzik
Urban Legend
King

Spaceheater/Perfect Interior
Between The Dead
Grandeur Of Hair
Occasion

Objectively, White Stripes. Subjectively, Jay Reatard's run of 57 songs in 40 months is one for the ages. Works out to four albums if you count the comps.

it's Ghostface by a mile.

yep.

I'm cool with the Stripes, AC, and Spoon bein closely behind tho

four albums' worth of material in 3 and a half years is not exactly superhuman, tbh (xpost)

def. Broadcast too

Scar
Tiny Voices
Civilians
Blood From Stars

I was gonna suggest that Ted Leo run.

oh this won't count but in so many ways it's my answer

love/hate
how to be a lady: vol 1
love vs. money
memoirs of an imperfect angel

This four-album run would be somewhere in my Top Five for the decade:

• Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)
• Trust (2002)
• The Great Destroyer (2005)
• Drums and Guns (2007)

four is ~really~ tough, esp. within this decade. Dylan(3), Wussy(3), Drive-by Truckers(3, but not in a row) & Sonic Youth come close. But the best run of four in a row, for my money, is Youssou N'Dour:
Joko (The Link)
Nothing's in Vain
Egypt
Rokku Mi Rokka

(Deerhoof presumably ruled out on account of their 5-star achievements.)

Tell me which of the lists above doesn't have at least one obvious weak link.

Agreed on Spoon, The Hold Steady, The Clientele and Tim Hecker.

Everyone Who Pretended to Like me is Gone
Bows + Arrows
A Hundred Miles Off
You and Me

for me, it's the mountain goats

all hail west texas
tallahassee
we shall all be healed
the sunset tree

Folktronic
Oskar Tennis Champion
Otto Spooky
Ocky Milk

lol

Sparks

2000-Balls
2002-Lil' Beethoven
2006-Hello Young Lovers
2008-Exotic Creatures Of the Deep

The last three are so good they make up for Balls being a bit average.

Four Tet, narrowly missing the 2009 cutoff:

Pause (2001)
Rounds (2003)
Everything Ecstatic (2005)
There Is Love in You (2010)

Of course, dude’s released a shitload of excellent material in between these “proper” Four Tet albums – four collaborative albums with Steve Reid, remixes/reinterpretations (many of which are on his Remixes 2xCD set), a couple EPs (Paws, Ringer, Everything Ecstatic 2xCD bonus tracks), a LateNightTales catalog entry, among others – so perhaps the 2009 vs. 2010 thing is overly restrictive in his case?

OOIOO just made my top ten after finally getting their early albums this weekend.

2000 Gold And Green
2002 Kila Kila Kila
2006 Taiga
2009 Armonico Hewa

Can't believe I didn't think of SFA.

2000 Mwng
2001 Rings Around the World
2003 Phantom Power
2005 Love Kraft
2007 Hey Venus!
2009 Dark Days/Light Years

Bonnie Prince Billy
2001 - Ease Down the Road
2003 - Master and Everyone
2006 - The Letting Go
2008 - Lie Down in the Light
(I skipped the Greatest Palace Music reinterpritation record)

as i was saying:

2002 Aldhils Arboretum (Kindercore)
2004 Satanic Panic in the Attic (Polyvinyl)
2005 The Sunlandic Twins (Polyvinyl)
2007 Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)

and yes this is their last great album:

2008 Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl)

whiney repped for the white stripes? guess i missed the 10th anniversary oral history of elephant

2000 Ágætis byrjun (UK/US release dates)
2002 ( )
2005 Takk
2008 Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

for me, it's the mountain goats

all hail west texas
tallahassee
we shall all be healed
the sunset tree

― kaygee, Saturday, January 23, 2010 10:14 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao @ whiney insisting spoon are part of the canon (and that the canon matters)

since this thread ended we have:

mama's gun (2000)
worldwide underground (2003)
new amerykah part one: 4th world war (2008)
new amerykah part two: return of the ankh (2010)

(yes i know you have to squint a bit to include 2000 and 2010 as part of the same decade but really it's a very arbitrary thing to demand in the first place)
(man i wish circus wasn't as mediocre as it is otherwise britney would walk this)

i vote for erykah too (though part two was pretty patchy) though kanye is the first one that came to mind.

Gravity (2001)
Cinemascope (2001)
Momentum (2003)
Polygon Cities (2005)

there ain't no insisting about it, spoon are part of the canon

happens when all you do is release classic records

I was listening to "The Complete Recollection" just the other day and thinking that this:

If It Was You (2002)
So Jealous (2004)
The Con (2007)
Sainthood (2009)

and then Heartthrob (2013)

Is a pretty amazing run. They're all great, and they also progress pretty logically towards the commercial breakout. It's like a throwback to the way artists used to develop.

I second Converge. A run of greatness that's still ongoing.

Think of all the ways Whiney would call somebody a Brony if they started this exact thread today

Trouble Over Bridgwater
Cammell Pairs Social Club
Achtung Bono
CSI: Ambleside

*Laird, fucken autocorrect

Hardly anyone outside American indie fans gives a shit about Spoon, but as they're pretty much the only people who care about canon these days they might as well let anyone in no matter how insignificant in the wider world.

Autechre a good shout too tho I need to get into Quaristice

This is actually really hard because hardly anyone releases four albums in a row without one of them being underwhelming at best - ie I would have thought the YYYs were nailed on for this but then Mosquito happened.

Like it's really annoying that Paper Tigers exists because Vocalcity -> The Present Lover -> something better than Paper Tigers -> Convivial would equal pretty much any artist of the 00s.

Porcupine Tree:

In Absentia
Deadwing
Fear of a Blank Planet
The Incident

really? The Incident was post-2009 anyway

I tell a lie. But still.

Think of all the ways Whiney would call somebody a Brony if they started this exact thread today

― some dude

lol at first i thought it was a joke thread and stevie meant 'steve hyden'

to help prove that Spoon is the best band from this last decade:

Our top overall artist of the decade: Spoon

http://www.metacritic.com/feature/best-music-of-the-decade

settled

lock thread

lol, not saying that but some people is this thread are dismissing them. i wanted the counter argument and hey i was able to back it up.

spoon are classic, fuiud

DJ Quik

Balance & Options (2000)
Under tha Influence (2002)
Trauma (2005)
BlaQKout (2009)

oh shit

Influence is kind of the weak link but still

yeah obv but still awesome

This kind of cheating but I'd like to add The Go-Betweens.

The Friends of Rachel Worth (2000)
Bright Yellow Bright Orange (2003)
Oceans Apart (2005)
The Evangelist (2008)

The last one was obviously a Robert Forster solo album but it did feature contributions from Grant and was a tribute to him so I'm counting it. Really great set of albums that are not far off the quality of the run they had in the 80s.

I guess i need to hear Convivial.

certainly

paper tigers is unaccountably disfavored, too

Yeah I never got why paper tigers was so bad and hated

one touch (2000)
angel with dirty faces (2002)
three (2003)
taller in more ways (2005)

sung tongs
feels
strawberry jam
merriweather post pavilion

Wussy deserve some mention here even though the last one came out in 2011.

Funeral Dress 2005
Left for Dead 2007
Wussy 2009
Strawberry 2011

If you add the last two Ass Ponys albums from 2000 and 2001 Chuck Cleaver has a Stevie and a half going.

lambchop

Is a woman
Aw cmon/No you cmon
Damaged
Ohio
Mr. M

i still think EPs (or mini-albums or whatever you wanna call them) should count for this especially if they are considered among the artist's strongest output (like "Young Liars" for example) and especially if the EP was crafted by the artist as a self-contained sequence of music (as opposed to b-sides collections like "Airbag/How Am I Driving" or remix albums like "Further Down The Spiral"). within certain contexts, i think this exception makes perfect sense.

my reasoning is that the initial stevie wonder 4-in-a-row that inspired this idea was built from 4 consecutive releases without EPs or shorter releases scattered in between. and plus they were all released within a 4-year span as opposed to getting spread across all 10 years of the 70s like many of the 2000s artists mentioned in this thread. (stevie had 8 albums throughout the 70s.)

Would be interested in a 90s version of this.