Some more personal picks on the album list, sandwiched between the previous heavyweights and the coming heavyweights.
18.
Album: Kish Kash — Basement Jaxx (Astralwerks, 2003)
As a dance-music dilettante, this London DJ/producer duo is my favorite, probably because I’m a huge Prince and so, apparently, are they. From my 2003 year-end piece:
It seems odd in a year so desperate — and desperately contentious — that there was so little music that acknowledged the colossal mess the world is in, as if all of pop music colluded to deal with it by dancing our troubles away. And there was no greater house party than Kish Kash. Brit DJs Basement Jaxx decided to make one thing we could all have when it all crumbles down, and they invited a jumbled assortment of friends — young rappers and old punks, second-tier teen-poppers and garage-rock soul belters, art-funk chanteuses and (literally) the girl next door — to help them do it. The result: the most ecstatic and warm-hearted party record in recent memory.
Song Sample: “Hot N’ Cold”