Throwback Jams: 2003 in LPs

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Continuing along our trip through time, we have an extremely seminal year in music: 2003. I cannot fully relate to you just how formative this time was for me at 19ish, a year of college completed, diagnosed for the first time with social anxiety and depression (the first of many that came close-ish), nearly alcohol-poisoning myself before my Public Speaking midterm—y’know, just the usual life of a college gal in south central Kentucky!

Except…not. Even though I went to college with several high school friend, none of us really fit into or had ties to the social scene, driven by Greek Life at the time. We didn’t miss out completely, but eventually I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d made the wrong decisions in all areas of my life: all chutes, no ladders. Looking back now, two decades later, it’s both heartening and heartbreaking to realize that I still think like this sometimes; second-guessing myself to the point of anguish might just be part of my personality.

Fortunately, the powers that be gave us music to get us through. And I know it’s cliché to be one of those teenagers who made sense of life through music, but I was: I lived for my mix CDs, one for every mood, a song for every complex emotion I couldn’t fully name. I blew out my car speakers within the first few years of driving, finally able to envelope fully myself alone in sound for the first time in my life, speeding down highways and back roads windows down, sunroof open, all my senses blazing, serotonin pumping full blast.

Suffice to say it was TOUGH for me to narrow down my 2003 favorites to only five here, but there were some truly iconic albums that I wore out all the way out and love to this day that still perfectly encapsulate this single year for me.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell

Growing up through the early-aughts rock revival, Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the first truly wild and exhilarating indie bands I encountered. Looking back 20 years later, it’s obvious why they resonated so much: I was a mostly quiet, pretty good student bottling up so much confusion and frustration inside I’m amazed I didn’t crack sooner. Karen O’s coos and screams were a kind of catharsis for me, the drums and guitar angular, dissonant, all of it unabashedly LOUD. Fever to Tell is their debut LP, after their seminal self-titled EP set the comfortably bro-heavy world of indie rock ablaze, and I couldn’t get enough. Every song is perfect, including, yes, “Maps,” the one slow-ish song on the album that became their only chart hit.

There’s only a handful of these, but Fever to Tell is a straight listen for me, kicking right off with “Rich,” a jam that encompasses the YYYs entire sound in a single song. Nick Zinner's sharp guitar riff is joined by Brian Chase's commanding drums, then Karen O slides in with her come-hither breath of “I’m rich…like a hot noise” (don’t think too hard about the lyrics, please), and then the full guitar wall of sound kicks in and KO is screaming and groaning within the first 30 seconds before the whole thing turns into a demented beach blanket surf vibe. Followed by the propulsive “Date with the Night,” and the psychotically sexy “Man,” the album doesn’t let up until “Maps.”

By that point you need a break from the onslaught, and it’s the kind of sweet, wistfully romantic track that was catnip to many of us girls pretending to be too cool and jaded by love until it heart breaks your heart wide open for the first time and you find yourself pleading, “Wait—they don’t love you like I love you.” It too starts in signature YYYs style: a guitar riff and an aggressive drumbeat, but KO’s voice is soft and vulnerable as the song builds to a massive midpoint, her gentle delivery contrasting with the onslaught behind her until it fades seamlessly into the equally thoughtful but faster “Y Control” as the album draws to a close.

In case it wasn’t blatantly obvious, Fever to Tell might be one of my favorite albums of all time, if I absolutely had to choose. I could listen to it on repeat for days, singing along the whole time, probably feeling some of those same emotions bubble up from wherever I’d hidden them. It’s the YYYs only LP that fully captures the energy of its three members, rare and raw with just guitar, drums, and vocals before they branched out into a broader sound. And much as I love their first two EPs, if you only listen to one Yeah Yeah Yeahs album in your life, it should absolutely be Fever To Tell.

Electric Six - Fire

And then sometimes an album comes along that doesn’t really change your life, per se, it’s just fun as hell. Detroit’s Electric Six had been around since before the OG Indie Sleaze era, so they didn’t take themselves quite so seriously as the Brooklyn brands, and we are all the better for it. The indelible rager “Gay Bar” was their first single from Fire, becoming a cult fave before their anthem “Danger! (High Voltage)” made it big, most likely due to fellow Detroiter Jack White (allegedly) lending vocals. Fire is blast after blast of big ole dance rock jams with titles like, "Electric Demons in Love," "Improper Dancing," and "Nuclear War (On the Dancefloor)," wrapping up with a charming little synth bopper appropriately titled, "Synthesizer."

If The Strokes were the Indie Sleaze band everyone loved to hate, Electric Six were the merry pranksters who didn’t need to sound like other bands, they only needed to rock. If you’d told me back then that Electric Six would be the band I’d end up seeing most in my life (Five times? Maybe six? I’ve lost count…) I would’ve probably laughed, but that’s how it’s turned out—E6 pumped out almost an album a year for the rest of the Aughts, and toured just as often (if not more), never failing to stop at mid-size Midwestern strongholds with $20 tickets and lots of cheap beer. Fire isn’t even technically my favorite E6 album—that would be their 2009 synth-rock banger Kill–but Fire introduced me and a whole generation of self-serious indie kids to the joy of actually having fun with your rock n’ roll, not just trying to look cool the whole time.

Anthony Hamilton - Comin’ from Where I’m From

Real talk? I cried a LOT in 2003. I had a whole mix CD called “Cryfests” for when I couldn’t deal with anything inside or around me and just needed to sob alone in my dorm room for 120 minutes while my roommate was out living her best college life. I know lots of people like to listen to sad songs when they are not in fact feeling sad, but I am not one of them—sad songs dig their way under my skin and find ways to stick around long after I’ve turned them off.

One of the sad songs that always got me hardest was Anthony Hamilton’s “I’m a Mess,” off his excellent second album Comin’ from Where I’m From. WHEW, even now, 20 years later, it still hits at parts of me I thought were long gone but may be in fact hidden down deeper than I remembered. This is not to say that Comin’ From is an album of cryfests, however—quite the opposite. It’s a truly soulful neo-soul album, in that it feels modern and timeless, rife with grooves, grit, and yes, heartbreak.

The title track was the album’s lead single, a piano-driven confessional with a very-2003 beat that starts: “Sitting here, guess I didn’t make bail / Got time and a story to tell…” Hamilton proceeds to list a litany of life struggles that never feels hyperbolic or fake—he’s just telling you what happened, take it or leave it. The other single, “Charlene,” is an absolute cryfest, however: a plaintive breakup song with a refrain worth wailing, “Come on home to me, Charlene.” The rest of Comin' From Where I'm From is a mix of laid-back grooves and evocative, heartfelt storytelling backed by decidedly analog-feeling production. Even now it still feels like an album you can cozy up to with some noise-cancelling cans, or blast as part of your smooth summer BBQ playlist. Just…maybe don’t include said cryfests on  public playlists, okay?

Peaches - Fatherfucker

I discovered Peaches senior of high school, when techno became cool again as long as it was lo-fi and raunchy and called electroclash, and I have endeavored to live my life in accordance with The Teaches of Peaches ever since. Fatherfucker (censored hilariously as F**********r in most places) is Peaches’ second album, expanding on the extremely DIY filth of her debut, both sonically and lyrically. She wrote and produced the entire album, bridging sly, sinewy techno and feverish punk in a mashup that predates James Murphy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids by at least two years.

As someone who’s never identified with any single kind of music, I love when artists explore sounds, genres, and textures, without losing their core identity, which Peaches does expertly here. She opens with the sparse, Joan Jett co-produced “I’m the Kinda” and shows off her considerable lyrical skill making rhymes like “My labia majora / dancing the hora / soft as angora” sound absolutely legit. The tracks ramp up from there with the playful threesome suggestion of “I U She” and then switches gears to raucous electro-punk on “Kick It,” a saucy duet with the Pope of Punk himself Iggy Pop, before sliding into the slick slither of “Operate,” most prominently featured in Mean Girls’ Halloween Party scene.

From there it’s an experimental blend of synth beats and guitar riffs all drenched in Peaches’ unapologetically freaky, feminist sexuality. “Tombstone, Baby” is a perfect follow-up to “Operate,” kicking up the beat several notches without sacrificing any slinkiness. My personal favorite track is the second to last, “The Inch,” another down & dirty electro club vibe punctuated by pulsating synths and well-placed hand-clap percussion.

Fatherfucker might not have been as iconoclastic as Teaches of Peaches, or as accessible as her third album, Impeach My Bush, but it fully established her as a fixture of any good, hooch-fueled indie-kid dance party for years to come. Peaches also gave us a new angle on what empowering femme sexuality could look like in real life—sweaty, brazen, unshaven and unashamed—amid the onslaught of early-Aughts Diet Culture-driven popular culture that told us it was okay to be sexy, but we couldn’t deviate from the thin, blonde, cis-hetero standard. Peaches said fuck that, and fuck your dad, too.

The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium

I’m going to be perfectly frank here: I did not know about The Mars Volta until one of my stoner friends put on De-Loused one night when we were all blazed out of our minds on BG homegrown, and it was the weirdest, wildest, coolest music I’d heard in a hot minute. I went out and bought the CD the next day (god I’m old) and enjoyed it just as much stone cold sober as I did while high, so that’s a feat in and of itself.

The Mars Volta are the spin-off prog-rock project of two former members of emo band At The Drive-In, and De-Loused in the Comatorium is a concept album about a man in a coma after overdosing on morphine and rat poison (which is apparently part of the real-life reason they split). Don’t let that scare you off, however; while it is a dense, deep and dark album that may only make sense when you are in fact stoned enough to fixate on it for an hour, it’s an incredible creative feat from vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist/producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. They weave jazz riffs, Latin beats, psychedelia, screaming guitars, and CBZ’s tremulous wailing tenor into an opus that is both tragic and defiant, anthemic and intensely personal.

The Mars Volta went on to release several more albums I never got into, and released a self-titled comeback LP of mellower but still musically thoughtful Latin pop-tinged tracks last year (it's okay). De-Loused is one of those rare masterworks, in my opinion, born from pain and rage and sadness that allowed its creators to fully express something beyond their own emotions, propelling them to the very top echelons of their craft and enabling them to connect with just about anyone who’s willing to take a deep breath, dive in, and let themselves be immersed.

While We're On the Subject...

• 💖 I'm not the only one loving Fever Ray and Yves Tumor at this precise moment, which is as it should be.
• 🎹 I had no idea there was a Little Richard documentary coming out soon, but I'm all the way on board. You should also absolutely read this essay by John Waters about the time he tried to interview Richard and shit got weird.
• 🇬🇧 Everything But the Girl are BACK, and already their first single "Nothing Left to Lose" is a certified jam.
• 👀 Now THIS is how you write a damn headline.

And so concludes this edition of The Enthusiast! Thank you for reading and if you're not already subscribed, you should sign up (it's free!). Be sure confirm via email link to receive it direct to your Inbox every week. If you're already a fan, forward this newsletter along to a friend and spread the love!

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Until next time, try to determine if "Indie Sleaze" is really the right terminology for this era (it's not), uncover fond memories of clicking through the world of Myst one step at a time like you were trying to find the Holy Grail, and face the facts about the effects smartphones are having on our collective mental health.

Yours in OG Indie Sleaze for All Eternity,
LKH