Localized The decade in local music: 2004

It's December, and you know what that means: lists. But this isn't just the end of a year, it's the end of a decade, which means even bigger lists (and an even bigger chance of pissing people off by forgetting something). Over the next two weeks, The A.V. Club will roll out year-specific lists of our favorite local albums. Is it a best-of? Not quite. We thought it would be more interesting to make it a little looser in scope, the better to highlight both some of the most well-known albums and also the ones that we love even though they've gotten a little lost in the mists of time. We've limited each artist to one album for the entire decade, and limited ourselves to no more than six albums for each year.

Dosh, Pure Trash (Anticon Records)
The artist: Martin Dosh, a drummer and percussion teacher who has played with Fog, Lateduster, and Andrew Bird, also creates loop-based electronic music.
The album: Pure Trash is a peculiar mish-mash of blips and bloops, drum breaks, atmospheric synthesizers, vocal samples, and innumerable other sounds all piled together. The glitch-poppy, avant-noise material Dosh conjures up is best appreciated with an understanding of how he creates it. Live, the multi-instrumentalist and knob-twiddler surrounds himself with loop pedals, samplers, keyboards, a trap kit, and a wide range of other things that make noise. He then begins layering, bringing repeated sounds in and out to construct hauntingly beautiful melodies. Trash is an instrumental ode to Dosh's family, featuring the song he used to propose to his now-wife ("I Think I'm Getting Married") and a song named after his son ("Naoise"), as well as multiple seemingly impromptu samples of his loved ones' voices strewn in the background. With his innate sense of non-traditional songwriting, Dosh turns accidental moments of savant brilliance into fully realized scores. The result is both organic and electronic, and sounds like little else.

Eyedea And Abilities, E&A (Rhymesayers Entertainment)
The band: Freestyle champion Eyedea and unrivaled turntablist Abilities have helped bolster the Rhymesayers roster with their brand of alternative hip-hop since the turn of the century.
The album: If you've only heard Eyedea And Abilities' first record, you might mistake them for navel-gazing, down-tempo indie rap. 2001's First Born was philosophical diatribe in rap form, side-stepping hip-hop tradition in favor of abstract beats. Live, the duo has always been more energetic and in-your-face than that, combining Eyedea's manic, rapid-fire battle raps with Abilities' unparalleled scratch techniques. With their sophomore effort, E&A, the pair better reflects this, turning out a record full of bangers, shit-talking, and mind-blowing scratches. The beats are big and funky, and Eyedea's signature schizophrenic flow has never been more fun. Abilities' skills make a big impact here: The album is teeming with samples—movie quotes, rap references, porno clips—delivered at a fast pace and begging for multiple listens. E&A is in many ways as experimental as the twosome's past and future efforts, but in a stronger, more accessible fashion.

The Hopefuls, The Fuses Refuse To Burn (2024 Records)
The band: Something of a local supergroup, The Hopefuls of 2004 boasted formidable songwriting talents of co-leaders Darren Jackson (also of Kid Dakota) and Vicious Vicious' Erik Appelwick, not to mention Storyhill's John Hermanson. Originally named The Olympic Hopefuls and dressed in signature orange tracksuits, they were forced to change their name and their fashion motif after being sued by the U.S. Olympic Committee for an inadvertent trademark violation.
The album: Never mind what the fuses did or didn't do; the album itself burns. Jackson and Appelwick are not only excellent power-pop songwriters but producers as well, and Fuses benefits from the whole skill set, with songs that have real heart to them given a glowing polish and layered with so many handclaps and other little audio surprises that there's, quite literally, never a dull moment. The album's highlight, Weezerian party song "Let's Go!," landed the band some deserved national attention when it was picked up in an episode of The O.C. The Hopefuls lost a key member when Appelwick left to join the then-exploding Tapes N' Tapes, but they soldier on, with Hermanson taking a more active songwriting role next to Jackson for 2008's worthy followup Now Playing At The One-Seat Theater.

The Owls, Our Hopes And Dreams (Magic Marker Records)
The band: Indie-pop quartet The Owls began when Allison LaBonne, former guitarist for The Legendary Jim Ruiz, surprised her boyfriend of seven years, Hang Ups singer Brian Tighe, now her husband—with the songs she'd been secretly writing. The duo grew into a quartet with the addition of a third songwriter, Maria May, and drummer John Jerry.
The album: Despite a multiplicity of songwriters and voices, The Owls' debut EP feels like a unified whole. May's dreamy, zen-like "Air" became a local sensation even before the album was recorded after the U of M's Radio K began playing an early demo which became the station's most-requested song. But that proved to be just the tip of the iceberg, as Our Hopes showed with LaBonne's catchy folk-pop "Do Ya" and Tighe's sweeping "Forever Changing." The group's collaborative embrace of Beatlesque folk-pop is broad enough to let each songwriter's distinct style come through, but the sweetly sad, wide-eyed emotions that pervade and connect the songs also create a beautiful, quiet concordance.

P.O.S., Ipecac Neat (Doomtree Records/Rhymesayers Entertainment)
The artist: P.O.S., a member of the nine-piece hip-hop collective Doomtree, infuses his records with punk rock, and now rivals Atmosphere as the most popular rap act in town.
The album: From the iconoclastic opening lines, in which scrappy young rapper P.O.S. sends bullets through "disgusting Biggie Small's fat," it's evident Ipecac Neat isn't a typical rap record. The album is as raw and gritty as you could hope for in underground hip-hop, but in eschewing funk samples for the punk records the MC-producer was raised on, P.O.S. delivers something startlingly unique. Lyrically, he's rarely less than impressive: The storytelling, calls for political and social change, and expressions of personal strife are all couched with the hunger of an up-and-comer and old-fashioned mic skills. Odd references in the lyrics ("Remember sixth grade? / Pencil wars and thumb wars and bikes / Yeah, well, I still do that shit") and ad-libs left in the intros give the album a conversational feel, making it easy to connect personally with the songs. That the Doomtree empire would soon take over the local rap scene seemed destined.

Previously: The decade in local music: 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000.