Now that's what i call noughties - 'songs of balmy reassurance'

Sure, i got going on my decennary review way back when others had actual contemporary ideas to work on (though possibly not as early as Pitchfork), but they're fast catching up a mere six weeks from the cut-off point for hurried evaluation. John Harris in the Guardian is excellent on what, in some quarters, has been creatively a cowardly decade:

"Musicians, by contrast, have returned time and again to the songs of balmy reassurance that have been the calling card of Oasis, Coldplay and Keane and lately converted into lachrymose show-stoppers for X Factor contestants: piano played with all the passion of a nodding dog, and a singer once again imploring us to "hold on ... Fatalism and impotence aren't the half of it ..."

While the good old NME surprised no-one in naming the Strokes and the Libertines' debuts as the first and second best albums of the noughties. In their rejuvenation of indie from 90s' sludge, reflection of the now rebirthed but increasingly bourgeois cultural spaces for druggy, guitar music and the influence they then wielded on the rest of the scene (not to mention typical trajectories of fast rises and ignominious falls), these are fair picks. But Babyshambles questionably makes number 35. Decent selection outside the NME box were Scream's Xtrmntr (but is the agit-industrial noise approved only because it's Bobby and co?), M.I.A's Arular and Crystal Castles' self-titled debut.