2003 : 37 "I've Lived On A Dirt Road All My Life" by Manitoba

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Here's how I imagine the Manitoba album Up In Flames came about: Kieran Hebden, a vinyl-collecting nerd, secludes himself in his bedroom with a trove of purloined break-beats which he proceeds to integrate into new sonic constructions, full of ornament and embellishment. To this task, he brings an omnivorous sensibility, raiding, in approximately equal measure, the fire energy of 60s jazz, the blasted-out, disorienting energy of late-80s-early-90s shoegazer rock, and the twentieth-century avant-garde love of sound for its own sake. He emerges with ten tracks that resemble Cornell boxes: idiosyncratic, meticulously built, self-contained, slightly airless yet weirdly vast. It's a deeply cerebral project, yet, like the best hermetic projects, it has, as its end, the aim of discovering something that is beautiful, blissed-out, and ecstatic. —Jeremy Bushnell Listen: Manitoba >> "I've Lived On A Dirt Road All My Life"