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Top 12 Blender Blunders

By Scott Reid & Joel Elliott | 29 June 2008

Choice what-the-fuckery from Blender’s Top 100 Greatest Indie Records of EVAH list. Sadly we’re not making these up:

12. On Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped: “The original riot grrrls: cute when they’re angry”

11. On Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West: “A great road-trip album, especially if you’re planning on driving off a cliff”

10. On Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation: “If Slanted and Enchanted was indie’s Sgt. Pepper’s, this was its version of…Electric Ladyland: a double-LP psych-out that exploded like a car bomb”

9. On Pixies’ Surfer Rosa: “Bassist-vocalist Kim Deal’s chalky, cheery singing added the right pinch of cuteness”

8. On Slint’s Spiderland: “They practiced until they got very skilled, and apparently quite depressed”

7. On Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous: “Ex-actress Jenny Lewis found her finest role yet: stone indie fox”

6. On Interpol’s Turn On the Bright Lights: “There are a few lullabies, but the band mostly hits the ground running with interlocking riffs and giddyap grooves”

5. On Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I: “Like he’s trying to cram three albums of smartness into one CD”

4. On M.I.A.‘s Arular: “MIA makes a point her Third World roots and revolutionary politics, and the first rule of Third World revolution is that you make weapons from whatever’s at hand. So her debut is a DJ-grenade lobbed into the disco, with sharpened fragments of dancehall, electroclash, jungle and new wave flying everywhere”

3. On Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted: “Pavement said in their tossed-off, übercool way: Forget that, let’s party”

2. On Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out: “Riot grrrls show the dudes how to kick butt and mean it”

1. On New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies: “The remaining members of Joy Division bounced back from Ian Curtis’s suicide and made a beeline from the funeral home to the club”