There’s a scene, several seasons into CBS’ super-hitcom “How I Met Your Mother”, where protagonist Ted Mosby desperately tries to convince a girl why they should be together. Spinning his proverbial wheels in her apartment, he grabs a copy of this record from the shelf. “The Unicorns’ Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? I have never met anybody who has this album!” Turns out the record belongs to the gal’s roommate (and Ted’s future babymoms), but that’s neither here nor there: point is, approximately seven years removed from its release, The Unicorns’ lone album remained entrenched enough in ’00s indie folklore that it ignited a pretentious Manhattanite’s love affair with a mystery woman, which seems to me a strong case for lionization all its own.

But as I listened to the record top to bottom for the first time in roughly two years, I was surprised to discover that it holds up unusually well for such a short-lived phenomenon. (I was also reminded that, once upon a time, Pitchfork was sometimes helpful to me, and that that time is but a distant memory.) See, The Unicorns’ unique mythology is steeped largely in seeing their live show, wherein mercurial band members would often indulge in profane rants or fistfight each other mid-set; they released this album to general acclaim, and eventually imploded, just as everyone (themselves included) predicted.

Who Will Cut Our Hair remains a sonically mesmerizing album; deconstructed, economical guitar pop a la Guided By Voices raises its head often, as on the majority of “Sea Ghost”, but the band’s artsier tendencies permeate even the most accessible tracks (“Sea Ghost” opens with a gloriously out-of-place pan flute solo, for no reason other than “why not?”). More often than not, the whole thing is an agreeably kooky hodgepodge of inventive instrumentation, catchy melodies free of verse-chorus-verse structure, rising and falling vocal harmonies courtesy of frontmen Nick Diamonds and Alden Ginger. The farting Casio bleats that open “Jellybones” would sound like the intro level of a Nintendo classic without Diamonds and Ginger layering guitars and vocals atop them; later, Diamonds and Ginger go head-to-head, trading argumentative vocal barbs over the guitar-and-drums flurry of “I Was Born (A Unicorn)” (“I write the songs!” “You say I’m doing it wrong!” “You ARE doing it wrong!”), which also has a spoken-word section because why not.

Perhaps just as notable as The Unicorns’ off-kilter but undeniable pop chops is the album’s vague concept: the record as a whole, sugar-addled and euphoric though it may be, seems to deal with mortality with unusual frivolity. It adds a whole macabre layer to the proceedings; they cross over to the proverbial seal’s watershed (to borrow from Antony Hegarty), both stave off death and come to terms with it (in bookending tracks “I Don’t Wanna Die” and “Ready to Die”, further examples of the band’s peculiar and dark brand of humor), have sex battles with ghosts, all sorts of ethereal shenanigans.

It’s a weird record, but never a somber one. The Diamonds/Ginger songwriting tandem plays fast and loose with their own demise, riding mythological sea creatures into the sunset and thwacking their fears away with drunken carnival organs and woozy drum machines. Diamonds seems quite busy with his current band, Islands, but if he and Ginger decide to cash-grab off some sort of anniversary reunion tour, I’m not gonna miss out again — even if I’m not entirely convinced that any hatchet between these two won’t end up buried in someone’s face.

Playlist Track: “Sea Ghost”, splitting the difference between the group’s weirder tendencies and their fun guitar pop gene.
Next up: One of the decade’s most important rappers resurfaces.

Drew’s Album-a-Day will be counting down the Top 200 Albums of the 2000s one at a time until the list is completed. Drew will still be sporadically reviewing reader suggestions for albums, but will no longer be exclusively focusing on listening to, digesting, and writing a treatise on a completely new album every 24-hour cycle. This list was voted on by a panel of expert judge, the sole executor and determiner of quality being Drew himself, because make your own list if you don’t like it. Drew’s Top 200 Albums of the 2000s encompasses the record-releasing period of 2000-2009, and will include both albums of objective quality and subjective value personal to the author in whatever order suits him best. When the author hits #1, he’ll, I dunno, order a couple pizzas or something. Enjoy!

The Stand Ins just barely made this list. That’s not a knock on it; I listened to a great deal of music in the 2000s, hitting the record store every single New Release Tuesday and escaping with literal heaping armfuls of albums, and plenty of great albums fell just outside of the 2000s. Sometimes, I included artist’s entire discographies, and it felt a bit like slavish fandom; and then, I realized that not only do I slightly prefer Okkervil River’s jaunty 2008 record to The Fiery Furnaces’ Blueberry Boat, but this list ditches all emotional honesty if I penalize an artist for my own fandom. So welcome, Okkervil River: I like you more than I like lots of bands, and that’s okay.

And really, why not? Okkervil River are, first and foremost, highly literate, which already predisposes my word-obsessed self to appreciate what they offer; but in the world of song, highly literate means nothing without a good tune. From the early 2000s on, Okkervil River slowly transformed their signature sound from often-dark folk-rock to the kind of sprightly, ramshackle indie-pop that could nestle comfortably next to your New Pornographers records; they did it without sacrificing any of frontman and lyricist Will Sheff’s rambling, novella-length narratives, and so I’m willing to call the transformation a win.

The Stand Ins, a companion and sequel to OR’s 2007 masterpiece The Stage Names, elaborates and expands on the earlier record’s thematic treatise on pop culture and the perils of fame. Together, they’re an indie pop dream, dripping with pathos, reams and reams of wordplay, and wicked tunes; individually, they’re both pretty awesome, The Stand Ins containing some of the band’s most indelible melodies to date. Take the perfect “Lost Coastlines”, a clinic all its own on song dynamics, each element building upon the last in service of a metaphorical crew of rapscallions (read: rock band) navigating choppy and ill-mapped waters (read: fame). Here Sheff and Co. subvert expectations by introducing a Motown backbeat (complete with thick, groovy bassline) to their acoustic opening, eventually turning it into a duet with Jonathan Meiburg (ex-OR guitarist-turned-Shearwater mastermind), his sinewy baritone weaving into tight, braided harmonies with Sheff’s earnest yelp. The ship rides into the horizon on a wave of insanely singable “la la la”s, and that’s just the first track.

But the entire record is a master course in dynamic pop song craft, even as Sheff pens some of his most first-person, self-loathing lyrical screeds; the big-rock slow-burn of “Blue Tulip” (an obvious centerpiece a la the previous record’s “A Girl in Port”) begins “they’re waiting to hate you, so give them an excuse”, an eager defense/takedown of the singer-songwriter’s fancies, before bleeding into a thirty-second ambient instrumental shattered by the pounding, New Pornos-via-vintage-Elvis Costello “Pop Lie”, a scabrous, infectiously catchy takedown of “the liar who lied in his pop song”.

Big moments abound: tight snares bolster “Calling and Not Calling My Ex”, allowing sprawling piano lines room to play around, and the lightly wrenching “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979” boasts at least three of the sort of pinwheeling, shape-shifting vocal melodies any pop songwriter would kill to conjure.

The Stage Names is the final salvo of Okkervil River’s fruitful middle period, and almost certainly the poppiest record in their discography; later records would either go on to be less willfully tuneful or simply just get released after the listener turned old, the jury’s still out.

Playlist Track: “Lost Coastlines” — it may be the band’s most popular cut to date, but it’s too irresistible to ignore.
Next up: Indie pop and mortality find themselves strange bedfellows.