The top 10 albums of 2002

Tom Waits, Alice / Blood Money (Both Anti/Epitaph)

It's hard to think of another artist who could release two albums simultaneously without any drop in quality, as Tom Waits did this year: both these offerings boast a standard of conception and execution that lesser talents can only envy. Written 10 years ago for a Robert Wilson opera, but recorded only last year, Alice features lullabies and laments etched with elegiac resignation, its love songs stained with a stalker's covert intimacy, and even its liveliest characters dogged by an awareness of mortality, the sure knowledge that, ultimately, "all the worms will climb/ The rugged ladder of your spine." The songs have the ominous, mythopoeic weight of traditional folk tales, their settings veiled with smears of strings appropriate to the project's dreamlike imagery and mood.

Blood Money is more purposive in manner, though no more cheerful in aspect – as might be expected of songs inspired by Georg Buchner's tragedy Woyzeck. Musically, it's more recognisably Waitsian, with the familiar palette of marimba, horns, bespoke percussion and prickly guitar atonalities – augmented in places by the funfair wheezings of an old pneumatic calliope – conjuring up the usual parade of folksy hybrids, from louche cabaret blues and bitter-sweet fado laments to dyspeptic lounge muzak and mutant oompah stylings. It's a darker, more sardonic work than Alice, with songs such as "Misery Is the River of the World" ("If there's one thing you can say about mankind/ There's nothing kind about man") streaked with a cheerful, mordant cynicism and a keen awareness of human fallibility. The writing is brusque and aphoristic, with epigrams tumbling from every song: "If you live in hope, you're dancing to a terrible tune"; "Time is just memory/ Mixed in with desire."

Few songwriters use the semicolon as much as Waits and his partner Kathleen Brennan do here, an indication of the sense of qualification in these songs, where love is tempered by spite, hope soured by bitter wisdom, and misery cauterised by endurance. But through it all courses a lust for life, in all its myriad forms, that shames the paltry ambitions of lesser artists.

Johnny Dowd, The Pawnbroker'S Wife (Munich)

Johnny Dowd here stalks the terrain of noir novelists such as James M Cain and Jim Thompson – a world where desire and danger snake around each other like a Möbius strip. As ever, his characters are from the dark end of the street: poor, simple folk stumbling into disaster as they pursue a dim, distant glint of happiness. Dread lurks at the end of every line, whether it's the self-proclaimed "King of Emptiness", whose "memory is the cave between my mother's thighs", or the murderess executed in "Judgement Day" – their grim plights etched out in raw, scarifying settings that sink Dowd's plaintive drawl and Kim Sherwood-Caso's spookily innocent lilt among a thorny tangle of Beefheartian guitars and discordant organ. Even Christmas – the peak suicide period, lest we forget – receives its sombre due in the least joyous version of "Jingle Bells" ever recorded.

Common, Electric Circus (MCA)

"Hip-hop is changin' – y'all want me to stay the same?" asks Common rhetorically on the dazzling Electric Circus, one of those rare records that herald a game-changing breakthrough for the the genre. Extolling the virtues of musical openness and humanitarian respect through his "revolutionary planet rap", he builds bridges here between funk, soul, rock and psychedelia in a way that recalls Outkast's Stankonia – toasting Hendrix in the eight-minute psychedelic soul symphony "Jimi Was a Rock Star", name-checking Kurt Cobain and Steely Dan, and collaborating with talents as diverse as Prince, Mary J Blige and Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier. Common confronts hip hop's conservatism, displaying a rare liberalism toward homosexuality and feminism. Infectious and intelligent, Electric Circus is the most heartening recent development in hip hop.

Cornershop, Hamdcream For A Generation ( Wiiija )

Unaccountably ignored in the Mercury prize nominations, Cornershop's Handcream for a Generation is a marvellous album, a life-affirming celebration of music as both a pleasurable listening experience and a cultural force. It returns to pop something of the sheer joy of making new music, that essential spark of creation that flickers so dimly in most contemporary pop fodder. It's an eclectic affair, Tjinder Singh and co ranging freely across the gamut of sounds and styles, taking in everything from indie to Indian, reggae to rock, funk to techno, with a buoyant charm that lifts the spirit at each turn. Lyrically, Singh's deadpan stream of surreal-political imagery could be the missing link between Dylan and hip hop.

EL-P, Fantastic Damage (Def Jux)

Having produced last year's stand-out rap album (Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein), Jaime Meline, aka El-P (El Producto), strikes a further blow for intelligent hip hop with this solo debut, on which the agglomerations of apocalyptic imagery are blurted out like frantic warnings over jagged, cacophonous backing tracks whose samples, scratches, synth figures and breakbeats collide with a weird, chaotic logic. The most effective tracks are those on which the backing best reflects the subject matter: the eerie sonic wasteland of scratches and synth whines in "Accidents Don't Happen", for instance, underlines the conspiracy-theorist paranoia of his lyrics, while the sinister creep of "Stepfather Factory" brings just the right tone of contemptuous menace to El-P's mordant sci-fi commentary on America's single-parent society. It's by no means easy listening; but few of his peers' efforts have a fraction of the impact.

Steve Earle, Jerusalem (Artemis)

Steve Earle is virtually the only American songwriter to have responded to September 11 in a considered manner devoid of nationalist posturing or maudlin sentiment. Instead, he has done what any decent artist ought to in this situation, which is to try to learn about Islam and thereby shine a light on both this "alien" culture and his own. It's led him into territory untrodden by his peers, with "John Walker's Blues" dealing sympathetically with the American youth captured while fighting for the Taliban, and "Amerika V.6.0" offering a bitterly sardonic portrait of a once-proud nation riven by class, wealth and racial divisions. Like much of the album, it's set to a gritty "Jumpin' Jack Flash" raunch that helps Earle's ironies punch home like uppercuts. Most courageous of all, "Ashes to Ashes" offers an assertion of the impermanence of empires that goes directly against the grain of his country's imperial arrogance.

Sigur Ros, () (Fatcat)

This third album from Iceland's Sigur Ros is an exercise in controlled subversion. Not only do the eight tracks, like the album itself, lack titles, but the songs are sung in no known language, listeners being invited to offer their own interpretations of the lyrics. The music, too, avoids rock's usual easy extraversion: Sigur Ros tracks don't progress with the usual narrative drive of tunes – instead, they loom ominously from some crepuscular gloom, gradually glowing brighter without actually illuminating, then die, leaving a faint impression of mood rather than melody. The overall effect is akin to a more spiritual Spiritualised, particularly when the sepulchral organ and methodical piano cycles are burnished by understated horn and string tones: few albums this year contained as many moments of transcendent beauty.

Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, Out Of Season (Go Beat)

This hook-up between the Portishead singer Beth Gibbons and the former Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb is coloured in autumnal hues and moods, full of melancholy and retrospection. "It's that feeling of decay when the values you put on things have no relevance any more because the world's moved on to another place," as Webb says of the track "Rustin Man", a creepy, atmospheric piece that closes the album with Gibbons's voice slithering like a snake across a scrawl of weatherbeaten organ. Throughout, subtle tints of acoustic guitar and keyboards allow her murmured intimacies to stand alone, more isolated and vulnerable than ever. A similar restraint marks out instrumental detail such as the lugubrious cello break in "Show" and the toy piano that concludes "Spyder", while Gibbons's layered background vocals add a ghostly backdrop to some songs, spooky and tremulous as a theremin.

Suicide, American Supreme (Blast First)

The Seventies garage-punk-electronica pioneers made the comeback of the year with this, the duo's first studio album in a decade. Seamlessly fitting modern sampling methods into Suicide's original hard-techno style, American Supreme boils with a fierce energy and subversive political anger, its itchy electronic pulses allied to infectious funk grooves, turntable scratches and fanfare stabs of brass, like hip-hop backing tracks. Alan Vega's impressionistic sci-fi street-life raps are a far cry from mainstream rap, however: barked out in breathless grunts and yelps, and subjected to a welter of electronic effects, they're like apocalyptic missives from another world, a kind of psychopathic Beat poetry that transmutes the events of September 11 into a nightmare vision of white-faced zombies running wild in Manhattan while the sky is on fire and leaders urge their subjects to "Swear to the flag! It's your duty as we all burn!" Extraordinary.

Various Artists, The Sound Of The City (Stateside)

Before he became radio's pre-eminent champion of world music, Charlie Gillett wrote the definitive account of American pop's regional development in The Sound of the City. Three decades on, this series of five double-CD compilations in effect makes his book audible, each album dealing with the recording history of a different city (New York, Los Angeles, Memphis, Chicago and New Orleans). At around 40 tracks per set, the scope is vast, and Gillett's taste is virtually unimpeachable. The LA and New York anthologies are the most varied – they switch deliriously between rock and jazz, punk and country, doowop, salsa, gospel and pop – while the other three cities are less wide-ranging, and less modern, though no less entertaining.