A few weeks ago a friend and fellow music writer called Finbarr Bermingham (a fine Irish name) asked me to contribute to a feature he’s running on his blog, where various scribes are picking their top five albums of the past decade.

I put it off for a while as it’s not the easiest task to whittle down everything you’ve listened to over the past ten years into five standout LPs, but then one evening I thought I’d stop procrastinating and just do it. Finbarr was looking for personal choices, not some kind of authoritative barometer of the decade, so I just shortlisted the albums that had stuck with me, the few I can still enjoy after hundreds of plays.

And the top five I came up with? Well, here they are, in no particular order:

Radiohead – Amnesiac
OutKast – Speakerboxx / The Love Below
Midlake – The Trials of Van Occupanther
The Strokes – Is This It
The Knife – Silent Shout

You can read my reasons for choosing them in full over on Finbarr’s blog.

If he asked me to do this in six months time I’d probably come up with five completely different choices, but there you go. If you haven’t heard one of the five I recommend you give it a spin, as they’re (obviously) all extremely good.

And what are your top five albums of the Noughties? I’ll give you a few weeks to post your comment.