I don't know if that's somehow reprehensible on my part, or whether it constitutes a woman-hating act, but to my own credit you'll note that I'm not spouting anything like, "Karen O receives top marks for her boobies!!", or anything of the sort. Give me some credit.
I might say that about Regina though. Karen's more leggy.
Ahem. I think I've had enough of the agonized modesty shtick for this year. This chunk was by far the most difficult to order, much less decide upon its constituents. I mean, it's an eclectic bunch, and there really is no valid reason except favouritism for putting, oh say, Regina Spektor ahead of J Dilla. I mean, Regina has assets; J Dilla wrote his final album while dying in a hospital bed.
I'm a bad person.
Best of '06, thirty to twenty one:
30 Show Your Bones - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
29 The Way the Wind Blows - A Hawk and a Hacksaw
28 We Are the Pipettes - The Pipettes
27 Orchestra Of Bubbles - Ellen Allien & Apparat
26 Young Machetes - The Blood Brothers
25 Destroyer's Rubies - Destroyer
24 Donuts - J Dilla
23 s/t - Working For A Nuclear Free City
22 Yellow House - Grizzly Bear
21 Begin to Hope - Regina Spektor
Fever To Tell. There, I said it, everybody can fucking get over it right now. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs got a bad rap this year for no valid reason, other than the excellent, if straightforward Show Your Bones not being FTT2: Fever Harder. SYB isn't garage rock, it's a pop rock album put together by three musicians who've lamentably been crammed way, way too far up the indie-scene's backside. Zinner's guitarwork is crisp and unrelentingly cathartic, the rhythms are hard and buoyant, and Karen O is a creative and extremely powerful frontwoman not afraid of her own fantastic range. Not only do they have the balls to cover Phenomena better than anyone could ever have thought possible, they wrote a ballad to the tune of Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird, or whatever that goddamn tune is called, that turned out catchy and tear-jerking at the same time. It's good, now leave the scene behind.
A Hawk And A Hacksaw, in somewhat the same vein, weren't so much obscured as buried under a veritable avalanche of scenic wankery in the wake of Beirut's madly successful reception, an album partly shaped by AHAAH's own Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost. The Way The Wind Blows, while certainly enamoured of same Balkan persuasions Zach Condon's debut is, succeeds in an entirely different endeavour, much more of an explanation than an extrapolation. The instrumentation is incredible: a wheedling, cavorting dance of the indescribably exotic and deeply affecting. The feelings conveyed in Barnes and Trost's playing, particularly when dashed on Barnes's workmanlike melancholy vocals, are impossibly vivid, and genuinely, unpretentiously moving. A tricky feat for such left-field work by indie rock royalty.
I love that Jams can't reconcile my enjoying The Pipettes (that's pee-pettes, they're English) with, well, my being me. It's a tough case to sell: an outfit fronted by three pretty ladies who do little but sing and offer a carefully constructed image to sell. But if you can get past the kitsch and the - ahem - bracingly poppy exterior, there's a hell of a lot more to this debut. The vocals are, as can be expected, spot-on, and instantly recall any number of old school girl-pop hits no one really actively listens to but everybody somehow knows. The rest of the story is a sheer surprise: the lyrics feature possibly the wittiest writing in an album all year, self-deprecating, funny, and aggressive. Best of all, the instrumentation, provided by principle song-writers and everything-elsers the Cassettes, is enormously creative as well as delivering - with sparkling confidence and unexpected grit - the requisite hooks for each and every song.
I won't pretend I'm an electronica music major, like most indie kids would've liked to consider themselves this past year. What makes Orchestra Of Bubbles great, though, is anything but its rich techno pedigree: it's a glittering, weightless, cohesive album of incredibly pretty sounds, and that's more than enough. Again, I'm not in the business, so I can't offer up much in the way of context or analysis - one pretty blip sounds pretty much like another pretty blip, I don't think they're meant to mean much more. Ellen Allien (Ay-leen, no fooling) and Apparat are, obviously, masters of their chosen craft, and the music herein is startling, powerful, and uncomplicated; evocative without being specific, if you take my meaning. The synths are shiny, the beats are hearty, what singing and sampling goes on is incorporeal and sharp: it's a pretty, many-sided gem, and it succeeds gloriously in that role. And as an aside, I'll take OOB over the hideously over-hyped Silent Shout any fucking day.
The Blood Brothers hold a special, bias ridden place in my heart, but the fantastically executed explosion that is Young Machetes absolutely deserves its place on this list, if only for the fact that everyone was sure they'd choke this time around. YM (hah!) is the best punk album of the year. Sure, it was a lean year, but based on the vitality of the Brothers' performance on this cacophonic slab of an album, you wouldn't know it. "Peak shape" doesn't even begin to describe how these men have progressed over the years, nor the poignancy and ferocity of every single song. The confidence apparent in every note is stunning, and the dual-vocalist shtick that is the Brothers' calling card is, finally, devoid of any shtick at all. Both Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie are extraordinarily strong, wildly unique frontmen, and the cohesion that permeates YM's songs could not be tighter, nor put to greater effect. Plus, Spit Shine Your Black Clouds is completely ghetto fabulous (listen before you laugh, assholes!).
Rubies is an album I feel funny about praising, being that I am a Canadian boy and we're expected to do just that. Still, while Destroyer main man Dan Bejar gets everything but oral sex from the critics of my homeland, he's rightly deserving of such adoration. Rubies is epic, jangly, and beautiful, Bejar's writing invigorating and vocals... vocal. This is music much bigger than the man, appealing in an impossible to pinpoint kind of way and with depth I've only had the opportunity to scratch. It's bouncy, mournful, and poetic - it's a troubadour with a symphony playing on a small town's back roads. Something like that.
J Dilla must have had the strongest work ethic of any musician ever. I'd like to disentangle thoughts on his final-ish album from the truth of his death from lupus three days after its release, but it's difficult. Donuts is a jagged, incredibly well put-together little album showcasing a man's indescribable talent as a producer. The mix of sounds is beyond eclectic, favouring strong blasts of brass and bass-lead rhythms instead of the infinitely overused cellphone synths and one-two drum beats of the genre. The hodgepodge is amazing, the sampled vocals alternately compelling and sly, the end result superb, witty, and darkened and silver-hued by the loss it'll forever be linked to.
Working For A Nuclear Free City's self-titled debut could be the best debut of the year, if not for Beirut's insurmountable perfection. Fortunately for WFANFC, the two bands are not and could not be in any conceivably sort of competition with one another. The album can't rightly be called electronica or rock, but it's certainly a beautiful, explosive union of the two. Possessed of an extremely broad dynamic and an apparent ambition to cover it all in one album, these boys pack a terrific mass of raw talent into a tight space, and feature a ready and able motherfucking bassist not at all shy about leading these songs with an intense sense of honest groove. The epic synths and needling guitars that swirl about this bass-heavy core don't ever touch the ground, and I'll be damned if any other 2006 release that can make you dance and rock out at the same time with such efficiency.
Grizzly Bear did a whole bunch of contradictory things with Yellow House. It's difficult, it's easy on the ears; it's apparently complicated, intuitively simple in orchestration; it's pretty, it's creepy. Like a tidy graveyard in the greenest summer field, the tone and execution of this already-legendary orthodox indie release for grown ups is lush, inviting, warm, and filled out around the edges with a hint of delicious menace. These men are good, they're very good. Trilling, sweeping violin sections, gothic piano rumbles, an effects-laden funereal alto, perfectly tinkly bluegrass strings, a stark intimacy with the melancholic - no one does indie-folk like this so well anymore.
Okay, I love Regina Spektor. Physically, if I could. I wasn't sure if Begin to Hope deserved any praise at all on my first listen last June, and to this day I challenge any fan of the lovely lady to call the second through sixth tracks of the album anything but duds (yes, I include the entirely pointless and half-baked new edition of Samson in this, zealots!). The title is awful, the single is suspiciously radio-ready, and the cover makes her look like a myspace-born wannabe starlet. But, and I mean but, get past all of those things and make it to the second half of the album, and any and all doubts about Miss Spektor's credibility and virtuosity as an artist must disappear. Regina's talent is boundless, and if she made some insufferably vacuous songs on this album I trust it is because that is what she meant to do. Her voice is matchless, her skill behind the ivories is phenomenal, and her songwriting ability can and will make her a figure of mythic proportions for decades to come. Après Moi is both powerful and deft, 20 Years Of Snow dazzling, Lady indescribably sultry without camp, and Summer in the City the most gorgeous realization of Regina's peculiar style and strengths to date. I couldn't stay mad at her, could you?
And on second thought, I think Dan Bejar probably has got oral sex from at least a few Canadian critics.
At least a few, wouldn't you think?
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