Sincerely? I don't know how people do this sort of thing, the very notion of ranking disparate musical albums against one another is a veritable exercise in madness. What, really, separates my number one from my number forty? They're nothing at all alike! More poignantly, what makes an album worthy of number fourteen and another worthy of twenty six? These artists represent radically different genres and wholly incompatible perspectives! This entire endeavour is intellectually bankrupt! Stop me before I do this again!
Caveats aside, I've always really, really wanted to do this. No, let's not go into why - that way lies madness. The nerdish, utterly vacuous dissection of music is, obviously, a passion for one such as myself. And really, what better expression of nerdy vacuousness is there than an arbitrarily determined list rife with bias?
I'm making it sound as though I don't love every bit of this - I do.
But, and yes I will wax philosophic from time to time, sifting through a year's worth of favourites, some of which I'd genuinely forgotten about (The Grates, Islands, Ultra Dolphins) and others I'd literally discovered the day of my idiotic list-making (Guillemots!), percolated a year's worth of tumult and rage - and the occasional positive feeling - in a most unexpectedly vivid manner. A year's a pretty long time, nyah? If my self-appointed quest to sketch something like this out is devoid of any valid significance, it's at least worthy in its verification of the deep, deep power these albums have had over me.
I think I know why we do this, Jams.
Maybe, maybe not. I look back on two thousand and six and realize, with some moderately sharp pangs of guilt, what massive, collective agnosia we who sing the praises of the alleged anti-mainstream possess. Picking out my top choices for the past twelve months, how often was I confronted by a half-forgotten, viciously neglected album from the previous year that I'd sworn the same type of praises on when it was newish as well? Two thousand four? Much worse, and two thousand three? Forget about it.
It was awkward, somewhere up there with meeting an ex at a party and not remembering the finer points of, oh, say, their name.
Not that such an event has ever, ever happened to me.
Nurr. But making lists like these? A desperate grasp at immortalization of fleeting ideals? A half-panicked, ill-conceived chance at resisting inexorable change? A genuine fear that if we don't proclaim our love for these songs they might be swallowed whole and destroyed by the irresistable maw of history? Something like that. I think, with as much modesty as one who's about to submit that he thinks he knows what the best albums of an entire year are can muster, that such predilictions might drive our entire fascination with identifying and praising only those underdogs and perverse finds we come across in our travels. It's paternal, innit? Songs and artists that no one pays attention to can hardly be said to exist, and that's a pretty affecting idea when you're as soft-skinned and weepy as I certainly can be.
Shut up, I am dreaming. (But that didn't make the list, sorry.)
Thus, for those few who'll read this, and especially for those extremely few who'll read this compulsion-free, behold this, the first act:
Best of '06, forty to thirty one:
40 Me, Myself and Rye - The Russian Futurists
39 Melody Mountain - Susanna & The Magical Orchestra
38 Mar - Ultra Dolphins
37 Drum's Not Dead - Liars
36 Gravity Won't Get You High - The Grates
35 Altar - Sunn 0))) & Boris
34 In Bocca al Lupo - Murder By Death
33 Brightblack Morning Light - Brightblack Morning Light
32 The Horror The Horror - The Horror The Horror
31 Fear is On Our Side - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness
The lowest echelon of a best-of-the-year list always reeks of nonsense to me. If you've dubbed an album worthy of being on such a list at all, how do you turn around and boot it to the furthest position from gold you can give it? I made it easy on myself. My, Myself And Rye, while a superb album providing a sweeping and beautiful panorama of one-man Torontonian Russian Futurists' style, is, as a matter of fact, an honest to God compilation album. TRF's far-future symphony might deserve better than this, but I needed a patsy. Same deal for Susanna & The Magical Orchestra's cover album Melody Mountain, but this non-album benefits not just from Susanna's silver pipes and a gloriously understated instrumentation from her one-man eponymous Orchestra, it features a motherfucking Prince cover.
Mar was one of maybe two or three true-to-form punk albums to catch and hold my attention all year, one that I didn't even realize I respected as much as I did till it came time to make this list. While the Ultra Dolphins certainly don't make a case for themselves based on range of tone or dynamics, they more than make up for it in genuine goddamn vitriol and a fearlessness to incorporate absolutely random, fantastically inexplicable piano breaks and flourishes in a manner akin to pre-Relationship Of Command At The Drive-In's younger, more pissed off sibling. Liars fell on and off this list and occupied more locations during its contruction than any other single album could possibly hope to. Every pass I've taken through Drum's Not Dead has been difficult to the point of frustration, provocative in that it strays dangerously close to discomfort, absolutely bizarre, and finally capped off with the perfect The Other Side Of Mount Heart Attack to remind me that this is not, in fact, a joke, and these men really are musicians.
The Grates surfaced in my library during an all-too brief foray into the jarringly lovely world of Twee, and I'd honestly forgotten about them entirely till this week. Gravity Won't Get You High is a superbly simple, completley straightforward blast of sunshine meant to accomplish nothing other than bringing a smile to your face, and it does that without modesty or shame. At the absolute other end of the spectrum, scary drone god-monsters Sunn 0)))'s collaboration with big metal oddity Boris confounds and depresses with the deft hand of artists doing exactly what they want to do - scare, confound, and depress. Altar defies any and all critical expectations heaped on either band with a ferociously understated melange of music. I've heard it picked apart as never delivering on its promise, and hated on for just not being Metal, and that's bunk. Centrepiece track The Sinking Belle, featuring vocals of all goddamn heathen things, creeps me out more than any dodecahedron of noise either excellent band has delivered beforehand. It's a horror movie with a constant, brilliantly overdrawn hush of suspense, and it deserves its accolades.
I don't think anyone noticed that Murder By Death released a new album, and I'm ashamed that I nearly succumbed to that's-so-last-year thinking in my slow digestion of In Bocca Al Lupo. Given a chance, the album reveals a band at their musical and stylistic prime, producing exactly the kind of songs they want to produce and alternately pouring on and stripping away the gorgeous instrumentation they're capable of to achieve unceasingly fantastic results. Plus, I'd put it up here even if the entire album was only two-minute long third track Dead Men And Sinners repeated over and over again. Brightblack Morning Light accomplish the same effortless expression of style, but to such perfection and in a hazy, hippy morass of psychadelia that I can honestly say I can't objectively differentiate one track from the other. I've lost hours listening to their self-titled release, and I think that speaks more to its power than anything else.
Swedes The Horror The Horror released, without a doubt, the best guitar album of the goddamn year, and it's only unfortunate that it didn't have more competition in a year where such outfits were ignored as blasé, if not openly disparaged for not being with it. They're hooky, they're dancey, they feature vaguely british vocals and lovely sharp tones, and they're fully capable of showcasing why the six-stringer has been the it instrument for most of a century. Lastly, for this installment, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, forever hereafter referred to as the mildly more wieldly ILYBICD for my sanity's sake, crept into my psyche with their synth swaddled update of Interpol's grim update of Joy Division. I outright refused to give these guys a try based unfairly on their admittedly ridiculous name, and was genuinely impoverished for it. Fear Is On Our Side is monumental, dense, and absolutely glittering with obsidian slyness. Alternately furious, visceral, instantly appealing, and mind-numbingly creepy, it is mood music for destroying minds. Repetitive, distorted hooks draw attention away from barely heard voeyeur snatches of synthetic wiles, simplistic drums tap out irresistable rythms over a vocalist's vivid alto, and unexpected bass and synths fill in all the cracks. It's a science fiction film noire soundtrack, and I get lost in it.
This constitutes a suitably large chunk to break off on. Smoke if you got 'em.
Caroline, I am looking in your direction.
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