Josh actually thinks these topics are related to each other

I like Google, perhaps you've heard of it.

I'm mostly sure I'd wielded the mighty search engine for a good half-decade before I finally made the jump into that tantalizingly vague little piece of text hinting at "More >>". Since then the company has achieved something like Illuminati-scale dominance of virtually every piece of information reaching my and, if my guess is correct, every single other human being's mind.

I can, right now, use Google Earth to find an aerial photograph of my own home then open up Google Picasa to post this picture onto my Google Blog which will be recorded in my Google Reader and thereby into my Google Email account. There are programs from Google on my computer which I have actually forgotten about but I am certain are still there, adorning the deepest dungeons of my digital kingdom smiling happily and sporting stylish interfaces. Every time I so much as look at these sleek paragons of computerized efficiency I feel the whole vista of human possibilty lurch before me, vast fields of potency held open by the nigh endless power of Google.

This would all be very exceptional if I really had anything to do. I am sure very important people are using it right now to actually take over the world.

Now: I like how, even amidst the notoriously violent sprawl of total anguish which is final exams, Spring's managed to drag its cheap ass out of retirement for a swing at legendarily stubborn Kingstonian Winter. This has had two immediately recognizable effects. First, the lot of us students get to ruin ourselves on textbooks and ink fumes with full view and knowledge of the saccharinely beautiful weather outside our crypt-like windows, a land of beauty which seems to relish its opportunity to prod and taunt us whilst remaining just beyond our reach, and flitting into actual goddamn blizzards the moment we step outside. Second, holy jesus spring hormones are ready to get some business done.

In honour of this, as something of a burnt wicker effigy style offering aimed at the placation of our lusty and effervescent god, I'd like to put forth the following list of names, corresponding to what I am sure you will discover to be the eight prettiest folks in indie music.

My list will be complete with pictures. I am sure I do not need to explain the importance of such decadence within the context of my sinful list-making. The pictures, I don't need to tell you, are brought to you by Google. Heee.

Sufjan Stevens



Get it out of your system right now: Gay, Josh, super gay. Okay. Sufjan is a pretty boy, he plays bluegrass instruments with flair and penetrating blue eyes and has somehow made the former sexy. Guys are now going to parties and picking up girls using the humble banjo instead of the classic acoustic guitar, and I blame this man. He has ruined forty years worth of accepted sexual politicking and made me feel inadequate. You also could slice diamonds on those cheekbones.

Owen Pallet



I've recently had to good fortune to see young Owen live, and I can tell you all from experience that he is a good looking boy. The kind that make me curse my mortal body and deliberate over the pros and cons of expensive and dangerous surgery, but I digress. His appeal is astoundingly compounded by his simultaneous invocation of old-school geek culture with ridiculously advanced playing of the violin, and the fact that he both describes his feather-soft singing as complete shit and also on par with the Thin White Duke.

Emily Haines



I admit, sometimes she looks like she's subsisted on wine and cheap gin for a good couple of months: all hungover and partially skeletal. I haven't seen her in person: I'm seventy five percent sure this phenomenon has photography to blame. Emily is, at least under certain light, spectacularily sexy. Her consistently hot-and-bothered lyricism has the uncanny ability to hook directly into my libido and stick there, and when she sings in french I feel like that horny guy from the Adams Family. I can't help it. I don't need to mention that she's an All Canadian superstar, which at this point in time I conjecture does qualify as Supremely Hot, and that she moshes in miniskirts. And did you see that video with the bondage themes? Jeeeeezus.

Karen O



So she's half Korean, and half Polish? Something like that. I relate to Karen as New Yawk's version of Miss Haines: the same, only louder and crazier. Her sense of style very frequently scares the living hell out of me, but when the act's off she's absolutely magnetic. Lithe and allegedly batshit crazy, I can't pinpoint how much of her sex appeal is the direct result of her erotic punk rock persona, but neither do I spend much time deconstructing such things. Her lips are almost as beautiful as Regina's, I like her bangs, and I'm always a sucker for the deep dark hair.

Sarah Balliet



She plays a cello in a rock n' roll band which is inlayed with Iron Maiden album covers. No, not that one, but if you want to come over I'll show you since I plan on making Sarah my girlfriend. I honestly just don't know that much about this beautiful Murder By Deather, except what I have just told you, but her tough-as-nails attitude and conjoined gorgeous cello playing and pretty face is enough justification for the crush I like to assume she reciprocates. One time Jess saw MBD live and she couldn't see Sarah: goddamnit.

Sarah Slean



Being a twin has some funny side-effects which non-twins don't really get. Case in point, I couldn't allow myself to like Sarah Slean all through high school because my twin sister loved her to the point of idolatry and I just didn't like music that Alyssa likes. That's a bad Josh: first year out of high school I got to see Sarah perform in the same church I'd later see Final Fantasy at, and upon seeing my twin sister again the first words out of my mouth were something along the lines of "I saw an angel and she sang to me." I've since scoured the hoary pores of the internet searching for any picture which might accurately convey the overwhelmingly beautiful presence that the songwriter carries like a bracelet, to no avail. The first person to buy my sister a drink at a bar ever was Sarah Slean, and I am really totally jealous.

Valérie Jodoin-Keaton



All of you readers just went, "Who?" Let me tell you: the first time I saw the Dears perform I spent the entire time trying to physically adjust myself to the torrent of absolutely flawless Canadian rock which had flowed into and over me for a good half hour. The second time, I spent almost all of the concert fixated like a crazy man on the equally flawless visage of Valérie. She plays flute and second synthesizer, and is in general a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. I recently discovered that frontman Murray Lightburn is in fact not married to her, but the other girl in the band, and I actually exulted because I thought I had a chance. Jess immediately laughed at me.

Regina Spektor



I know you're not surprised. Also, you're wondering if my blog has had enough frivolous pictures of Regina tossed in for candy. The answer is NO. I don't believe I need to again expunge my deep-seated adoration of Miss Spektor, nor do I think I could reasonably stop talking if I were to begin. She's the prettiest woman in music, you know? Her lips and eyes could start a war, her figure can and does regularily induce aneurisms in yours truly, and her shy and earthly personality and ceaselessly quixotic songwriting taps into the warmest feelings and memories I humbly tote around with me. I have a crush on her, and if this list isn't in any sort of numbered order she still takes first place on principle. I often wonder if I could meet and speak to the lady without melting like a cheap candle: in most scenarios it doesn't turn out well.

Miss Leslie Feist gets an honourable mention for consistently writing and recording the sexiest Canadian pop-folk I have the singular pleasure of listening to. The Reminder recently dropped and it delivers on the breath-taking potential which the Albertan-cum-Maritimes songstress has been working on expressing for years and two moderately fantastic albums. I think she's pretty too, but something deep inside of me registers her as some sort of second grade teacher archetype. I can't really deal with it, you understand.

I wonder if Google's noticed me today. I'm sure there's some way that I can check that, excuse me.

Shifting of eyes, shuffling of cards

I've just realized, after another of my nearly endless reviews of my established list in search of any metaphysical crack or sign of weakness, that all but one of my female-fronted picks have been placed in the middle two quarters of rank. That aberrant one not in the middle took away the number thirty nine spot.

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?

Every thug needs a lady

I don't think I ever actually spelled out my adoration for Regina. To further aggravate Krista - who haaates Antony btw lolz - I think she's super purty. So do most people; Krista doesn't. Them's the breaks!

Well. Sitting down and extolling Regina's work would take me hours, which I don't have. I'll gloss over this by saying everything, and I mean absolutely goddamn everything, prior to her recent Begin To Hope is perfect. Perfect. She's the best singer-songwriter ever. Except maybe she's second to Tom Waits.  I don't have time to get into why.  If you want to know, everything is perfect.  Everything, so don't ask.  I gave you your answer.

Begin To Hope had some bad points. And by bad, I mostly mean insufferably poppy and inconceivably shallow. I heart Fidelity, as anyone with a working soul does, but Better and Hotel Song and Field Below aren't good. Not... not terrible. Just not good. That Time is iffy, but gets by on unshakeable pluck. The rest is perfect like the rest of her seemingly limitless repertoire.

Apres Moi is amazing. Lady is better. Summer In The City is fantastic. Every track on the extra special-edition disc is wonderful, and I will fight any one who says otherwise. By hitting them.

And she's purty. Ahee, etc.

In which our hero abandons his aspirations for journalistic legitimacy

I've changed my mind and want her for my birthday.
I Want To Sing is the single sexiest song of all time.  Fuck Barry White, I'm talkin' Regina.

Shut up you guys.  I just wrote a fourteen hundred word essay ripping on one of my favourite bands.  Give me a break.

I want to take a fuckin' bath.

PS Send Regina.