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.

This is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you, Mister Keely

I don't know what I'm doing.

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.