2006 Albums: 6-10

10. Cat Power - The Greatest
I think a lot of people were waiting for this album. It's always been clear that Chan Marshall knows how to write great songs, but on previous albums they've seemed unrealized, almost-there but held back by something. Finally, the production and arrangements are really working for her, bigger but not obtrusive, giving the album a kind of roominess, which you can tell Chan's thankful for. But at the same time, the songs, as always, are humble--at some moments to a fault, when they're sad and forlorn and there's a bit of self-pity that creeps in. But they remain small and personal and intimate, and that Cat Power keeps that quality while also growing larger I think is a feat. Musically, it allows her to channel and develop more of the elements in her music, the gospel and the soul. The songs are all still sad and heartbroken, but I can keep listening to this record without feeling emotionally assaulted and depressed. So I guess that's what I was looking for: a Cat Power record that let me do this.


9. Islands - Return to the Sea
I tend to fall for shambly, ebullient albums that are goofy and poppy. I liked the Unicorns a lot, though at times they frustrated me with their free-form attitude, when things became more sloppy than interesting. Once they fractured and reformed with members of Arcade Fire as Islands, out came this decidedly more polished work. All the odd, awkward, at times gross humor is still here--" total void tells me stories / sometimes they make me sorry / but i need another / i need another / sugar dumpling muffin baby / this world is going crazy,"or incomprehensible white-boy rap freakout halfway through "Where There's a Will There's a Whalebone"--but the more organic music allows the coolness to become something closer to beautiful, the idiosincratic becoming cultivated eclectisism. In short, a band growing up and creating a more unified sense of focus or vision. This is all not to say how varied and ambitious the styles that are jammed into this 11 song collection--hip hop, country, etc.--or how well it all integrates into a pop artiface without sounding glued together. And of course, major points for the Friedrich album cover.

8. Asobi Seksu - Citrus
I think there are a few of us who have this album hiding, ready to emerge in our top ten lists, and we all think it's kind of our secret. I, for one, find it difficult to resist any kind of shoegazing tendencies. And when it's fronted by a female vocalist, it's doubly hard. Then when she sings "put your tongue up to my battery," I give in. To this gorgeous, well-crafted, highly-original, sweeping-yet-intricate album. It makes me so happy to listen to it. I love the way lush, distorting guitars absorb me. I love that she sings in Japanese, it's so charming. Sometimes listening to this entire album is like slipping into this foreign dream, where I've been shrunk and I'm being led by the hand through a forest of bonsai trees, with a big paper bag over my head. Other times, I'm in Brooklyn (where the band is from) at a house party in the summer, and everyone is smiling, and there are these big, swirling guitars like funnels of colorful light all over the place, and I'm hanging upside down by my knees from a rafter in the ceiling. Oh man is it beautiful.

7. Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
Speaking of Brooklyn in the summer: Nick stole my story. Which isn't fair, because I'm placing this album higher. But anyway: we're outside, cold white wine being passed around as thousands wait for the sun to set behind a giant projection screen, which is going to play dusty, scratched-up underwater documentaries that some French guy made decades ago. We see sea horses making love; prehistoric sea anenomes bend and waffle in the curents; a jellyfish turns itself inside out. Thousands of people are sitting there, absolutely rapt. Can you imagine a better visual image for this band's music? There isn't one. But what I love about this album is that they begin with the ten-minute epic, then spend most of the album working on very tight pop songs, by turns hypnotic and bouncy, with the usual core of geniune, accessible emotion. The disembodied, epic style of Yo La Tengo never sacrifices that sophisticated core, which is why their albums are rewarding. And, thankfully, the last track absolutely obliterates me and is a glorious return to fuzzy form, which is when they remind you that, indeed, they're not afraid.

6. Bob Dyan - Modern Times
After watching the Scorcese documentary, like many people, I began the long path of making my way back through Dylan's albums. It just happens that way, and you have no choice but listen to him an no one else. In the midst of that, this strange sort of shock hit me: Dylan's alive. He's somewhere standing around, possible spouting off Dadaist poetry about commissioning his clips and getting his bird bathed and burned. I started listening to his Theme Time Radio show and reveling in the weirdness of the way he talks and just becoming a intrigued by his personality. Then this album came out and, after loving it from the first listen, I've come to think that it potentially ranks up there with what he was putting out in the 60s. I think the songs are working on a number of levels, and I think it's very complex and quietly a masterpiece. And perhaps I'm saying this because I'm trying to convince myself just as much that this album is that good, to shed the nostalgia and forgive Dylan for his possible tendency to be derivative and to realize that he's got every right to be predictable, because he invented the things people are blaming him for sounding like. People like Pitchfork are suspicious that an aging world of music critics heapspraise on Dylan because he's Dylan, but I really think this is one of the best releases this year, by far. He's doing whatever he wants to do, and for as long as he'll do it, people who are objective or gushing fans forsaking their critical impluse, will listen. I'll be joining them.

2006 Albums: 11-15

15. Josh Ritter - The Animal Years
I know this isn't much of an indie-cred sort of pick, what choosing a folksy singer-songwriter and all, but I really like this album. I've been listening to Josh Ritter for a few years, after spending a semester in Ireland, where he is twice as popular as he is in his home country (the Irish band The Frames have invited him to tour with them numerous times). I've always thought he's three or four steps above your average guy with a guitar, crafting enduring songs with simple storytelling, integrity, and emotional sensitivity. He's had a few early-Dylan-derivative moments and the occasional boring patch of songs, but this is certainly his best album to date. He's learned to avoid platitudes at all costs, honing in on personal elements and experiences and the metaphors available within those stories. He has a literary bent without being heavy, a light touch, and the ability to maintain this kind of human-spirit positivity even while writing about the very political and angry subjects of these songs. This is all not to mention the music, which is folky in a way that I don't feel I'm being nostaligically manipulated. I think this is an excellent, excellent record.

14. Joanna Newsom - Ys
While I was getting the art for this album on Amazon, I scrolled down and picked through some of the reviews, just curious. I'm absolutely amazed how many people utterly hate and attack Joanna Newsom's music. People go way out of their way to call her awful and condemn the people who listen to her--and for me, this kind of overcompensation is always a good sign that an artist is doing something right--polarizing people is one quality of good art. True, there's such a thing as holding new/interesting/weirdness on a pedestal so as to forget about actual quality and intelligence in a work of art. But I think it's quite obvious that this isn't the case with Newsom. She's not playing a character and making her voice weird and trying to fool us all, and this album--its depth, its extended, complex allegories, its imagination--is proof. Those who didn't like Milk Eyed Mender, I could see a kind of sense to their suspicion of her voice and pretension (though I, for one, thought that album was beautiful and smart and so affecting). I've been desperately trying to listen to this album over and over in hopes that I could make sense of it by the time this list came around. I'm not there. But after listening to interviews (check out an NPR segment on All Songs Considered when she guest DJs--her picks are fascinating) I know Newsom is doing something incredible, and I don't really care to even discuss the concept of people "getting" it or not. She's making music without much precedent, and I'm happy that the indie scene--which doesn't usually listen to harpists and albums without drums or guitar--gives her a place to explore and continue to make music.

13. Junior Boys - So This is Goodbye
I never listened to Junior Boys' first album, so I came to this thing with fresh ears after reading a 9.0 Pitchfork review (which I think was a bit unwarranted, and the reviewer seemed to be rating it on very personal reactions to the album and not very objectively). That said, this album is so well crafted and compelling, and lives up to so many repetivive, abusive listening sessions, that I'm ecstatic over it. From the playful poetry of the lyrics ("you're high-staked /you're right-faked / floor creeps / and deep sleeps / you catch up / you young pup / you old dog / you bullfrog") to melodies and harmonies that clearly fell out of heaven (the chorus bit in "In the Morning" where they switch and go up on "too young") to the spick-and-span sound of the production, not a note out of place--it all adds up to smart, danceable album, which is a rare combination I'd say.




12. Various - Marie Antoinette OST
Am I allowed to write about this album? It's not really an album and, save a Kevin Shields remix here or there, none of this was new to 2006. But have you sat down and listened to this thing? Forget that it's a carefully sequenced group of selections on par with Sophia Coppola's mastery over every cinematographic element. The songs in this collection, once it was released, solidified a trend in my own listening habits: a growing amount of time I was spending listening to songs from the 80s, which is another thing that spun out of my Smiths obsession this year. Who knew how atmospheric 80s music could be? How naturally The Strokes could have fit in, not only to that context but cinematically into the 1770s (the moment they play in the film is spot-on)? While Marie Antoinette the film asked us to collapse centuries, in a anachronism-embracing feat, so the soundtrack makes a challenge of comparison within pop music, and it's suddenly not that challenging. I could argue for awhile why the auteur hand of Coppolla in picking the tracks for this soundtrack makes it aceptable as an album, but the point is I loved the way my trajectory into 80s interests this year was represented and confirmed with this film and soundtrack. So it may be weird that I'm putting it in my list, but now you know the reason. I guess it stands for that collective listening portion of my year.

11. Peter Bjorn and John - Writer's Block
Yes, I really like this album--I have from the moment I began listening to it, increasingly, until this moment as I put it on again to write this sentence. Once in awhile an album comes along and I simply like it, in a way that rarely happens. I'm not excited intellectually for some reason, or for a specific musical style, or vocal style, or apparent influence, or that it makes me dance. The whole thing just sounds familiar and it's immediately important to me. For that reason it's hard for me to say anything intelligent, because it's hard for me to seperate it into distinct parts. Kind of like I'm too close to it to get much focus. And I'm not usually much interested in unpacking it. I like it when this happens, and I like it to last, and so far with this album it has lasted, and I keep listening to it and it keeps making sense and feeling like it was made for me. I'm not really sure what Austin meant when he talked about the Belle-and-Sebastian-like elements, because to me the album doesn't sound overly happy or sappy, and I think it has a lot of interesting textural elements and sounds. But that's just me, and I'm clearly lacking objectivity when it comes to this pick. But I know it should be this high on my list.

2006 Albums: 16-20

So, I changed my mind. There are 20 albums from 2006 that I'd like to write about. Originally, I was going to spend this section talking about the all-encompassing 8 month bender I went on listening to The Smiths and Morrissey, but that will have to be another blog post another day. So here's my 16-20. I'm in the game.


20. Alex Smoke - Paradolia
Don’t ask me what this album is doing on my 2006 list, because I won’t have a good answer. I have no idea how I came across it, or why a techno album, a genre which generally holds little appeal to me, is in my list at all. After 4 listens in one afternoon at work, the thing had worked its way into my skull and refused to leave. It’s something like this: yanking techno away from the inane, wall-smacking repetition, and injecting it with a cyborgian soul. Somehow this is music that is yes, very danceable, but refuses to quite give in to that human element that comes with danceable music. It’s very cold, and doesn’t make you want to join a whole crowd of people somewhere, and it has suitably creepy moments. But it’s also consistently melodic. Like electronic music I usually prefer, it engages your intellect and tugs in this metallic way at your emotions at the same time. Like having a conversation with a robot.


19. The Blow - Paper Television
I heard this album quite late, after Nick sent a pleading email spurring Austin and I to get off our post-college asses and work harder to find good music. This was one of the 30 or so albums that I immediately began liking, mostly for its airy, yet complex songs and melodies. In one mood, it’s easy to breeze through the album and absorb its bouncy pop constructions and juxtapositions of organic instrumentation and dance-influences electronic elemements. But in another, each song holds up to careful listening and scrutiny and turns up lots of funny witticisms about love, strung together by Jona Bechtolt’s emotional but distant-sounding singing.







18. Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
I didn’t plan on liking this album very much. For one, I resist hype. Second, I don’t usually fall much for the projected persona sort of songwriters, finding literary pretensions vaguely annoying and even inappropriate in a music context, and just inauthentic. I don’t know why this is and it isn’t logical, but I find it overbearing. With a band name like Beirut coming from a 19 year old guy, songs referencing European countries, and a carnivalesque array of instruments that sound like they were found under a bench in a pub in Romania, I was suspicious. Turns out the songs are authentic, captivating, and sophisticated, and maintain a kind of joy through all the maudlin heaviness, whether through the instrumentation or melodic choices. I think I’ll return to this album with fondness for a long time to come.





17. Hot Chip - The Warning
In my best estimation: if I continue to listen to this album, which I will most definitely, and if I had a time machine, which I most definitely do not, then this album, as I listened to it longer then returned to this moment to say what I really feel about 2006 albums, The Warning would climb my list of 2006 albums, and I don’t know where it would stop. I’ve had this album for just a few weeks, and I really, really love it. However, the point of this writeup is to say why, and I can’t do that, unfortunately. This seems to happen to me when albums like this come along: the music which I am most immediately affected by, which strikes me off the bat, is often the sort of music that makes the least sense to me. When I try to apply words to it, I fail. I can point out my favorite parts--that gorgeous and funny chorus in “the warning”, the dance madness of “careful”, the way the beat drops in the middle of “colours”--but that doesn’t go anywhere near a explaining intelligently about why I love this album. Is this a definition of pop music? All I know is Hot Chip rub me right and I’m not going to say I don’t like it.


16. The Knife - Silent Shout
I’ll be honest: this review is half about Deep Cuts, The Knife’s previous album which, like Mike, I discovered this year. I had been listening to Jose Gonzalez’s “Heartbeats” after seeing it in the Sony Bravia ad (amazing commercial worth watching, by the way), and found it by far the standout track on his album. And then, somewhere, I heard that the song was a cover, and that The Knife had written it. I’d been listening to Silent Shout for awhile, mostly just confused by it, but once I heard “Heartbeats” I was totally, absolutely floored. Deep Cuts, I think, it a phenomenal album, and it makes Silent Shout a lot easier to understand. I’m divided over which is better--Silent Shout is more cohesive and precise, but it resists letting you have much fun, it’s frigid and scrubbed clean--I like listening to Deep Cuts a lot more. I have no idea what to do with this music, whether to engage it intellectually or not. I do know that Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice might be the perfect tool for parsing the divide between human and abstract, and exploring that little area of the time/space/philosophical continuum. I think that this music is, in the end, very important and deeply serious. It’s dance music...but I don’t think we’re supposed to dance to it.

Top 5: Nina Simone

I decided early on that writing exclusively about albums that were released in 2006 wouldn’t do my year in music much justice. For one, 2006 didn’t have the extraordinary releases which 2005 had, although I'm not sure if that's true, or merely a function of my changing perspective. I also simply spent a lot more time looking backwards, exploring older albums and especially individual artists. To justify this totally personal approach to the listmaking, my "Top 25" is going to be a bit different (just at first): I’ll talk about an album by an artist that actually was released in 2006 (as a kind of justification), but mostly as a platform to talk about 5 albums from that artist's history which I grew to obsess over and love as a result of hearing this release. I want to do this twice, and once we reach 15, I’ll start with 2006 albums, because I can make a suitable list at that point. I hope that it’s still interesting to y'all. For today: Nina Simone, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1935 in Tryon, North Carolina.

Forever Young, Gifted and Black: Songs of Freedom and Spirit
Forgive the overly-earnest album title: the songs within marry fiery anger and politics and tender emotion without a drop of sentiment. That quality, along with complex emotions and musical versatility, is what I’ve come to love in Nina Simone’s music as I’ve explored it this year. Young, Gifted and Black, a phrase popularized by Aretha Franklin’s 1972 album, was originally a song by Simone. Musically, the album showcases Simone’s penchant for blues and soul singing, and the breadth of style in her recordings, from jazz to showtunes to gospel to r & b, all balanced atop accomplished, classical piano playing. In the end, she hated being categorized by anything, calling her music “black classical” (she was rejected from attending Juliard, purportedly because of her race). In some ways, it’s a blessing, because her resulting recordings, most of them covers from traditional spirituals to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” are remarkable. She released almost 60 albums in her lifetime and penned over 500 songs (she died in 2003). Here, 5 albums that I most loved, though I’ve just begun. MP3: "Revolution (Parts 1 & 2)"

5. Wild is the Wind / High Priestess of Soul (1967/67)
I think this is a pretty good place to begin with Simone’s music, especially since you can buy it as a double-LP, both from 1966. The albums are full of somewhat boisterous arrangements and characterize a number of styles, mostly due to the fact that it’s made up of six disparate recording sessions. Here is the song Jeff Buckley later covered, “Lilac Wine,” as well as traditional folk songs reappropriated (“Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”) and spirituals (“Take Me to the Water”) and original selections like the four-part song called “Four Women,” which highlights her gift for spinning unsentimental emotion out of political and racial animosity. One of my favorites is “Break Down and Let it All Out,” where her emerging pop sensibilities shine a little bit. MP3: "Four Women"




4. In Concert / I Put a Spell On You (1964/65)
The first half of this double-LP album (I know I’m kind of cheating again, but they were from very similar periods in her career), a show from New York City, where Simone’s live persona--brash, contradictory, moody, angry, breathy, tender, funny, emotional--really shines through. For subject matter like “Mississippi Goddam,” which was about a church bombing, she chooses light-heartedness, claiming that the song is a show tune, “but the show hasn’t been written for it...yet.” But the scowl on the cover of the album suggests her humor is in irony, and she’s not really joking, not really. The rest of the performance is peppered with bitter moments and shrewd comments under her breath. She lets some joy come through in “Old Jim Crow” about the hopeful end of discrimination, but the song at the end of the concert, “Missisippi Goddamn” became an anthem for young black people fighting oppression. The second LP is Nina Simone at her more personal, opening with the title track “I Put A Spell On You,” one of my favorite of her covers. The album is one of the most enjoyable and satisfying of her albums--it’s certainly one of the most consistent. “Ne Me Quitte Pas” is absolutely gorgeous, an example of her numerous French cover songs (she later moved to France). MP3: "I Put A Spell On You"

3. Great Show of Nina Simone / Live in Paris (1975)
This is a fairly rare recording that I got from a friend, released under a couple different titles in France as above, and once as “Live in Europe” in the US. I was interested in it originally because it’s the source for the famous “Just in Time” recording which is used in Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunset, in the poignant last scene. It’s an excellent quality recording and she’s in a fairly good mood (not typical). It has a few of my favorite songs from her repertoire, including “When I Was a Young Girl,” “Backlash Blues,” (written with Langston Hughes) “See-Line Woman,” and the strangely affecting “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” (made famous by The Animals) during which I’m consistently convinced that being misunderstood, trying and being passionate and foolish and then, in the end, being misunderstood--that would be the greatest tragedy of all. This is just a wonderful recording of some her best originals and covers, and I continue to come back to it. MP3: "Backlash Blues"

2. Sings the Blues (1966)
Sings the Blues might be Nina Simone’s most cohesive, successful studio album, recorded with the same band in the same sessions from start to finish. The blues spectrum from Muddy Waters to Ma Rainey is covered, with Simon’s unique, powerful vocals free to roam over a simple, effective backing band--bass, drums, harmonica, occassional organ, and Simone’s own piano mastery. The result is raw and prurient and a whole lot of fun. It has the feel of a live album but a careful set of players and arrangers cultivating contained energy. The songs all feel like they’re about to burst, but that energy/restraint is a characteristic of the blues. Over all else, Simone’s vocals weave it all together, along with her song choices, to make daring, earthy, potent album. I'd say it's objectively among her enduring and best, certainly as far as a singular style is concerned. MP3: "Buck"



1. To Love Somebody (1969)
By most standards, this is not Nina Simone’s best album, but for various reasons, I’ve put it at #1. The first track, “Suzanne,” is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s song, and I’ve listened to it around 100 times in the last 3 months. It’s gorgeous and heartbreaking and perfect. Leonard Cohen’s original is good, but in Simone’s hands, it becomes celestial and eternal. I couldn’t say why I love this song like I do, but it’s enough to affect me even as I listen to it again and write this, long after I’ve memorized ever moment and know it inside out.
The rest of the album is top-notch, especially the two-part “Revolution” song set. I’ll admit the latter half of the album falls off some, especially the three Dylan covers (she never quite pulled any of those off throughout her career, but these are done well), but the Byrds cover “Turn! Turn! Turn!” is quite good. This isn’t the place to begin listening to her music, and it’s not the best as far as universal objective standards, but for some reason I like it and I don’t know what else to say beyond that. MP3: "Suzanne"