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.