2006 Albums: 1-5

Okay, finally:

5. Tapes & Tapes - The Loon
I’d admit, if pressed, that this is a flawed album. Maybe it’s because it came at a time in the year when, aglow with all the great releases of 2005, I was beginning to be sorely disappointed that something hadn’t come out which I was genuinely obsessed with, that hit more than one spot in my proverbial musical appetite. I’d kinda liked the Mylo album, The Knife was leaving me interested but confused, The Strokes album was depressing, and I was briefly enamored with Man Man until they started they began to annoy me. Where to turn? How about an album that collected a bunch of influences--Pavement, Pixies, Talking Heads--and wrapped them up in one amazing release of quick songs, interesting guitar playing, a dynamic vocalist, and raw energy? Weirdo lyrics that make sense to me--I always fall for that. Depressing content and with sprawling, possibly incoherent musicianship to counterweight: an effective combination. I knew I liked this album from the start, but it was also an album that grew on me more than any other--the incoherency began to gel into an emotionally complex picture, the loose-cannon musicianship became purposeful and controlled, the humor suddenly less ironic and more genuinely laughable.

4. Morrissey - Ringleader of the Tormentors
I’m probably going to be dismissed for putting this album so high, but isn’t everyone allowed an indulgence on their favorite album lists? One which they’ve enjoyed immensely despite the usual built-in suspicion that ought to be present towards albums put out by 50 year old, gray-haired men, who take themselves very seriously? Albums which, as Smiths devotees might complain, are so well-produced and lacking in Johnny Marr’s interesting guitar work as to sound scrubbed clean, corporate-sounding, and, in the end totally irrelevant? Okay, okay. All interesting points. But the fact is I listened to this album almost more than any other, found it interesting and emotionally complex, and, most importantly, it was my entry point into the fascinating cult personality of Steven Patrick Morrissey. His irony, artifice, his witticisms, leading me to reread Oscar Wilde and start listening to Elvis and read about James Dean. Could it be that my unhealthy love of all things Smiths/Morrissey this year (Thanks, Paul) is clouding my opinion of this album? I couldn’t say, really. But I do know I loved it--the self-satisfied, even smug, critiques of politics and religion, the admittedly maudlin songs about abusive stepfathers, the sentimental-leaning attempts at exploring love and sex and the divine. My english degree scolds me for liking this stuff, but I can’t help being affected emotionally, something I can’t dismiss easily. His more acclaimed and similar album, You Are the Quarry, doesn’t interest me that much, which probably means that my love of this album is incidental to its release date and what it led me to read and think about otherwise. But the fact that it consumed me so gave it a prominent place on this list.

3. Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
“Hey, is that the new Belle & Sebastian?” Yes, we used this joke a couple of times the moment Nick or I downloaded this album, and our third roommate Max, was home (not all that common). We all three listened to it together in our tiny Manhattan apartment and couldn’t help cracking a smile during almost every song--this was not at all the “sad bastard music” of High Fidelity fame. This was ebullient, happy, complex, catchy, literary, clever, emotional, imaginative collection of near-perfect pop songs. Why am I a sucker for this combination? For pop songs that tightrope-walk the wire-thin line between utter happiness and complete despair? That something so strange and personal, an emotional life so depressing in a literal sense, can be transformed into universal pop-inflected pleasure? Because I think it’s a matter of genius. Sometimes this attempt is cloying, sometimes depressing, sometimes fake-sounding and simplistic. Rarely can an album balance heavy lyric content without being weighed down, crafting pop lifeboats around it and improving the quality of life for people who listen everywhere. Twin Cinema, an album I began loving intensely shortly after we had all published our 2005 lists, did it last year. Murdoch and co. did it this year. I don’t have a good response to Austin’s complaints, but all I know is I think this album is totally wonderful and, save for a few songs from their very early career (check out “The State I Am In” and the rest of Push Barman to Open Old Wounds), is full of their best moments yet.

2. Destoyer - Destroyer’s Rubies
This is the third album in my top 10 with an audacious first track close to 10 minutes long, which suggests a combination of arrogance and theatricality, and, when appropriate, genius. Austin and I had a couple email exchanges in which we discussed, with some degree of dismay and frustration, that the Destroyer album was once again coming ‘round the bend to completely ruin us and any chance for listening to anything else. All that had to happen was that first track, a little seduction which happened to stretch for enough time to leave you unable to do much but fold and submit to the textured, abrasive, idiosyncratic, familiar, distorted, weird literary world of Dan Bejar. The music is so strange and willfully queer that it’s remarkably interesting to more than a few people, both immediate and purposefully wearing its strangeness as a kind of distance from the listener. But it’s such a devoted, complete vision, a kind of shrine to one man’s outlandish bizarreness, that it’s endlessly engaging and satisfied repeated excavations into its interior. His voice is the perfect metaphor for this: nontraditional and making no effort to sound normal, but once you hear it enough times, as expressive as anything you’ve heard, malleable and creative and doing things many other voices wouldn’t dream of doing. Getting somewhere artistically means, at least at first, the method will seem too out-there, but this is merely the time where we’re readjusting to another way of seeing the world and we’ll be rewarded once we get there. At least in this case, we get nine minutes thirty-two seconds to come around.

1. Liars - Drum’s Not Dead
This is the kind of album--mysterious, awe-inspiring, emotionally draining, ambitious, elastic, tangled, beautiful--that makes me wish language was as abstract and flexible, as possible to reach for the infinite, as music. The kind of album that reminds me, forcefully, that music is perhaps the greatest, most universal, most capable of art forms. Which makes writing something like this futile, doomed to sound overexcited and overwrought. Description of the music, I think, would highlight only those qualities in this album which are conscious (as opposed to subconscious), like the conceptual backbone of the whole thing, a dialogue (or battle) between creativity and doubt, confidence and second-guessing. That’s all interesting, but it’s the subconscious effects of the music that has made me listen to it so obsessively since the first afternoon I put it on, at which point I had to stop all I was doing and listen to every epiphany-filled turn (the incredible falsetto at the start of “A Visit From Drum”), every texture and the shape of the music (The incredible buzzing, robotic, angry sound at the start of “It’s All Blooming Now Mt. Heart Attack”), every emotion, until, assaulted and exhausted and drained, yet strangely content, the final track took all that abrasiveness and exhaustion and noise and chaos and let it unfold into the most beautiful denouement I think I’ve ever heard. In it’s context especially, but even without, it’s the most affecting, emotional song I’ve heard all year. The Liars live, back to Brooklyn from Berlin, was the best show I saw in 2006, full of the most unrelenting energy and ambition. How is it that amidst all the mayhem there is a powerful emotional core? I couldn’t say, and I don’t want to, because these kinds of paradoxes are the territory of music.