2006 Music Spectacular! Part 4 (Best Albums of the Year!!!)

And now (drumroll, please)...
The Best Albums of 2006!


#5: Girl Talk, Night Ripper
The people who made sample clearance such a pain in the balls never envisioned a work like this one.  Cutting up as many as a dozen different songs to make up a single track, it's like a benefit album for ADHD research.  Matt from You Ain't No Picasso once referred to the mashups as "obvious" (or, at least, referred to someone else's as "less obvious"), but I don't think there's anything obvious about mixing up Elton John and Biggie Smalls, or Boston and Ludacris--he just makes it sound that way.  The fact that the album farts in the general direction of copyright law and that it was made by some guy with a day job at a biotech outfit in Pittsburgh just adds to the allure.


#4: Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat
When I first heard Rilo Kiley's "It's a Hit" last year, I was intrigued by that sultry voice, so I downloaded their entire catalog.  And hated it.  I wish I could say why--it just doesn't grab my interest.  But with Rabbit Fur Coat, former child star Jenny Lewis (I bet she hates being called that) finds a style that matches her voice perfectly.  I'm lukewarm about her cover of "Handle with Care", mostly because a friend and I learned to play that entire Traveling Wilburys album back in high school and not even Jenny can compete with how good we sounded (in my mind), but tracks like "You Are What You Love", "The Charging Sky", and the creepy title track brought this album back to my playlist time and time again.


#3: Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit
I never really "got" Belle and Sebastian before this year, because my mood never seemed to sync up with theirs.  This disc was hard to ignore, though, with tracks like "Another Sunny Day" and "The Blues are Still Blue" wedging themselves into my head after a single listen.  I went back through the catalog and fell in love with If You're Feeling Sinister, but I can see why Jack Black labeled them "old sad bastard music" in High Fidelity.  Were they running away from that, or did they finally just cheer up?  I say, who cares, as long as they keep putting out albums this good.


#2: Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Yes, Neko is a goddess, but her albums have never quite matched up to the promise of her voice.  (How could they?)  She finally outdoes herself on Fox Confessor, with songs that don't just show off that enormous voice but make great use of it.  Mysterious stories are told, secrets are revealed, and even more secrets are kept.  Like most great albums, this one releases itself slowly, so you hear something else that tears you in half every time you listen to it.



#1: The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
The Hold Steady was, without question, my favorite band of 2006, and that was true for the 10 months before I heard this album.  It started during a long solo convertible trek down the coast during a New Year's vacation in Charleston, when their 2005 disc Separation Sunday finally reached out and grabbed me.  I picked up their 2004 debut, Almost Killed Me, from the CD Central used bin, and like many CDs I buy, I left it sitting unplayed for a few months.  When I finally put it in one day, "Positive Jam" set me up and "The Swish" knocked me down, then "Barfruit Blues" and "Most People are DJs" beat me to a bloody pulp.  I had forgotten that a band could rock this hard.  How did I miss these guys before?  (Oh, yeah--residency.)

So if I hadn't already been obsessed with the band, would Boys and Girls in America have made the top of my list?  Is it great out of context?  I've got a better question--who gives a shit?  Context is everything, and an album's impact on you has as much to do with your life and your mood and your circumstances than the album itself.  It turns out that what I really needed this year was beat poetry with great big monitor-straddling rock and roll backing it up, and damn if The Hold Steady weren't there to provide it.

Just as they did on Separation Sunday, they make the best use of piano in rock-and-roll since the E Street Band.  (In fact, I'm pretty sure that I told keyboardist Franz Nicolay that as far as I was concerned, it was Professor Roy, and then him.  I was pretty drunk, though, so God knows what I actually said.)  Craig's vocals employ a little more melody and a little less recitation than on SS, and way more than on AKM, with mixed results, but his lyrics are as strong as ever with quotable lines popping up all over the place.  These guys could take over the world right now, and I'd be pretty happy if they did, since as their first act in charge, they'd walk around and drink some more.