Spencer Patterson
1. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
2. Liars, Drum's Not Dead
3. J Dilla, Donuts
Packing 31 mini-tracks into 44 minutes, this sonic collage almost makes you wish you could hear more of each song ... until the next cut drops.
4. Mission of Burma, The Obliterati
5. Tom Waits, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
I'm normally reluctant to include archival sets in a year-ender, but these 56 tracks were either unreleased or so hard to track down that Orphans feels oh-so-brand new.
6. Destroyer, Destroyer's Rubies
7. Tapes 'n Tapes, The Loon 8. Ali Farka Touré, Savane
9. Band of Horses, Everything All the Time
Features not one but two legit song-of-the-year contenders: "The Funeral" and "The Great Salt Lake."
10. The Walkmen, A Hundred Miles Off
Patrick Donnelly
2. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America 3. The Drams, Jubilee Dive
Reconfigured cult faves Slobberbone add keyboards, discover pop-rock groove without losing their gritty edge.
4. Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way
5. Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat
6. Rhett Miller, The Believer
Second solo disc by Old 97's dreamboat shows Miller is more than a pretty face.
7. Drive-By Truckers, A Blessing and a Curse
Not their finest work by far, but three blazing guitars and a satchel full of Southern angst always score with me.
8. Nellie McKay, Pretty Little Head
9. Golden Smog, Another Fine Day
10. Willie Nelson, Songbird
Julie Seabaugh
Work yourself into a sexual lather. Rinse (with copious amounts of alcohol). Repeat. 2. The Elected, Sun, Sun, Sun
3. Secret Machines, Ten Silver Drops
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones
5. Tom Petty, Highway Companion
6. My Morning Jacket, Okonokos
Jim James croons, guitars drown in reverb (in a good way) and the music itself provides the contact high on this ambitious double-live album.
7. The Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics
8. Gomez, How We Operate
9. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
Is "Dirtywhirl" the sickest groove of the year, or the sickest groove of the century? Discuss amongst yourselves.
10. Johnny Cash, American V: A Hundred Highways
Andy Wang
2. Rainer Maria, Catastrophe Keeps Us Together 3. The iOs, In Sunday Songs
4. Ben Kweller, Ben Kweller
5. The Beatles, Love
Pure joy. Not really reinvented. Not exactly improved. But still amazing, like those guys in the show with skates.
6. Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped
7. Grandaddy, Just Like the Fambly Cat
The always ambivalent Jason Lytle finally says no more. "Summer is gone," he sings, and you have to wonder if he means forever.
8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones
"Cheated Hearts" is even better than "Maps." As long as Nick Zinner has more of these riffs inside him, Karen O. will have a career. Well, unless Nick quits to join Bright Eyes.
9. Muse, Black Holes & Revelations
10. Band of Horses, Everything All the Time
Scott Woods
Former '70s indie icon and '80s dance-pop maestro Green Gartside returns from hibernation with a set of homemade recordings that are mysterious, sensual, elliptical, playful and deeply felt. For half of the year I couldn't listen to anything besides. 2. Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55
3. Broadcast, Future Crayon
4. Lindsey Buckingham, Under the Skin
5. Paris Hilton, Paris
The multigenre flitting about is unconvincing, but when she sticks to rock-disco grooves (where biting rhythm-guitar lines function as Eurodisco rhythms), it's as ecstatic as any other dance music released in the last couple of years.
6. Ciara, The Evolution
7. Belbury Poly, The Owl's Map
8. Burial, Burial
Burial? Sounds like the name of a heavy metal band. The truth is, I don't know how to describe this: It's got a good beat and you can bury things to it?
9. Lady Sovereign, Public Warning
10. Hot Chip, The Warning
Steven Ward
2. Midlake, The Trials of Van Occupanther More Fleetwood Mac than Fleetwood Mac.
3. Donald Fagen, Morph The Cat
4. Slamer, Nowhere Land
Remember good AOR/melodic rock? Slamer never forgot about it.
5. David Sancious, Live In The Now
6. Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
7. The Who, Endless Wire
8. The Decemberists, The Crane Wife
9. Los Lobos, The Town and the City
One of the few bands still around that continually makes interesting, creative and truly progressive roots music, album after album.
10. GPS, Window to the Soul
Trend 2006: Everything's going prog |
King Crimson, Yes and Genesis might never find their way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but progressive rock needn't feel slighted as 2006 draws to a close. Prog—long the uncool younger cousin of hipster art-rock, Kraut-rock and psych-rock—extended its tentacles into surprisingly far-reaching corners of the musical universe this year, leaving us wondering if ELP could have a few more admirers than just Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer after all. You couldn't visit your favorite blog this year without stumbling onto some hyped extended epic, packed with more melodic shifting than The Shins tackle on an entire album. Is that really a 17-minute song by indie harpist Joanna Newsom? Did Geddy Lee body-snatch Colin Meloy when I wasn't looking, or does that new Decemberists tune actually have two slashes separating its three movements? And when did Mastodon, Isis and every other buzzed-about metal band reject 4/4 time signatures and start doing actual math in the studio? Plenty of acts not buying into the progressive song schematic still paid allegiance to the cause, by appropriating another grand prog tradition: theatrical conceptualism. The Thermals crafted an entire album warning of the dangers of theocracy. My Chemical Romance told the tale of fast-approaching youthful death. And The Killers, well, we're still not exactly sure what Sam's Town was all about, but it sure felt dramatic. The proggy rebirth probably shouldn't have come as a total shock, seeing how fast retro-garage and neo-New Wave played themselves out, except that a year ago reviving a style as dead and buried as prog-rock seemed about as likely as nu-klezmer or avant-polka suddenly turning the world on its head. Maybe folks just needed a hero, and The Mars Volta's arm is far longer and way trendier than we ever realized. The guess here, though, is that the new generation of rockers are just a bunch of dorks, only too happy to get out their slide rules to write songs about ogres and elves as they dream of finding Peter Gabriel's old makeup and costumes in some abandoned storage locker. Spencer Patterson |