Top Ten Albums of 2006: #5 - "24 Hours" by The Kleptones

(For those of you keeping score at home, I've now hit my top five albums for 2006. To be perfectly honest, from here on out all of them are tied for first place. I've still assigned an ultimately arbitrary order to them, but these any of these five releases could be the best of the year.)

You won't find The Kleptones' double-disc masterwork 24 Hours in stores because the current climate in the music industry towards copyright would never allow it to happen. See, every one of its thirty-three tracks is a mashup, or what's sometimes known as 'bastard pop': taking two or more recorded songs and mixing them together to create something new from the collision.

That makes what Eric Kleptone does sound simple or even trivial, but the results prove otherwise. There is more artistry and compositional brilliance on these two discs than the vast majority of music I heard last year, mash-up or not. Having said that, 24 Hours is funny as hell in some places and clever everywhere.

The album serves as the soundtrack to a typical. Our lead character wakes, catches the bus, goes to work, hits the clubs, heads back home, goes to sleep and yes, even dreams. All of his or her story is via music and sampled dialog from, well, everywhere. Imagine Steve Miller Band, ZZ Top, White Stripes, Dilated Peoples, Korn & the Dust Brothers all mashed together – in the same track. Not only does it work, but it's brilliant. And he does it again and again, track after track, for two CDs worth of music.

But lest you think this is all just one big musical stew, know that this combination of music and thoughtfully chosen dialog creates a cohesive, complex work of art. Each track is a completely viable musical work (if not legitimate in the legal sense), and not a one of them I would have ever thought of on my own. I could spend all day trying to enumerate the crafty combinations Eric cooks up, but thankfully folks with far more time on their hands than me have gone to the trouble to dissect all thirty-three tracks already. It's a pretty stunning list.

Looking back, I've probably gotten more pure entertainment from 24 Hours than any other in 2006. Download it now and find out what you're missing before the lawyers find it!