Top Ten Albums of 2006: Recap (+ Bonus Round!)

Whew! That was really hard!

As I mentioned in the kickoff four and a half weeks ago, 2006 was the most difficult year for picking a top ten that I can remember. So many great releases and so difficult to settle on an order! To recap:

Top Ten Albums for 2006

1. Sound Mirrors – Coldcut
2. The Eraser – Thom Yorke
3. So This Is Goodbye – Junior Boys
4. Burial – Burial
5. 24 Hours – The Kleptones
6. Harmony In Ultraviolet – Tim Hecker
7. Body Riddle – Clark
8. Days To Come – Bonobo
9. The Information – Beck
10. Hello Everything – Squarepusher

Honorable Mentions:

• St. Elsewhere – Gnarls Barkley
  
• Mr. Beast – Mogwai
  
• Amputechture – The Mars Volta
  
• Beat Konducta, Vol. 1-2 – Madlib
  
• Hideout – Dub Tractor
  

I think I'll start earlier next time, and pledge to have my next Top Ten done by the end of January 2007. :-)

And now as a bonus for all those of you who waited patiently for the main event, here's the rest of the notable musical releases from 2006 IMHO:

Song of the Year

• "Live With Me" – Collected - Massive Attack

Best Live Album of 2006

• Live Session (iTunes Exclusive) – Iron & Wine

Best DJ Mix of 2006

• DJ-Kicks – Four Tet

Best Album of 2005 That I Didn’t Discover Until 2006

• Speak For Yourself – Imogen Heap

Biggest Disappointment of 2006

• Riot City Blues – Primal Scream

Agree? Disagree? Just feel like commenting? Let me know what you think!

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #1 - "Sound Mirrors" by Coldcut

Jonathan More and Matt Black don't have anything left to prove to anybody.

They made the U.K.'s first homegrown breakbeat record, "Say Kids, What Time Is It?". Shortly thereafter they unleashed a worldwide top ten hit and musical milestone, their remix of Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid In Full". They're responsible for what is widely recognized as the single greatest live DJ set ever recorded, Journeys By DJ: 70 Minutes of Madness. They are true dj pioneers, among the first to incorporate the live mixing and scratching of video hand-in-hand with vinyl and CDs in their performances. And they've parlayed their global success into their own innovative Ninja Tune record label, home to some of the most creative musicians recording today (Amon Tobin, Bonobo and The Cinematic Orchestra, among others). Working together for the last twenty years as Coldcut, they've paid their dues, pushed the envelope and staked out a rare position of total creative freedom for themselves and their like-minded label mates.

Sound Mirrors, the duo's first proper album in seven years, finds them taking on a whole new challenge: no longer needing to prove how clever or talented they are, this album is an exercise in song craft. There's no unifying theme here, just a remarkable variety of fantastic music. Each of the twelve tracks explores different stylistic territory, forcing each one of them to stand on its own merits by design. While this diversity has pretty well guaranteed commercial failure for the release, it stands as a musical triumph.

Given that neither of the men are singers, More and Black worked with a hand-picked group of collaborators on almost every track to great effect. The album starts off with the melancholy indietronica of "Man In A Garage", with words and vocals by American poet John Matthias. This is followed by a hip-hop/Bollywood party monster "True Skool", featuring U.K. rap giant Roots Manuva. Next is "Just For The Kick", a sedated meditation on consumer culture by synthesizer pioneer Annette Peacock set to a robotic electro beat. After that we're treated to classic performance from Chicago house legend Robert Owens, on the anthemic "Walk A Mile In My Shoes". And then it's "Mr Nichols", an arresting spoken word masterpiece by Saul Williams set to music...followed by the dadaist delight "Whistle & A Prayer", co-created with the indescribable band Fog...followed by a hard-rocking call to revolution courtesy of Jon Spencer and Mike Ladd (yes, the two of them on the same logic-defying funk explosion).... No slight to the other excellent contributions from Amiri Baraka, Soweto Kinch, Mpho Skeef and talented unknown Dom Spitzer, but you get the idea. Fittingly, the album closes out with the instrumental title track. It's a jazzy soundtrack piece with real emotional weight built on a dissonant and extremely unlikely rhythm loop, undoubtedly because they found the challenge of it enjoyable.

With Sound Mirrors, Coldcut have created a reflection of their own musical, cultural and political kaleidoscope with unmatched skill and creativity. Commercial appeal be damned, they've made the album of the year.

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #2 - "The Eraser" by Thom Yorke

There's no way to talk about Thom Yorke's The Eraser without mentioning Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac. The band's bold flirtations with electronica back in 2000 clearly planted the seeds for Yorke's quietly powerful solo debut six years later.

The sonic formula for the album is quite consistent, and Nigel Godrich's contributions cannot be underestimated (he serves as arranger, producer, mixer and musician on the album). Yorke's relatively unadorned vocals are placed front and center, backed by minimalist instrumentation built largely from electronics. It's a subversive tactic, because the album's easy flow belies the emotional weight of the songs themselves. Every single track has moments of lyrical brilliance, and no other vocalist can match Yorke's ability to convey the anxieties and psychoses of modern life with such arresting beauty and fragile strength.

Moreso than any album of 2006, this one has grown on me with each successive listen. Whereas I was initially ambivalent towards it, at this point I consider The Eraser to be an obvious classic.

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #3 - "So This Is Goodbye" by Junior Boys

Junior Boys really made a huge leap forward last year with So This Is Goodbye. Without selling out even the tiniest bit of indietronica cred they earned to date, on this latest release they've jumped headlong into the art of the pop song. Sounding comfortable and effortless, they've mastered the form without falling back on clichés, and given their long-time fans a lot to chew on regarding what it means to be 'pop'.

Alternating between bouncy, sexy tunes like "Double Shadow", "The Equalizer"* and the perfect pop treasure "In The Morning" and more introspective, mellow tracks like "FM" and "When No One Cares" (a Sinatra cover), the album shows both range and maturity while holding onto an ephemeral youthfulness that's key to its success. And while the songs are thoroughly modern, the album as a whole seems to pay respects (sonically, at least) to John Foxx, Fad Gadget, Thomas Leer and other synth-pop pioneers from a generation back.

Junior Boys have created something essentially of-the-moment by looking back to their arguably unhip influences while planting their flag firmly in the pop present. If there's any justice, So This Is Goodbye will get them the mainstream attention they rightfully deserve.

*Man, is the Morgan Geist Graphic Mix of this on the In The Morning awesome!

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #4 - "Burial" by Burial

Lurking around the fringes of the British club scene, dubstep isn't so much a formula as a feeling. Burial's self-titled debut, perhaps the first breakout album born of this new genre, is spilling over with mood and atmosphere. Even the cover's murky, night time view from high above South London perfectly captures the detached, spectral vibe of the album.

Burial invokes a London in perpetual darkness, crowded yet lonely, as if walking down a darkened back alley just around the corner from the rest of humanity. It hints at sounds from many different cultures, both ethnic and social, without embracing any of them. Voices and melodies often exist only in the margins of the mix, and even then sparsely. Listening, one is struck by the purposeful repetition of ominous bass patterns and sporadic, minimalist percussion dominated by echoing rimshot rhythms...with little else. It all comes together perfectly on the astonishing "Southern Comfort", setting the high watermark for the album's unique ambiance.

Burial is both of and outside electronic music trends, a distant observer deconstructing the rituals of the genres that surround it. For my money, this haunting futuristic dispatch is one of the very best of the year.

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!

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #6 - "Harmony In Ultraviolet" by Tim Hecker

How to describe Tim Hecker's music?

The first track I ever heard from him was "Sundown6093" off Ghostly International's Idol Tryouts Two. One listen and I was hooked: waves of noise and distortion coalescing into a haunting soundtrack for a distant future. The fact that it's still my favorite track from the entire Idol Tryouts series should say something.

Harmony in Ultraviolet, the title of Hecker's amazing 2006 collection, offers offers fifteen compositions using a wide variety of sounds – sometimes melodic and/or rhythmic and sometimes neither – all in service of this unique aesthetic.

"Whitecaps Of White Noise" a two-part piece found on the disc, is perfect example of the results. There are conventional instruments here, briefly taking their turns at the monolithic chord progression that makes up the melody line, but their presence takes a distant back seat to the otherworldly waves of distortion that permeate the piece and give it its weight.

Hecker, like Kevin Shields at the height of his powers, is interested in the sounds between the notes as much if not more so than the melody itself. He also understands the transcendence of repetition, and at times his music approaches the fugue state that composers such as Philip Glass or Steve Reich know so well. Yet as a whole, Harmony In Ultraviolet feels like an ambient music experience more than anything else. There's incredible, peaceful beauty to be found everywhere on this disc if only you're willing to listen for it.

Noise that reveals beauty – that's Tim Hecker.

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #7 - "Body Riddle" by Clark

The last time I checked in on Clark was a couple of albums ago, when he was still early on in his recording career and still went by his full name, Chris Clark. Clarence Park sounded pretty much like any generic IDM release of the era. Body Riddle is an entirely different animal. While there are scattered appearances by analog instruments and sounds, the entire album is heavily processed. Throughout, the source audio has been processed and manipulated so heavily that when analog sounds make an appearance it's almost as if they've broken free of the track, popping right out of the sonic stew. But this isn't to say that there's a sterility to the music – the adjective that comes to mind again and again is "organic".

Clark is really in some singular territory on much of the album. Like some kind of musical explorer taming a primeval land all his own, he creates and builds on combinations of sounds that just quite haven't been heard before. Rather than the strict metronomic precision typical to most electronic compositions, these tracks are exotic and unpredictable, with an unrestrained messiness to them. Some have the feel of field recordings from some strange alien jungle, or the internal soundtrack of imaginary beasts.

To me, Body Riddle is a place – one filled with strange vistas and beautiful creatures. The duo of "Herr Bar" and "Frau Wav" give a sense of soaring through lush foreign landscapes. The single, "Ted" reminds me of nothing moreso than a huge dinosaur, drunken and lumbering through the swamplands. "Night Knuckles" sounds like a parade of cheerfully industrious insects, while "Vengence Drools" evokes visions of some kind of predatory beast on a late night mission of destruction. And "The Autumn Crush" is a twister touching down to raze the countryside for the apocalyptic grand finale.

Who could resist an album that makes one see such amazing things?

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #8 - "Days To Come" by Bonobo

This album arrived at a really crucial juncture for me. All year I found myself wondering where all the great downtempo went. Thankfully, Bonobo came to the rescue with a real gem.

It seems like there's been an ever-growing supply of shallow dinner party background music trying to pass itself off as the latest in urban hipster soundtracks. Days To Come arrived on the scene this year to kick all that to the curb like a bad one night stand.

Sophisticated yet utterly without pretension, the album is a seamless wedding of electronics, live musicians and subtle studio technique that clearly demonstrates the stunning talents of producer / DJ / composer / performer / mastermind Simon Green. Every track incorporates jazz, latin, tropical, and even club elements into a smooth and intoxicating mixture. Guest vocalists Bajka and Fink add a sensual shimmer to several tracks (particularly notable on the title track and "If You Stayed Over" respectively), but the voiceless ones comfortably hold their own. Case in point, I'm certain that the instrumental "Recurring" will be a favorite of mine for years to come.

Beautifully warm, mellow and understated, this is a quiet masterpiece that transcends genres to create captivating, universally human music.

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #9 - "The Information" by Beck

There's no way I 'm smart or lucky enough to have predicted Beck's long-lasting critical and popular success when I first heard "Loser" back in 1994. I have no doubt that Beck himself knew all along, as he's been at least a couple steps ahead of the rest of us the whole time. And so in 2006 we're lucky to get his tenth album, The Information.

(Wow, another tenth album in my Top Ten...I feel dizzy.)

Beck's always had a delightful sort of musical schizophrenia. His albums tend to ricochet from genre to genre; more or less sticking to one vibe per release and then taking a hard left turn for the follow-up, rinse and repeat. This one though, this one he somehow managed to bring it all together in one place. Apparently this album was started before Guero but finished afterwards. You can certainly hear signs of that in the attention to detail throughout, a quality no doubt at least partially attributable to the album's producer and co-conspirator Nigel Godrich.

While I'd stop short of calling this a more "mature" Beck – because the quirky goofiness is all still here, just better focused – this is definitely a guy at the height of his game, taking his fun very seriously. There are recurring themes both musical and lyrical; hints that The Information might even be a concept album concerned with the Information Age and its discontents. Whatever it's intended to be, the end result is fun, funky, inventive and thoughtful all without tripping over itself. While it might not be obvious at first listen, this might just be the best thing he's ever done.

Top Ten Albums of 2006: #10 - "Hello Everything" by Squarepusher

By my count, this is Tom Jenkinson's tenth album as Squarepusher. When you've gotten that far down the road, what else is there to do but release a greatest hits collection, right? Longtime fans of Squarepusher are wise to his ways however, and probably expected nothing less than a complete departure from What Has Come Before. But if you're Jenkinson though, meeting expectations is simply not part of the game. And so we get Hello Everything, which is neither fish nor fowl...and yet a bit of both.

While every track on Hello Everything is a new composition, listening to the album one gets a sense that we're being given a tour of the widely varied styles that Squarepusher's releases have explored over the years. It's all here: the manic drum'n'bass in "Hello Meow", the droning tension in "Vacuum Garden", the slow layered build in "Rotate Electrolyte", the electro-prog jazz in "Plotinus" and the signature Squarepusher spastic attack of "The Modern Bass Guitar". In a sense we do get a greatest hits, but on Jenkinson's terms not ours.

More than anything else though, Hello Everything has something completely new: warmth. Every track – even the most abstract – is infused with a sense of joy and light (but never "lite"). Squarepusher's been a lot of things over the years, but the last thing anyone expected was out-and-out happy. Perhaps the strangest thing: is seems to suit him well. At no point in the album do I find myself thinking "this doesn't work". In fact, I really like the change of pace.

Ten albums in, and still surprising us. Thanks for that!

Top Ten Albums of 2006: Kickoff

I can't remember any year in this decade that I've had as much trouble deciding on my personal Top Ten as I've had for 2006. That's a big part of why it took me to the end of February to get them posted -- I couldn't decide!

There was no shortage of releases (is there ever?), and no shortage of really outstanding ones either. I had significantly more than ten releases that seemed deserving this year, and they were all so different that I couldn't figure out how to rank them. Anyone who's ever done this knows that the ranking is always totally arbitrary to begin with, but forcing yourself to decide on an order for your list is part of the fun.

So over the next few days I'll be posting my Top Ten Albums for 2006, building up to the Album of the Year. Stay tuned, and keep those comments coming!