Top 60 of 06 (and other ramblings...)

You know, a top 60 might seem like a lot, but when you listen to literally hundreds of things throughout the year, and then pilfer selections from several other best-of lists at the end of the year (which I did surprisingly little of this year, I'm proud to say), it's kinda hard to narrow it down to that few. Or maybe there was just a lot of great music that came out this year....

First, the Honorable Mentions...definitely worth mentioning...
(I'm linking to allmusic because it's an invaluable resource to make me sound like an even bigger music geek on the air...and the reviews are usually right on + you can even listen to song clips!)
Band of Horses
Yo La Tengo
Paul Simon
Johnny Cash
Tom Petty
Peaches
Loose Fur (Tweedy & Koche from Wilco + Jim O'Rourke)
Michael Franti & Spearhead
Calexico
The Hold Steady
Catfish Haven
Sparklehorse
TV on the Radio (for being possibly the weirdest major label album ever)
Tom Brosseau
Editors (05 UK release finally out in States in 06)
Sonic Youth
Emily Haines
Drive By Truckers
Ben Harper
Jerry Lee Lewis
James Hunter
Ray LaMontagne
Raconteurs
Snow Patrol
Girl Talk - Night Ripper (for sheer non-clearance of samples gall)
Jake Ziah (guess they've heard of Springsteen and Uncle Tupelo in Norway)
Headlights
Greg Laswell
Snakes on a Plane soundtrack
Rogue's Gallery - Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys (Pirates of the Carribean was #1 at the box office for 2006, after all)
Viva Voce
Tom Waits
Bob Dylan
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Grant Lee Phillips -1980s cover cd
The O.C. Mix 6 - Covering Our Tracks


Who Will Be the Next in Line? (just barely missing the top 10 cut...at any given time this year, any one of these coulda been my solid #11 pick)
Cat Power
Ben Kweller
Brazilian Girls
Teddybears
Tapes'n'Tapes
Serena-Maneesh (saw them at SXSW this year, so I'm counting it towards 2006)
Arctic Monkeys
Flaming Lips (half of it was great enough to overcompensate for lame other half)
The Strokes (see above Lips comment)
Neil Young
Howe Gelb
Built to Spill
Twilight Singers (plus the Stitch In Time EP is good too and features Mark Lanegan & Joseph Arthur more prominently)
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man - soundtrack


(so that makes 50 so far....no particular order to the above except the honorable mention/close calls distinction)


and now...the Top 10 Albums of 2006 (that didn't feature me)


10. Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam (despite lame cover art and my indifference toward the middle third, there were at least 5 bona fide classics to add to the repertoire, plus they're the only band with the guts to take My Morning Jacket out as their opening! act...and it was nice to see them getting all kinds of mainstream media coverage about their "comeback," even though real fans know they haven't gone anywhere, really - except a new label, which I'm sure played a part in them wanting to "promote" themselves more than they had in a while...see how easily the media is manipulated?)

9. Eef Barzelay - Bitter Honey (missed my chance to meet Snow Patrol at SXSW because I had to catch Eef...little did I know, he'd come to Mojo's in Columbia, MO later in the year and be excellent in that much less hectic setting as well...he's the frontman for the equally excellent Clem Snide)

8. Tenacious D - The Pick of Destiny (heard the soundtrack before I saw the movie, so I probably cut the movie a little more slack than I would've without hearing the music first...in other words, the tunes - and Dave Grohl as Satan - are definitely the best part...acting/script - uh, no...)

7. M. Ward - Post-War (I'm glad I gave this another listen after I shrugged it off the first time...there really are actual songs on here, not just guitar interludes and hushed vocals!)

6. Thom Yorke - The Eraser (who needs a band when the beat just goes...)

5. Wolfmother - Wolfmother (saw these guys from a few feet away at about 2am at SXSW and I was picking up the pieces of my mind scattered about the country for the rest of the year...hence, my arrival in Virginia!)

4. Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope (while Wolfmother blew my mind, Regina went straight for the heart and tore that into tiny pieces as well with beautiful quirkiness)

3. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere (November re-issue had a bonus DVD and the "Crazy" video in flipbook form as cool bonuses...I will take this over whatever flavor-of-the-week unlistenable tripe Pitchfork suggests any day...sure, Crazy was everywhere and the Violent Femmes cover is pretty basic, but it's a paranoid, soulful, technocratic masterpiece that is perfect for the times in which we live...and I found it inspiring as well, which is a pretty cool, rare feeling to get from music)

and for #1, we have a tie:

Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat
(Rilo Kiley frontwoman puts a little twang into her (gasp!) pop tunes...with Rilo Kiley, something about her songwriting style makes me cringe more often than not, but on this cd I felt that devastating combo of sad & sweet was not so forced, I guess)

and Amy Millan - Honey from the Tombs
(co-lead singer of the excellent Canadian band Stars had some old solo songs laying around that she thought still had resonance, so she put 'em out...to an inexplicable lack of fanfare...a couple rock, most are folk/countryish ballads, and between her voice and her lyrics, I am "a better person for having listened" to it (to quote Death Cab's Chris Walla's quote about Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin)...which leads to the next set of categories...

best re-issue --
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Broom (Spfld, Mo's finest finally get the record deal mid-Mo has hoped for them for the last 2 years...yay Polyvinyl! Sweet move putting bonus tracks on the LP too!)

best album title --
Peaches for "Impeach My Bush" (just barely over such awesome competition as Loose Fur's "Born Again in the USA," Michael Franti & Spearhead's "Yell Fire!" and of course, Yo La Tengo's "I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass")

favorite EP --
The Features (must be noted for posterity that one of the reasons Nada Surf ended up doing that "ok, now you're really going to burn in hell" version of "all you need is love" for a credit card company - and I love Nada Surf, mind you - is that the Features turned it down. Universal therefore dropped them, and they put out this stellar EP on their own)

favorite archival release --
PJ Harvey - BBC Sessions (take that, Sufjan and Bright Eyes!)

Best live album --
My Morning Jacket - Okonokos
distant 2nd - Foo Fighters

Best charity single (maybe ever? as far as quality of song choice and performance anyway) --
U2/Green Day - The Saints are Coming

there sure were some great new bands this year that sounded eerily reminiscent of my glory years (Band of Horses = Flaming Lips/My Morning Jacket/Modest Mouse; Serena-Maneesh = Velvet Underground/Sonic Youth/My Bloody Valentine; Black Angels = Doors/VU/Black Mountain; Silversun Pickups = Nirvana/Pixies/Smashing Pumpkins and Tapes'n'Tapes = Modest Mouse/Pixies/Pavement)...and I like all of these new bands, but it was just surprising I guess that they all mixed their influences together so well and so blatantly... then I realized...pretty much every band can be summed up in 3 bands (or less) - maybe that's the key to rock'n'roll: the good bands take at least 3...just a theory...that's what blogs are for, right?

isn't it great to hear bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Decemberists on the radio (and see them on the Colbert Report) fairly frequently now? and even Bright Eyes, Shins, Spoon, etc. have made some commercial radio inroads in the last couple years...i'm excited by the new platforms all kinds of bands have to get their music out there (whether it's myspace, youtube, or even movies, tv shows, commercials, or yes, blogs), but then again, ALL KINDS of bands have these same platforms. So it's going to take time to sift through even more riff-raff to get to the good stuff, but hopefully that also means there will be more good stuff, too! it seems we're going back to the pre-Nirvana system a little bit, where the underground is allowed to grow a while before the mainstream comes calling. plus, i think "indie label" artists are realizing if they just scale down their rock star dreams a bit, they can make a decent living doing things on their terms. and kinda like being a radio dj, that's preferrable to "getting a real job." i just hope with our increasingly short (and fickle) attention spans, we don't stifle the underground, because the mainstream will eventually suffer as a result as well.

and finally,
Best Performance by a real DJ as a fake DJ --
me! Foundry Field Recordings allowed me to realize my life's goal (I'm a simple man)...to be immortalized in the credits of a nationally distributed cd...not simply mentioned in the "thank yous" (although that's always awesome too), but credited on the prompts/miscues Emergency Umbrella cd, which ended up getting ADA distribution in the fall, so I was able to go into Plan 9 here in Charlottesville, and plunk down my hard-earned $ for a copy! Which I promptly gave to Jaclyn, who is already a big fan of SSLYBY...hmmm, I sense a trend here, people! A new movement..."Missouri" is the new Omaha! Why the hell did I move again? Anyway, other great regional releases I really enjoyed that everyone should know about include...
Doxies - In Search Of...
Ellie Come Home - Primary Sources, and
Shirelle C. Limes & the Lemons
and I must give big ups, mad props and (insert your favorite hippity-hop catchphrase here) to my CoMo brethren and sistren, who did a fantastic job on a regional "scene" compilation, a Bob Dylan tribute cd and my Blue Note send-off Hootenanny, showing that comraderie can and does still exist in the world of rock'n'roll circa 2006. More rock and less talk in 07, I promise, people...thanks for reading (and listening)!

Hello!

We're still kicking around ideas for songs and specialty shows and show features on Charlottesville's new radio station, 106.1 The Corner! Thanks for listening, your feedback is always welcome, and stay tuned for further updates and ramblings here on my blog!