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The Top 50 Albums of 2006
The Top 50 Albums of 2006
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1 Modern Times BOB DYLAN
"Thunder on the Mountain" kicks off with a salty old Chuck Berry riff, stretched out into a six-minute lust letter to Alicia Keys, and things only get weirder from there. Dylan hasn't sounded this frisky since John Wesley Harding in 1968, and like that underrated masterpiece, Modern Times is a groove album disguised as a poetry album, leaning hard on the rhythm section. Dylan breathes fire while his current road band beats up on some tough blues and country licks: the Muddy Waters stomp "Rollin' and Tumblin'," the Irish parlor ballad "Nettie Moore" and the mean Slim Harpo strut "Someday Baby," which as an iPod commercial became the closest thing to a hit single he's had since the Traveling Wilburys. Where can he go from Modern Times? Anywhere he goddamn wants.
2 Stadium Arcadium RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS
Love songs, nothing but love songs, across two CDs of encyclopedic variety and explosive verve: Stadium Arcadium, the Chili Peppers' first Number One album, is also a confessional and creative triumph. Anthony Kiedis sings of commitment and contentment with naked need and joy, as the rest of the band swings through psychedelic bravado, sunburst pop and supercharged funk, often in the same song. The icing everywhere: John Frusciante's Hendrix-in-my-head guitar flourishes and blowouts.
3 Rather Ripped SONIC YOUTH
Their mean age now up to forty-eight with thirtysomething troublemaker Jim O'Rourke gone, indie's gray eminences made a light, simple, terse, almost-pop album. Granted, the guitar hook on, for instance, "Do You Believe in Rapture?" wouldn't sound so lovely if they and all their progeny hadn't long since adjusted our harmonic expectations. But who better to play to our expanded capacity for tuneful beauty? The vocal star of Rather Ripped is Kim Gordon, breathlessly girlish at fifty-three as she and her husband evoke visions of dalliance, displacement, recrimination and salvation that never become unequivocally literal.
4 Return to Cookie Mountain TV ON THE RADIO
This Brooklyn band's major-label debut comes with David Bowie's seal of approval -- the Thin White Duke contributes vocals to "Province." More important is the fact that you can hear Bowie so clearly, nestled into the distinctive vocal blend of Kyp Malone's police-siren falsetto and Tunde Adebimpe's R&B tenor. The deliberate enigma of TV on the Radio's art rock has given way to a spacey magic, especially in the dark drone and drive of "Wolf Like Me," which sounds like the Bowie of Low -- with a pair of Arthur Lees at the mike.
5 Fishscale GHOSTFACE KILLAH
With crack-rap ascendant, Wu-Tang's iron man dares Young Jeezy to tell everything he knows -- not by showing off fresh slang but by displaying his knowledge of old-school slangin'. As always, Ghost raps on the edge of some kind of breakout or breakdown, but whether revitalizing Bomb Squad freneticism or settling into the ominous luxury of RZA soul, it's the beats that seal the deal.
6 The Greatest CAT POWER
Chan Marshall faces up to death and despair on a record that justifies every lofty claim her devoted fans have always made for her. On The Greatest, she cuts deep soul with Memphis session men, which brings out the country in her Georgia-bred voice on hard-won ballads like "Could We." Ten years after her first great album, What Would the Community Think, she sounds like she's just getting started.
7 Hell Hath No Fury CLIPSE
Hell Hath No Fury is, in part, a showcase for Clipse's longtime buddies the Neptunes: All skeletal, insistent grooves and mind-**** atmosphere, cuts like "Chinese New Year" are ill enough to raise goose bumps. Brothers Pusha T and Malice simply love to rhyme, and on a series of coke-slinging anthems their clever, singularly fluid flows intertwine like the two guys share a brain. And the banging "Wamp Wamp" and snap-track "Mr. Me Too" are simply head-and-shoulders above almost anything on radio.
8 Boys and Girls in America THE HOLD STEADY
Keyed to the Jack Kerouac line "Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together," the Hold Steady's third release in three years doesn't approach the faith-based weight of 2005's Separation Sunday, but it does make its point with an abundance of narrative flair. The saddest entry is "You Can Make Him Like You," for a pretty girl who always finds another guy when she gets tired of her boyfriend's buddies or music or drugs. The happiest is "Chillout Tent," where the sadness is comic, and the mook has his moment with the Bowdoin girl.
9 Blood Mountain MASTODON
When it comes to metal, subtle is just another word for not trying hard enough. So glory be to Mastodon for piling it on like there's no tomorrow, in the most acclaimed, most innovative, most iron-tusked and just plain heaviest metal album since Metallica ran out of gas. The lyrics go over the top with warrior-fantasy mythos, full of lion slicers, ice gods, ogres and dwarves, not to mention something about "the sheep's- head curse." These four Atlanta dudes grind it out fast or slow, or leap between math-prog tempo shifts without losing their sense of primal paranoid thunder.
10 Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards TOM WAITS
The running tale through this collection of fifty songs -- more than half are new recordings -- is the way Waits rummages through roots for inspiration, then bends them to his singular will. Waits still finds magic, waiting for overhaul, in Lead Belly, Jack Kerouac and the Ramones -- the cover of Da Brudders' "Danny Says" is a ragged stunner. So is the harrowing "Road to Peace," Waits' imagining of a young Palestinian's transformation into a suicide bomber -- and how the path of fundamentalism, on either side, is always a dead end.
11 Continuum JOHN MAYER
Mayer's sixth disc made one thing clear: Homeboy has his **** together. Continuum is Mayer's most assured album yet, channeling familiar gifts -- fluid guitar-playing, sexy white-boy croon, strong tune sense -- with more subtlety, more focus and less lady-baiting cheese than ever. The result is a breezy pop-rock record that surrounds supremely crafted songs like "Vultures" with soul like "Gravity" and weightier stuff like "Waiting on the World to Change."
12 One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This THE NEW YORK DOLLS
David Johansen is no longer twenty-four, so this reunion album surprises by revealing the dirty little secret beneath the Seventies Dolls' playful pansexuality: religious emotion. "Dancing on the Lip of a Volcano" is explicitly pagan; "Take a Good Look at My Good Looks" begins, "Spirit slumbers in nature and awakens in mind" before asking, "So what if this old world is just artifice?" Everywhere Johansen mourns mortality and celebrates contingency in the most searching lyrics of the year -- lyrics deepened by how much fun the band is having.
13 Pearl Jam PEARL JAM
Pearl Jam's best studio album in a decade is like Vs. with politics -- iron-rock riffing and a lyric righteousness forged in real battle. "World Wide Suicide" and "Army Reserve" don't just protest the Iraq War and its disastrous consequences. These are songs about universal accountability (you need two sides to have a war) and the still-revolutionary power of individual dissent. "I will not lose my faith," Vedder sings on "Inside Job," a climactic fusion of Zep and Seventies Who. Now that's classic rock.
14 American V: A Hundred Highways JOHNNY CASH
The man in black was dying when he made this record, and he did not hide the truth of his condition. It is shocking to hear Cash fight to stay on pitch in "If You Could Read My Mind." But there is a deep strength and dignity in his performances and in the wisdom of songs such as Hank Williams' "On the Evening Train." V also includes the last song Cash ever wrote, "Like the 309," on which he growls and cracks wise like a guy on his way to a party instead of his last reward.
15 Wolfmother WOLFMOTHER
This wild-haired Australian trio flattened crowds all year with organ solos, 'nad-crushingly tight pants and riffs heisted from Zep, Sabbath and the Purp. Andrew Stockdale brings the Ozzy-Plant screech, the lyrics are true metal poetry, and when "Joker and the Thief" hits its power-drive climax, there isn't a bat in the room with its head still attached.
16 Food & Liquor LUPE FIASCO
"Now come on everybody, let's make cocaine cool/ We need a few more half-naked women up in the pool": Fiasco's debut is smart, ballsy hip-hop both backpackers and Jay-Z fans can love. The A-list production helps: Kanye pumps "The Cool" full of dark funk, and the jazzy "I Gotcha" has the best Neptunes beat the Clipse didn't get.
17 Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not ARCTIC MONKEYS
Arctic Monkeys came charging out of England, blowing up worldwide with no looks, no fashion, a dumb name and garage-punk nuggets built in the grim steel town of Sheffield. What makes them special is that they're common-as-muck lads from down the pub, full of slang and cheap lager, singing about bouncers who won't let you in, bad benders and one-night stands. All this plus "The View From the Afternoon," the best drunk-texting song ever: "You can pour your heart out around three o'clock/When the two-for-one's undone the writer's block."
18 Game Theory THE ROOTS
The best band in hip-hop still refuses to make records conventional enough to get over on radio and luxury-SUV stereos. Game Theory is classic studio Roots, full of invention and left turns. It doesn't quite have the lift of the band's shows, but there's a consolation prize for Philly-soul heads: a cameo on "Long Time" by one of the city's R&B greats, Bunny Sigler.
19 Taking the Long Way DIXIE CHICKS
The Dixie Chicks respond to their rough past few years with brass balls: This disc shows they didn't regret speaking out against the Iraq War, and Natalie Maines sounds almost punk at times. There is also a whole lot of craft -- Long Way is a widescreen pop record with gorgeous country rock, killer power ballads and fierce honky-tonk.
20 The Black Parade MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE
This New Jersey band's third studio album is the best mid-Seventies record of 2006 -- an ingenious, unrestrained paraphrasing of the over-the-top glam theater of Queen and classic Alice Cooper. The relentless message of Parade is: Life sucks, and death is no great escape. But My Chemical Romance rev up the pathos with an arena-ripe panache that ensures their trip to the mausoleum will run right through Madison Square Garden.
21 Begin to Hope REGINA SPEKTOR
On Begin to Hope, the Russian-born New York singer-songwriter offers her thorniest collection so far, building on the poetic, eccentric, piano-based style that won her so much acclaim for early records like Soviet Kitsch. Her vocals are intense, whether she's singing dark love songs like "Apres Moi" or urban-single vignettes like "Summer in the City" ("I went to a protest/Just to rub up against strangers"). The bigger production augments her songs instead of drowning them out -- although it's hard to imagine what could drown out Spektor.
22 Night Ripper GIRL TALK
One remarkable fact about Pittsburgh DJ Gregg Gillis: To date, he hasn't been sued. On his virtuoso mash-up record Night Ripper, Gillis uses hundreds of unlicensed hip-hop, pop, rock and dance samples. The bedfellows are strange: One short stretch strings together Neutral Milk Hotel, Juelz Santana, Panjabi MC and Sophie Friggin' Hawkins. But he also blends them into something coherent and sublime, like when Biggie's "Juicy" blends with "Tiny Dancer."
23 The Crane Wife THE DECEMBERISTS
Real life seems light-years away from the fantastical murder ballads and desperate-love stories that singer-guitarist Colin Meloy wrote for his band's major-label debut. In the title suite, a man marries a bird, then literally works it to death. The soldier serenading his pregnant wife in "Yankee Bayonet" is already quite dead. But the union of arcane folk and Eighties Brit pop on the Decemberists' indie albums is pumped up here with electric guitars, prog-rock bravado and even Seventies funk in the Elmore Leonard-like tale "The Perfect Crime #2."
24 The Information BECK
The Information is the best of both Becks -- the sample-delic warrior of Odelay and the confessional troubadour of Sea Change. Beck has wily fun with loops and historical references in songs like "Soldier Jane," a compact blend of droning sitar, John Lennon-like vocals and star-shine electronics. But there is a moving clarity to Beck's cleverness, summed up best in the gentle shimmy of "Think I'm in Love." When he sings, "I think I'm in love/But it makes me kind of nervous to say so," it is the sweet, plain-spoken sound of a loser about to reverse his fortunes.
25 Blue Collar RHYMEFEST
A freestyle veteran who's worked many jobs to support his habit, Chicago's Rhymefest is life-size. He can brag because that's part of the tradition he loves, but he's funny about it. Blue Collar is the rare big-label hip-hop record to honor the part of black street life that wishes there were no corner boys. A major talent we're lucky to have, Rhymefest makes you wonder how many others like him don't happen to know Kanye West.
26 FutureSex/LoveSounds JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
It's been only four years since Timberlake established his solo cred with Justified, but from the sounds of FutureSex/LoveSounds, he has been keeping Cameron Diaz extremely busy. Timbaland lets his musical imagination run wild all over these tracks -- the results may be too arty and disjointed for some fans, but both the singer and the producer prove themselves worthy of the challenge in one of the year's most enduringly pleasurable hits.
27 Pieces of the People We Love THE RAPTURE
The Rapture's 2003 debut, Echoes, was a punk-funk shiver of late-night desolation, like catching your reflection in a mirror and noticing you've turned into a zombie. Now -- with help from Danger Mouse -- the New York quartet sounds warmer, happier, stronger, with Mattie Safer yelping, "I used to think life was a bitter pill/But it's a grand old time," over the studly bass of "W.A.Y.U.H." It's like the evolution Talking Heads made between Fear of Music and Remain in Light.
28 Broken Boy Soldiers THE RACONTEURS
The Raconteurs are a side project that rocks like a main dish. Jack White brings the raw garage-rock aesthetic, Brendan Benson shows pop sense and brightens the vocals with heavy-Badfinger radiance, and bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler nail it all down with elementary muscle. The album's only drawback: Everything here -- especially "Steady, as She Goes" and the closing glam-Zeppelin blues "Blue Veins" -- sounds even better live. Maybe they should have cut the album after the tour.
29 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
The stories in these songs are as old as the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and sixteenth-century Scotland. But the truths and lessons of natural disaster, war and citizenship are as immediate as New Orleans, Iraq and the midterm elections. These big-band treatments combine Dixieland brass, cantina accordions and barn-dance fiddles and feature Springsteen in rough but vintage jubilant voice -- as if John Henry himself is hammering those spikes through the stage at the Stone Pony.
30 Robbers & Cowards COLD WAR KIDS
The Cold War Kids' debut wasn't quite the best indie-rock record of the year, but it might have been the most original: all cracked, soaring croons and shambling story-songs about alcoholics, killers and other shady characters, courtesy of L.A. boys doing Seventies-style rock with a dash of Southern gothic.
31 Like Father, Like Son BIRDMAN AND LIL' WAYNE
New Orleans' Cash Money Records may be past its heyday as a hitmaking cartel, but with Like Father, Like Son two of the label's biggest names were able to reinvigorate a familiar sound: thick, exuberant drawls about guns, cars and girls backed by locked-in, hard-charging bounce.
32 Supernature GOLDFRAPP
So you thought they stopped making dance-pop records like this in 1988, when the Eurythmics started to slow down? Or in 1998, when trip-hop hit the wall? Goldfrapp exist beyond time and space, in a metropolitan interzone of sleek computer beats and dark melodies and after-hours club-$lut ambience. First lady Alison Goldfrapp's sex-robot vocals hold it it all together -- when she sings "Ooh La La," it sounds like a threat.
33 The Devil You Know TODD SNIDER
This veteran folkie's third consecutive great album finds voices for an assortment of Middle Americans who "didn't want to throw a fishing line in that old main stream." Although Snider likes the coke-snorting Romeo, the hard-as-a-carapace ****, the dayworker just out of prison, the bank robber he lends his car keys, he doesn't romanticize them. He just believes that with "a war going on that the poor can't win," each of them is enough like him to be worth a song. And generally that song is pretty damn funny.
34 The Eraser THOM YORKE
Major Thom managed to keep his first solo album a secret until just before it dropped -- the reason, he explained, is that he didn't want to raise any questions about whether Radiohead were breaking up. The sound recalls Kid A's quiet glitch-tronic moments, in disarmingly straightforward verse-chorus-verse tunes. But even in morose ballads such as "The Clock" and "Atoms for Peace," Yorke's steely intelligence shines through.
35 Once Again JOHN LEGEND
The very talented Legend is a mama-friendly smoothie, a devout sex-lover and a skilled songwriter who makes good use of his hip-hop buddies. Once Again finds him playing all those roles, often on the same great song: Legend goes from Nat "King" Cole to Jeff Buckley on a dime. His manly croon and pretty tunes might suck you in, but it's the less obvious stuff -- his wit and big ears, namely -- that keeps you hooked.
36 I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass YO LA TENGO
Nobody else should even bother entering the competition for the Year's Dumbest Album Title, but this is the most effortlessly spectacular music Yo La Tengo have made in years. The attention-getters are the opening and closing ten-minute guitar jams, with Ira Kaplan mangling the feedback over Velvets-sharp trance-riffs. They mess with acoustic ballads, country, Motown soul, but there isn't a bad song on the album, with special honors for the folk-rock twang of "The Race Is On Again."
37 Alive and Kickin' FATS DOMINO
Topped only by Nonesuch's Our New Orleans 2005 among Katrina records is an old man's album recorded in and around 2000. Like the levees, but with far better follow-through, these tracks had to await the disaster before they got the funding attention they deserved. The sense of irrepressible fun that made Domino the biggest African-American rocker of the Fifties is replaced by a reflectful calm that never turns blue. Rhythmically it's so astute you can only assume his reflexes are as sharp as ever.
38 10,000 Days TOOL
The pointlessly elaborate packaging (the 3-D specs just give you a headache) contradicts the no-gimmicks fury of everything else Tool does, to obsessive perfection, on Days -- and that includes actual songwriting. Even at seven and six minutes apiece, respectively, "Vicarious" and "The Pot" are packed with clever twists on instant-hit-single kicks: Adam Jones' nagging, grinding guitar riffs; the catchy, mounting-fear stammer of drummer Danny Carey's odd time signatures. That's more than enough to leave you seeing double.
39 The Tragic Treasury THE GOTHIC ARCHIES
These songs, aimed at the precocious youngsters who jones for the gleeful gothic gloom of the Lemony Snicket novels that have made sometime Magnetic Fields sideman Daniel Handler very rich, are of a thematic piece. Perfect for Stephin Merritt's melancholy baritone, they also satisfy his appetite for rhyme. "The world is a very scary place, my dear," Merritt intones. "It's hurled and it's twirled through outer space, I fear." Comedy album of the year.
40 Make History THUNDERBIRDS ARE NOW!
In sweet home Detroit, Thunderbirds Are Now! are not garage enough; in outer Alternia they're not arty enough. Les Savy Fav fans think they're a rip-off. But there's a reason you've never heard Les Savy Fav, and that reason is tunes. Figure that keyboard man Scott Allen provides those, with his guitarist brother Ryan pitching in when he's not riffing angularly or yelping, generally about something social if not political. Perfect for anyone who believes complex song structures are best served by punk attitude and pop amenities.
41 Friendly Fire SEAN LENNON
As the son of a Beatle, Sean Lennon certainly has the right to make music in his father's mode. Indeed, Sean's boyish, nasally voice is a near-spittin' image of his dad's Rubber Soul-ballad croon. But there is also a lot of the Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson and Brazilian tropicalia in the disciplined sparkle and feathery distress of Friendly Fire. Actually, the most overt Beatlesque moment on this record is the bottlenecklike effect of the lead guitar in "Spectacle" -- it sounds like George Harrison's spirit dropped by to say hi.
42 Under the Skin LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
In "Not Too Late," Buckingham looks back at his life in Fleetwood Mac with frantic flamencolike guitar: "Reading the paper, saw a review/Said I was a visionary, but nobody knew/Now that's been a problem/Feeling unseen." He could fix that by making records more often. But the eccentricity of Skin suits Buckingham's reflections on his past life and current blessings. And he is secure enough to cover madrigals by Donovan ("To Try for the Sun") and the Rolling Stones ("I Am Waiting"), with quietly magnetic results.
43 Tropicalia: A Brazlian Revolution in Sound VARIOUS ARTISTS
Finally: a comprehensive, junk-free compilation of Brazilian tropicalia, which in its late-Sixties heyday was a political, pop-friendly mix of rock, bossa nova and other native rhythms. Tropicalia cherry-picks from the genre's biggest names -- Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Tom Ze -- without settling on a single sound. Any of these twenty cuts could light up a mix tape.
44 Show Your Bones YEAH YEAH YEAHS
The New York mod squad's hotly awaited second disc is a triumph: dark, spooky, lithe, broodingly sexy, with Karen O venting her heartbreak and libidinal heebie-jeebies into post-punk tunes with a new kind of goth-cowgirl twang, and Nick Zinner deploying a fresh array of vampire guitar-noise splatters. Bonus: "Gold Lion" made it onto Pants-Off Dance-Off, the ultimate rock & roll desideratum of 2006.
45 Fox Confessor Brings the Flood NEKO CASE
For the country-rock fan who wonders why they don't make them like they used to, Case brings her smoky voice (Emmylou Harris meets Liz Phair), rootsy band (featuring members of Calexico and the Band's Garth Hudson) and cryptic songwriting, as in the scary "Dirty Knife."
46 You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker WILLIE NELSON
The outlaw-country king of Texas pays loving tribute to the state's songwriting queen. Nelson played many of the songs on this album in his youth, on the way to his own songwriting fame, and he revisits them with such affection and Texas-dance-floor authenticity that you can almost smell the sawdust.
47 Brightblack Morning Light BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT
With their second album, Alabama bohemians Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes created the perfect chill-out soundtrack for roots-music fans, all slow, glacially pretty songs that toss in traces of the Band, the Dead and grimy blues. The result: Zen-like peacefulness that keeps your ears perked.
48 Public Warning LADY SOVEREIGN
Public Warning was one of the year's oddest hip-hop discs: a daft, electro-tinged record starring a nineteen-year-old Brit girl fond of booze and shepherd's pie and given to playfully barbed rhymes like "Just check how my flow differs/I'm droppin' lyrics like a ho droppin' knickers." But the album is also completely lovable: Nimbly rhymed cuts such as "Gatheration" show that cheeky monkeys who sound more like Austin Powers than Jay-Z can make it in hip-hop.
49 Pick a Bigger Weapon THE COUP
Longtime Oakland, California, rapper Boots Riley does things his own way -- big Afro, a live band and a militant leftism better informed than that of, say, Dead Prez. "Baby Let's Have a Baby Before Bush Do Somethin' Crazy" is his sexy love song, and glory be, it's actually erotic. "Head (of State)" shares a character with that one and is also sexy in its own way: "Bush and Hussein together in bed/Giving h-e-a-d head/Y'all mother****ers heard what we said/Billions made and millions dead."
50 It's Never Been Like That PHOENIX
These sleek french rockers made their none-too-French name with light, dreamy synth confections designed for film soundtracks, such as their Lost in Translation theme "Too Young." But Phoenix achieve a harder, more aggressive guitar-driven sound on this, their third and best record. "Second to None" and "Long Distance Call" rock out, without losing the band's original conception of elegant melancholy; the exquisitely surging "North" is their pithiest ballad yet.
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Source: RollingStone
#36 - Best album title EVER! I wanna get that album just for the title XD
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16th December 2006, 10:20 PM
I love Supernature and Show Your Bones, never saw any for sale locally.
I'm glad it got #6, (Go CatPower!) 
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