December 19th, 2006
Over the past year, the music industry has continued to struggle with the growth of digital media and the fragmentation of the listening audience. But that didn't get in the way of a lot of excellent music, beginning with, but not limited to, our selections for the year's 25 best albums. (Note: Because of deadlines, only albums released before Dec. 5 were in play. Music mostly goes to sleep in December, but late arrivals like Nas' Hip-Hop Is Dead will be eligible for next year's poll.) We assembled this list by polling 14 regular contributors to The A.V. Club's music section, plus the editors of our city editions. We used a weighted voting system—meaning passion proved nearly as important as widespread popularity—and tallied the votes using a highly scientific combination of computer spreadsheets, solar calculators, and an abacus, in a scientific formulation designed to ensure that only the finest albums would make the list. Beginning with our runaway winner…
1. The Hold Steady, Boys And Girls In America (Vagrant)
Last year's Separation Sunday established that The Hold Steady had more wit, hooks, and ambition than any other half-ironic ultra-bar-band, but few expected these boys to maximize their potential so quickly, and make one of the most entertaining and compulsively listenable straight-rock records of the past 20 years. It'll be a truly banner day when Craig Finn learns to write lyrics about something other than getting loaded, but the dynamism and dull ache of songs like "You Can Make Him Like You" and "Chillout Tent" are nothing to nitpick. They're the kind of songs that rock fans hear once and instantly make a permanent part of their lives.
2. TV On The Radio, Return To Cookie Mountain (Interscope)
Already at a high creative level with the previous Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, TV On The Radio pushed even further with its second album. Return To Cookie Mountain is more experimental, often abandoning ordinary verse-chorus-verse structure for a wash of drones and harmony-laden soundscape, and yet it's also more consistently engaging. TVOTR sets the sonic template with Mountain's opening track and best song, "I Was A Lover"—which lyrically evokes Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime," another song about postmodern dissatisfaction in a chaotic world. The two bands don't sound much alike, but they share an adventurous and unorthodox spirit. One's already a classic, and the other seems destined to become one.
3. Midlake, The Trials Of Van Occupanther (World's Fair/Bella Union)
A quietly insinuating disc that feels instantly familiar—okay, it sounds a bit like The Eagles—Midlake's second full-length is packed with lilting songs (particularly "Roscoe" and the stunning "Head Home") that don't reveal how weird they are until after repeated listens. And then it's too late. Simultaneously sinister and almost medicinally pleasant, Van Occupanther tells lush tales about stonecutters, young brides, hunters, and the mysterious title character. That may sound over the top, but it isn't: Imagine The Decemberists with a Cali-pop jones and some serious lessons in the art of subtlety.
4. Jenny Lewis With The Watson Twins, Rabbit Fur Coat (Team Love)
Rabbit Fur Coat didn't make a great first impression: The album's radio hit—a cover of "Handle With Care" recorded with Ben Gibbard, M. Ward, and Conor Oberst—wins the Zach Braff Award for "yindie" superstar cuteness. But the rest of Rabbit Fur Coat (the parts written by Jenny Lewis, and not The Traveling Wilburys) is an absolute stunner, loaded with richly detailed country-soul songs that weigh the pros and cons of God, relationships, and twentysomething rootlessness.
5. Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit (Rough Trade/Matador)
For a while, it looked like Belle & Sebastian would never recover from a career that began with a pair of classics, Tigermilk and If You're Feeling Sinister. After repeating itself too many times, the band pushed too far outside its comfort zone with 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress. But The Life Pursuit sounds like a band that's long put jitters to rest. Filled with confident songcraft and characters rendered with the care of a portrait artist, it's simultaneously forward-looking and unmistakably a Belle & Sebastian album. Maybe they belong in the 21st century after all.
6. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale (Def Jam)
Rap's most cinematic storyteller returned with Fishscale, an album of mind-altering weirdness and coked-up intensity. Ghostface's dizzying pulp narratives firmly thrusts listeners into the center of drug deals gone bad, hyper-violent street tableaus, fond reminiscing about childhood beatings, and a trippy underwater fantasia involving a pimped-out Spongebob Squarepants. As always, Ghostface proves a master of telling, novelistic details, from what's playing on television (a Honeymooners marathon) to what his posse is drinking as they watch him record (a bullshit Budweiser).
7. The Decemberists, The Crane Wife (Capitol)
The literate princes of indie-rock make their major-label debut with the most bizarre, visionary album of their career, full of grim, multi-part songs about death and how we deal with it, set to music more forceful than anything they've attempted before. It helps that The Decemberists keep their arrangements tight, their melodies bright, and their storytelling curiously gripping.
8. The Coup, Pick A Bigger Weapon (Epitaph)
Forget Jay-Z's overhyped comeback: What hip-hop really needed in 2006 was the resurrection of The Coup's brawling, humanistic, hysterically funny revolutionary music. Frontman and producer Boots Riley rose to the occasion with another masterful set of heartbreaking character studies ("Tiffany Hall"), proletariat anthems ("My Favorite Mutiny") and irreverent social commentary fusing sophisticated sociopolitical metaphors with scatological humor ("Assbreath"). Boots, Pam The Funkstress, and an impressive roster of guest musicians and fellow travelers (including Audioslave's Tom Morrello) here reconfigure the Marxist dream of social and economic equality as one bodacious house party, a revolution you can dance to.
9. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (Anti-)
Neko Case has that voice—soaring, velvety smooth, achingly beautiful. She's proven her talent on her four solo albums (and three with The New Pornographers), but never has she wielded such jaw-dropping power as on the masterful Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. No one released a better song this year than "Star Witness," a gut-punch that captured Case at her finest. Case has moved away from straight-up "alt-country" to an airy Americana that's uniquely her own.
10. Band Of Horses, Everything All The Time, (Sub Pop)
After wasting his songwriting talent as a side player in Seattle's un-spell-checked Carissa's Wierd, Ben Bridwell took matters into his own hands after the group's breakup, and did the next-to-impossible: He made a distinctly modern-day indie-rock album with songs that are almost guaranteed to sound great two decades from now. Band Of Horses' Everything All The Time is like The Shins deep-fried in My Morning Jacket—Bridwell is from South Carolina, so he isn't faking—but even if the whole thing were stripped down to an acoustic guitar and un-revered vocals, songs like "Wicked Gil," "The Funeral," and "The Great Salt Lake" would still sound like little nuggets of pop magic.
11. Rhymefest, Blue Collar (J Records)
Oh major labels, why can't you do anything right? Rhymefest's long-delayed debut lived up to the advanced hype with its down-to-earth lyrics, strong-but-not-overbearing production, and thematic cohesion. But label delays failed to capitalize on the early buzz, and in spite of tons of press hype, Blue Collar sold poorly.
12. The Thermals, The Body The Blood The Machine (Sub Pop)
Hands down, there was no better opening track this year than The Body's "Here's Your Future," though "A Pillar Of Salt" is an even better song. The trio wraps its bitingly sarcastic deconstruction of religious fundamentalism in loose, hook-laden garage-punk that's as instantly ingratiating as it comes.
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