#9

TV on the Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain
(Interscope)

The holy My Bloody Valentine name is tossed around a ton these days, at pretty much anything that will categorize easily as “overtly distorted” or “effects laden”, which sometimes includes TV on the Radio. It’s a shame and lazy on any reviewer’s part. Loveless isn’t a meaningful album because of its innovative use of the distortion and volume knob. If that were the case, then there never would’ve been Velvet Underground’s White Light, White Heat. Rather, it was a record that took suffocated and nebulous yet very melodic songwriting and buried that sound under countless layers of discordant noise. In that sense, the MBV comparison only vaguely warranted, but even then, not so much so. In reality the only space they share is that of fantastic songwriters and visionaries of their own craft.

TV on the Radio exist in a sphere all their own. It’s a virtual junkyard of pop music incorporating doo wop, R&B, electronica, balls out rock, and other cast-off detritus. It’s a sound that’s unavoidably “urban”. Like any big city the disjointed and unfamiliar are braced up against one another. Rather than jump out in alarming juxtaposition, Return to Cookie Mountain is a sound of the unfamiliar yet undeniably exciting smoothly coexisting.

#10

Mastodon
Blood Mountain
(Reprise)

From one extreme to the other. Metal’s not something I was bred on – it was just always available. I grew inclined to the imagery (skulls, swords, leather, chicks – YO!) from all the ridiculous late 80’s and early 90’s Omen and Danzig videos. And despite all the Metal denial I went through in college and the fey stuff I do tend to like, deep in the most closed-off recesses of my mind exists Metal Brett that wants nothing more than to mainline Jack Daniels, huff paint and grow his hair long. Metal Brett loves Mastodon. Hardcore enough not to be wimpy, yet containing some impressive soft parts (“Sleeping Giant”) that are definitely not gay, and most importantly and triumphantly, dudes can slay. Blood Mountain is a band at top form, technically impressive, capable of writing a great song and ready for arena worship. See you in the parking lot – I’ll be crushing my 17th Studweiser.

#11

Brightblack Morning Light
Brightblack Morning Light
(Matador)

They’re a cheeky group, but I’ve very much fallen for the gimmickry. Normally any group that asks their fans to bring crystals to shows to give “positive vibes” won’t get a second glance from me (normally because one must avoid the patchouli stink). But despite the 3-D-esque prism-creating glasses with pot leaves on them that come with the CD, something just jives, brah. BML trade in groovy, damp funk, the kind that’s perfect on summer mornings with 85 degree temperatures when you wake up. Words are immaterial: it's the lumbering, stoned beat, restrained Fender Rhodes and he/she coos that suck you in. In my alternate universe, this is what hippies would listen to while making hemp necklaces. Too bad they’re all wasting their time staring at Trey’s bulge.

#12

Chad VanGaalen
Skelliconnection
(Sub Pop)

Apparently these songs are culled from multiple tapes recorded in the musician/animator/illustrator’s home and the intimacy is one of Skelliconnection’s greatest appeals. Broadly, it’s indie rock, but drilling down and separating the elements, you hear a truly distinct artist at play here. His ghostly vocals hang over most every track here casting a spell on most everything he tries. And nearly every type of pop music is represented: from power pop (“Burn 2 Ash”), to wimpy metal (“Flower Garden”), to minimalism (“Grubbbish”), to acoustic rock (“See-Thru-Skin”). It’s important to state that this isn’t a genre exercise. Rather, it’s a guy, probably with a large record collection, that likes to never paint the same picture twice.

#13

Scott Walker
The Drift
(4AD)

Every word measured. Every sound labored over and considered. Every moment devastating. Something as sonically incapacitating and polarizing doesn’t come around, well, ever. Nothing has ever sounded like this before and never will. If you can do one thing to expand your perception of what exactly sound can do and how it should be considered, start here. You will not be disappointed.

#14

T.I.
King
(Atlantic)

A cocksure young black man is not a unique figure in hip-hop music. But a young man calling himself “King”, using UGK’s finest production moment for his own(“Front Back”), and nonchalantly rhyming the same word, like, 50 times (“What You Know”) while still captivating the listener? An impressive feat wherever you come from. It doesn’t hurt that T.I. gets immaculate production help, but his understated, laid back and incredibly charismatic flow is star here. There’s no denying that King has its schmaltz, its unimpressive guest spots and overlong intro/outros. It’s unimportant. When dude hits the mic, it’s over.

(One more thing: there’s no ignoring any record that includes the best single song of the year. “What You Know” is classic – the best of any genre.)

#15

Cat Power
The Greatest
(Matador)

Ms. Chan Marshall is one of only two women on this list bearing most of her record’s load – a fact that I’m both embarrassed and alarmed by. Is the underground that much of an exclusive fraternity? I’ll be the first to admit – 99% of women would be turned off, no, repulsed by Human Animal or even Hell Hath No Fury. But does music, and particularly independent music, always have to be a man’s man’s man’s man’s world?

Regardless, Chan is a hell of an artist. With one of the world’s best voices, a smoky, whispery croon, Marshall channels the Dusty (Springfield) south and creates one of the smoothest records short of Windham Hill. It’s old news that some of Memphis’ finest accompany Chan on this collection, but every time you press play, instead of getting some soul retread or worn out genre, you hear a woman on the top of her game lyrically, vocally and as a songwriter. It never gets old.

#16

Boris
Pink
(Southern Lord)

I want to love Sunn O))), but they’re sometimes not rocking enough. I dig the slow and heavy and scary thing often, but sometimes the obfuscation of melody for anti-momentum can be extremely frustrating. Not that Boris is coming in with a hyper-slow song, but rock tempo-wise, “(parting)” is a churner with great melody making the journey into Pink all the more gratifying and exciting. From there, pretty much every heavy type of rock is put under their lens and done so muscularly and with radical grit and excitement. A wonderfully dynamic and burly group making a very welcome effort into the expansion of the Zep Empire.

#17

Thom Yorke
The Eraser
(XL)

I first bought this record during one of the most oppressive heat waves that I’ve ever encountered. The cold synths were perfect then, almost like aural air-conditioning. Fast forward a few months, driving home on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I flipped this on. Full moon, no one on the road but me, gently rolling hills -- it was the perfect sound. I’m easily swayed by circumstance, but every time I seem to flip The Eraser on, it adapts. You could chalk it up to the technologically cold and emotionally barren times we live in. I think its just clear – Yorke’s the one of the best songwriters my generation’s ever seen.

(Bonus: I think they talk about #20 in “Black Swan”. Right?)

#18

Dark Meat
Universal Indians
(Cloud Recordings)

It’s a good rule of thumb to be wary of any group that gets press because they’ve got 26 members and are “crazy”. Usually it just means a core of untalented clowns padding the impact by surrounding themselves with people who can dick around long enough to distract to the task at hand – the core of the song. Well, the beacon of goodness that is Cloud Recordings strikes Athens, GA gold here again with a great rock band and an ecstatic group of blowers. (Loosely) think a more polite Stooges but maxed out with 10 more saxes and trumpets going full-on. And that’s just “Freedom Ritual”.

#19

Clipse
Hell Hath No Fury
(Startrak)

The fact that Clipse were held back for 4 years is a travesty. Buy this album – support quality art. Dense, disturbing, dilating, and incredibly impressive.

#20

Fucked Up
Hidden World
(Jade Tree)

I’ve had a ban in spouting profanities on this space for a few reasons. One, it’s lazy. Two, it’s unnecessary. Three, what if my boss/parents read this? Honestly, I’m gonna keep it up, but when you have a band like Fucked Up, I’m not gonna be a huge wimp and “*” and “$” their name up. After all, these are a group of people who stick to their morals as unusual, non-mainstream, and, yeah, quite possibly as fucked up as they are. They’re true-blue punk rockers here giving good old hardcore a lift out of straight-edge stagnation. Aside from Clockcleaner (who I didn’t hear until last week – unreal), I can’t really think of hardcore as brutal and uncompromising that I want to hear on a regular basis. Loud and screamy is one thing, it’s their arm-raised triumphant-ness and self-righteousness that makes me want to throw Molotov cocktails at Verizon stores, convert my car to vegetable oil and replace my entire library with Zinn and Chomsky. High fucking recommendation.

#21

Pearls & Brass
The Indian Tower
(Drag City)

Mountain/Cactus/etc.-esque boogie rawk finally gets it’s due. Another in a long line of unreal rock releases this year. Pearls and Brass aren’t so much classic rock revivalists as breathing new life into music that never should’ve disappeared.

#22

Robert Pollard
From a Compound Eye
(Merge)

Viewed through the lens of Bobby Pollard’s discography, FaCE must seem like it came out 20 years ago. He’s pretty much put out about 6 or 7 albums since this was released about a year ago in January of 2006, but you’d probably be hard pressed to find a better power-pop release in that time. Pollard’s Who affectations are on full display along with an incredible knack for the pacing of an album. Often times, a Guided By Voices or Pollard record just seems like a 16+ songs threaded together for an “album”. Here we finally get a glance back to the good old days of the double album – 2 records, 4 sides, hard rockers and ballads. Viewed as such, this is a paramount record – windmill guitars, verbose lyrics, and a much too short 75-minute playtime.

#23

Burial
Burial
(Hyperdub)

Dubstep? Whatever. Bored journos and scenesters make up genre names on the minute in our hyper-connected times all out of the need to fit something somewhere. I guess it’s so you can organize your iPod? This still sounds like trusty drum and bass, slowed down like a 45 on 33, with plenty of eerie space and industrial winds blowing over the collapsing drums. It’s the sound of gray cities at dark – strange, seedy and dangerous.

#24

Flying Canyon
Flying Canyon
(Soft Abuse)

Dependent on who you ask, folk music either had a banner coming out year or a deluge of half-baked ideas and crap singer-songwriters wearing Indian Guides outfits. Either way, when the originators come through it’s best to listen and pay attention.

Notable for their interesting recording techniques (often open air, in caves, etc.) and homemade instrumentation, the Jewelled Antler-associated folks here Shadye Sartin, Glenn Donaldson and frontman Cayce Lindner released one of the finest quiet and introspective collections of the year. Self-promoted as “doom-folk” perhaps jokingly, the melodies here are, in fact, heavy and downtempo, but a certain natural ease emanates from the record giving the Californian in all of us a place to rest our weary head.

#25

The Roots
Game Theory
(Def Jam)

No need for crack rap tales here. Illadelph’s finest heed the call when Jay needs ‘em to. And to actually have a balls to take a Radiohead sample and make it nearly better than the original? You(se) earned it.

#26

Witch
Witch
(Tee Pee)

2006 was finally the year where hard MF-ing rock finally made it back into the underground in spades. These dudes really aren’t leading any kind of charge or organized scene to be honest. Shoot, most of them are from Vermont -- they’re probably nothing more then shop class burnouts. But having the Dinosaur Jr. blessing with J Mascis playing drums means that things are most likely gonna be fine. Foregoing all the bad hesher ideas like black jeans and long hair and bad attitudes Sam Ash dudes all seem to be drawn to, Witch rips the hell outta some old fashioned rock and roll, Ozzy vocals, shredding leads and all.

#27

Tim Hecker
Harmony in Ultraviolet
(Kranky)

Sound-sculptor? Sounds kinda pretentious, kinda art-school lame, no? For better or worse, pretty much everything I’ve read of him includes that description. Maybe I’m just lazy, maybe my self-imposed deadline is already way over, but the PR people that approved that one pretty much hit the nail on the head. Hecker gathers granular, static-filled noises into seamless pieces, approximations of the most beautiful moments in time. Yet with each triumphant moment of utter beauty, comes a back end of melancholy which understands that the moment may not last. That sense of un-ironic self-awareness makes each breathtaking sweep even more incredible.

#28

The Knife
Silent Shout
(Mute)

At a glance my list will pretty much ensure the fact that I’m not a dance music fan. Not altogether true though, as, for the most part, great dance music just doesn’t appear in 12-song, 45-minute installments. Dance music has (and still does) play to the idea of the single. That makes it all the more fascinating when an icy, sci-fi disco record like Silent Shout appears. I won’t begin to pretend that I know anything earth-shattering about the Knife, but one thing – if they can keep this shit up, rock and roll will die, and dance music will kill it.

#29

Akron/Family
Meek Warrior
(Young God)

Scores of bands come out of seemingly nowhere these days to release incredible records, but none have the accomplished musicianship and ingenuity of Brooklyn’s Akron/Family. Riding on the coattails of their astonishing self-titled debut and Angels of Light split, their new full-length shows just how virtuosic the family is. Flipping easily between free-jazz ecstasy, captivating (and thankfully not freak-crunchy like thousands of crap ’06 albums) folk, and old fashioned rock ‘n roll, Meek Warrior is a success any other band would call their masterpiece. And these hotshots are just getting started.