The Post-Rockist

SCOTTER’S TOP 5 OF 2006

So, you ask, why a Top 5 and not a Top 10? Is it because only five albums this year were good enough for mention on a “Best of” list, you may ask? Well, no. To prepare my list I gathered all of the 2006 releases I had gotten my hands on this year and found, to my surprise, that I only had in my possession 11 new releases this year, six of which I would not put on a “Best of” list.

Alas, 2006 was a year for the archive. I passed on the new Decemberists album due to a new-found obsession with Harry Nilsson; I passed on the new Beck in order to feed a newer-found hunger for the Bach and Beethoven recordings of Glenn Gould; I passed on the new M. Ward when all of my time for a straight couple weeks focused upon Caetano Veloso’s marvelous A Foreign Sound; I passed on TV On The Radio because I knew 27 people who had already purchased it and thought one would have burned me a copy (none did); I passed on the new Hold Steady because, well, between me and you, I just didn’t like Separation Sunday that much (SHHHHHHHHHH!); I passed on Joanna Newsom and the new Tom Waits because rent was due.

The irony is that all of these albums will surely need to be acquired for the archive in 2007, thus disabling me from acquiring 2007 new releases and the endless cycle shall cycle perpetually for sure.

Thus, what you receive from me is not a definitive list based upon a vast and deep experience with new music, but a “Best of What I Got” list. But believe me, my fellow Post-Rockists, the “Best of What I Got” got the best of me.

5) The Blow - Paper Television (buy)
“Parentheses”

I was introduced to The Blow’s Paper Television late in the year and soon became infatuated (and still am). Comprised of the duo of vocalist Khaela Maricich and beat-maestro Jona Bechtolt, The Blow’s songs are as painfully infectious as Maricich’s lyrics are painfully blunt about relationships failed, failing, and flavorfully frivolous. This is the album I’ve been waiting for since Junior Senior’s D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat: pop and electronic music marry for the benefit of every long boring road trip, pre-party, party, post-party, and night alone when you can’t help but become your own personal dance party.

4) The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely (buy)
“Woke Up New”

I reviewed this album in September for this very internet publication, which you can find here. It was bad medicine for a tough part of my year, a year of anxiety and loss (fuck you 2006; come hug and kiss me 2007). The album so vividly reminds me of this year that I’m not ever going to listen to it again. It’s that good.

3) Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins - Rabbit Fur Coat (buy)
“Melt Your Heart”

That voice, those lyrics, that band, those songs. Jenny Lewis stepped away from Rilo Kiley for a year to put out her first solo album and, with the help of the Watson Twins, made the country album of the year. If popular country music was anything like this album, no lover of music could wince when stumbling upon CMT while flipping stations on cable. The album establishes Lewis as one of the wisest of lyricists, able to use understatement and irony artfully and to sing each word exactly as it should for maximum effect. This album is the work of a master songwriter/performer. When I listen to “Melt Your Heart,” I seriously think I’m about to levitate, so enraptured I become in such a smooth, soulful, and sorrowful silk.

2) Xiu Xiu - The Air Force (buy)
“Buzz Saw”
I bought this album for the cover, and it was well worth it. I wanted to write about the album several times for the Post-Rockist, but words always fell short. The experience of listening to this album is so simultaneously intense and beautiful and disturbing. It isn’t an album one can listen to from start to finish in one sitting. It requires listenings in shifts. But it rewards the listener with an understanding of how profound modern music can be. While the meaning of the songs is often elusive, they are unforgettable and deeply affecting. Don’t listen to the album while driving: vertigo on the freeway is never a good thing.

1) Bob Dylan - Modern Times (buy)
“Beyond the Horizon”

A lot has been written about the greatness of this album (this website is certainly guilty), so I’ll supply my favorite blurb. Jody Rosen of Slate writes, “I hate to break it to Justin Timberlake, but a wheezy old man has recorded the best make-out songs of 2006.” This, of course, isn’t the whole story since Modern Times falls upon serious subjects like life, love, and death, which anyone at Dylan’s age must be seriously thinking about (for the purest statement of this, check out “When the Deal Goes Down”). But what marks this Dylan album, as well as Love & Theft, is Dylan’s singing. This may sound like hogwash to some haters, but Dylan put in the best singing performance of the year (well, at least against everything else I heard). He developed a command of the growl, the sneer, the sigh, the whisper, and the croon, and matches each to the words to which they belong. When sound and sense meet perfectly, so said a college English professor of mine, that is poetry. We don’t tend to think of Dylan as someone who develops: he was pretty great as he came out on the scene in the ’60s. But Dylan had to develop into this album. I think it’s his best ever.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…