2006, year of the hand-claps, or, the annual obligatory music review best of post, part two
Music: Skinny Puppy: The Greater Wrong of the Right (2004)
A'ight, I shall continue and conclude my twenty best albums of 2006 list (you can find the first ten here). I can guarantee every album I've recommended will not disappoint if you like music like I do. You probably don’t, but, you know, if you were me you'd like this stuff.
The Knife: Silent Shout: Well, I had this album in 2005 since it was leaked way, way early but I'll give it a nod 'cause it's my kind o' thing. Swedes with synthesizers and interesting femme vocals (reminds me of Bjork without the scratchy throat on the top end), sometimes sounds like Asian pop, dancey but also moody with subtle glitchiness for percussion. "Marble House" is great torcher with female/male duo (is that Jay Jay Johanson?). Filter sweeps and synth washes and slow builds, dance beats and groove, reminds me of FPU, but with vocals. Best of all, no voice goes without a treatment!
Ladytron: Witching Hour: Ladytron's third effort strikes out beyond the cold, two-tone background amble of electroclash into less synth-heavy, warmer songcraft (although the drum machine is never abandoned). Like a number of electronic acts this year, Ladytron's latest features a number of less dance-floor friendly songs in favor of more focused story-telling. As in the previous albums, the machinic female vocal predominates, however, there is more of an attempt here to stray into polytonal delivery. Some songs amount to little more than extended grooves with the occasional break-beat and change up ("Beauty 2"), but a sense of melancholy weaves throughout the entire album. Guitar is featured conspicuously on a number of tracks, signaling the move toward a warmer, less paranoid-android sound (e.g., "Whitelightgenerator" sounds like some analog Swedish pop bad). The stand-out track here is "Destroy Everything You Touch," an upbeat, rollicking dance track with a hard slap-clash beat and biting lyrics about a very bad King Midas character (no doubt a great anti-love song, which is why it found its way to my Philophobia 2006 mix this year).
The Legendary Pink Dots: Your Children Placate You From Premature Graves: It's hard to believe this is the 20th anniversary album for LPD, a psychedelic-goth-ambient-folk-drone-pop outfit from London (now the Netherlands), because it sounds so much like stuff they were putting out a decade ago (about the time I interviewed Ka-spel for college radio). Ka-spel's voice and lyrics are consistently Syd Barrett-esque, his voice at once a sweet comfort and then, well, creepy as all get out (the opening track begins with a snide "Jesus loves the children" and builds, repetitively, as Ka-Spel's voice is progressively manipulated/mutilated to an electronic murmur). Your Children features mostly organic, percussion-and-base driven songs that are mostly low-key ruminations on spiritual themes, many starting out as discernable and coherent songs and gradually turning into a kind of jam-band psychedelic porridge. Niels Van Hoornblower's sax gets a lot of time on this particular album (recalling the earlier 1992/3 pairing Shadow Weaver and Malachi), as does the acoustic guitar. This is an intoxicating, late-night record for contemplative moods. Gentle and "middle-of-the-road" for LPD, sans the usual songs about tragic beauty and the evils of abortion—except for the title, of course. My favorite track is "Bad Hair," which features a slow-building, repetitive guitar strum and electronic bloop for seven minutes as Ka-Spel whisper-sings "will you stand next to me, will you cast nets for me . . . will you accept me?"
Marconi Union:Distance: This is by far my most played album of the year. Given my taste for Harold Budd and all things minimal and ambient, when I heard this I almost melted (indeed, it is the ambient sound of melting Josh, or at least Josh writing or studying or reading in the bath tub). Soft guitar strums cascade over gentle, unobtrusive percussive loops as whirrs of glitch and static and synth sweeps build and relax, all in a minor key or melancholic dronish sort of way. Next to the Delays, this is my second favorite album of the year. Contemplative and moody and electronic but somehow also authentic. On the All Saints label, of course.
The Rapture: Pieces of the People We Love: Disco-punk with more handclaps and cowbell than the last album, which is definitely a great thing! Pieces is the roller-skating album of 2006! Lead singer sounds like a young Robert Smith beat upside the head by James Brown. I've been a fan of the Rapture since they started out as a fuzzy punk outfit and listened to them morph into the money-making party-music machine. Old time fans have deserted them, but I, for one, find the disco-bug they got in their butt quite fun! Almost every track is dance-floor groove-juice, and the lyrics are pretty standard ("C'mon give it to me," and so on), but the bass is sooooooo dirty. We likes the dirty bass! Stand out track: "Get Myself Into It," a disco drum beat with sax fills and bass very high up in the mix. Just a fun, disco, punk groove thing. Pieces is this year's Hot Fuss (but better, cause this gang don't do the self-important thing).
Ratatat: Classics: Hand claps! I say: 2006 was the year of hand claps in pop music! Righteous! Ratatat has some hand-clapping in some of their songs. But what they ain't got is vocals. Instead, they play guitars. They play guitars like percussion instruments. They play guitars like voices. And they play guitars in harmony—they do lil' guitar duets. It's like dualing banjos, only they ain't dueling and they ain't banjos. Ratatat mix guitars and lo-fi electronic to produce melodic groves of non-dueling guitar solos, and sometimes with fake cat roars. This album is righteous, somewhere between 70s cheese and pomo-electro-beats. I don't know how else to describe it.
She Wants Revenge: [Self-titled]: Well, I always feel dirty when I recommend an album that you can buy at Target (that is, that I bought at Target for $6.99), but She Wants Revenge has all right ingredients to make it a VH-1 People's Choice award winner. This band's fantastic retro-80s sound is perfectly timed for my demographic: thirty-somethings are now the target of Targets and prime-time programming. Every track features the leads tortured, 80s moan to bass-heavy mixes of songs that sound like they were written in 1988. "Sister" is a great example of the album as a whole: the song opens with a repetitive guitar strum reminiscent of Joy Division, and the tortured voice of the vocalist begins telling a story of a devout woman who took him home to make love as "the angels are watching." "You can hurt me/do whatever you like" the chorus repeats, a consistent lyrical theme throughout the album: sadism is fun!. Well, this album is naughty. And it's a ton of fun!
Spank Rock: Yoyoyoyoyo: She Want's Revenge may be naughty, but they're nothing compared to the "ass tapping" ambition of Spank Rock! Well, the lyrical themes are par for the hip-hop course, as this band first got noticed for their single "Backyard Betty" which repeats "Ass and boobs, ass and boobs, I'd tap the ho, tap the ho!" This album, however, is not quite hip-hop and not quite electro, but a combination of the two. Originally from Philly, Spank Rock have a distinctive electronic sound that relies on old school rap beats that are re-processed and transformed into deep electronic baselines; it's definitely party music and dance-floor friendly, but different in that many of the vocals are self-samples layered on top of one another and re-re-repeated and re-wound. I swear the same cat roar sampled by Ratatat is sampled here in "Touch Me"—maybe they should do an album together (and yes! "Touch Me" has processed hand-claps too!).
Stuart Staples: Leaving Songs: Stuart Staples has such a unique voice, deep but not yet Cohen, a little Willard Grant Conspiracy but not as misanthropic in sentiment or mood . I'm sure the comparisons to Cohen are out there because his back-ups sometimes sound like "the Angels," but the flavor is altogether different---perhaps a bit more optimistic. Hammond organ beds foreground a slow, acoustic guitar build to brass horn fills, chimes, and xylophone on the lead track, "Goodbye to Old Friends," which echoes in a strange way, the academic life: "it's not that I don't love you/or am tired of your ways/if I could only take you with me/if I could only ease this pain." Those of you in long distance relationships know what I mean. This is a great road trip album or late night drinking album. You'll either love his voice or hate it, but, fans of Cohen will probably dig it. It's a marvelously crafted album (and it comes paired with a repress of his first album---not as good, but still good).
White Rose Movement: Kick: Heavy, dirty baselines and repetitive guitar strumming, and the occasional hand-clap percussive, mark the White Rose Movement as party to that 80s retro-thing. What can I say? I'm a child of the 80s and this album hits all the right buttons. But whereas we might describe She Wants Revenge as the U.S. hetero 80s retro, this is the British faggy retro: Skinny sexy lead singer with a snotty British accent singing "I wanna get straight/I wanna put you through/cos in a darkened room/you orchestrate your moves/Whipcrack/Girls in the back." Do you know what it means? I don't either, but it sounds naughty! I'll forego describing how good this album is and just provide you a link to the video for this stand-out track; please do take note of the hand claps (and here's a game: what side does the yellow-pants hottie dress on?).
Thom Yorke: The Eraser: Given the last few Radiohead albums, the direction Yorke takes on his solo effort is not surprising: looped samples and synthetic beats provide the backdrop for slurrily pronounced lyrical moaning. The title-track is redolent of the whole: two sampled piano chords repeat until an electronic beat sets in, and then York begins his sloppy singing. By the time he's at the chorus, there are ghostly moans that echo in waves. As the song continues, new elements pile into the song, such as random electronic bloops and bleeps, and the faint sound of strings. The entire album is mostly structured similar, low-key and mostly percusso-glitchy. It's a beautiful album that represents how influential Yorke (and his friends, not to mention Bjork) have been in stretching the boundary of what counts as "pop." Had this album appeared five years ago, many folks would have been baffled. We know how to listen to it now . . . thanks Thom.
And finally, an innovation for the best-of post! Here are TWO OF THE MOST HYPED AND OVERRATED ALBUMS OF THE YEAR:
The Hold-Steady: Boys and Girls in America: I listened to it twice, and this must be a good live act, because the album, to quote Lita Ford, "ain't no big thang." Every lyric is about tortured manhood, doing drugs and getting wasted, which is good for, well, exorcizing your metrosexual, doing drugs, and getting wasted, but what about the rest of the week? Sing-talk style lyrics that veer into cheesy territory, power chords aplenty, but . . . bleh. I don't get it.
The Killers: Sam's Town: Overdone Meatloaf from a Flower that would be Bruce Springsteen or Bono. Such shite, really. "When You Were Young?" Yeah, he looked like Jesus: what the fuck does that mean?. If you're going to be a songwriter, your songs either have to make delicious nonsense (e.g. early R.E.M.) or poetic sense, or something. This album is just so arrogant, but not in a good way (e.g., first Strokes album). Hot Fuss was such a fun party album, snotty, you know, a groove thing, but on heavy rotation during my road trips. Now we have pretensions to grandeur . . . but Joshua Tree this album ain't. It's ultimately forgettable gestures to stadium rock and ballads and, barring a few tracks, will not leave any tracks in your conscience in a year's time. Enjoyable but still mediocre.