Top 5 Albums of 2006

Reading some of the year-end retrospectives (especially Pitchfork's) confirmed what I had been feeling all year—2006 offered up an unprecedented breadth of musical brilliance, with few real dominant trends or fads, but just a whole lot of really interesting people doing amazing things with music—some of it incredibly innovative, quite a bit of it blissfully and gloriously derivative.
A list of five albums can't begin to do this breadth justice, so I will be posting later on some other albums which I really enjoyed this past year, but here are my desert-island top 5 best of 2006.

5. Voxtrot - Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives
Were I able to count all Voxtrot eps together as one glorious lp, it would easily and undeniably be at the top of this list. However, the Raised by Wolves ep is a 2005 release, I believe, and the Your Biggest Fan ep has only one really mind-blowing song ("Trouble"), so I'll stick to this ep and slot it at #5.
I started listening to Ramesh Srivastava's Austin-based band shortly after I got back from the South by Southwest music festival this spring. Unfortunately, or fortunately I guess, SXSW introduced me to so many new bands that I didn't really listen to them much until this fall, when they quickly became my most-listened to band.
Some congenial criticism of Voxtrot focuses on how much they owe to bands like The Smiths and Belle & Sebastian, and I do have to say, listening to them is like listening to all my favorite records--at once. And that's why I like them.

4. The Thermals - The Body, The Blood, The Machine
Another discovery this year, The Thermals are the most sonic fun I've had in 2006, or longer, probably. Ten nuggets of pure brash energy, abusively enjoyable guitar riffs, and hilarious lyrical excursions into alternate exegeses of Christian history and spirituality, The Thermals have all the elements which make The Hold Steady so great, but somehow manage to outdo them on all counts. You really have to listen to this album.


3. Regina Spektor - Begin to Hope
You know, I used to think that indie rock kids, being really enthusiastic about the quality of music that they listen to, would be a little less obsessed with how their favorite female artists looked. Yet I find attractiveness to be almost more obsessed about by some bloggers and writers, though more quietly and more subtly than in the mainstream. The blogasm over Lily Allen is just one example, but the photo coverage online of almost any Cat Power or Jenny Lewis concert seems a bit excessive.
At any rate, yeah, Regina Spektor is hot. She also produced what I think are the two best singles of the year ('Fidelity' and 'Better') and an album's worth of songs which could all be singles, and fine ones at that.

2. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Broom
I'm not going to try to hide the fact that, much like Voxtrot, SSLYBY is basically an accumulation, digestion, and expert reconstitution of a group of bands that I already liked. Pitchfork's review is right on the money here. There is almost a studied attempt at not being different from anybody that goes on throughout Broom. But why is that really such a bad thing?
I can understand that a music reviewer who, through a messy entanglement of passion and paychecks, does nothing but listen to all these bands until they bleed together anyway, might thank the music gods for something different and original like Animal Collective or Liars or someone to break up the emerging monotony. But if you don't spend all your conscious hours chained to a music library, you might think this album is really fucking good. I do, at any rate.

1. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
I may actually like all four of the other albums on this list more, but I have to acknowledge that they don't touch The Crane Wife in terms of ambition, talent, execution, or even beauty. The Crane Wife is jaw-droppingly good. The first time I listened to it, I spent most of my time gaping at the stereo. While I knew The Decemberists were a good, even great band, nothing they had done prepared me for the consistent perfection of this album. I cannot say enough in its favor.