The Best Our Favorite National Albums of 2006

In Which The Flagpole Music Department Realizes That Yes, There Is Music Beyond Our Borders, And Lists 20 Albums That Kept Us Going Throughout The Year

originally published December 27, 2006

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TV on the Radio

Return to Cookie Mountain

If the members of TV on the Radio were students at Hogwarts rather than a New York art-rock band, right about now they'd be excited about the Triwizard Tournament and about to have their name inexplicably arise from the Goblet of Fire. But in terms of progress and talent, they'd be ready to take on Voldemort already. It's been barely three years since the release of the Young Liars debut EP, and it seems like magic that the band can be this good this quickly. 2004's Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes never quite gelled as a whole album, but after a two-year deep breath, Return to Cookie Mountain exploded onto the scene this year. The soul first demonstrated on Young Liars' cover of The Pixies' "Mr. Grieves" is still the focal point of the band, but the kaleidoscopic pallet has deepened impressively. Straddling so many genres is hard work, but TV on the Radio makes it look easy. Expelliarmus, y'all!
Belle & Sebastian

The Life Pursuit

Rarely does a band so explicitly model the process of growing up. Belle & Sebastian started off clinging to its mother's skirt, shy but cute, then went through a gawky puberty of half-successful and half-embarrassing experimentation. The Life Pursuit is the band all growed up: maybe not as charming as it once was, but with more than enough self-confidence to make up for it. B&S reinterprets glam's legacy by ignoring hair metal entirely and coming up with something… not better, but thrillingly different, as if the stringently observed genre divisions of the '70s never existed. Belle & Sebastian made a party album, and it's fantastic.
Art Brut

Bang Bang Rock & Roll

Like most good things, at first Art Brut seemed to be a joke. A well-delivered joke, sure, but kinda uncommitted: the hot new MP3 with a funny name. On the album, though, Art Brut kids for real. In the first song, nerd pinup Eddie Argos yells, "And yes, this is my singing voice / it's not irony, it's not rock 'n' roll / we're just talking / to the kids," a breathtaking quadruple axle of a lyric that packs three different levels of meaning into four lines and declares its commitment, as all great jokes do, to truth. The best rock album released in America this year.
Califone

Roots & Crowns

Obfuscation versus revelation. Future versus past. Bloody blues-folk versus hypermodern electricity. Stark simplicity versus deep complexity. Spooky versus optimistic. If lines were drawn between polar opposites, the intersection of any number of contrary forces would chart the location of Chicago's Califone. A seriously deep journey through numerous spectra, Roots & Crowns is the strangest album Califone has created. It also may be the best.
Lupe Fiasco

Food & Liquor

From the over-hyped (Rhymefest) to the unnecessarily obtuse (k-os) to the where'd-all-that-talent-go (Kelis) to the dull and predictable (um… the rest of it), 2006 was a pretty low point for both mainstream and underground hip hop. But writing here at the tail end of 2006, it's hard to imagine this Chicago rapper's "Kick, Push" - the summer breakout paean to young skateboarders in love - feeling any less open, liberating and smooth even given several more months to think about it. The album does have its low points, but they're mitigated by the luscious Jill Scott collab of "Daydreamin'" (which at times calls to mind Massive Attack's "Daydreaming") and the truly entertaining EC Comics-inspired zombie-gangsta tale "The Cool." Here's hoping Lupe Fiasco's boldly structured yet low-key rapping style sticks.
Grizzly Bear

Yellow House

Pretty, sparkly. Mommy, can I keep it? A couple of years ago, there was considerable buzz over little ol' Grizzly Bear's bedroom recording Horn of Plenty. The debut was even reissued with a bonus disc of who's-who remixes. The hype was all a bit much, but when sophomore effort Yellow House was released on Warp, eyebrows shot up. Grizzly Bear is now a quartet rather than a single dude in super lo-fi mode, and this is one of the most consistently enthralling records of '06. It's the perfect sunshiny summer record, but it permeates with autumnal melancholy. Weaving the laptop textures into the folk-pop to infinitely greater effect than on the debut; each of the 10 tracks shines with its own wonder. If Brian Wilson were in his prime today, he'd be encouraged to be a little depressed, and the result might be as mystifying as Yellow House.
Clint Mansell

The Fountain soundtrack

Are there any other composers today whose film scores are so immediately identifiable? John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Danny Elfman… Clint Mansell's name belongs alongside theirs. Recruiting the Kronos Quartet and Scot rock act Mogwai to perform his orchestrations, Mansell has created the most purely emotional and moving piece of music this year. Of course, it wouldn't have been possible without Darren Aronofsky's transcendently compelling film, but even alone the music conveys the same mystery, awe and emotion as The Fountain's rich imagery. Remarkable.
Junior Boys

So This is Goodbye

For spending your time kind of dancing, kind of making out. Hot on the heels of 2004's surprisingly awesome debut Last Exit, synth-pop duo Junior Boys returned this year with So This is Goodbye. Again, a surprise: this one's even better. The music's so fascinating because it's cold and mechanical, but at the same time silky and smooth. The best of this style achieves just that, but Junior Boys makes it sound so damned easy. Meticulous beats and synth squiggles make the perfect bed for Jeremy Greenspan's modest vocals. It's difficult to describe why a genre that's been mined so deeply (and generically) sounds so fresh here, but robots have served as seducers all year. This stuff should be all over the radio. Sigh.
Final Fantasy

He Poos Clouds

In an era where serious-seeming bands trade their signifiers of importance for papal indulgences - "Please ignore our commerciality and pretend we are a shared secret when you write about us for your website or print publication!" - Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett records complex art music in a purist way and releases it via an artists' collective without ever taking himself too seriously. He constructs strings and pianos around songs about computer games, gentrification and angry infatuation. It's doubtful any other album this year was as well-thought-out, or as inspirational. This is the sort of adventurous music that gets cited as an influence far into the future, and these are the kinds of stories that stick with you for just as long.
Camera Obscura

Let's Get Out of This Country

This is a great non-Christmas Christmas album. It has nothing to do with the reason for the season, but it evokes pinpoints of colored light in the dark through its sharpness and occasional dusky organ music. Tracyanne Campbell sings strongly both in favor of her right to eventual heartbreak (because the path there is so sweet) and her right to let a love go easily, and the background of strings, twangs and hums reaches too far back in its nostalgia to be truly twee.
Sparklehorse

Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain

You might have at some point in the past several years thought, "Yeah, I like Sparklehorse, but I'm kinda done with it. I've got three albums, and that's enough." But then you might've (should've) heard Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, the first album from Mark Linkous in almost five years. And then you would've realized you were wrong. Linkous has always been skilled at combining grimy, jagged noises with uptempo, fuzzy and nervy pop, and the new album is no different. Arpeggio-heavy, it sounds a little like the Beatles worked through a meat grinder and then refracted through a prism.
Gnarls Barkley

St. Elsewhere

The monster track "Crazy" has come out of so many cell phones this year that everybody's close to sick of it, but we're all just as much to blame for keeping the album in our stereos for a good part of this year. Joining forces with Atlanta's Cee-Lo Green was the best move Danger Mouse has made since splicing Jay-Z and the Beatles. Dripping with soul and both members' characteristic goofiness, St. Elsewhere hops and jumps with all the right vibes. It'd be easy to go on about "Crazy" and its 2.5 minutes of elated perfection - turn to the feature in this issue for that - but the best news is still that the remainder of the album, particularly the ebullient "Smiley Faces" and the vivid "Just a Thought," holds up surprisingly well. Even André 3000 is probably jealous of Gnarls Barkley.
Growing

Color Wheel

Every now and then, a genre-defining album comes along. A Daydream Nation or Loveless that takes everything that came before it, breaks all the rules and produces a mind-bending phoenix. In the world of abstract guitar music, Color Wheel is that record. Joe Denardo and Kevin Doria have restlessly taken Growing to an entirely new plane. Building on the power-drone, near-metal riffage and restive beauty of their earlier releases, the two now function as visionaries, playing off of one another like jazz veterans. The music segues seamlessly, shifting from gorgeous picked melodies pureed by effects pedals to sculpted noise to pure drifting bliss to realms previously unknown. "Fancy Period" alone makes this album of the year and features too many jaw-dropping elements to list here. But above all, Color Wheel blends hypnotism and rocking out in a way never quite heard before.
Man Man

Six Demon Bag

The best thing about Man Man's Six Demon Bag is that listening to it transports anyone who was at Team Clermont's Summer Festival earlier this year back to that electrifying 45-minute set. The members of this Philadelphia six-piece performed in tennis clothes and war paint and swung nonstop through their Beefhearty, Zappafied tunes, complete with two drummers positioned at the front of the stage to face one another and leap off their stools in unison mid-song. It felt like what might have happened if six apes had been zapped by an evolvo-ray, turned into men, spent years at work on a pirate ship and then decided to start a band.
Scissor Sisters

Ta-Dah!

The Scissor Sisters became the only actual successes of the much-lauded New York scene by getting Britain to fall in love with them, and they reciprocated on their sophomore release by ditching New York's gritty sensuality for something more British, polished and poetic. This makes it harder to love, but don't mistake its distance for coldness: there's passion here, but for life rather than living. The surfaces groove and soothe, but dig beneath the surface and you'll find a complex celebration of melancholy. It's a different experience than their all-killer debut, but there are few other albums that you can both dance to and put on after a funeral.
Liars

Drum's Not Dead

After going way over the music industry's heads with 2004's They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, Liars returned this year with a masterpiece. Drum's Not Dead features everything that made the band interesting, but now there is stunning cohesion and superior songwriting. Bold statement: It is here that the former New Yorkers (now based in Kingston, Jamaica) truly surpassed their progenitors. Yes, it's true, Liars is now a better band than the Pop Group, Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, et al. Pounding tribalism and monolithic, monotone incantations pair up with grainy Radioheadesque numbers. Most of the album locks into a mid-tempo groove and grinds away deliciously, but then there are stunning moments that shock you out of the reverie. "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack" is easily song of the year, and proof that Liars can break your heart.
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

The Proposition soundtrack

Bummed that Nick Cave's recent albums have sunken into schmaltzy, pedestrian lyricism? Turn no further than the moody, evocative soundtrack to brutal Australian cowboy flick The Proposition, for which Cave also wrote the screenplay. The former Birthday Party powerhouse recruited his longtime collaborator Warren Ellis (violinist for The Dirty Three and Cave's Bad Seeds) and they wrote the haunting score together, with Cave on piano and vocals (although "moans and whispers" might be a better credit) and Ellis on violin, loops and samples. Other Dirty Three folks show up occasionally, but the focus here is on Ellis' searing bow work, a perfectly subtle complement to the dustiness of eroded lands. (And a Western score that doesn't simply ape Morricone? Finally!)
Boris

Pink

Bloody head, lovely blood. The countdown to the release of Japanese every-metal trio Boris' collaboration with mighty and evil doom-drone act Sunn O))) filled much of the year. When the momentous day finally came, Altar was definitely worth the wait, yet the superior album had been in the CD player for months. Pink is Boris' Dark Side of the Moon, meaning that it should be the record to vastly expand the respected band's fanbase. Stoner metal, sludge, doom metal - it's all still in the formula in spades, but now the band has mastered focusing its powers into a most destructive death ray. Flirting with shoegaze and ambience, Pink is a behemoth of a melting pot, horned head and shoulders above any other metal release this year. Hell, don't even call it metal. Call it everything that rocks in every way you can be rocked.
Snowglobe

Oxytocin

Best album title ever. Oxytocin is the hormone some gland shoots into your brain to make you feel happy and satisfied post-coitally (as well as at some other key times), promoting increase in trust and social bonding. The scientific advance that made it available aurally must have been under-publicized, but someone must have come up with that invention, as this album’s full of it. The lyrics often belie the feeling of the best hug ever that the harmonies promote, but we can ignore those and wrap ourselves up in the pure mathematical beauty of the sounds.
Girl Talk

Night Ripper

Mixing ain't easy, but Gregg Gillis, AKA Girl Talk, makes it look that way. He constructs maximalist mashups, hundred of pieces crammed into 16 songs that flow together in a mix greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of the easy jokes or shallowly transgressive kitsch that most mashups trade in, Gillis makes difficult music you can dance to, accumulating micromeanings in the collision of bits and the spaces between them, and it's absolutely thrilling. Night Ripper seems either too easy or too hard to be one of the year's best, but the energy it creates can't be denied.