Ken's cool "Best albums of the year" thread

[frag]

Wait, I lied. Apparently it was released in April. Why the hell did I have to get the import then? Bastards.

[rockysigman]

What album are you talking about?

[frag]

kenholzman said:

frag said:

You'd be happy to know that Whatever You Say I Am... finally grew on me, and I do enjoy listening to it now

'Bout time. ;D

I still can't stand Beck, though. Sorry.

I'm not a big fan of Beck either. But Sea Change impressed me enough that I wanted to hear his second outing with Godrich. Those are the only two albums of his I listen to, if that puts any perspective on it.

[frag]

rockysigman said:

What album are you talking about?

The best album of '05, duh.

[rockysigman]

I hate you sometimes.

[frag]

Is that to say that other times you love me?

[Weeping_Guitar]

kenholzman said:

One that definitely won't make it for me is Dylan's latest. I tried to revisit this again a while back, and it still sounds like a bad Dylan imitation rather than the real thing. Easily the most disappointing thing I've heard this year.

That's funny because I listened to it this morning and it's still just about the best thing I've heard this year. Keep trying, bucko.

[kool]

kenholzman said:

Kool - did you pick up the latest Pearl Jam?

It's currently collecting dust on my hard drive. I'm not going to criticize the album, since I do think it sounds good and is an improvement over the last two, I just feel like I've outgrown them.

I'm surprised you like that album that much. If any album released this year is full of guitar and vocal wankery*, than it's definitely Avocado. ;D

*_{© 2006 KenHolzman Publications. All Rights Reserved. Used without permission of the author.}

[kmc]

frag said:

The best album of '05 has yet to see release in the states. Arrgh.

Broken Social Scene's s/t came out October of last year, frag.

[phil]

For what it's worth ... Coming from England ...


The definitive top 10 albums of the year


Can't be bothered to wade through all the different top albums of the year lists? Never fear, for Jude Rogers has done it for you, then hit the calculator to reveal the overall critics' top 10 of 2006

Wednesday December 13, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Ah, top ten albums of the year round-ups! They start to fall like tiny, pretty snowflakes in November, getting us all excited for the coming of the winter, but by mid-December there's blizzards of the buggers.

But what would happen, I thought the other day, if someone put all the albums in these lists together in a super-computer and saw what came top of the pops? Granted, I didn't have a super-computer, but I had an inky pen, a shonky calculator, a stack of magazines, a sheaf of record shop polls and some website verdicts strongarmed off the internet - literally all the top tens I could find that were in order of preference.

I suddenly had a mission: to work out which album the critics considered the best of the best. Ten points were to be given to a No1 placing, nine points to a No2, all the way down to one point for whoever snuck in for last orders at No10. So, at this point in time, barring all forthcoming surveys, behold the top ten of 2006 to bury all top tens...

10: The Fratellis - Costello Music (14) tied with CSS - Cansei De Ser Sexy (14)

The chart kicks off with some youngsters. "Fucking incredible after 32 pints of Stella, while sitting in a pool of vomit" was Maxim's charming critique of The Fratellis' debut effort, presumably while Greil Marcus quaked in his sensible critic's shoes. "Arguably the year's catchiest record", quivered Tiscalimusic.com, a comment I considered a little rich given that they placed both Bob Dylan and The Feeling above the Glaswegian rock and rollers, and that I listened to this album twice before it disappeared from my ears and my grey matter forever.

The other mouthy debut tying for 10th was much more up my rua (that's Portuguese for "street", you dirty devils). Gold stars to CSS, the Brazilian post-punk bawlers who brand Paris Hilton a bitch, deem music "my hot hot sex" and tell listeners to "suck my art tit". How refreshing. "A vibrant testament to that age-old adage that sex sells," wibbled Rough Trade, rather mindlessly, while the NME's critics put it in at No5, lapping up every filthy moment.

8: The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers (15)

Mojo's No1 album of the year, by Jack White and Brendan Benson's bluesy rock "supergroup", also raised the pulse to a pace on tiscali.music (their No6), got me air-drumming on the bus home, as happens most evenings, but flatlined completely in the polls elsewhere. "Giddy...heavy-riffing...hair-shaking" trembled Stevie Chick, troubling the old Mojo pacemaker, and the barnstorming band celebrated with the magazine in person with a bottle of Berocca vitamin supplement. How very gauche.

7: Lily Allen - Alright, Still (16)

"The hottest princess in pop!", Mixmag bubbled and brimmed, giving pop's cheeky young charmer a well-deserved slot at No3. "Didn't get the musical props it deserved: too much fun and Lily's a girl," added the Observer Music Monthly, rather sagely. Rough Trade - the shop Allen barged into on her video for the re-released *LDN* - praised her witty "Marmite (love or hate) pop persona". For her lyrical nous and her quick delivery alone, get that toast on, I say.

6: Burial - Burial (18)

"An instant classic," said Fact Magazine, moistening visibly; calling it the post-rave equivalent of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, post-punk's "requiem for a collective dream", and putting forward the libellous theory that it came from an "ecstasy damaged brain". Enjoying the record's wonderful weirdness, I get what they're saying, but have recently moved house to spare the legal letters. "Burial's night-bus innerscapes marked the Capital's pre-dawn reveries," woozed the BBC Collective, before nodding off on an N38 to Clapton Pond, whereas Mixmag preferred a simpler analogy: "the Massive Attack of dubstep".

4: Joanna Newsom - Ys (27) tied with Muse - Black Holes And Revelations (27)

Meadowlarks, dancing bears, that harp and that voice (insert "bloody" before "voice" if your ear isn't as attuned as mine is to Newsom's whelping soprano), and here's my favourite album in an age. Uncut shoehorned it in at No4, while OMM, claiming it "pushed all known boundaries", let it jostle its bell-sleeved arms between Dylan and Ghostface Killah at No7 (whose reactions, sadly, remain unreported). The BBC Collective were similarly dazzled: "Did you ever think you'd care so much about woodland fables?," they pressed us.

No I didn't, but I wasn't too bothered about supermassive black holes either before this year. And for that I blame Muse, God bless their spacey socks, and their latest fabulous slice of David Icke-lite. NME put them at No3, while Q - appearing in this definitive top 10 for the first time, fact fans - whooped rowdily in favour of "rock's mad scientists"; adding helpfully that the Teignmouth trio were "never knowingly understated". Maxim put it rather more bluntly: they're "daft, overblown pomp". And if pop music can't give you that, readers, then what can it give?

3: Bob Dylan - Modern Times (46)

Only number three? Bobby Zimmerman, who could fart into a microphone and get six stars out of five, comes up short in the chart, despite Uncut giving him pole position, Q describing his album tracks less as "songs, more 10 tablets brought down from the mountain", and Mojo calling their second favourite record of the year, rather bizarrely, "a life-raft of interwoven oxymorons". Modern Times was a rollicking, thigh-slapping, bright burst of life from the fella, but let's not get silly now, shall we?

2: Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (56)

Didn't it come out bloody years ago? No, it did not - Alex Turner's caustic Yorkshire poetry, those big fearless basslines, and all that spit and wit, first arrived on shiny discs and thick vinyl in January of this very year. WPSIATWIN tops the charts for Q ("[their lineage] begins with The Kinks, passes through The Who, The Jam and Oasis"), OMM ("the freshest sounding record of 2006") and the NME, and gets glowing report cards from Mojo and Uncut. Maxim reduces the Arctics' epoch-defining sound to this prosaic suggestion - "listen to while picking a microwaveable snack out of teeth" - while the BBC Collective sums up its power rather more elegantly: "a thrilling document of the moment when everything went right".

All of which leaves us with... (Drum roll, please...)

1: Hot Chip - The Warning (66)

Beating Dylan and the Monkeys to a pulp with their Joe 90 bottle-tops and primary-coloured Bontempis? Yes indeed, my little cherubs, for in terms of this top ten of top tens this is so; and waddling through the workings, it's easy to see why. The Warning was a brilliant pop record that connected with the rock hack as much as the disco kid (see Uncut, NME, Rough Trade, Maxim, Mixmag, Fact Tiscali, BBC Collective and Pure Groove for the proof); full of Beach Boys harmonies, catchy melodies, and hard pulsing beats. "Body-buildingly brilliant!," sweated Maxim; "Brave and deliberately different!" raved Rough Trade. And Mixmag captured its charms in a nutshell: "The perfect marriage of pop music and elegant lo-fi electronica... had something for everyone".

[skvorisdeadsorta]

I think what I like about the Arctic Monkeys is that they are just fun. Totally fun and it's nice to see Hot Chip at the top of someone's list.

I also must admit that I have a very fond affection for Lily Allen.

[Paul]

I only have Stadium Arcadium and Avocado from '06....between the two I gots to go w/ Pearl Jam. Shocker there, eh?

[Thorngrub]

God how I hate fun.

[riley]

That Hot Chip disc is fantastic.

[luke]

Yeah, it's great, but that list sucks. The Raconteurs album was terrible.