10: Scott WalkerThe Drift
[4AD]
Like a malcontent Santa Claus, Scott Walker's gift to the music world this year was a sack of coal-black art songs, dumped centerstage and set on fire. It's strong stuff: Ghosts of European and American political crimes howling from the grave, percussion constructed from gut punches to a side of beef, scary string arrangements that tilt the floor downward, and heavy guitar sludge that hits like first-wave Swans. Presiding over this palace of gloom is Walker's gnarled, throaty croon, a gallows moan that braids sweetness and violence. His trembling vibrato can be overwhelming, but Walker's histrionics are kept on a short leash of meticulous control. Amid the endgame of microscopic sub-genres and unconvincing pastiches that is contemporary music, Walker's hard slap reminds us that music can be both High Art and utterly new. --Drew Daniel
09: BorisPink
[Diwphalanx/Southern Lord]
Pink's liner notes peel apart into small individual squares resembling either Pantone chips or acid tabs, but the implication was surely meant to be ambiguous: Whatever you were looking for, you would find. This meant gauzy, billowing meditations; disembodied vocals and dirt-caked guitar tones; and an echoing thicket of colliding feedback and gong reverb. For a trio so ready to fall on its collective face, they found a way to make vertigo their chief strength. Attempting everything at once, all elements magically congealed; only on Pink will you hear three musicians committed so deeply to going exactly where their songs took them. --Zach Baron
08: Grizzly BearYellow House
[Warp]
2005's Horn of Plenty earned Grizzly Bear a number of comparisons to Brooklyn brethren Animal Collective, but Yellow House outed the band as its very own kind of critter. The album was recorded in Edward Droste's mother's Cape Cod home, and that familial, clean sheets, cookies-baking warmth is weirdly palpable: Yellow House is cozy, nuanced, and lovingly produced, as delicate as a fistful of dried flowers. Tracks like "Little Brother", with its acoustic intro, wisps of flute, and slow descent into psychedelia, and vintage waltz "Marla" (written by Droste's own grandmother) are dense with dizzying vocals, plucked banjo, and dusty, room-filling arrangements, all showcasing Grizzly Bear's strength for imbuing scratchy, archaic sounds with a sense of safety and warmth. --Amanda Petrusich
07: ClipseHell Hath No Fury
[Jive]
You could file it in the last two years' "crack rap boom" if you want but you'd be selling Clipse's climactic second album short. Hell Hath No Fury might detail crack-dealing and all its ugly vagaries, but it's also an exercise in self-awareness: Its street tales follow two balls-of-fire rappers (Pusha and Malice) for whom the game-- and the society that helped them into it-- has turned frigid. Hardly a glorification of the drug dealer lifestyle, Hell Hath No Fury's immediacy, no-future misanthrope, and grim delivery feel borderline apocalyptic. Even tracks like "Dirty Money" and "Trill", which are supposed to be about "fun," ring like death knells for materialism. Pharrell's gruesome, impersonal space beats may sound futuristic, but these lyricists' tales are as old-- and maybe as effective-- as Greek tragedy. --Julianne Shepherd
06: LiarsDrum's Not Dead
[Mute]
Brooklyn-to-Berlin trio Liars have one of the strangest career arcs in recent memory, but even their staunchest champions couldn't have anticipated the avant-rock masterstroke of their third album, Drum's Not Dead. Following through on the murky promise of 2004's widely panned concept album They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, the band hunkered down in an East German radio facility, using the varying acoustics of different rooms to naturally inform the atmosphere of each song.
The result is an album cut with dark, devastating simplicity, colored by ritualistic percussion, translucent guitar figures, and Angus Andrew's unearthly falsetto, which hovers like a phantom. The fabric of tracks like "Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack" or "Let's Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack" is rent with shadowy turmoil, depicting an ongoing conflict that finds fragile resolution in the exquisite album-closing ballad "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack". Gorgeous and unfathomable, Drum's Not Dead is a landmark achievement from a group that many had virtually left for dead, but whose prospects now seem more limitless than ever. --Matthew Murphy
05: The Hold SteadyBoys and Girls in America
[Vagrant]
Almost every description of the Hold Steady invokes alcoholic imagery: a bar band with drinking songs. But such condescension doesn't do Boys and Girls in America justice; it isn't so much a dashed-off, beer-soaked record as an unflinching and literary document of social intoxication, from its Kerouac-quoting thesis statement-- "Boys and girls in America/ Have such a sad time together"-- to the 11 one-acts that repeatedly drive the observation home.
Craig Finn fills his dioramas with characters using substances to stave off boredom and fuel desperate, fleeting collisions with people in similar states; in most songs, the drugs get equal billing. The only way to accurately depict these interactions was to reach back to an era of bigger rock sounds-- not just Bruuuuce, but also Thin Lizzy and the Band-- that do the alchemy of making the everyday seem momentous. If alcohol's most seductive effect is making one feel like they're the main character in a movie of their own life, the Hold Steady made the bombastically bipolar soundtrack for that feeling. --Rob Mitchum
04: Ghostface KillahFishscale
[Def Jam]
Fishscale was officially released in March, but unofficial versions were devoured and crapped out on blogs for months prior. Upon hitting stores, it was showered with praise by critics from your local paper to NPR-- trusted sources of hip-hop since never. In other words, no matter when you heard it or in what form, Fishscale became your favorite rap record, maybe for hours, maybe forever.
Exactly how it became Ghostface Killah's most lauded is more difficult to explain. It's not his most compelling album lyrically, nor his most progressive album sonically. Still, Fishscale most vividly displayed Ghostface's versatility. Even when forced into revision by his abiding (but impatient) fans, he retained his signature faculties-- ludicrous imagination, elaborate storytelling, tortured soul singing, and dirty jokes for days-- all while evolving into a wiser, gentler armchair hustler whose charisma spanned race, class and creed: He was still Ghost, but now he was everybody's. --Pete Macia
03: Joanna NewsomYs
[Drag City]
Ys is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious albums on this list, which is not always a good thing. But Newsom's ambition is the quiet, professional kind, and complaining about it feels a little like standing at the finish line of a marathon and pointing out that the runners look a little haggard. She's summoned up every shred of her compositional training, refined her voice from a curiosity to an expressive marvel, and shot past the average singer's confessionals into a complex personal mythology of manipulative circus animals, astronomer siblings, and one "awfully real gun." She directs arrangements that veer from shades of Chinese opera to a sort of Broadway baroque.
As fans and detractors talk about fairies, debate the validity of the pronoun "thee," and argue the aesthetics of it-- as if she's on her deathbed and can't just try something else next year-- what slips quietly, professionally under the radar are the triumphs of her songwriting and craft. In the middle of this record, she sits alone with her harp for 10 minutes, asking stuffed birds "Why the long face?"-- it feels like four minutes, tops, and you can spend at least two of them right up toward the edge of your seat. --Nitsuh Abebe
02: TV on the RadioReturn to Cookie Mountain
[4AD/Interscope]
This could be the only record this year I never tired of. Each time I heard it, I liked it more-- and I heard it a lot. In one sense, it's a fairly conventional rock record, with big chords, hummable refrains, chorus hooks, and even a few bridges. Peter Gabriel, U2, and other none-too-hip references are spread out for everyone to hear, though the fantastic singing gives TV on the Radio their own spin on the rock anthem. Still, David Sitek's production-- sounding like nothing else out there at the moment-- wormed its way in between the songs' cracks, all thick and sludgy and opaque, ensuring that the biggest moments never hit all at once. Of course, even after all this time and so many listens, I still don't really know what the songs are actually about. But I guess that'll come in 2007. --Mark Richardson
01: The KnifeSilent Shout
[Rabid/Mute]
Entering the year, could there have been a more unexpected consensus pick for 2006 than the Knife? OK, so the Swedish brother/sister duo got a boost from the Sony Bravia commercial featuring José Gonzalez' rendition of their brilliant "Heartbeats", and that exposure served as unintended cross-promo for Silent Shout, helping anoint them among the upper echelons of this year's blog-rock royalty. But nothing else on the blogs sounded like this. Masters of their own record label, Rabid, the Knife may be indie, but nowhere would their shuddering trance arpeggios and steely technoid programming qualify as "rock."
Vocals aside, Silent Shout is deeply rooted in contemporary European techno at a moment when techno remains deeply unfashionable among American listeners, for all but a few Europhilic holdouts. Retaining the merest echo of their last album's electro-pop perk, Silent Shout plunges into the darkest thickets like a Japanese horror flick, turning sunny-day steel drums into instruments of harmonic torture and processing vocals in a way that decouples the "human" from "expression."
Perhaps what stuck out for listeners, despite the shivering digital luster of it all, was the obvious attention to old-school notions of musicality: Here, no matter the synthetic nature of its source, a sound is never a static thing but a breathing, heaving presence that pushes air across the room helter-skelter. It didn't hurt that, no matter the studio-bred nature of their music, the Knife built their popularity the old-fashioned way, by touring-- embellishing their playback-heavy concerts with suggestive video projections and ominous theatrics.
Ultimately, Silent Shout thrives on its uncomfortable balance of mystery and transparency. The way they structure their tracks, every sound sticks out like a lone wire waiting to be stripped, but the more you tug on any given strand, the more all the rest-- unstable harmonics, queered pitches, android shanties, looping tales of forest families-- is plunged into the most addictive kind of inscrutability. --Philip Sherburne
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