CROSSROADS

December 30, 2006

Top 50 Albums of 2006 # 30-21

30: Belle and Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
[Matador]

By the time of The Life Pursuit, most people probably thought they had Belle and Sebastian figured out. The Scottish group's sixth album followed within a few short months of a live recording of If You're Feeling Sinister and an essential 2xCD compilation of their seven Jeepster-era EPs. Then again, most people slept on those records the first time around. So The Life Pursuit was probably doomed to become the one-time D.I.Y. band's most misunderstood album, even as its exuberant soulfulness and L.A. polish also made it the group's most accessible. But rather than fade into the post-glory MOR that word implies, The Life Pursuit explodes with love-- for pop, insects, misfits, choirgirls, and a divine power that may not even exist. Stuart Murdoch's canny wordplay and bold melodies keep the faith, from the opening theatrics to the urban country-Stones ennui of "Mornington Crescent". Punk may be dead, but here are 13 frivolous reasons to believe in just about anything. --Marc Hogan

29: Lily Allen
Alright, Still
[Parlophone/EMI]

From MySpace rumor to gloriously gobby pop star in less than a year, Lily Allen's public profile at times threatened to eclipse her music. This would be a shame as Alright, Still proved to be one of 2006's most enduringly rewarding pop albums. It was a bawdy comedy of North London manners and romantic hangovers, with a soundtrack expertly sourced from the likes of Lord Kitchener, Althea and Donna, Shampoo, Terry Hall, and the Happy Mondays. While she'll always stand accused by some of being a mere stageschool style-biter of the rawer Lady Sov, the best of her debut suggested that Allen might actually turn out to be the heir of another mordant kitchen-sink pop storyteller (and daughter of a famous dad): Kirsty MacColl. --Stephen Troussé

28: Cat Power
The Greatest
[Matador]

When people go to Memphis to record, it's usually to escape into a simpler past; either from the coastal machinery of the music biz or personal turmoil. Chan Marshall doesn't sound like she quite succeeded in evading the latter on The Greatest; throughout the record, her own woozy vocal and ponderous piano seems somehow at odds with the Muzak-slick brass and strings. But rifling through a historical genre wardrobe (gospel, soul, brittle country) in search of a life preserver isn't a futile effort, whether she's coldly watching herself hit bottom on "Hate" or charting a path to redemption on "Living Proof" or "Love & Communication". By all accounts, Chan Marshall left 2006 in a much healthier place than she started it, but The Greatest lingers as an eerie souvenir of her emotional battle's homestretch. --Rob Mitchum

27: Califone
Roots & Crowns
[Thrill Jockey]

It didn't come easy: After touring behind Heron King Blues in 2004, Califone collapsed. Struggling with a lack of motivation and his place as a musician, frontman Tim Rutili moved to Los Angeles, where he busied himself with film scores until chancing upon a mixtape graced by Psychic TV's "The Orchids". Obsessing over the song, he began writing, fell back in love with music, and finally, resaddled the band. A paean to resurrection bathed in electro-acoustic manipulation and flanked by Jim Becker's violin, "The Orchids" is the sonic and thematic epicenter of Roots & Crowns, an album that ties the threads of Califone's existence. Rutili's songs have rarely said so much so freely, and here, the thoughts and melodies come rendered in perfect detail with conviction, clarity, and reignited devotion. --Grayson Currin

26: Hot Chip
The Warning
[DFA/EMI]

For all its sly tech-pop wit and style, Hot Chip's 2004 debut, Coming on Strong, suffered from the ancient English affliction of bathos. But with The Warning, they shook off all that irony and understatement, sincerely embracing British art-pop tradition-- from Robert Wyatt to Brian Eno and New Order-- and making good on their abundant potential. "Over & Over" was a smartly dumb, brilliantly addictive dancefloor juggernaut, while both the wistful "Boy From School" and the Willie Mitchell-style ballad "Look After Me" showcased Alexis Taylor's reedy but affecting vocals, tugging on heartstrings without sacrificing any of their hipster poise. --Stephen Troussé

25: Justin Timberlake
FutureSex/LoveSounds
[Jive]

Justin Timberlake has a powerful, serpentine voice, but it's not suited for superhuman r&b pyrotechnics. It has a soft, timorous vulnerability, a lost-little-boy quality. When he sings about heartbreak, he sounds like he wants to crawl into a hole and die. When he sings about dancing, he sounds like he's seeing nightclub lights for the first time. When he sings about pimping, he sounds like a kid playing dress-up. But here, Timbaland takes that voice and traps it in a hall of mirror-balls, surrounding it with glistening strings, dizzy sci-fi synths, and itchy funk guitars. The result is a disco album both dazzling in its technical trickery and enormously satisfying in its emotional sweep. If an album this ambitiously weird can be one of the year's biggest sellers, we're in good shape. --Tom Breihan

24: Peter Bjorn and John
Writer's Block
[Wichita/V2]

One of the year's most misleadingly titled releases, Writer's Block is by far the most studiously crafted of Peter Bjorn and John's three full-lengths. Channeling romanticized 60s U.S. pop through the D.I.Y. filter of 80s New Zealand indie rock, the Stockholm trio's songs are more charmingly inventive here than ever: "Young Folks" fashions bongos and whistling into an elastic groove that's simultaneously soaring and navel-gazing; "Start to Melt" lays guitars and distortion like brick and mortar; "Let's Call It Off" shuffles on a floor tom/handclap beat and a goofily catchy chorus; and every last note sounds basted in liberal doses of reverb. So PB&J aren't fooling anyone with that title: Writer's Block evokes a sense of crippled creativity without falling victim to it, capturing the feeling of being uncomfortable in your own skin and wanting to be anywhere but wherever you are. --Stephen M. Deusner

23: Yo La Tengo
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
[Matador]

Even if home-run opener "Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" were the only great track on I Am Not Afraid of You..., the album would still be among Yo La Tengo's best of the decade. That extended guitar blissout not only fits snugly in the Ira Kaplan Hall of Fame (right alongside "The Evil That Men Do" and "Blue Line Swinger"), it's also a loud, clear sign that Yo La Tengo have relit their own eclectic flame. Their winning streak might have seemed on the verge of running its course with 2003's spotty Summer Sun, but even if its final track claims to be "The Story of Yo La Tango", I Am Not Afraid of You proves this trio still has tales to tell. --Marc Masters

22: LCD Soundsystem
45:33
[iTunes]

Dear LCD Soundsystem: Please break up. Ok, ok... just kidding. I'm probably one of the few Pitchfork writers who hasn't yet heard LCD's new album, but the first one is nowhere near as boring as everyone's post-facto making it out to be. And live, LCD smoke-- the hands aloft, ridiculous transition from "Yeah" to "Beat Connection" to Paperclip People's "Throw" was one those moments this year that's kept me from chasing bourbon with barbiturates. As of right now, though, I have no idea how James Murphy is gonna top this quickie exploitation number for a little-known shoe company. A multi-part "suite" that moves like a smoothly mixed DJ set and nods to Ash Ra Tempel mastermind Manuel Göttsching's E2-E4 along the way, 45:33 encompasses everything from an original space-disco re-edit of an original Foreigner-esque rock song to the prettiest microhouse this side of anything by actual Germans to spastic HI-NRG-- and it should finally silence anyone who thinks Murphy's just a cranky pastiche artist. Also, apparently you can jog to it. --Jess Harvell

21: Be Your Own Pet
Be Your Own Pet
[Ecstatic Peace/Universal]

Grumps might complain that the best thing about Be Your Own Pet is that their minor success helps bankroll the weirder stuff on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label, now that it's part of David Geffen's empire. But c'mon: These scruffy-shoed, dirty-faced teen angels might not be the second coming of X-Ray Spex, but little else this year ripped shit up with such screechy formalist glee. Fourteen shots to the dome of bratty pop-punk, with only one dip into "ballad" territory, Be Your Own Pet is snot as high art. Singer Jemima Pearl sneers the way only a teenage girl can, and she sounds just as good shouting things like "We wanna be friends with you! Everyone wants to have a good time!" And I've spent the better part of a year hearing the bridge to "Adventure" as "From MySpace to my place to castles to highways." Which, right or not, is about as 2006 a sentiment as I can think of. --Jess Harvell

Top 50 Albums of 2006 # 40-31

40: Tapes 'n Tapes
The Loon
[Ibid]

It was not a great year for guitars and drums. Bearing little flash, no licks, and too much story, Tapes 'n Tapes used a kitchen-sink approach to guitar'n'drums slack (nicking bits of Pavement, Modest Mouse, and Wire) and combined it with an angry-young-man urgency. When Josh Grier's voice gets a little too emotive over The Loon's nervous tunes, it's against his better judgment: "I'll be had if I'm in your dress tonight" he sings on "Insistor", as if his jealous hand-wringing was directly wired to his bandmates fingers. Who cares if the band boxed CDs in their apartments, and walked them to the post office uphill? Cut their bootstraps and you're still left with an album that's richer for its frugality: just drums, just guitars. --Jessica Suarez

39: Fujiya & Miyagi
Transparent Things
[Tirk/Word and Sound]

It shouldn't have worked this well. Somehow, the British trio behind Transparent Things managed to quote "Dem Bones" (possibly the least hip song ever written), rip Damo Suzuki's vocal technique (possibly the easiest-ever influence to spot), combine motorik drumwork and long, major chord vamps (possibly the most Stereolab concept ever demonstrated by someone other than Stereolab), and still came out sounding like nobody else in 2006. The band's singles "Collarbone" and "Cassettesingle" painted them as groove addicts, but the heart within the record belonged to tracks like "Ankle Injuries" and the gentle closer "Cylinders", sounding like a motive sunrise and sunset, respectively. The record's title clues me in: Analysis and dissection is fun and all, but sometimes it pays just to listen to the nice music. --Dominique Leone

38: J Dilla
Donuts
[Stones Throw]

No, this is not a posthumous award for lifetime achievement. We wish James Yancey was still here, but we don't sit around crying over Donuts. We nod our heads. We tap our feet. We might even dance some. (Okay, a lot.) But more than anything, we marvel at the 31 tracks of synaptic soul Dilla left with us. Listening to Donuts is like listening to him daydream about his favorite records-- crackles and pops included-- each song a passing notion from a man in love with his sampler. He made plenty of better songs, but he never made an album like this-- one so personal it feels almost intrusive to listen to, and so generous it feels selfish to hold it up for glory. So yes, it makes a difference that he made this while he lay in bed dying. It should. --Peter Macia

37: DJ Drama & Lil Wayne
Dedication 2
[Gangsta Grillz]

As mixtapes continued their evolution from street corner myth to major-label marketing ploy, Wayne proved himself to be the medium's most riveting ambassador. Thanks to the peerless beat selection and pacing of Atlanta's DJ Drama and Wayne's magnetic mugging, Dedication 2 easily rose above all other tapes that hit over the last 12 months. The rapper's nonchalant dexterity works perfectly within the casual, anything-goes vibe of a mixtape.

"As far as this rap thing, I think I am better than everybody," he said on one of the record's confessional interludes. "I'm a competitor. I hope everybody else feels the same way about their craft. If you do it makes it better for the listeners." And when his ache to be the best involves flipping several silly flows over a tennis-ball beat ("Sportscenter"), contemplating calling a girl with the neurotic self-awareness of Woody Allen ("This Is What I Call Her"), and eloquently exposing government hypocrisy ("Georgia…Bush"), it makes you wish other rappers had a similar drive. Dedication 2 isn't a byproduct of fourth-quarter fiscal pressure as much as a gauntlet thrown down by a rapper who simply loves to rap. The difference is clear. --Ryan Dombal

36: Brightblack Morning Light
Brightblack Morning Light
[Matador]

Thick with swampy guitar twang, chocolate Rhodes organ, group chanting, deeply funky handclaps and flutes, and acres of smoked-out ambience, this was the record I turned to first thing in the morning and late, late at night. It feels so listenable, so effortless, and sooooo stoned that you don't notice how well sequenced and tightly constructed it really is: If Rachel's organ riffs are sneaking the instrument out of church and onto the corner, the soulful harmony singing is walking right back in and grounding the band in gospel's ecstatic discipline. Brightblack's ecological and Native American lyrical allegiances will garner curiosity from some corners and skepticism from others, but their musical momentum carries them beyond scenes and signifiers. The rhythmic upramp of Nabob's heavy riff in "Everybody Daylight" is one of my favorite moments in music this year, but it's tough to pick favorites because the whole album is just so damn foxy. --Drew Daniel

35: Herbert
Scale
[!K7]

Riding the momentum generated by his well-received collaborations with the likes of Björk and Róisín Murphy, Matthew Herbert hopped back into the lab and came out with one of the best albums of his career. Although it contained samples of a reputed 723 different items (including coffins, birds, gas pumps, mobile phones, and the sweet sounds of some unfortunate soul losing his lunch), Scale felt more like a digital composite of all the best parts from his own winding back catalogue. Combining the moody brass flourishes of his big band effort Goodbye Swingtime with the rhythmic invention evident in his remix collection Secondhand Sounds and the intimate, late-night murmurs of the lush Bodily Functions, Scale is joyously overpacked with one stunning moment after another. --Mark Pytlik

34: Girl Talk
Night Ripper
[Illegal Art]

Girl Talk's Night Ripper is not so much a compendium of the best bits from your favorite songs mashed up into an epic sample-a-thon as it is the best bits from your favorite parties. Remember that night those dudes in the back killed the keg to Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time"? Or how amused you and your middle-school friends were the first time someone played you 2 Live Crew's "We Want Some Pussy"? How about the college radio station mixer that introduced you to Pavement and Sonic Youth? Kind of blurry? Well, Gregg Gillis remembers them all for you, and vitally, makes you dance in the process. He cites Dr. Dre and Nirvana as his two favorite acts as if it was natural to mention them in the same breath. And, argues Night Ripper, maybe it is. --Joshua Klein

33: Mission of Burma
The Obliterati
[Matador]

Conventional wisdom says Mission of Burma first broke up in 1983 due to various logistical obstacles, but the high quality of Burma's output since their 2002 reunion suggests they were merely waiting for everyone else to play catch-up before moving the goalposts again. While art-punk progeny like Trail of Dead struggle to reconcile their aggressive and extravagant impulses, The Obliterati provides an exemplary model of tuneful atonality, with 14 songs that are as melodically precise as they are fierce. But what's really remarkable is that Burma aren't trying to play like men half their age; instead, they rage like the pushing-50 cranks that they are, seething at an American political landscape that sadly hasn't changed much in the past two decades. There's a big difference between reformation and revitalization, and The Obliterati makes that gap all the greater. --Stuart Berman

32: Lupe Fiasco
Food & Liquor
[1st and 15th/Atlantic]

Fairly touted as the great crossover hope by hip-hop reformists looking to reap philosophical gains from a repeat of the Kanye Effect, the heroically-delayed and oft-resequenced debut from Chicago's Lupe Fiasco ultimately scored a small victory by landing at #8 on Billboard's album charts. That it didn't sell much more beyond that was hardly an indictment of its content; stuffed full of rolling strings, lustrous horn samples, and bumping (if not slightly too tasteful) rhythms, Food & Liquor was one of the year's most decadent hip-hip albums. And at the core of it lie Lupe's impressively tricksy raps, equal parts virtuosic and virtuous, but never overly clever. What he does from here is anyone's guess. Lord knows, he's got the charisma and the Rolodex to full-court press for mainstream numbers, but I'd just as happily take three or four more records like this, provided he doesn't have 12 minutes worth of people to thank each and every time. --Mark Pytlik

31: Danielson
Ships
[Secretly Canadian]

A burning hard rock album disguised as a "Kumbaya", Ships didn't achieve the level of blog frenzy that Daniel Smith might have hoped-- but not for want of trying. With a cast of over 20 indie greats including Deerhoof and Why?, Smith delivered a majestic, melodic beast that's closer to Queen than to his better-known disciple Sufjan Stevens. The summer camp sing-along vocals-- which were probably the biggest obstacle to potential converts-- belie the rich arrangements and gigantic power chords that lift and heave the band: Dig the centerpiece, "Two Sitting Ducks", where they climb higher and higher until you think their metaphorical ship might break apart and spill uniformed twee-rockers into the sea. But Smith keeps their heads above water: He's always a step ahead of his massive ambition, and here, he doesn't falter for a second. --Chris Dahlen

Top 50 Albums of 2006 # 50-41

Top 50 Albums of 2006

Staff List by Pitchfork Staff

2006 wasn't easily characterized by distinct seismic shifts in independent music's ever-changing topography, or by a select handful of burgeoning new genres. Instead, it was a year of true independence, in which listeners pursued broader palettes, spread music by word of mouth, and openly welcomed increasingly forward-thinking approaches to songcraft.

Even the artists seemed to approach the new year as a clarion call to abandon tradition and realize their own unusual visions: From Joanna Newsom's feudal harp odysseys and Scott Walker's claustrophobic night terrors, to the Knife's raven-black horror house and Boris' juggernaut grind, 2006 was a banner year for boundary-breaking. And yet, between 60s girl group revivalism, lovesick Swedish pop, and more homemade, meat-and-potatoes indie rock than anyone knew what to do with, perfect, chiseled melody remained the magnetic force that kept us crawling back for more.

And it's not over yet. Or at least, not quite: For those who didn't find exactly what they were looking for, or those who simply aren't content to quit exploring, Pitchfork closes out the year with its annual list of the year's finest full-lengths. Dig deep: The best may be yet to come...

50: Booka Shade
Movements
[Get Physical]

Between the hyperreal clarity of its production, the friendliness of its arrangements, and the diversity of its stylistic detours, Movements may have been the most deliberately inviting of 2006's dance albums. There's something intuitively dead-on about the German duo's exquisite production, the way their sinuous melodies and weedy synth riffs slide like plasma over the surface of their thick grooves, as if all recent German house and techno had been distilled into a single, charming sonic signature. True to the duo's restless form, Movements intermingled rousing anthems with atmospheric curios, but it's when the duo go in for the kill with expansive emotional juggernauts like the trance-inflected "Darko" and "In White Rooms" that enthusiastic comparisons to Orbital or Underworld suddenly make perfect sense. --Tim Finney

49: Ellen Allien & Apparat
Orchestra of Bubbles
[Bpitch Control]

More assured than Ellen Allien's solo work and more immediate than Apparat's, Orchestra of Bubbles is at heart a pop album, albeit one cloaked in techno's urgency. With both artists working at their moody best, the Bpitch Control label's typical stridency is tempered by an uncommon attention to warm, electro-acoustic sounds-- resonant strings, harpsichords, voices and analog synthesizers. Despite nominally four-to-the-floor cadences, Allien and Apparat layer long phrases in a way that creates a sense of suspended animation, with morphing tones extending to the horizon in undulating waves-- with the exception of one dubstep-inspired cut and Apparat's bashful foray into balladry, both of which usefully break up the record's horizontal sprawl. The whole album, ragged at the edges and bloody with tone, is swollen in the best way, and it crests from peak to peak across 13 tracks that are at once meditative and eruptive. --Philip Sherburne

48: The Long Blondes
Someone to Drive You Home
[Rough Trade]

The racks are cluttered with promising albums from British post-punk bands boasting charismatic singers, needling guitar work, and hollow, driving drums. But what separates the Long Blondes' debut album is lush-voiced frontwoman Kate Jackson's dexterity in exploring the complexities of women's relationships with other women. You'd have to reach back to the halcyon days of riot grrrl to find the subject probed this deeply. On songs like "Once and Never Again" and "Heaven Help the New Girl", Jackson is the wise survivor counseling her young, naïve sisters; on "Giddy Stratospheres" and "In the Company of Women" she competes for male affection; on "Separated by Motorways" she celebrates girl friendship. Turns out Jackson shares more with a certain Charlie's Angel than just a name. --Amy Phillips

47: Matmos
The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast
[Matador]

Physical objects have always played a central role in Matmos' music. On The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, the duo of M.C. Schmidt and Pitchfork contributor Drew Daniel use their typically esoteric collection of materials-- teeth, cigarettes, typewriters, a cow's digestive tract-- as instruments to embody their various biographical subjects. The album's resulting "sound portraits" draw links between cultural figures like novelist Patricia Highsmith, punk rocker Darby Crash, and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Not that any of these high-concept reconstructions would matter much if listening to this record was not such an absolute blast. Tracks like the space-age surf instrumental "Solo Buttons for Joe Meek" or the mutant disco of "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan" are entrancing even when heard apart from their contextual sources, and ambitious musique concrète narratives like "Rag for William S. Burroughs" are crafted with enough microscopic detail to foster endless fascination. Though directly animated by its two creators and 10 iconoclastic subjects, this brilliant and deceptively cohesive album contains multitudes. --Matthew Murphy

46: M. Ward
Post-War
[Merge]

M. Ward is the kind of guy who seems to sneak his way onto lists like this year in and year out-- but he deserves it every time. Post-War is a move away from lo-fi intimacy that finds Ward entering a more polished widescreen world in which his guitar virtuosity lends itself as ably to ragged fuzz riffs as it does to delicate acoustic duets. Yet even with the big arrangements and production, he still sounds like your friend singing you a song. That comfortable, gravelly croak is one of the most disarming voices out there, and it's never sounded better than it does on "Chinese Translation", a song you could throw a thousand adjectives at without getting it quite right. --Joe Tangari

45: Camera Obscura
Let's Get Out of This Country
[Merge]

"You're not a teenager," sang Tracyanne Campbell on Camera Obscura's 2003 album, Underachievers Please Try Harder. And on follow-up Let's Get Out of This Country, she no longer acts like one. With percussionist/singer John Henderson now out of the picture, Campbell takes on full vocal duties, her sweetly crestfallen presence giving a cozy glow to organ-glitzed ballads about loneliness, yearning, and Lloyd Cole. The band's sound has grown up, too, leaving behind song-for-song influence-spotting to pour Northern Soul shimmy, country melancholy, and twee-pop bookishness into a single, half-empty glass. "I don't believe in true love, anyway," Campbell sighs. Point is, she's lying. --Marc Hogan

44: The Pipettes
We Are the Pipettes
[Memphis Industries]

The Pipettes admit they were a concept before they were a band. The polka dots, the dancing, and the re-appropriation of 1960s pop were all apparently set before the band began writing songs. But if the songs came second in the band's grand scheme, they come first on We Are the Pipettes. With few exceptions, each one is polished, clever, and miraculously poppy. Whether singing about a boyfriend's "slightly unnerving" cleanliness, confessing to murderous thoughts brought on by envy, or considering ripping out a mother's spleen, the lyrics are slyly self-aware, offering cartoony twists on modern love. Meanwhile, producer Gareth Parton puts the uniformly excellent harmonies upfront while adding just the right amount of iPod-friendly, DIY-Spector flourishes underneath. Love or loathe their charming nostalgia, but navel-gazing backlashes are wasted on the Pipettes. --Ryan Dombal

43: Sonic Youth
Rather Ripped
[Geffen]

On Murray Street and Sonic Nurse, Jim O'Rourke pulled Sonic Youth out of a late-90s rut, spurring noise-rock jams that looked backward, forward, and somewhere in between. But even the biggest fan of those albums probably wouldn't deny craving a sequel to pop records like GooDirty, and on their first post-O'Rourke effort, Sonic Youth offer exactly that: Twelve shiny, beefed-up rockers that funnel noise into melody at a level not seen since The Year Punk Broke. The surprise isn't so much that the quartet made this move, but that they pulled it off so sharply. There's hardly a wrong turn here, just reams of revved-up rock with all the classic pieces-- Kim Gordon's voice, Thurston Moore's writing, Lee Ranaldo's poetry, Steve Shelley's energy-- locked together as tightly as a jigsaw puzzle. --Marc Masters and

42: Mastodon
Blood Mountain
[Reprise]

After going major label in the wake of 2004's epic masterpiece Leviathan, Mastodon could've gone melodic and recorded the metal Nevermind that many fans expected from them. Instead, the Atlanta quartet crawled even further into their death-gurgle aesthetic and still managed to churn out a transcendently violent opus. On first listen, Blood Mountain is a heaving, spitting, seething mass of throat-shredding screams and serrated riffage. And after listening a while, the details really begin to creep out, like the scrabbling pseudo-jazz noise-boxes at the beginning of "Bladecatcher" or the way Brann Dailor's drums tumble all over themselves in a flurry of speed but still manage to find their own pocket. Throughout, the band walks a thin line between technical complexity and outright brutality, never letting one overwhelm the other. There's also a vaguely mythical storyline about a mountain populated by one-eyed sasquatches and blood-sucking flies, if you're into that sort of thing. This is metal, after all. --Tom Breihan

41: The Decemberists
The Crane Wife
[Capitol]

The melodies are grand but stalwartly hummable, and Colin Meloy finds surprising soulful inflections in his reedy voice. Proggy epics blur seamlessly into poppy jangles, successfully drawing an implausible line between Jethro Tull and R.E.M. Meloy revisits a number of his favorite themes-- star-crossed lovers on "O Valencia"; imperiled children on "Shankill Butchers"-- but by drawing them together under the Japanese myth of the Crane Wife, he creates a more cohesive album than his erstwhile period pastiches. His well-heeled diction remains intact, but it's tempered now, more concerned with artfully framing the album's emotional payload than attempting to work turn-of-the-20th-century jargon into rhymed couplets. The Decemberists have always been an interesting band, but with The Crane Wife, they became a great one, and they did it without shedding an ounce of their oddball charm. --Brian Howe

December 29, 2006

My 2006 Picks # Highway Companion : Tom Petty

Four years after he took Elvis Costello's advice and bit the music/radio biz hands that have simultaneously fed and frustrated him for decades on the scabrous The Last DJ, Tom Petty returned to the studio with more personally introspective matters on his mind.

Reuniting with producer/Wilbury sideman Jeff Lynne sans Heartbreakers for his third solo release proper, the veteran doesn't so much retool his trademark sound here as allow it the freedom to roam. The sonic landscape here is bluesier ("Saving Grace's opening shuffle, the haunting "Turn This Car Around") and more country-fried (the twangy energy of the blue collar lament "Big Weekend"), a return to familiar roots that produces subtly different results this time around.

That sensibility now seasons songs as different as the stoned-elegant languor of "Night Driver" and the playful "Jack," where Petty and Lynn give a knowing nod and wink to the contemporary pop milieu. The stately, pop-perfect closer "Golden Rose" may lean on the Beatle-y side of their familiar sound, but it's a cliché the duo use both sparingly and shrewdly throughout, forging one of the veteran's most free-ranging and warmly satisfying efforts in a decade.

Jerry McCulley

My 2006 Picks # Pearl Jam

If its debut album 15 years ago made Pearl Jam apprehensive with success, the Seattle quintet better buckle in for a return to eminence. On its eighth studio release--and first since 2002--the band socks away the adventurous experimentation that dogged some of its most recent records to investigate a post-September 11, war-ravaged world overflowing with urgency and significance. "It's the same everyday in a hell manmade/What can be saved, and who will be left to hold her?" lead singer Eddie Vedder wonders in "World Wide Suicide," one of several contemptuous rants on the Bush administration.

Yet the album's spark is more than political. Songs like "Life Wasted," "Comatose" and "Big Wave" embrace the garage-rock past, as guitarists Mike McCready and Stone Gossard play off each other with the primal lucidity of a decade ago and drummer Matt Cameron, one of rock's best, adds raw backing vocals to Vedder's polished craft.

But Pearl Jam also turns up some of its most harmonious works since "Daughter," including "Marker in the Sand," with its radio-ready chorus, the tuneful "Parachutes" paced by Gossard's divine strumming, and the burning narrative and Urge Overkill punch of "Umemployable." Finally Vedder pleads for a lover's return in "Come Back," a keyboard-soaked love song complete with a chilling Gossard solo.

It's got a soulfulness that begs for Sam Cooke to sing it and an originality that shows that a vibrant and cocksure Pearl Jam is back in town--and ready to retake the world.

--Scott Holter

My 2006 Picks # TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain

Often when we say a record has "atmosphere," we mean it as a put-down. From Sgt. Pepper's to the present, a record's sonic appeal-- the effects, the mood, the spaces between the notes-- is inextricable from how it hits us. But when an artist pushes atmosphere in place of songs, it's frequently thought of as a crutch. Most listeners don't trust a mood to grab their hearts the way they trust, say, a human voice; nobody counts on production to deliver the "money note."

When I try to explain TV on the Radio to people who aren't into them, the first thing on the checklist is singer Tunde Adebimpe, a stoic romantic who falters but never whimpers. He's got about the best set of pipes in indie rock, yet on Return to Cookie Mountain his greatest strength lies in how well he stands back and blends in-- with the throatier Kyp Malone, guest singers including David Bowie, and, especially, with the atmosphere evoked by producer and noisemaker David Sitek. As the two founding members, Adebimpe and Sitek fit together like Jagger and Richards. But where the two Rolling Stones projected snarling sex, these guys express... what?

In the original version of Return to Cookie Mountain that leaked this spring-- the one that kicked off at full throttle with "Wolf Like Me"-- they sounded like victory. With that cut up front, you knew this was the great leap forward for which their last two records paved the way-- and when I say three records, I'm counting their scattershot sketchbook OK Calculator, which caught the band at its most "Hey, what can I do with this four-track?" They always claim they'd rather keep messing around with new ideas than settle down and crank out the hits that are at their fingertips, which is one reason 2004's Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes felt more eclectic than excellent. (In retrospect, the other reason is that they were still using drum machines.) But this time, maybe they'd changed their minds.

But before Return to Cookie Mountain became their major label debut, its tracklist was reshuffled. Now it leads off with the fascinating "I Was a Lover", a sympathy card that carries the most emotional sample on the record-- a bellow like the sound of a sad elephant, which fits right in with the defeated verse. It takes skill to craft a tone that people can feel sorry for; maybe there is a money note locked in that pedal crouching under Sitek's shoe. But other times, the noise evokes an orchestra, or a rockslide. Abstract and electronic textures roll over acoustic sources-- bowed upright bass, sitars, flutes, backward wind chimes-- to reach a perfect consistency, all the way through to the closer, "Wash the Day Away", where white noise rises and swallows them all. But not a moment too soon: not only is the mix stellar (if a little too biased away from the vocals), but once you get used to the new setlist, the pacing is perfect as well.

The band cycles up like a centrifuge. Vocals spin on "Dirty Whirl" like wooden figurines on a Swiss cuckoo clock, while a shimmering piano figure chimes across "Province". Like their first albums, the songs build on loops, grooves, and drones. They feel familiar, but they've never sounded this good-- or this thick. Even the voices cascade on top of each other, which obscures much of the lyrics. Nothing can cut through except the sharp and vigorous rhythm section. Check out the way the air catches in Adebimpe's throat on "A Method", then shakes loose when Jaleel Bunton bursts in like a drum corps waiting in the parking lot for the parade to start.

But what's their message? They're not here to rock-- they use too many loops, too much repetition, and too little chaos. They can do the community-drum-circle thing, but they're too slick to try it more than once ("Let the Devil In"). And even Adebimpe's voice has never sunk this far into the music; we don't even get an a capella feature this time, because this isn't an album about standing out. He's still a failed romantic, a social conscience, a charmer, and a distant voyeur; but with every album he becomes less of a "persona" and more of a regular person.

Maybe that's why this album has such an incredible pull: It doesn't make an atmosphere so much as a space to spend time in, and Adebimpe doesn't become a narrator so much as a witness. We sidle up into his head and watch through his eyes the tyrants, the druggies, the cocky lovers, the losers, and those beautiful fools who still surrender to lines like "Love is the province of the brave." And TV on the Radio are standing in the center, watching it all go by again, and again, and again.

-Chris Dahlen, July 05, 2006

My 2006 Picks # Raconteurs: Broken Boy Soldiers

Smothered by the indulgence of his rock star ranking, Jack White steps into the eccentricities of the supergroup, and at first glance, this seems to be a band where White's imposing presence could overshadow the rest.

Not the case with these Raconteurs. Teaming with fellow Detroit songwriter Brendan Benson and Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, the rhythm section from Cincinnati band the Greenhornes, White exhales a bit, deferring enough to his mates to make Broken Boy Soldiers play like a team effort.

Following the Benson blueprint, "Steady as She Goes," which opens as a slice of 1960's radio pop, the record steers away from pigeonholing the rest of the way. White's in a Middle Eastern mood for the title track as he pulls off a wicked Robert Plant howl, while Lawrence and Keeler excel on the chorus-strong "Intimate Secretary" and the optimistic acoustic rocker "Yellow Sun."

Like so many all-star bands before them, The Raconteurs could be one and done. But don't place the blame on this fertile and genuine debut. --Scott Holter

My 2006 Picks # Neko Case : Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

The voice looms larger than ever. It's almost unfair. Draped in luscious, acute reverb, every phrase is granted its own pitch-perfect spotlight, and each precious syllable stands alone as a singular accomplishment. On Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case's peerless cries crash through the mix with unprecedented force, their natural grandeur captured in sonorous surround sound.

But it's not all about the voice; songs are important, too. Case's lungs-for-days Dollywood boom may be as direct an emotional instrument as there is in contemporary music, but her increasingly prominent songwriting skills tend to eschew visceral connections for intellectual intrigue and poetic mystery-- and Flood features Case's most cryptic lyrics to date. The odd disconnect here between singer and songwriter is absorbing: Though shaded by finely-tuned, country-noir twang, the rapturous belter's high-minded lyrical aspirations often undermine her throat's unhindered veracity.

Given her former life as an art-school punk, Case's increasingly independent, non-traditional songwriting trajectory isn't totally surprising. Moving from the countrified mix of covers and originals of her solo debut, 1997's The Virginian, to 2000's Furnace Room Lullaby, which featured mostly originals co-written by Case, to 2002's Blacklisted, on which the singer wrote most of the alluringly bluesy songs on her own, Case's musical ambitions have evolved and taken greater definition with each successive album.

Flood finds Case continuing to write the lion's share of her material, while also producing and mixing. Appropriately, it's a logical extension of the themes, instrumentation, and mood of Blacklisted. Long gone are the relatively straightforward Furnace-era break-up laments with their simple-yet-effective couplets like, "Oh my darlin', oh my darlin', how can you forget/ All the love we had between us, now it's like we never met."

Removing herself from many of the album's David Lynch-like narratives, Case often embraces the role of omnipotent storyteller. One such twisty tale is the harrowing rich-girl/poor-girl opener, "Margaret Vs. Pauline". Strolling alongside a frolicking, Jon Brion-esque piano, wordy descriptors and odd details inform a striking gap between the song's haunting title pair. Describing the blessed beauty Pauline, Case sings, "And they placed an ingot in her breast to burn cool and collected/ Fate holds her firm in its cradle and then rolls her for a tender pause to savor." Lines like that don't roll off with ease, but within the scheme of the album, they can add up to something palpably uncomfortable-- a vague, inescapable sense of loss.

Confessional only in the most roundabout sense, Case's songs set up strange anecdotal skeletons that beg listeners to connect the dots between. "Star Witness" may be about a car accident, a shooting, a deep love wiped away, or all of those things. Bound together by an awe-inspiring, harmony-laden hook, the swaying waltz may seem like free-associating farce at first, but subsequent exposures offer slight turns.

There's no right answer to "Star Witness", but its keen open-endedness is an appealing destination in itself. Such complex examples of Case's unique songwriting string theory abound, from the ghostly, near-a cappella "A Widow's Toast", to the quasi-political, fable-based title track, to "Dirty Knife", a haunted-house elegy to madness. Each track relies on a starkly defined bleakness to guide its queasy understanding of an existence between the bitter end and its sometimes-sweeter aftermath.

What once again prevents Case from delivering a front-to-back classic is a perfectionist streak that accounts for Flood's mannered meticulousness. A nice-enough reinterpretation of traditional folk spiritual "John Saw That Number" rumbles along amiably but Case can't adequately summon the spontaneous affectations that the gospel-style track requires to truly transcend. Though she often cites churchly touchstone Bessie Griffin as a guiding influence, it seems as if Case's hard-line precision rarely allows her to encapsulate Griffin's untethered style and act in the moment. Such flawless phrasing can cause songs to become too treasurable, as if they're off-limits, encrusted under a thick glass casing.

Still, nobody today does eerie dust-bowl balladry and anachronistic rustic-murder milieu quite like Case. Combining country, folk, and old-school rock, she faithfully invokes scenes of late-night wandererings illuminated by a jalopy's lone functional headlight. As a refined version of Blacklisted, Flood provides alluring riddles and obsessive desolation, Case subverting her easy-access vocals with difficult abstractions and heady projections. Yet, after fishing through Flood's 12 intricate tracks, a plainspoken love song delivered in that voice would not be unwelcome.

-Ryan Dombal, March 07, 2006

My 2006 Picks # Modern Times: Bob Dylan

As an artist and a conundrum, Bob Dylan is well-versed in semi-hysterical critical hyperbole. With each new record since 1997's stellar Time Out of Mind, music writers and editors have been tripping all over themselves trying to sputter out the best, most dramatic encapsulation of Dylan's rebirth (which, given the relative late-career flops of his peers and his own 1980s shitstorm, still seems strange and thrilling). Now, 45 years into a perfectly studied, over-anthologized, well-chronicled career, even talking about the cult-of-Dylan seems clichéd: Analysis of Dylan-love, Dylan-backlash, Dylan-histrionics, and Dylanology is moot. Books have been published, academic treatises have been defended, documentaries have been ordered and directed, cover stories have been savored and parsed-- but every time Bob Dylan cranks out a new record, we still try, again, to figure out what it all adds up to.

Modern Times is Bob Dylan's 31st studio LP, and an obvious companion piece to 2001's Love and Theft, offering new tracks of jazz-inspired, rockabilly-scamming, ragtime-aping rock'n'roll, more heavily indebted to blues and honky-tonk than Woody Guthrie and Folkways. The record does little to persuade disbelievers, will continue to infuriate those who cheered when Pete Seeger jerked the plug at Newport, and isn't entirely unfamiliar: Anyone who's seen Dylan play in the past five years will recognize the silhouette here, hunched over a keyboard, all crags and angles, brambles of hair puffing out from under a big black hat, pencil mustache combed into place, pounding keys, infinitely more compelled by his fellow players than his sycophantic audience.

Unsurprisingly, Modern Times is musically intricate, thick, and expertly played, more the product of a well-rehearsed-- but still gorgeously mellow-- band than an auteur. It also contains some of the softest, funniest, and most charming songs of Dylan's late career, as he snickers to himself, cooing about love, God, and doing it ("I got the pork chops/ She got the pie").

Dylan recently spat a series of (now-notoriously) curmudgeonly comments to Jonathan Lethem in Rolling Stone, pining that nothing sounds like shellac-- and while his complaints seemed depressingly stodgy, they were also promptly misconstrued and yanked out of context; as it were, Dylan was deriding contemporary production/studio techniques and not the whole of modern music, which becomes instantly and weirdly obvious to anyone who listens to the lyrics to raucous opener "Thunder on the Mountain" ("I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn't help from crying/ When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line/ I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be/ I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee"), or considers the fact that Dylan produced this record himself (under favored stage-name Jack Frost).

Still, it's obvious that Dylan's most beloved songs are old ones, and he borrows gleefully from Nina Simone, Memphis Minnie, Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters, and, in the grand tradition of AP Carter and John Lomax, plenty of unnamed songwriters whose work long ago slipped into public domain. "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (Muddy Waters famously recorded the song in 1950, but its origins date back to at least 1929) is given a new workup, infused with Dylan's signature clatter and wheeze and punched up with peppery guitar and even spicier lyrics ("I got trouble so hard, I just can't stand this dream/ Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains").

Meanwhile, "Nettie Moore" (a well-worn 19th century ballad) is staggering, a spare blend of vocals and light, airy instrumentation, Dylan's decaying pipes tut-tutting sweet proclamations of love: "When you're around me/ All my grief gives way/ A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day/ Everything I've ever known to be right has been proven wrong." "Workingman's Blues 2" is similarly gentle and lapping, and "The Levee's Gonna Break", with its familiar Zeppelin-via-Memphis-Minnie refrain ("If it keeps on raining/ The levee's gonna break"), seems almost self-referential ("I paid my time/ And now I'm as good as new…Some of these people are gonna strip you of all they can take").

The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected. Dylan's voice, sinking further into grit, is all wheeze and mew, rolled in salt but still instantly recognizable. And now that he's eyebrows-deep in the rock'n'roll canon, maybe the heart-stopping appeal of Bob Dylan has less to do with his output-- which, tangentially, remains outstanding-- and more to do with his cowboy boot-saunter.

Maybe we all want a little bit of Dylan's superhuman restraint, and whether it's real or brutally calculated doesn't actually matter: The fuck-off detachment, the unconcerned genius, the squinty-eyed disdain, the arid, gut-punching humor, the total (if feigned) disinterest in his growing superhero status. He's the boy who doesn't love us back, the one everyone yearns for, the Holy Grail, the last American hero.

-Amanda Petrusich, August 29, 2006

My 2006 Picks # The Crane Wife : The Decemberists

For a few years now, the Decemberists' stagey, hyperliterate folk-rock has played well at indie labels Hush and Kill Rock Stars. The quintet has occupied a small community-theater space with gleefulness and confidence, but now it's accepted a scholarship to Capitol Records, which means a larger stage and a bigger audience. Can the band still project, or will its voices be lost in a cavernous auditorium, rejoined only by crickets and barely stifled coughs of boredom? Will nine-minute mariner epics play in Peoria?

Given the band's graduation from minor to major leagues, The Crane Wife may prove to be the most crucial record the Decemberists will release in their lifetime. Fortunately, their fourth album further magnifies and refines their strengths. Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, the Decemberists assemble an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted. The Crane Wife employs an impressive variety of styles and sounds to tell Meloy's imaginative stories: There's the band's usual folk-rock, honed to an incisively sharp point, but they also deploy a smuggler's blues ("The Perfect Crime"), a creepy lullaby ("Shankill Butchers"), a Led Zep stomp ("When the War Came"), and, perhaps most divisively, a multipart prog track ("The Island") that stretches well past the 10-minute mark. No epic chantey this time, though.

Meloy's inventive songwriting is the binding force, emphasizing character but remaining ever in thrall to stories, savoring the way they always play out to the same conclusions. Along with the homosexual undertones that have informed Decemberists songs from every album, he jettisons most of the archetypes that inspired Picaresque and cuts his characters loose in their own tales. They still do what they're fated to do-- the thieves thieve and run amok, the lovers love and die tragically, the soldiers soldier on and pine for peaceful homes-- but they seem to do it more out of free will than authorial design.

Meloy focuses mainly on matters of war ("But O did you see all the dead of Manassas/ All the bellies and the bones and the bile?") and love ("No, I lingered here with the blankets barren/ And my own belly big with child"). On the duet "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)", Meloy plays the part of an errant, possibly dead Civil War soldier while singer-songwriter Laura Veirs cameos as his "sweetheart left behind." It's Cold Mountain writ poignantly small, its sweet, wordless chorus perfectly life-size. Lumbering menacingly, the martial march of "When the War Came" smells of gunpowder and singed hair, although it sounds like it's anchored in Neverland despite trying to comment on real-world events.

Meloy's taletelling will always define the Decemberists, but The Crane Wife puts as much weight on the music as on the lyrics, and here the band gels into a tight, intuitive unit. The musicians give each song a particular spark and character, not just reinforcing the lyrics but actively telling a story. They create a breezy eddy of guitar strums and piano chords to enhance a windborne melody and an undercurrent of peril on "Summersong", and the tragedy of "O Valencia"-- any good song about star-crossed lovers must end in death-- is countered by the pep of the music, especially Chris Funk's ascending and descending guitar, which seems to take a particular glee in the inevitable denouement. The band isn't just able-bodied, but ambitious to boot. It makes the brainy prog of that monster second track, a distillation of the musical reach of their 2003 EP The Tain, sound like a natural extension of their base sound. They troll confidently from the rumbling overture and heated exposition of "Come and See" to the final rueful notes of "You'll Not Feel the Drowning". The song is chockablock with progisms-- organ runs, dampered cymbals, laser synths-- but manages to shake off the genre quote marks as the band jam with convincing menace.

Their range allows them to be precociously diverse, but everything fits naturally. The Crane Wife sounds like their most shapely album to date, resembling a spirited story arc in its set-up, rising action, climax, and resolution. In this structure the three title segments, despite essentially bookending the tracklist, form the album's thematic centerpiece, the music and story meshing gracefully and tenderly to retell a Japanese fable. "The Crane Wife 3" opens the album with a ruminative flourish as John Moen's drums push the sensuous thrust of the music and Meloy's delivery of the lines "each feather it fell from skin" colors the resignation of "I will hang my head hang my head low." It opens the album en medias res, setting up the subsequent story-songs as the narrator's rueful reminiscences.

"The Crane Wife 1 and 2" comprise a medley towards the album's end, starting slow and soft but gradually reaching crescendo in an unfurling finale, with Meloy breaking the word "heart" into multiple syllables over an unraveling drum beat. Restrained yet resonant, the song's (and album's) climax is a remarkable moment. As it segues into the rousing coda of "Sons & Daughters", the Decemberists sound like a band that knows exactly where they're going and won't be satisfied until you come along for the trip.
-Stephen M. Deusner, October 03, 2006