Skip to main content

2006: Best Of The Rest

#11:
Regina Spektor – Begin To Hope

Some years it’s very easy to make that cut at 10, but when you have an eccentric, varied, mysterious album like Begin To Hope, it’s almost painful! Witness the demented nostalgia of That Time, the heart-broken beauty of Samson and the irresistible bounce of Fidelity. If Bjork and Fiona Apple recorded an album together, this is how it’d turn out.


Biggest Disappointment:
Glen Phillips – Mr. Lemons

Last year’s number one artist took a frightening tumble with an all-too-appropriately-titled effort.


Biggest Surprise:
Gnarls Barkley – St. Elsewhere

Every year seems to produce at least one left-field success story. Who would've thought it’d be Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse teaming up for an exceedingly weird vanity project that could have just as easily slipped into obscurity? If you’d told me that at the beginning of the year, I’d have called you, well, crazy. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)




Guiltiest Pleasure:
Corinne Bailey Rae – Corinne Bailey Rae

Why should I feel guilty? When you hear about an artist via VH1, she reminds you of the love child of Sade and Norah Jones and all of your female friends go ape the minute they hear her, the cool factor drops to an alarming low. But Ms. Rae’s breezy-summer-evening voice and cozy grooves are enough to ease my shame.



Best Cover Art:
Keane – Under The Iron Sea

Tapping the (admittedly limited) potential of the CD booklet, an amazing flat color drawing with waves and sea monsters folds out to reveal an undersea world of evil owls, castles, skulls, squirrels, an ice queen, whales, totem poles and flowers.






Best Cover Version:
Mary J. Blige & U2 – One

Technically this came out at the end of 2005, but it easily bests any cover I heard in 2006. Without the showiness that sometimes sinks R & B singers, Mary makes the melody her own and cuts to the heart of the lyrics. Listen to her get worked up on “You ask for me to enter / but then you make me crawl / And I can’t keep holding on / When all you’ve got is hurt.” And having U2 and Bono actually back her up doesn’t hurt a bit.


Best Album Title:
L.E.O. - Alpacas Orgling

Orgling is the mating noise of the male alpaca. It's always nice when an album title makes you giggle and expands your vocabulary at the same time.


Best Concert:
Semisonic, Minneapolis Aquatennial

It’s hard to top seeing Richard Thompson, Soul Asylum, Cake and Tapes N Tapes in one day. Or folk singers Teitur and Tobias Froberg giving their all to all of 40 people at a hip-hop club. But it was Semisonic reuniting for the Aquatenniel on a hot August night that ruled over all others. It was a free show, the excitement was as palpable as the humidity, and the band sounded tight, especially considering the three-year layoff. And could you believe no one would go with me?


Best Discovery:
The Old 97s

It wasn’t their Chili’s commercial or their appearance in The Break-Up that did it, but 2006 was the nevertheless year I succumbed to the Dallas quartet’s charms. I started the year owning nothing by the band and will end it owning 7 of their 9 albums. My faves: Satellite Rides and Fight Songs.



Best Trend:
Break-up albums

Nina Gordon, Sean Lennon, Jon Auer and The Secret Machines all put out impressive records about the end of relationships. As long as the romances keep going bad, that’s good news for music fandom.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

12 by Matthew Sweet (2002 - 2021)

Sometimes a huge part of an artist's career has not been summarized. Case in point... Matthew Sweet has a couple of compliations out there, but neither of them cover the past couple of decades, a span that has seen him release 8 albums of original material and 3 albums of covers.  I followed Sweet's career religiously early on, with my ardor gradually diminishing after the magnificant one-two punch of In Reverse (1999) and The Thorns (2003) That's not to say he hasn't produced some great work since then, it's just that it requires bit of effort to pick out the gems. Here's my college try: (Two of these albums are not available on streaming servies, so here's a slightly modified version of the playlist on YouTube .) 1. "I Can't Remember" ( The Thorns , 2003) The Thorns was a rootsy, close-harmony early-aughts version of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, featuring Shawn Mullins (of "Lullaby" fame) and Pete Droge (of "If You Don't Lov

2022: The Album

Since 2003 I've made a mix of some of my favorite songs of the calendar year. Here's the cover art and track listing for the 2022 edition. 1. BODEGA - "Pillar on the Bridge of You" 2. Harry Styles - "Late Night Talking" 3. Vicious Vicious - "Evolution" 4. Hot Freaks - "Lovely" 5. Carly Rae Jepsen - "The Loneliest Time" 6. Tears for Fears - "End of Night" 7. Spoon - "Wild" 8. Death Cab for Cutie - "Here to Forever" 9. Citrine and GUKKO - "Feel Better" 10. Rhett Miller - "Fascination" 11. Broken Bells - "Fade Away" 12. Leah Marlene - "Flowers" 13. Robbie Williams - "The World and Her Mother" 14. Jimmy Eat World - "Something Loud" (acoustic version) 15. Sloan - "Dream It All Over Again" If you have Amazon Unlimited, you can listen at this link . 

Weezer: SZNZ Abbreviated

One of the most oldest and most enticing thought exercises in pop music is: What if (artist) had released the best songs from (double album) as a single disc instead?  Pre-Internet, folks used their cassette decks to create their own truncated versions of likes of The Beatles'  White Album ("Revolution 9" has to go, for sure) and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (sorry, "Jamaica Jerk-Off"), some out of artistic vision, others because the tape just wasn't long enough to hold all the songs. Now, with mp3s and streaming, we have the ability to curate everything for ourselves, which means even a single album could be reduced to an EP of your faves, with the shuffle feature making it so the order doesn't even have to be the same every time. Here's where I could detour into a healthy digression about the negative consequences of that total freedom, but I'll resist the temptation. Our good friends Weezer - who are not typically known for rest