The Factual Opinion

The Best Album of 2006

Ghostface Killah
Fishscale

Marty will take care of the serious business.  For now, Tucker's gonna get personal and tell you why Fishscale is a better album than all the rest of this top 25, and another album I'm sick of hearing about.

Why Fishscale is better than...

....T.I. King: Because listening to Ghostface doesn't require an explanation or defense of selling out.
....Girl Talk Night Ripper: About 300 reasons, all of which involve Ghostface not including anything on his album by the band Wings.
....Liars Drum's Not Dead: Because the Liars are white.
....Herbert Scale: Pretty pop/dance/electronic music will never beat anything that is even surreptitiously connected to the Clan.
....Lil Wayne Dedication 2: Album Art.
....Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood: Maybe because liking Neko Case makes you almost as gay as liking State & Main?
....Comets on Fire Avatar: Uhhh. Vocals?
....Scott Walker The Drift: Yeah, cause of vocals.  And Ghostface never makes you want to kill yourself?  Or at least, not on every track?
....Burial Burial: Cause it's longer.
....Califone Roots & Crowns: Cause it's louder.
....Spankrock Yoyoyoyoyo: Clever sex vocals and loud bass.  Rinse, repeat.
....Voxtrot EPS: Have you heard these? Are they good?
....Tom Waits Orphans: I'm on the fence here.  Go with cause there's one disc length too much.
....Quantic Announcement To Answer: Marty and I have a confession.  This album doesn't actually exist.
....Asobi Seksu Citrus: Brooklyn music shouldn't sound like it came from Japan.
....Hold Steady Boys and Girls in America: Separation Sunday beats Fishscale.  Boys and Girls lost to Quantic.  Moving on.
....Clipse Hell Hath No Fury: crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack.  yawn.
....Beirut Gulag Orkestar: Φάτε το γάιδάρο μου. 
....Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome: At no point during Fishscale does one experience "yearning."
....Robert Pollard From A Compound Eye: Only because i'm the only person in the world who likes this album enough to remember talking about it.
....Islands Return To The Sea:  The problem with cleverness--it grows to irritate.
....Deftones Saturday Night Wrist: Surprise. This album is better than Fishscale.  Okay, no.
....Decemberists The Crane Wife: I don't know.  Is there anyone on Earth who would push for this to be higher?
....Joanna Newsom Ys: Wait a second. Are you serious?  No, wait, come back.  I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!

-Tucker Stone, 2007

Tucker's sorry he didn't take this so seriously.  Really.  He's really, really sorry. He took a risk that Marty would--and he did, which is why he's our Music Editor-In Chief.

Did you catch Ghostface’s interview in The Onion? He starts out by answering the question, “What can you tell me about the new album?” (meaning Fishscale) with, “What do you want to know about it?” He goes on to compare beats to pussy, admits to picking his Iron Man persona arbitrarily, and refuses to name his favorite soul artists. Dude’s impenetrable. He gives the most insight into himself in the opening moments of the interview, when he describes how he makes an album: “You get the beats, you write to them, you go in the studio and lay it down. Hopefully a song comes out sounding good. If it comes out sounding good, you put it to the side with the rest of the other good ones, and you try to decide which ones you’re gonna use on the album.” 

If Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1 proves—as Nick Hornby suggests—that Dylan thinks entirely in metaphors and poetry, so his songs are the natural and obvious outpouring of a mind that sees the world through a singular point of view; then hearing Ghostface talk about making music marks him as a completely different beast altogether. Ghostface’s writing is analogous with Dylan’s in many respects: his elevated language, his storytelling, his concepts for songs. Both Ghostface and Dylan view songwriting pragmatically rather than artistically; their artistic sensibilities just naturally tumble out into their music. But where Dylan approaches his entire life in the same way he approaches his songs, Ghostface shows up in his songs in a way he doesn’t in real life. 

But, maaaaaaan, does he show up all over the place on Fishscale. Ghostface goes to more places in more ways on this album than on any before. It’s his Blonde On Blonde.

“Whip You With A Strap” waxes poetic about the beatings his mother gave him. “Kilo” sounds like Ghostface and Raekwon rolling with the Hard Knock Life orphans on a conveyor belt stacked with mountains of coke. “Big Girl” begins with Ghost hitting on two coked-up hotties and ends with him looking on them like a father figure, telling them, “All I ask in life's for you to be careful/ Stay focused, take care of your health/ Have kids and marry a prince/ Good luck and happiness.” He tops everything off with a far-from-horrible duet with The Notorious B.I.G., a bona fide Wu-Tang joint, and a dream sequence featuring mermaids with Halle Berry haircuts.

Fishscale features at least five songs that have never even been imagined before. Concept for concept, he’s outthinking every other MC in the game. Yet, Fishscale is his most commercial album as well. His duet with Ne-Yo may flip romantic expectations as Ghostface begs the girl he cheated on not to get with one particular guy (“Okay, girl, what I did was whack/ But you don’t get a nigga back like that”), but it’s still, you know, a duet with Ne-Yo. There’s an ode to mothers which tilts Ghost into sheer sentiment, and “Be Easy” is his most straightforward track ever—he rides a horn-driven Pete Rock beat with a catchphrase hook and, voila, the song nets a spot on Entourage. 

Then, there’s the stuff you go to Ghostface for: the high-octane drama of “Shakey Dog;” the murky, RZA-influenced beats (this time provided frequently by MF Doom); Ghost working himself up into an emotional frenzy. Fishscale would be all things to all people, if all people could appreciate violent storytelling dressed up with surreal, stream-of-consciousness imagery; Kanye-baiting, soul-twisting production; and songs that don’t fit into the usual hip-hop tropes of a typical major-label album. As it is, one can only assume that the people who have gravitated toward Ghostface have done so because of his staggering acuteness or the deep mystery of his verses. As much as we can zero in on his turns of phrase, his concepts, the way he picks his beats, there’s still something elusive about Ghost. This is not a guy who should have as many supporters as he does. But he does. He’s the best rapper in the game, but if you asked him, he’d tell you, “I just do this shit because I gotta feed my family.”

-Marty Brown, 2007

The Best of 2006: #2

T.I.
King

Say what you will about Jay-Z’s technique—how he switches up his flow to suit his subject-matter, how he composes rhymes in his head and doesn’t write anything down—we love Jay-Z because he is the hip-hop Everyman. Jay-Z took anonymity to superstar proportions. He released a monolithic album a year for eight years, yet we know next to nothing about him. And what we do know seems cribbed from the rapper’s workbook they hand you the second you decide to become an MC. Jay-Z was our blank slate upon whom we projected all of our personal hip-hop dreams. His primary attribute was a vacant coolness, and when he showed back up this year and spent an album rhyming more introspectively and honestly than ever before, people flipped out. He wasn’t ours anymore. All of a sudden, people could criticize his personality, because for the first time he had one—not even a fully fleshed out personality, mind you, only the beginning of one. Of course, the inevitable fall of Jay-Z in 2006 only underlined what most of us already knew. We live in a new era of hip-hop, and that era’s name is T.I. Jay-Hova is dead; long live the King.

King takes the structure of a generic hip-hop album and uses it to flesh out and perfect a sound that has spent the last couple of years in its nascent stages—the vaguely Southern bounce accentuated by keyboards and horns whose last peak was Young Jeezy’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101. T.I. hits all of the marks—the I-want-you-back-girl song (“Hello”), the pouring-out-the-40-for-the-lost-homies song (“Live In the Sky”), the shout-out-every-potential-major-market-in-America song (“Ride With Me”), the don’t-call-it-a-comeback-(even-though-nobody-was-calling-it-a-comeback-anyway) song (“King Back”)—but he filters them all through a sensibility that rivals Jay-Z’s eight year run. But where Jay-Z’s back catalogue contains stylistic flourishes that make his singles jump out (the children’s chorus on “Hard Knock Life,” the Kanye/Just Blaze sound of The Blueprint), T.I.’s sound is all business, with everything in service of the song.  “What You Know” is the first monster rap hit not to owe a debt to The Blueprint since The Blueprint. He is the new Everyman, only more so; the man we all want to be. We know next to nothing about him, except that he’s cooler than shit, and that’s more important than anything else.

-Marty Brown, 2006

"...and the prophecy read, that one day, like the phoenix aroused from the ashes, that a boy would be born unto a family in the slums.  This boy would go on to use the knowledge he gained while fighting for survival in the streets, To Become A Great Leader.  And in time that boy would become King."

That's how you start an album.  Or, at least, that's how you'd start if an album if you wanted it to be really good.

Have you seen a picture of T.I. with his shirt off?  Doesn't that make you want to do sit-ups and drink protein shakes?

Or shave your head?

There aren't enough albums that rhyme "the sirens is silent" with "on Fantasy Island."  Unless we missed something, there's only one.

See, the problem with Jay-Z saying he'll kill someone to settle disputes is that we all know, beyond certainty, that he has people do that for him, if he's involved in it all.  Jay made more money doing a computer commercial than a street dealer makes in a year.  And if Clipse were going to kill anybody, they'd probably have done it during the last two years that they were dicking around trying to release an album.  50 Cent is about as scary as a wet dream, whether he can cry in a movie or not.  (He can, cause he's a little girl.)  T.I. on the other hand could believably record backing vocals for Timberlake while slicing off a hater's earlobe.  And while we should all be grown up enough for "cred" to mean nothing, we're not, and it means a lot.

2006 was a year with a whole lot of albums that tried to hide commercial interests under artistic clothing: The Killers, Christina Aguilera, Jay-Z, Bob Dylan, Gnarls Barkely, Tool and a thousand others (most of which can be found in the Rolling Stone Top 50) put out albums that were as flimsy as the paper that made their too-long linear notes while sounding like they were approved by the same focus groups who pushed 18 talking animal movies on film-goers.  It wouldn't surprise anybody to find out Owen Wilson did backing guitar for Dylan or filed paperwork for Gnarls Barkely tours: the asshole was everywhere else.  It's tried and true dull cynicism to pretend that 2006 was any worse for music than any other year, so why break tradition?   Where was our Broken Social Scene?  Why did Mars Volta and The Evens spiral down so badly?  Will Jeremy Enigk hurry up and take his own life before he tries another solo album on us?

So yeah, maybe King isn't that innovative, and maybe it's lyrics are too easy to remember, and maybe the beats don't break ground.  Who is it that said hip-hop had to be moving forward quicker than any other genre?  Rock and Jazz stay the same for ten, fifteen years before they move along.  As far as anyone can tell, Classical music stayed the same for something like 400,000 years.  But if a hip-hop album comes out that doesn't sound that different from something in 1999, if it just sounds like the son of 'Hova returning, everybody shits all over it and brings up some pussy ass Blackalicous album as if it's the antidote to cancer.  The Factual likes the Digable Planets as much as the next white guy, and we'll always listen to the Roots and mention how they "play their own instruments" as if that's so goddamn hard, but when it's time to stop being a moody freak isolating in a bubble like Kurt Russell it'll be albums like King we listen to: because it's fucking push-up music, cause it's got the boom you test subwoofers to, and because it's a hell of a lot more fun to scowl when you're not wearing a goddamn backpack.  2006 was the year that tried to make albums like this guilty pleasures. I'm here to tell you that ain't right.  If you're listening to Belle & Sebastian, Scott Walker and Joanna Newsom, you're the one that should be embarrassed.  (And I am, so don't try that card here.) 

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 2006: #3

Girl Talk
Night Ripper

If you haven't gone there yet, check out this wikipedia entry on Night Ripper.  After that, you'll have a full understanding of what Gregg Gillis has in his record collection.  It won't give you much of a sense of the sound, so if you haven't heard the Ripper yet, you'll probably wonder how the hell Pavement, 2 Live Crew and Wings can end up on the same track and be even remotely listenable.  You might even say that the album sounds like some kind of bullshit ruse, some clever experiement that shouldn't be examined as music, or as art.  On the art tip, you're probably right.  Maybe even the music.  Maybe Night Ripper, and mash-ups in general, are just another nail in the coffin of decent work in the same way that reality shows are steamrolling documentary filmmaking, or the way commercial news organizations are eradicating ethical journalism.

Maybe.  Probably not though: not enough people bought Girl Talk's 3rd album, and like anything, if it ain't profitable, it'll never win a fight.  Still, Girl Talk defeated all comers in the fun album of the year, narrowly lost to Scott Walker for most creative, and definitively demolished all but The Simpsons for swampiest arena of pop culture reference.  For anyone who ever wanted a team-up between Bell Biv DeVoe, Hum and Kanye West (which should be anyone with taste,) your time has come.  Get moving.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Tucker doesn't like mash-ups, but if you like Hum (and Girl Talk does), you're alright with him.  So get out there and pick up Downward is Heavenward and You'd Prefer An Astronaut.

Mash-ups circa 2002 were about context, i.e. if we grafted the vocals from Christina Aguilara’s “Genie In a Bottle” onto the music from The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain,” we changed the meaning of both songs. Essentially, mash-up artists drew parallels between disparate types of music. The trend became a metaphor for the new way of interfacing with music that Napster and iTunes provided. But, in practice, mash-up artistry peaked almost the instant it arrived. With a rudimentary knowledge of pop culture, one could accurately imagine how an entire mash-up would sound upon hearing the first fifteen seconds. The novelty of the actual songs wore off quickly, but the trend created new vocabulary in the language of pop music. Here were songs with instantaneous pleasures that also rewarded knowledge; dumb music for smart people. Yes, Freelance Hellraiser recontextualized both The Strokes and Christina Aguilara with his seminal mash-up “A Stroke of Genius”—but only if you knew each song’s context to begin with. 

With Night Ripper, Pittsburgh DJ Greg Gillis AKA Girl Talk, distills the idea of the mash-up—the merging of two otherwise unrelated songs into one track that, ideally, outshines its sources—and makes it listenable by refusing to linger on any one idea long enough for that idea to become predictable. Night Ripper unfolds in a series of left turns, packing Missy Elliott, "Around the Way Girl", Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz, "Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover," Panjabi MC, "Hate It Or Love It", Pixies, "White Rabbit", "The Whistle Song," and Neutral fucking Milk Hotel into a single song. Yet even the most genius marriages on Night Ripper—The Notorious B.I.G. rapping over Elton John, say, or “Best of My Love” backing “Kryptonite”—aren’t really the show. One can imagine a dedicated mash-up artist arriving at any of these places eventually, given enough time. But where every mash-up hinges on a single idea, Night Ripper contains multitudes. 

Strangely, it all works because Gillis rarely samples genuinely dynamic songs. He chooses his sources for a particular sound (Missy Elliott’s “On and On”) or phrase (Cassady’s “I’m a Hustler”) or rhythm (M.I.A.’s “Galang”). In each case, he reduces the song down to its basest component. One gets the essence of Elastica’s “Connection” from the opening guitar riff, for example; one doesn’t need the entire song. So, while pop knowledge and awareness greatly enhance the enjoyment of Night Ripper, the album doesn’t rely on context to create its effect, the way mash-ups do. In other words, this is still dumb music for smart people, but the learning curve has greatly increased. Girl Talk takes a new and problematic genre and accelerates it to perfection. What could be timelier? It’s a bonus that he solves all of the mash-ups problems by giving us more: more ideas, more parallels between more diverse genres and more eras, more ambition, more fun.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 2006: #4

Liars
Drum's Not Dead

EIght years ago or so, my uncle lent me a book called The Secret History of Rock by Roni Sarig, which profiled a ton of band and artists who had--as the title implied--secretly helped develop the sounds used by the artists I listened to at the time.  Sarig focused on artists as diverse as Slint and Van Dyke Parks and Erik Satie and The Last Poets and Flipper and traced their lineage through to Nirvana and 2Pac and Soul Coughing.  This was mind-blowing, of course, in the way that retroactively witnessing the development of an idea over time is always mind-blowing.

Now, of course, there’s not even the potential for secret history of rock. The internet sheds light on everything, with the methods discovering music growing exponentially. The artists on our list who would never have found an audience even as little as three years ago—Lil’ Wayne, for example, and Beirut—have gotten the attention they deserve online. As a by-product, we often get to see the formerly invisible process by which an artist becomes a visionary. Also, as we know well by now, the internet is fickle. This is where the Liars show up.

Over the course of three albums, Liars have made that leap. 2002’s They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top chased fashionable dance-punk, got swept into a scene with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and reached an unfadeable zenith with “Mr. Your On Fire Mr.” Four years later, Drum’s Not Dead is an unclassifiable behemoth of an album. Tribal rhythms and chanting create a sense of extreme compression. Everything comes across as stunningly simple—even obvious—but sounds like absolutely nothing else. 

More than just a monumental album, though, Drum’s Not Dead establishes Liars as a new breed of artist. The experimenters and influencers in The Secret History of Rock had no one watching when they failed. Years later the risk-taking received the attention it deserved. Liars, on the other hand, attempt to be Secret History-caliber artists, but do it in full view of the public. Their middle album, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned—widely regarded as a disaster on the scale of Metal Machine Music—undeniably helped develop the sound they achieve on Drum’s Not Dead. To make such a critical comeback at a time when failure can be career-ending, and to do it by creating an entirely new sound—well, that’s unprecedented. We look forward to hearing what they do next.

-Marty Brown, 2006

There's nothing really fun about drone music--regardless of what anybody says, you'd be hard pressed to find relatively sane individuals who are excited to start their day with Om or Orthhelm.  Unless one has a lot of experience with the actual mechanics of making music, which this writer doesn't, than drone is something that's far more interesting as an object than anything else.  One listens to it just to see if it's understandable, to see if it's something beyond just noise--and people who do that usually should be doing something more constructive, like breakfast.  Some people like to make that arguement about the Drum: that it's an album that's constructed of things that aren't really cohesive songs, that don't fall into place.  They couldn't be more mistaken.

When the Liars first showed up with Trench, they were described as post-punk, and due to Stooge-like similarites (wall-like sound, aggro-lyrics and a weird kind of pop song structure) this was a pretty apt description.  The follow up album, 2004's They Were Wrong was universally loathed by critics (an exciting occurence in itself: critics were far more divided regarding the aural assualt of Wolf Eyes and previous no-wave revivals from the SYR series--but everybody, from Spin to Pitchfork, hated the Liars in 2004) and was, even to those who enjoyed, a hell of a difficult listen.  Instead of jettisoning the Wrong sound, the Liars completely jettisoned everything from Trench that didn't work, brought the vocals up a bit, and made They Were Wrong, again.  This time, it worked.  Whether it's because Drum's Not Dead has more, ahem, percussion, or whether it's because it loosely creates a larger thematic story, Drum's Not Dead got rave reviews.  It deserves them all: it's one of the strongest artistic statements any band made in 2006.  The Liars made drone/noise/rock/art/punk music, they made it listenable, they made it intelligent, and they made it exciting. 

Buying cd's is a stupid waste of money--everybody knows it.  Drum's Not Dead was worth the money for one sole reason: the DVD.  If you profess to dig the album, and you still haven't sat through Drum's Not Bread, one of the three album length companion pieces, than get ready to be happy.  To those who didn't really dig the album due to noise complaints, get ready to be even happier.  Although straight-up performance footage takes the backseat to cheap music video tricks, watching the three man crew in the studio does occur, and it's fascinating, educational stuff.  While the films have less to do with the story of Mt. Heart Attack and Drum, the enthustiatic confusion that takes up the album's over-arching story, the films are must watches for anyone with interest in the Liars.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The best recommendation for someone looking for something like The Liars is for that someone to catch the Liars live: this writer did, and it was the best live show of the year.

The Best of 2006: #5

Herbert
Scale

While 2006 can go down for the dirty (Wayne, Clipse, JT and Avatar,) and it can go in for some scary (Walker, Burial and Liars,) Herbert's the one who's bringing the wash.  As complicated as his earlier Bodily Functions, yet far more compulsive, Scale is that rare piece of electronic music that is able to apply the minimalist technique found on Sleeparchive with the lifeblood of a humanistic Daft Punk, and then layer in enough pop vocals and horns to make it sound like the album Cristina Aguilera would've shot her mother to make.  Somebody better hurry up and give Herbert a grant: otherwise, he's going to be enslaved by some label to produce every half-ass pop act that Simon Cowell hasn't emotionally devastated.  Even more upsetting, he could probably make them seem interesting.

Dance music gets a lot of static and derision--The Factual isn't about to argue that most of it isn't deserved.  While no music should ever be labeled "responsible" for any sad state of affairs, dance music is, for the most part, made for and by aggravating collection of the biggest nimrods this world has ever produced.  If it wasn't for Phish and Deadheads, dance-freaks and X-girls could easily take the top spot as the most repugnant fanbase on Earth, even during the heyday of Poison.

Herbert gets a pass--after all, this is the first time in a few albums that he's pulled back on his solo work from just exploratory sound--in other words, he's made a dance music you could actually dance to, instead of just crazy beeps and sexy voices (Bodily Functions grows on you, but it takes some serious abstract thinking to tap your feet to.)  Whether it's left over excitement from his 2005 work on Roison Murphy's album, one of the best pop albums that doesn't involve Justin, Herbert went to town on this one, crafting one of the cleanest love albums in a while.  Scale is a masterstroke, and it's an album that grows into far more than just sexy techno the more it's played.  Most heavy music critics are going to ignore albums like this--to artsy to be a guilty pleasure, but too fun to be taken seriously.  That's their loss: don't make it yours.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

You'd also be might be pleasantly surprised by Ekkehard Ehler's recent A Life Without Fear--an album as bizarre as Scale is pretty.  Although it would be a far cry to call the two artists contemporaries, they're both continuosly exploring the field of electronic music while still making music that people might actually want to hear.  That's a backhanded insult at Alan Courtis.

Matthew Herbert once wrote a manifesto for his work, which included the guideline, “The inclusion, development, propagation, existence, replication, acknowledgement, rights, patterns and beauty of what are commonly known as accidents, is encouraged.” Everything on Scale sets in its right place, but Herbert’s attitude about the happy accidents (his manifesto is titled “Personal Contract for the Composition of Music [Incorporating the Manifesto of Mistakes]”) allows his compositions to break free from the rigidity that defines most electronic music. Though they’ve obviously been given extreme attention down to the minutest detail, his songs most often feel breezy and carefree.   

The vocals on Scale unfold slowly. Herbert builds exquisite tension before launching into his hooks. Often, one catchy chorus gives way to a second, even catchier chorus. “Harmonize,” the album’s high point, has no less than five musical phrases which playfully interact with one another until, finally, the joyful “You are the world/ I am your people” swoops in and outdoes them all. The effect is stunning. It’s also fairly orgasmic, but not in the blatant way that most rock music aspires to be orgasmic. Orgasmic in the way that two people can interlock their breathing and rhythms to create something greater than either one could achieve on his or her own. 

An album ostensibly about the nature of love—falling into it, recognizing it, coping with it—Herbert’s Scale may come closer than any album in history to capturing the sound of what we imagine love to be. On the one hand, he has the syrupy strings that we associate with Sinatra and walking in Central Park. He has the antiseptic vocalists singing like they’re in a Hallmark commercial. He has jazzy horn sections and swirling orchestral arrangements. On the other hand, he has a strong pulse, the electronic flutters that sideswipe “The Movers And The Shakers,” the sick bass line of “Moving Like A Train,” the intrusive bleeps censoring the dirty talk of “Down.” With so many contradicting elements knotted into one tight little bundle—so many accidents meeting within such a deliberate construct—it’s practically the real thing.    

For further investigation: Herbert’s wife and primary vocalist, Dani Siciliano, made her own album this year featuring, on one song, the sound a room full of girls slapping their own asses. The album is called Slappers. Also, Róisín Murphy’s nearly flawless Herbert-produced debut, Ruby Blue, was released stateside this year, and comes highly recommended by us here at TFO. Also, for a taste of experimental but accessible electronic pop from a completely different angle, dive into The Knife’s Silent Shout.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 2006: #6

Lil Wayne & DJ Drama
Dedication 2

It's a good thing for mp3 blogs and file sharing.  After all, if you don't live nearby a major rap hub, you probably are only able to pick up CD-R "mixtapes" that reflect your local scene--which, if you live in Houston means you get a lot of great DJ Screw, and if you live in Baltimore, you probably hang out with Spank Rock, but if you live in Nashville you're probably a little sick of David Banner.  If you live in Nome, Alaska, you just need to start uploading more: none of us know what's going down up there, and we're all beginning to wonder if there's any bands in Canada besides the Constellation collective and Malajube.  Does Canada make mixtapes?  Do they make ones without Swollen Members?

Lil Wayne's cheaply put together and non-marketed Dedication II didn't just come out the same year that he was involved in multiple major-label releases, it slaughtered them wholesale: if you listened to Lil Wayne at all this year, and you weren't listening to Dedication II, than you're some kind of freak who still uses the regular old non-satellite radio.  (And yes, that makes you a freak.  Buy an iPod shuffle, you cave-dweller.  You people are what's wrong with America, you and your 2000 vote for Nader.)

Wayne doesn't have the best beats or production value to back him up here--and that isn't a slight to Drama or Gangster Grillz, it's just a statement of fact: the beats are cheaply made and repetitive, which is always going to be the nature of this type of hip-hop.  It's a old school soap box for an old school MC, so if anything about Dedication is going to be more than just an updated diary entry, it's going to be because of Wayne's ability to entertain and impress.  Thank the gods of Kobol, he's got that in spades.  Whether it's "Sportscenter," the single funniest rap/skit track released this year, or "Georgia...Bush," the only protest song of 2006 to have any real meaning whatsoever, Lil Wayne remains one of the brightest artists of the last ten years.  Imagining what he would have done with the strong production forces beyond some of the other albums this year is like imagining a fantasy football team that includes LT, Lee Perry and Chuck Yeager--and Lil Wayne seems to show absolutely no sign of either stopping or slowing down.  Although it's unlikely that Wayne will team up with Steve Albini any time soon, it's clear that just about anything else may be in the cards.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Go buy mixtapes, buy them on Canal and W. Broadway, buy them outside Virgin Megastores, buy them online, upload 'em, download 'em, do whatever else.  There's way more good ones out there than any one website or magazine will ever be able to dissect, and the difference between the good, the great and the what-the-hell could be, quite literally, a couple of inches.

The Best of 2006: #7

Neko Case
Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

Neko Case begins Fox Confessor Brings the Flood with “Margaret vs. Pauline,” written from the point of view of Margaret, who lost three fingers at the cannery. Margaret envies Pauline, who appears to effortlessly obtain everything she wants. “Everything’s so easy for Pauline,” Margaret thinks, “Fate holds her firmly in its cradle.” Usually these kinds of stories end with the Margaret-type character discovering that the Pauline-type doesn’t have everything laid out for her as perfectly appears, but there’s no such revelation here. Neko Case firmly sees herself as Margaret, and her position is clear: The Paulines of the world do, in fact, exist, and she will never be one of them. Subsequently, although Fox Confessor Brings the Flood travels effortlessly through its series of intricately constructed story-songs, everything Case describes—from the blossoming of love in “That Teenage Feeling” to the murder in “Dirty Knife”—comes hard-earned. She may not have lost three fingers, but her hands have gotten dirty creating these songs, and they sound like it. 

Case mostly steers clear of verse-chorus-verse structures, instead allowing her songs to unfold like short fiction—the music twists and turns to support the storytelling. Without the hooks she manages to wring out of almost every line, however, the album wouldn’t be much of a listen. Thankfully, we get the gospel bounce of “John Saw That Number,” which rides along on an old-West barroom piano. We get “The Needle Has Landed”—the album-closer and catchiest number—which spins a variation on an old theme as Case sings, “If I knew then what’s so obvious now/ You’d still be here, baby.” We get her slow-playing the payoff of “A Widow’s Toast,” in which a circle of women grapple with the ghosts of their dead husbands. She multi-tracks the vocals over a subtle guitar—it almost sounds a capella—to create an aural portrait of memory before laying into the wistful refrain, “It’s a faster love than you and me/ Faster than the speed of gravity.” In fact, the entire album reflects a sense of history intertwining with a vision of the future—the desire to change one’s past or one’s fate usurped by the mundane and often tragic facts of the present. “Better times collide with now,” she sings, “and better times are coming still.”

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 2006: #8

Comets On Fire
Avatar

There it is--the album that you never remember to bring up in conversation when you're arguing about the Liars, why The Hold Steady is a good band, and whether or not listening to the Raconteurs will turn you gay.  (They will.)  But when they come up on shuffle, here it was: the album that reminds you that calling Death Cab indie rock is, quite literally, a blasphemy in terms.  Avatar is what rock sounds like, it's what you and I think about when we tell somebody when they ask us how Half-Nelson was--we say, "It f--king rocks." We aren't thinking about Ryan Adams, we aren't thinking about the Decemberists--we're thinking about Avatar, whether we know it or not.  Hanging around the junkyard, the campfire and wherever else bearded drunks go, Comets On Fire have been doing whatever they feel like for years now, and when it came 2006, they decided they were going to remind everybody what the Strokes have been trying to make us forget: that there wasn't anything wrong with liking Led Zeppelin in middle school. Avatar is up to the minute enough to stand toe to toe against Mastodon and Boris, and it walked away with the crown because it liked having fun a hell of a lot more than they did.  If you wanted somebody to rock your body in 2006, you went with Timberlake: but if you just wanted to rawk, than Avatar was the way things went down.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Howlin Rain was another album that should've gotten a lot more love for rekindling people's van-loving power chords, and this recommendation goes straight out to any holiday drivers who are able to hang an arm out of an open window--you'll beat a dent into the door frame.