Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > Albums of the Year 2006

Yolk: Yolk

Described by our guitarist as “the best band ever to pick up instruments,” Dunkirk’s Yolk are bursting at the seams with ideas. Their sound takes breathless handbrake turns between yelped Deerhoof melodies, Eastern European folk forms, Boredoms-style freakouts and fiery prog rock. With a singer whose unique wordless approach sees her modulating her voice between sub bass and squeaking, a guitarist who converses ably between Agata, Bailey and Haino, treated sax and violin and one of the most versatile rhythm sections ever to grace a band this individualistic and bonkers. Regardless of the obvious reference points they seem to have sprung fully formed with a sound all their own.

Yolk give lie to the cliche that virtuosity is a joyless exercise enjoyed in lonely rooms and sterile studios by session musicians. Rarely will you find a band as silly, intense and downright fun, and they put on one of the best live shows I’ve seen all year.

Ghostface Killah: Fishscale
Ghostface Killah: More Fish

At this stage is there any point in writing any more about this guy and his music? Fishscale is probably my favourite album of the year, More Fish is half like a DVD extras companion piece and half a follow up to Theodore Unit’s brilliant 718, and reckon I can make a very convincing case for Ghostface himself being the greatest recording artist of our time. He certainly beats that dreary Will Oldham nonsense, and anyone who disagrees can start an Ironman vs Bonnie Prince Billy thread. I’m thinking even the Palace dude wouldn’t argue.

Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto: Revep

Anyone who bought Insen and Vrioon will know exactly what to expect here, but there’s still a conundrum in the music that keeps you coming back for more of the same. It has something to do with the manner in which Sakamoto’s minimal piano is cut apart, deconstructed, manipulated and glitched with a cold surgical precision by Alva Noto without losing any of its soul or warmth. In fact the process involved serves only to enhance the unadorned honesty of the performance and its presence as it decays in the room in which it was recorded, leaving one wondering whether the sense that the music is breaking through the constraints of the medium is illusory or almost too immanent and real.

Parts & Labor: Stay Afraid

A part of me feels just the tiniest bit sorry for Parts & Labor. They’re just so unfashionably anthemic for the indie-schmindie-let’s-pretend-that-there’s-still-such-a-thing-as-alternative-music crowd while being too unfamiliar a prospect for the rockers what with the way in which they swap their guitars for table top rubbish no-budget keyboards with piled on effects pedals. Their drummer plays like I wish I could, one of the loudest in the business but coupled with a speed and accuracy that leave you boggled-eyed in disbelief.

Actually I’m not sorry for them at all. I’m really envious.

Stay Afraid is an album of brutally performed euphoric rock music with ear splitting electronics and gut churning bass. It’s brilliant.

LoFi FNK: Boylife

If only it were possible to go back in time and persuade them to call themselves something else. Almost anything else. There’s nothing “lo-fi” or “funk” about them. Instead it’s an album of beautifully crafted pop music with big plush sounding synths and blippy-bloppy drum machines, simultaneously wide-eyed with wonder at the an the ever expanding world you see when growing up and charged with an urgency to get out and enjoy it while you can. It’s fun and sweet and innocent and tinged with a kind of heart-on-sleeve teenage yearning that’s totally inclusive and easy to get obsessed by.

I also really recommend their earlier material, Unighted and ADT and the rest.

Mugstar: Mugstar

It’s a tough task to be one of the best live bands in the UK and be faced with how you capture that on record. Mugstar are pulverising on stage, relentless in their repetition and operating at all times with a thousand yard stare intensity. Their sound is hard won and individual despite drawing from clear influences in Can and Neu, with songs that build in intensity slowly out of minute changes rather than the more hamfisted methods used by lesser bands like Mogwai who only understand dynamics in terms of when they stomp on their distortion pedals. Early indications are that they want to make their new material even more repetitive, which makes me a very happy man. This is a great recording but it’s reassuring to know that their Sheets of Easter is potentially still ahead of them.

Boduf Songs: Lion Devours the Sun

“All round your sex/black flies breeding.” This is doom metal made inaudible, the sound of acoustic guitars barely plucked and vocals barely uttered above a whisper, with occasional scrapings or drones to add to The Fear. Personally I’ve never taken such things entirely seriously and part of me wonders whether Matt Sweet does either. I always wonder if there’s some kind of Salute with The Horns cheekiness behind this band, not that I think they’re a joke or parody, but that there seems to be a few more levels going on here than most reviewers are prepared to dig for. It almost seems like Tenacious D turned down to minus one rather than eleven and steered uncomfortably into Blue Jam territory. However, it’s the quality of the songs that makes the record head and shoulders above most of also rans that are usually lumped into the same field. Lion Devours the Sun is pared right back, bare and tense and beautifully composed.

They’re also one of the best live bands I’ve seen all year, playing almost totally unamplified to a fifty strong audience in a church hall. No-one made a sound and you could hear every note perfectly.

The Clipse: Hell Hath No Fury

Wow. The Neptunes certainly waited until we’d written them off to produce what’s close to being a career best, and they’ve saved it for just the right crew. The beats are dirty like the sample rate is too low and it’s a perfect match for the thugged out, lean and dextrous rhyming from Malice and Pusha T. Wamp Wamp is my most listened to tune of the moment, but it's barely a highlight on this brilliantly concise and consistent album.

The Knife: Silent Shout

Much more of a focussed record than Deep Cuts, and much stronger for it. This third album sees the Knife exploring a narrower territory in much greater depth, and obtaining their own individual sound. It’s still wonderfully low-budget electronic disco, but colder, more detached and austere sounding, as though their reported aloofness and disdain were progressively seeping deeper into their music. It’s a wonderfully bleak, fragile sound, like The Knife haughtily looking down their long masked noses at the rest of the record industry.

The USAISAMONSTER: Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age

This band sound improbably like a cross between Fugazi and Lightning Bolt covering the operatic mid-section of Bohemian Rhapsody. On their latest record their dabbling with folk forms is more integrated into the song writing, so it’s less an album in two halves than Wohaw. You might dismiss them as yet another power two-piece but they have a lot more tricks up their sleeve than most of the bands working in that format have evidenced in their whole careers. Thumb pianos, triumphant return-to-nature lyrics spat with punk intensity, folk interludes, and utterly useless keyboard sounds add to the mix, most of the time played by the drummer. . . at the same time as he drums and sings.

Spank Rock: YoYoYoYoYo

If this were nearly any other year YoYoYoYoYo would have easily been the best hip hop album. As it is it holds its own against Fishcale, Two/Three and Hell Hath No Fury. It’s a cracking mix of low end dancefloor fillers, filthy rhyming and rabble rousing call and response male/female singalongs. The production throughout is astounding, moving effortlessly between styles, always accessable. One of the few new bands that’s worth all the praise they’re getting.

OOIOO: Taiga!

Hooray! Drum porn. Yoshimi P-We has come to realise that drums and the human voice will always be the most exciting instruments to play with, and she’s a master of both. Taiga! moves OOIOO further towards being like a more manoeuvrable Boredoms. For the most part there’s barely any instrumentation other than the aforementioned, but far from being predictable it revels in its daft celebratory cheers, chants and mantras. Along with Yamatsuka Eye, Yoshimi has mapped a bizarre path through noise, all-styles-in-a-blender splatterpunk towards ecstatic music that is bizarrely functional and devotional, if the function is to soundtrack your party and your devotions consist of dancing.

Matmos: The Rose Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast

Snails playing theremins, a cow’s reproductive tract and the sound of adding machines and typewriters: it could only be a Matmos album. Here their bonkers methodologies are attuned to miniature biographies of some of their major influences, with the results moving between puerile, funky, cerebral and unexpectedly beautiful.

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Those are my current favourites of the year. Here are a few more that I also kinda liked:

Bruce Springsteen: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

When I was growing up my friend’s mum had a cupboard in her kitchen called The Boss Cupboard. It was always kept empty apart from a poster of Springsteen at the back. This raucous recording consists of the man himself and his mates in a room belting out songs they love and is about as unselfconscious a performance as you’re likely to find.

The Flaming Lips: At War with the Mystics

The Flips’ starry-eyed humanism gets angry and bizarrely political, messing around with seventies funk and rock as prime influences filtered via their skewed Muppet Show sensibilities and oddball electronics. Wish they’d paid more attention to the songs, as if they had this would have been a masterpiece.

Chris Corsano: The Young Cricketer

A series of sketches to show the state of Corsano’s unique craft in 2006, which has already been surpassed by subsequent live shows in which the ideas and techniques are better expressed in more coherent and fully realised pieces. Drums played with bouncy balls on bamboo skewers and cellotape, converted into stringed instruments, pot lids used as makeshift gamelan and homemade sax/rubber plumbing hose contraptions. The most exciting drummer in the world right now.

AFX: Chosen Lords

Aphex Twin makes fun squelchy acid. Good good.

Cornelius: Sensuous

Beautifully programmed scattershot drumming over cut up acoustic guitars and fragmentary melodies. A wonderful sounding record and a natural step on from Point.

Dabrye: Two/Three

Beautifully produced plush electonicish hip hop with patchy but often great guest MCs. In places spellbinding, and to be lauded for Tadd Mullinix not making the standard error of attracting only the backpack conscious crowd and/or trying to make a rap album that believes itself to be better than rap.

Johnny Cash: American V: A Hundred Highways

Goes the way of Tupac, hopefully the first of many posthumous albums. If you’ve heard any of his American Recordings releases previously you’ll know exactly what to expect.

Morton Feldman: String Quartet (1979)

At last, a readily available cut price Naxos record to act as a primer(ish) to anyone not familiar with my favourite composer. Although I’d probably recommend starting with Piano and String Quartet as performed by the Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi, or the Tzadik edition of Patterns in a Chromatic Field as a better place to start. It’s emotionless, quiet, austere and tense over its longform eighty minutes, which is almost a pop song duration compared to some of his works. Music to get in a trance to while staring at rugs, if you ever want to kill Joe Flyboy (or just torture him for information) then this is the music to use.

My end of year list proves once and for all that although I love hip hop dearly I can’t write about it for toffee. Probably something to do with no longer really listening much to lyrics (on any type of music). Wonder why that is. . .

Respect to Locust and Seth for some good lists.

And so, here finally is my extended top ten round-up.

Please keep in mind that, as usual, about 90% of the music I have listened to this year has been old stuff, and as such my list comes from an extremely limited palette, and there are no doubt many, many, many excellent 2006 records that I didn't get to hear.

So without further ado..

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Comet Gain – City Fallen Leaves (Track & Field)

The best albums are always the ones that are hardest to write about. Some may sneer at Comet Gain, with their occasional clumsy, stumbling, too-close-to-the-bone lyrics, their obvious, thunderous chords and botched attempts at harmonies, their indie hipster battle chants and their unashamed devotion to the gospel of the TV Personalities and the Go-Betweens. Most probably don’t even know they exist, given their complete absence from any kind of media.

But, unlike the po-mo shit clogging up a lot of end-of-year lists, the point is, Comet Gain come from the heart. And what they do essentially amounts to soundtracking and romanticising the triumphs and failures of my own life, to the extent that it’s positively unnerving. And if you’re a disgruntled indie diehard with a taste for ‘60s Godard, cultural authenticity, red wine, record shopping and the wreckage of riot grrl, a similar effect is guaranteed. Tribalism is a disgraceful contagion, but fuck it, Comet Gain are My People. Their last album, ‘Realistes’ was an unrepeatable masterpiece of statement-of-intent, power of music, rise above optimism, but this one’s altogether darker; it’s kinda bitter, heartbroken, skirting complete despair. But not quite, because whatever they’ve lost between records, they’ve still got passion, intelligence, poetry, beautiful guitars, punk rock fury and voices that weren’t made to sing trying for all they’re worth and daring you to believe. In good times or bad, their spirit and their songs mean a lot to me. So Album of the Year by a mile, and fuck you in advance.

The Mountain Goats – Get Lonely (4AD)

As you may recall if you read my review earlier this year, this one didn’t immediately win me over. Then I got lonely. So, I may not have been a teenage runaway in 2004, or trapped in a self-destructive marriage in 2003, but this year The Mountain Goats made an album especially for me.

Charalambides – A Vintage Burden (Kranky)

The two Charalambides live performances I have been lucky enough to witness this year have got me convinced that Christina and Tom Carter are quietly drinking from a unique lake of heavenly yet human beauty, resulting in some of the most moving and inspired music currently being produced on the planet.

But although they’ve all been thoroughly satisfying in different ways, none of the duo’s studio albums have so far revealed a definitive statement of aforementioned beauty. As such, the conventional Low-ish acoustica of some of the tracks on ‘A Vintage Burden’ is initially underwhelming, but repeated listens reveal aforementioned beauty burning through with solace and redemption, and ‘Two Birds’ in particular is one of the finest expressions of the group’s existential cosmic blues to date.

The Thermals – The Body, The Blood, The Machine (Sub-Pop)

Third album in from the most invigorating punk rock band of the modern era. This time round though, they’ve lost their kick-ass drummer, and as befits a punk band that’s made it through three albums, they’ve given way to worrying developments such as shiny production, keyboard and lead guitar bits and songs that are actually, like, 4 or 5 minutes long and mid-tempo. It’s also kind of a concept album about fighting against, and escaping from, a fundamentalist totalitarian regime, with a few love songs thrown in for good measure.

So is it any good…?

“I carry my baby,
I carry my baby,
Her eyes can barely see,
Her mouth can barely breathe

I can see she’s afraid,
That’s why we’re escaping,
So we don’t have to die, we don’t have to deny,
Our dirty god, our dirty bodies!”

Of course it’s fucking good.

Metallic Falcons - Desert Doughnuts (Voodoo-Eros)

Bought involuntarily from their merch stand along with a customised T-shirt long before I had any idea this was tagged as a Coco-Rosie side-project, all that matters is that Metallic Falcons = immersive, timeless psychedelic music of the best possible kind. It has moments that on other records would be somewhat affected and irritating, but who cares when it all flows so beautifully.

Remember that time you were driving through Death Valley in a 1970 Dodge Challenger, and you broke down, and these two weird Manson girls arose from the sand and took you back to their shack and danced in the twilight to ancient, bizarre gramophone records, before they fed you that strange broth from an Indian prayer bowl, and then that zeppelin turned up and you all took a ride..? – well this is the soundtrack.

Silver Jews – Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City)

I’ve never given the Jews much listening time before, but ‘Punks in the Beerlight’, the opening track on here, knocked me flat off my feet. Sounds like David Berman got up one morning and accidentally wrote the most sublime, hard-edged power-pop song since Big Star and Springsteen walked the earth. Being an obtuse, miserablist bastard, he made a few attempts to camouflage it, throwing together some of the most desperate and oddly moving lyrics of his career in the process. Then he shrugged his shoulders, called up the band and got cracking.

The other songs on ‘Tanglewood Numbers’ have proceeded to win me over one by one with their peculiar grace and zen-like wit and trashed suburban romanticism. Silver Jews creep up on you sideways like a crab.

Comets on Fire – Avatar (Sub-Pop)

By far the most structured / accessible Comets outing to date, this is like a master-class in how to make a really kick-ass cosmic rock album the old fashioned way. It’s like, I dunno, Blue Oyster Cult on the best drugs in the world, getting wild on Mars. In a very profound sense, this is ROCK, the way you always hoped it would be.

Pelt – Skullfuck / Bestio Tergum Dergero (VHF)

The first half of this disc is an absolutely jaw-dropping extended drone-raga reworking of Jack Rose’s ‘Calais to Dover’ – the most intense devotional psyche workout I’ve heard this year, and enough to give all the delay pedal abusing potheads stumbling onto this scene’s bandwagon the aneurysm/orgasm they deserve, as Rose drives his faster-than-the-human-eye string picking string toward the edges of the known universe, backed by a veritable galaxy of unearthly scrape and skree. Second half is a bit of a comedown, with a suite of Double Leopards / David Lynch style menacing, low-level hum that in itself is plenty good.

Blood on the Wall – Awesomer (FatCat)

Perhaps the first recorded example of a pure ‘90s retro band, these happy young NYC folks are unashamed of their obvious debt to the Pixies, Breeders, Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, Superchunk et al, and revitalise the best bits of their influences with snappy, ramshackle charm, chaos, energy, admirably few notes and the kind of hooks that’ll see them frying up a big, juicy haddock every night through the long winter months. It’s kind of a rough n’ ready album, and some tracks are pretty forgettable, but ‘Heat from the Day’ is a stonecold classic 90 second blast with the coolest one note guitar line ever, ‘Mary Susan’ is the best song Black Francis ever forgot to write down, and ‘I Want To Take You Out Tonight’ is the purest soothing, heartbroken fuzz guitar bliss-out I’ve heard in many a moon. It’s only indie-rock, but I like it.

Oneida – Happy New Year (Jagjaguar / Rough Trade)

For one reason or another, this one hasn’t grabbed me as much as Oneida records usually do. Whilst it’s a touch dense and forbidding though, I can still recognise it as a fine, fine album, heavy on Oneida’s brooding, evocative techno-medievalism rather than their acid-fucked future-pop. It has a certain spirit of resigned defiance, and makes me think of the knights of the Holy Orders marching forth on another doomed crusade to the far ends of the earth as the chronicler sprawls out in the woods in an opium haze, mind on higher things.

Sticking out like a sore thumb though is ‘Up With People’, a hyper-positivist floorfiller that would be an era-defining 12” club hit in a any decent world; it’s the full realisation of Oneida’s long held ambition to play euphoric dance music on live instruments, twisting drum kit, organ and guitars out of their usual orbits to create a perfect facsimile of some kinda totally awesome early ‘80s New York disco / proto-house dancefloor smash: you got get up to get free!

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PLUG: for more outbusts of clumsy and bitter music criticism, remember I can always be found at www.stereosanctity.blogspot.com