the moose 2006 year end best of music list
As the music industry continues to vacillate wildly, and no one can seem to agree upon whether or not downloading is gaining ground or slipping back, artists have continued to release some great, fresh music. Here at the Moose much music in the form of CDs, MP3s, vinyl and streams crosses our desks and a large amount of it sends us into the wrong kind of funk. But there are always diamonds in the rough and so we present our top ten favorites from 2006 some with comment some without.
01. TV On The Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain.
Far and away my favorite album of the year by a band that had clearly decided to throw caution to the wind and to simply embrace their art form fully. Jon Pareles said it best “an elegy, a squall, a survey of ruins, a call for resolve, an impetus to dance, an incantation, a reverie, a taunt, a surge…..”. Utterly brilliant and we should celebrate a band that is clearly without peer in the world of rock music.
02. The Roots - Game Theory. [Removed By Request Of Copyright Owner]
03. Hot Chip - The Warning.
Those wiry Brits known as Hot Chip are apparently the hardest working electronic act out there and with their CD The Warning they delivered on the promise that their 7″ single Down With Prince suggested. “Whereas a band like Primal Scream simply want to BE The Rolling Stones for one album, then King Tubby on the next, and Royal Trux on another, we prefer to make references in miniature to the spirit of the records and performances we love and admire,” says vocalist/keyboard player Alexis Taylor. “We might apply an interesting approach to recording that we have learnt from an artist, but with a different set of aesthetic principles. So traces of RTX, Anti-Pop Consortium, ‘I’m Your Man’ era-Leonard Cohen, Stevie Wonder, Tom Petty, MadLib and Will Oldham, for example, may all be somewhere in one song, rather than becoming the blueprint for an entire album.” Effortless.
04. Cat Power - The Greatest.
Chan Marshall stops time. She sits at a piano or lays her guitar across her lap, and whether it’s a noisy club overflowing with drunks or a coffee house full of laptoppers, Chan Marshall draws all the attention in the room and makes the world stop spinning. As Cat Power, Marshall’s music seems to rise from nowhere, envelop the room, then vanish; listeners know they’ve been hit by something but they’re not sure what.
05. Thom Yorke - The Eraser.
06. Scritti Pollitti - White Bread Black Beer.
“White Bread Black Beer�? — the title refers to Green Gartside’s starch-and-Guinness regimen, and to the notion of “white bread�? pop, which he has often defended — prompts a facile question. If the band’s early work was about dismantling pop, and then the mid-80’s phase was the apotheosis of pop, then what’s the new album about? Mr. Gartside drew a deep breath and shifted into theory. He spoke of the impossibility of free will and truth; of neo-pragmatism, the philosophy sometimes associated with the philosopher Richard Rorty; of the unfair critical “privileging�? of rock over pop, and the ways in which truly popular music hasn’t answered the logic of late capitalism in the same predictable way that the indie-rock tradition has. One glimpsed the porcupine he must have been as a younger man: combative, sardonic, high-strung.” The world needs Green. More.
07. Alela Diane - The Pirates Gospel.
Simply stunning.
08. The Blood Brothers - Young Machetes.
09. The Avett Brothers - Four Thieves Gone.
10. Camille - Le Fil.
Everyone should own this CD. Straight up. Apparently Camille’s shows leave you completely floored and that’s something I’m willing to travel for.