Best of 2006

I completely forgot this journal existed, to be honest. And I don't think anyone really reads it anyway, and I don't know if I'll ever remember to keep updating regularly, or if maybe it'll stop being simply a music journal altogether - anything can happen! - but I might as well post my (extremely late!) BEST OF 2006 list, since I've already written/edited/published in in the school paper and that's the sort of thing I made this for, anyway. Off we go.

LEAH'S FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2006.

1. Joanna Newsom - Ys


I have a pretty short attention span. As far as music goes, I’m usually unable to sit and listen to a whole song longer than five minutes long. This is why it’s so impressive that singer/songwriter/harpist Joanna Newsom’s newest release, Ys, can completely hold my interest through all five long tracks, averaging around 12 minutes long each. The lyrics tell intricate, beautiful, obscure stories; they are full of “thee”s and “genteel”s and references to Sisyphus and the Pharisees. Newsom deftly plucks the harp strings to accompany her uniquely childlike voice that sounds exceptional to some, and just plain annoying to others. But I am one of the exceptional ones and, to be honest, just don’t understand anyone who disagrees – Newsom, in all her glory and wonder, has created a gorgeous, sweeping album that deserves to be on every ‘Best Of’ list last year.


2. The Hold Steady – Boys and Girls in America


Even though it’s only reached the 2nd spot, this is the one album that I really just haven’t been able to stop listening to since I got it. While perhaps not as accomplished as number 1, this is just a really solid, fun album. There are fast songs, there are loud songs, there are quiet songs (the liquor-centric “Citrus” is one of the prettiest songs I’ve heard in a long time). The Hold Steady are being hailed as one of the best live acts touring right now – the ‘hardest working band in show business’. Songwriter Craig Finn is known for his intelligent, complex lyrics that tend to focus on religion, being young, and, above all, sin. Throughout the album, evident on each track and lyric, Finn is true to the typical rock mentality: it really is all about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

3. TV on the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain


In addition to having the best and most whimsical album name, TV on the Radio’s third full-length release is one of the most singularly distinctive and inimitable albums released all year. It seems impossible to try to describe TV on the Radio’s sound; you can’t separate the guitars from the electronics from the singing. These 11 tracks are instead about each song as a whole, and how they all fit together and within one another. Return to Cookie Mountain creates a haunting, evocative, unique sound unlike anything any other artist is doing.


4. Be Your Own PET – Be Your Own PET


Be Your Own PET is amazing. A bunch of 18 year olds from Nashville who are not filling out college applications like the rest of us, but instead are touring the country, opening for Sonic Youth. Who wouldn’t be jealous of that? Their music is loud, thrashing, exciting, piercing punk rock; singer Jemina Pearl alternately screams, wails, and croons with a power that draws frequent comparisons with Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ frontwoman Karen O. Already playing opening for big bands and playing at big festivals (I caught their 30 minute set this past summer at Bonnaroo), Be Your Own PET is snatching all the attention they can - and they even deserve most of it.

5. Sonic Youth – Rather Ripped


Rather Ripped shows a noticeable jump for Sonic Youth in terms of overall sound. Instead of the grand, fuzzy, orchestrated messes that they are usually known for, Sonic Youth’s new album is different; it is noticeably tighter and more concise. Even so, each track manages to remain interesting, and the old Sonic Youth trademarks of whining, feedback, and repetition are still evident. Although the second half of the album is slightly less impressive and pulled together than the first, Rather Ripped remains an important mark in Sonic Youth’s career.


(I didn't write anything for the next five, but here they are, in case anyone was curious:)

6. Beck – The Information


7. The Flaming Lips – At War with the Mystics


8. Built to Spill – You in Reverse


9. Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – The Loon


10. Regina Spektor – Begin to Hope


(N.B. Only the Be Your Own Pet and Flaming Lips photos are mine; the rest were found on Google images...but hopefully soon I will have some of my own Hold Steady pictures, since I'm seeing them next week...!)

Beck - "The Information"

I don't feel like uploading any songs for you right now, but I just (finally! After working on it for the past nine hours!) finished my review of Beck's new album for my school paper. And I wanted to share. Please please leave any comments you might have - it'll be edited this week, so any feedback would be nice.

Beck – “The Information”

Beck can do anything. Beck can be anything – from a grunge god to a father, a rock star to a rapper. Each album seems wildly different from the next. Compare Mellow Gold (1994), Beck’s first album that launched ‘slacker anthem’ “Loser” into the world, to the soft and romantic lullabies of Sea Change (2002). Beck turned from the smooth and clear production of Nigel Godrich (Mutations, Sea Change; also best known for his work as Radiohead’s producer) to the scratchy sampling and production of the Dust Brothers on Guero and Guerolito. Beck’s seventh (well, eighth, if you count the remix album Guerolito) full-length album, The Information, released October 3, is arguably his best album to date. Godrich has returned as producer to help create some perfectly blended songs, mixing and overlapping flawless melody with rapping and singing and tons of different instruments and sounds on each separate track.
The opening track of The Information, “Elevator Music”, is reminiscent of last year’s Guero. Much of the song is made of repetitive electronic drumbeats and Beck’s quick, obscure rapping, filled with oblique lyrics like “Gutbucket and a bottle of paint” and “I got a silicon bible song / Paranoid Jumbotron”. At the end of the track, Beck’s rhythmic “Na na na na”’s collide with telephone beeps, ringing, dialtones, and a bizarre electronic comet-y sound. Every Beck album has at least one or two of those obnoxiously catchy songs that you’ll keep humming aloud to yourself days after you hear it – Midnite Vultures’ “Sexx Laws”, Guero’s “E-Pro”, Odelay’s “Devil’s Haircut” – and The Information is no exception with “Think I’m In Love” and “Cellphone’s Dead”. “Cellphone’s Dead”, the third track on the album, is especially notable – who else but Beck could have a single song incorporating techno, rap, children chanting “One by one I’ll knock you out”, along with background samples of Abba’s “Dancing Queen”?
Analyzing each song would take pages more than what the Postscript has to offer, so some other highlights of the album: the pounding, almost White Stripes-esque piano melodies of “Strange Apparition”; the refreshingly simple (compared to the other super-layered tracks, at least) “No Complaints”, and the wonderfully ambiguous and lovingly apocolytic lyrics that run through the entire album. Oh, and the last two minutes of the second-to-last song on the album are filled with director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers philosophizing about the “ultimate record that could ever possibly be made.” That has to count for something.
I don’t know if this review made sense. It seems almost impossible to describe Beck without using way too many adverbs and hyphens. There are so many things one can say about this album, from the instrumentals to the vocals to particularly the overall mixing and sound of the songs, and I’m finding it extremely hard to accurately convey all of this through simple, two-dimensional words. Hopefully one thing that came through is the fact that The Information is good – I mean, really, really good – because in the end, no one really pays attention specifically to the production quality or the separate noises of each track. All that really matters is that it sounds good.