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The Best Albums & Singles of 2006

At least everyone can agree that Britney Spears’s rediscovery of underwear is an encouraging trend that will, we hope, continue into 2007.

The Best Albums & Singles of 2006

Call it a year without an angle, and blame Aaron Sorkin’s use of “cold open” in one of the last episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip that anyone watched for a reminder that it’s better to open any kind of show with a statement that articulates a clear point of view and sets the tone for what’s to follow. But what “tone” did the music of 2006 set? The commercialization of independent music such that “indie” joined the laundry list of niche genres to enjoy fleeting popularity (ska, swing, Latin, bluegrass, nü-metal, and emo have all come and gone), the number of both indie and mainstream artists who tackled forms of country music to prove their authenticity, the shocking sudden dearth of commercial hip-hop and R&B worth a damn, the growth industries that both MySpace and YouTube represent as marketing tools, the Internet’s ongoing impact on the way people listen to and buy music making it a stronger year for singles than for albums; these were all important stories in 2006, but no one story dominated the year or fully accounts for the utter lack of critical consensus. Not that consensus represents some sort of ideal, but it’s worth mentioning that, for a year that many would label underwhelming, there’s an impressive volume of music being championed. Consider the lack of overlap below, or just the first batch of Top 10 lists posted at Metacritic, which cite 65 different albums. So no two people could agree on the relative merits of Joanna Newsom’s Ys or what was the best single from Nelly Furtado’s Loose…at least everyone can agree that Britney Spears’s rediscovery of underwear is an encouraging trend that will, we hope, continue into 2007. Jonathan Keefe


SAL CINQUEMANI


Albums



The Best Albums & Singles of 2006

1. Ane Brun, A Temporary Dive

I receive hundreds upon hundreds of CDs a year, but only once or twice does something reach out and grab me by the neck, effectively securing a spot on my year-end list months before I’m even aware of it. Such was the case with Scandinavian singer-songwriter Ane Brun’s sophomore disc A Temporary Dive. From the very first note out of Brun’s mouth—no, even before that, from the very first strum of her acoustic guitar on the opening song—I knew I was listening to something special. Brun doesn’t break down any barriers or forge any ground uncharted by the late-’60s British folk artists whose footprints she so delicately presses her presumably petite feet into, but her songs are refreshing and pure, a throwback to traditional folk while at the same keeping one foot firmly planted in the no-longer-neo neo-folk movement.


2. Jóhann Jóhannsson, IBM 1403 – A User’s Manual

In the grand scheme of the universe, and even on the lifeline of music composing history, 1964 isn’t that long ago. In terms of computer technology, though, it’s virtually the beginning of time. And so, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1403 – A User’s Manual—in which the Icelandic composer combines vintage musical fragments that were culled from one of the first digital data processing systems by his father in 1971, along with other, new Eno-esque electronic sounds and a 60-piece orchestra—gives you the sense of hearing something truly ancient being married to something very modern and present, and, then, something very futuristic. Some theorists claim humans can simulate anything with a computer, even a soul, and with IBM 1403, Jóhannsson comes chillingly close.


3. Regina Spektor, Begin to Hope

Not to discount the theatrical—dare I say artful—value of fashion shows, but as a music critic, it can be embarrassing when producers of such exhibitions have their ears closer to the ground than you. Regina Spektor is one of many artists I’ve been introduced to via trips to Fashion Week over the years; her brand of dramatic, string-laden baroque-pop (though she’s no relation to Phil Spector) is the perfect soundtrack for over-the-top couture. Spektor’s arrangements on Begin to Hope are inspired and ambitious and her melodies are classic yet startling original. There’s a fearless, uninhibited confidence to Spektor’s voice, not to mention a delightful whimsy to her music, that sets her apart from similar artists like Fiona Apple.


4. Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds

The best album I heard this year was Canadian singer-composer Owen Pallett a.k.a. Final Fantasy’s Has a Good Home. Unfortunately, it was released in 2005, so his Dungeon & Dragons-themed follow-up, He Poos Clouds, will have to suffice. Ranging from lush and intricate chamber-pop to more pizzicato, Phillip Glass-style arrangements, the album succeeds on multiple levels, not least of which is musically. Harpsichord is a beast Tori Amos already attempted to tackle in the pop realm, but Pallett doesn’t approach the instrument as something to be tamed or assimilated but something that belongs in its own world and time. Pallett’s voice is recorded and mixed like a wind instrument, always tucked away quietly in the background but often to the detriment of the thickly narrative, D&D reference-filled tales he tries to tell. I spoke with Pallett earlier this year and he brushed off my insinuation that the album is less accessible than his debut. Either way, it’s earned a spot on my list—albeit a few rungs down from where his debut would have placed.

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5. Emily Haines, Knives Don’t Have Your Back

I’ve always thought “Figure 8” from Schoolhouse Rock was one of the saddest, most depressing songs ever written, and it would fit perfectly alongside the melancholic music on Emily Haines’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back, a collection of quiet, introspective piano ballads that are every bit as beautiful as the album’s packaging. Haines’s is a distinctly feminine—though not necessarily feminist—point of view, and she delivers bons mots like “Bros before hos is a rule/Read the guidelines” and “Don’t elaborate like that/You’ll frighten off the frat boys” throughout “The Maid Needs a Maid,” a double entendre-filled tune about desperate housewives, and “Mostly Waving,” respectively. There’s an inward, domestic tone to Knives—a record that could provide all-too-fitting accompaniment to a reading of The Bell Jar.


6. We Are Scientists, With Love and Squalor

Don’t tell We Are Scientists that they’re fashionably late to the neo-post-punk dance revival. Judging by songs like “This Scene Is Dead,” in which “singing guitarist” Keith Murray implores, “I’m not going home until I’m done,” they already know. And we all know the drill: stuttering, propulsive beats; clipped guitar licks; cheeky, upper-crust accent; hooky lyrics about alcohol, sex, dancing, and sex-dancing. The band has been around since the Strokes started—err, revived—it all, but they didn’t score a major record deal until now, and like pretty much every indie-rock hipster in Williamsburg, they’re generally just waiting for something to happen while lamenting the things that did. None of this matters, of course, when Murray exudes eons more genuine emo on With Love and Squalor than Brandon Flowers.


7. Adem, Love and Other Planets

Love and Other Planets is a thing of beauty, a woozy concept album that begins with an imagined wake-up plea from extraterrestrials. It’s not a completely novel idea for a song, but it’s the way in which Adem takes those lessons learned and seamlessly connects them like the stars in a constellation (and the dots drawn on his arm by a lover in the song “Spirals”) throughout the 45 minutes that follow. There’s a palpable sadness, a sense of longing, even in Adem’s joy, which is perhaps what draws us into his drifting, celestial soundscapes (and toward love) in the first place.


8. Beyoncé, B’Day

Deserting Destiny’s Child was an inevitable move for Beyoncé, but her reason is fuzzy at best: going solo seemed to suggest an opportunity to explore new styles and delve deeper into more personal subject matter, but the aggressiveness of the largely uptempo B’Day is more reminiscent of her former group. In many ways, DC’s last studio record, Destiny Fulfilled, played more like a solo album—it was a textured, ballad-heavy collection of songs that veered away from the trademark garishness of the group’s sexual-materialism masquerading as female self-empowerment. Here, though, the bombast is present and accounted for. There’s something obscenely gluttonous and perversely over-the-top about the way Beyoncé bats out one club banger after another, her voice pushing the limits of the board levels on almost every track. Whereas Beyoncé’s debut was accomplished in its diversity, B’Day sounds like the album “Crazy In Love” initially forecasted.

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9. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds

Judging by the skinny pants and grotesque expression he sports on his new album’s cover, it seemed like Justin Timberlake was prepared to get ugly for his art. And by ugly I mean in the same way his face contorted like someone with a neurological disorder while hitting the falsetto notes during his performance of “Señorita” on SNL a few years back. If I superficially enjoyed Timberlake’s music in the past, I found genuine respect for him as an artist after seeing that performance. It was in stark contrast to the pop-star posturing of his solo live debut on the VMAs a year earlier. Timbaland was moving in a similar direction, so it seemed like an inevitable progression for the two to produce something even warmer and more organic for FutureSex/LoveSounds. Instead, the pair has hit back with the complete opposite: songs that are cool, futuristic, and often synthetically brittle. But it makes sense: Now that Timberlake actually is a bona fide star, the music has to be slick and spit-polished enough to gleam from a thousand light years away.


10. Goldfrapp, Supernature

The dearth of electronic music on U.S. airwaves didn’t stop Goldfrapp from getting their music to the American masses. Following in the dance steps of artists like Moby, Allison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory’s tunes have been licensed to Diet Coke, Verizon, and Target, and were featured in TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and The Sopranos. A decadent romp into galloping nü-disco (you know, the kind with mirrorball-covered horses), Supernature didn’t pack quite as glitter-powdery a hit as 2003’s Black Cherry, but the duo added more overt shadings of glam-rock and new wave to their repertoire, not to mention a few more sparkling gems to their lapels.


Singles


The Best Albums & Singles of 2006

1. Rihanna, “SOS”

The year’s best redo came in the form of Rihanna’s “SOS.” Deftly using Soft Cell’s 1982 hit “Tainted Love”—itself a revision of Diana Ross and the Supremes’s “Where Did Our Love Go”—as a bleepy backdrop and adding a full-bodied bottom to the original tinny mod-rock track, producer J.R. Rotem helped Rihanna resurrect dance music on U.S. radio, at least temporarily. The single leaves little time to breathe, as does its hyper-colored and sensory-overloaded music video, but it was, perhaps, too aggressive to get play at your local supermarket and stopped short of being ubiquitous—despite reaching #1.


2. Justin Timberlake, “My Love”

“My Love” features all of the elements we’ve come to expect from a collaboration by the two Tims: Timbaland’s signature thump, Justin Timberlake’s proud falsetto, dual beatboxing, operatic background vocals, and a guest spot from the rapper du jour. But not every dish can be as savory as “Cry Me a River.” Luckily, “My Love” has got a few secret ingredients that set it apart from the divisive “SexyBack.” Despite its colossal, futuristic synth swirls and a cartoonish, maniacal giggle that’s looped ad infinitum a la the crying baby from Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?,” “My Love” proves that scorn doesn’t have the monopoly on dark, haunting, and sexy. Thank you, Cameron Diaz.


3. Madonna, “Sorry”

More ABBA-esque than the ABBA-sampling “Hung Up,” the unapologetically Euro second single from last year’s Confessions on a Dance Floor should have scored Madonna another Top 10 hit, but U.S. radio stations apparently got confused when they realized Timbaland wasn’t involved. Madge is notorious for not being the apologetic type, so, if nothing else, “Sorry” gave Camille Paglia a chance to hear her say it in 10 different languages.


4. Nelly Furtado, “Promiscuous”

It’s easy to forget your first impression of a song, particularly when that song becomes a monster hit like “Promiscuous.” What’s most impressive about Nelly Furtado’s big comeback at this vital, year-end critics-list juncture in its lifespan is that I don’t find it completely hateable.


5. Nick Lachey, “What’s Left of Me”

It’s as equally guilty-pleasurable to emerge yourself in Nick Lachey’s “What’s Left of Me,” which the Passengerz elevated from AC schlock to Euro-dance schlock, as it once was to watch him roll his eyes on Newlyweds. Who would have thought that the seemingly has-been ex-husband of MTV’s golden girl would be the one to come out on top in 2006?


6. Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” follows the retro-meets-modern template of “Hey Ya!” to a T. But unlike OutKast’s ubiquitous smash, I haven’t yet grown nauseated by the mere thought of “Crazy.” After all, who could ever get sick of those silky cinematic strings, that hypnotic bassline bounce, or Cee-Lo’s soothing-as-warm-milk delivery?


7. The Killers, “When You Were Young”

Amid the mountain of musical and lyrical clichés that makes up the Killers’s flawed but compulsively listenable Sam’s Town came the best pop song lyric of the year, from “When You Were Young”: “He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus but he talks like a gentleman, like you imagined when you were young.”

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8. Pink, “Stupid Girls”

Pink is always one raspy cliché away from completely dumbing her message away, but there’s enough bite in her growl to make her a more-than-worthy role model for young girls who, instead, try to emulate the porno-paparazzi girls she lambastes on “Stupid Girls,” the lead single from her underappreciated fourth disc I’m Not Dead. Leaving a K-Fed- (and panty-) free Britney to self-destruct all on her own, Pink took aim at the likes of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Jessica Simpson on this catchy, if somewhat novelty-esque, hit.


9. Arctic Monkeys, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”

Arctic Monkeys’s “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” is the crossover dance-punk tune that never was (it stalled out in the modern rock Top 10 and never cracked the pop chart), exploding out of the gate with a flurry of pounding garage drums and gritty electric guitar feedback and then settling into the first verse like it’s the early ’80s: “Stop making the eyes at me/I’ll stop making the eyes at you.” Despite being a very “current” ode to “dirty dance floors and dreams of naughtiness,” lead monkey Alex Turner manages to squeeze in references to things that came before him: that centuries-old tale of star-crossed lovers…and doing the robot like it’s 1984.

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10. Cassie, “Me & U”

While Janet Jackson failed to find her footing on the rocky (or, rather, hip-hoppy) surface of 2006, newcomer Cassie climbed straight past her with “Me & U,” a slinky, vintage-sounding track with a hypnotic, snake-charming whistle that garnered an endorsement from Janet herself. The simple video even evokes the impromptu solo dance rehearsal from “The Pleasure Principle.” Of course, it’s starting to look like Cassie doesn’t possess Janet’s career savvy or longevity, but it was fun for three-and-a-quarter minutes, right?


JONATHAN KEEFE


Albums



The Best Albums & Singles of 2006

1. Hank Williams III, Straight to Hell, and Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac [tie]

“Family” is tricky proposition for most everyone, but for the children of pop-culture icons, it’s a challenge that often plays out in the public sphere and is subjected to the kind of scrutiny and criticism that few would voluntarily endure. Who wants a legacy that’s been branded as “diminished returns” on anything or anyone? Unfortunately, most albums by second-generation artists looking to define their own legacies make for exercises in navel-gazing or hagiography, rather than legitimately good songs. So it’s all the more noteworthy, then, that 2006 offered two albums on which the progeny of certified legends renegotiate the terms of their relationships with their families. For Hank Williams III, that’s an act of rage against the way that the “family tradition” of his father—and especially his grandfather—have been bastardized by Nashville, and Straight to Hell stakes his first real claim as a serious, vital country artist who has a greater right to a little axe-grinding than anyone else on Music Row. For Rosanne Cash, that’s an act that spans the full emotional range of grief for the losses of her mother, step-mother, and father, and Black Cadillac reestablishes her status as one of the absolute finest singer-songwriters of any genre of popular music in the last quarter century. Hank III writes and performs songs that his grandfather would’ve written had he lived to hear the Sex Pistols, and, in doing so, firmly rebuts his father’s admonition that country music “doesn’t use the ‘F’ word.” Cash invokes the symbols of the religion that was so important to her father, all the while regretting that she can’t turn to that religion herself for comfort at his death. Both albums honor their storied heritage, but they also reject specific elements of that heritage. In doing so, both Hank and Rosanne forge artistic identities that build upon their families’ legendary works rather than simply relying on them. Both remind why the label of “artist” is one that’s better when it’s earned, and Straight to Hell and Black Cadillac certainly stand as some of the year’s most compelling art.

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3. The Knife, Silent Hout

What Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof Andersson understand better than any goth-metal band is that the most effective “horror” occurs when elements that are recognizable as fundamentally human are distorted to such grotesque, unpredictable extremes that the result is both disturbing and perversely funny (see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Suspiria). The songs on Silent Shout are rife with menacing, violent imagery, but they’re also set to kitschy retro synth-pop, performed at a planetarium-style laser-light show by two reclusive siblings wearing crow masks, who only occasionally peek out from behind a scrim just long enough to dispel any rumors that they’re actually holographs. Taken separately, both the tone of sustained dread and the chilly theatricality might run the risk of veering into camp, but the Knife’s Silent Shout works precisely because those two pieces are inseparable. It’s like the set list for a Grand Guignol-themed party: you’ll go and dance, but make sure you know exactly where all of the exits are.


4. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

The calculus for TV on the Radio’s output thus far is troubling, charting an inverse relationship between the quality of the global political climate and the quality of the band’s music. Listening to Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes back in the halcyon days of 2003, it wasn’t hard to imagine TV on the Radio as the next Next Big Thing in rock, but who could’ve predicted the specific type of political clusterfuck that was 2006? Plenty of artists tackled big issues this year, many of them (the Thermals, Neil Young) doing so to great effect, but few were consistently as complex or as soulful as TV on the Radio, whose sound and message both find hope within frustration and direction within chaos on Return to Cookie Mountain.


5. Drive-By Truckers, A Blessing and a Curse

The subject of the year’s most baffling line of criticism, A Blessing and a Curse was often labeled a step backward for America’s best rock ‘n’ roll band because, unlike 2001’s Southern Rock Opera or 2004’s The Dirty South, it supposedly lacks a unifying concept to give its songs thematic heft—as though the title weren’t a dead giveaway. It may not be an explicitly stated homage to Lynyrd Skynyrd or a collection of Southern gothic archetypes in 4:4 time, but it’s an album of subtly observed songs that explore, in the finest of details and with the keenest self-awareness, how and why it’s both a blessing and a curse to live in the modern-day South and, moreover, simply to live at all. And, while the album trades that duality, it’s exclusively a blessing to hear a band as powerful as Drive-By Truckers at their latest peak.

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6. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere

So there’s “Crazy,” and then there’s the rest of Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere. And with “Crazy,” it’s a rare case of a song that’s an instant modern standard, already covered seemingly hundreds of times (even, according to rumor, by Paris Hilton), sure to be butchered beyond recognition in the audition rounds of the next season of American Idol, and just as sure to be crooned by jazz singers a generation from now. But it’s with the rest of St. Elsewhere that Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse make good on the lingering “probably” of the song’s refrain, delving into a lunatic fantasyscape of hip-hop, gospel, power-pop, and vintage soul sounds that catalog just about the whole of junk culture and wrapping their more nefarious themes (suicide, paranoia, necrophilia, monsters under the bed) in what seems, on the surface, to be the glossiest of escapist packages. It’s heady and adventurous as an album, but it’s just as great an achievement as pure spectacle.


7. Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

The idea of an album from the likes of Belle & Sebastian leaving enough of an impression to last 11 whole months to land on a Top 10 list would’ve seemed an absurd proposition any time between, oh, 1998 and this past January. But that’s the thing about The Life Pursuit: even the smaller details of the album—that slide guitar on “Another Sunny Day,” that trumpet solo on “Dress Up In You”—somehow feel outsized, and the result is some of the year’s most spirited, memorable pop. And, suddenly, Thanksgiving has come and gone, and “The Blues Are Still Blue” is still even more buoyant and is still getting more iPod plays than most of the summer’s Top 40 hits, and there’s a fleeting moment of fear of having forgotten something obvious (Camera Obscura? Faded quickly. The Boy Least Likely To? Even more twee than this. The Long Blondes? A great single and a whole lot of blog hype.), but the stack of CDs still waiting to be shelved says otherwise, and here we are, surprised but nonetheless feeling pretty good about it.


8. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Following a few years in which one too many Ryan Adams soundalikes made alt-country passé, 2006 was the year that the indie kids “discovered” country music, thanks to well-reviewed, high-profile albums like Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins’s Rabbit Fur Coat, Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s The Letting Go, Lambchop’s Damaged, and Cat Power’s The Greatest, all of which cribbed from the genre either in form or content. But the fourth studio album from Neko Case trumped them all, displaying a deep understanding of even the most unpleasant recesses of the country genre, even as she traveled farther away from its basic conventions than on her previous albums. The voice, as always, drew the lion’s share of the accolades, but what’s ultimately most striking about Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is Case’s ongoing evolution into a first-rate songwriter, equally capable of a direct gut-punch or a dense nonlinear narrative. Nashville, of course, wouldn’t know where to begin with this, but listening to Fox Confessor, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to Patsy, Loretta, and Emmylou.


9. Aceyalone, Magnificent City

Overshadowed in the early months of 2006 by Ghostface Killah’s also very-good Fishscale, then one-upped in the Underground Hip-Hop Artist Plus Trendy Producer department by St. Elsewhere, and finally bumped from much of the year-end listology hand-wringing in favor of late-year (again, also very-good) albums by Clipse and Lupe Fiasco, Magnificent City stands as perhaps the most unjustly overlooked album of a remarkable year for hip-hop. Which is regrettable but not hard to understand: Magnificent City is the smoothest, most subtle album of the lot. Its ambitious use of recurring tropes to explore various forms of modern isolation only appear when taking Magnificent City as a whole, which is, in turn, given further depth when considering that it’s the work of two men (Aceyalone with RJD2), each pushing the other to the top of his game.

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10. CSS, Cansei de Ser Sexy

To translate for those who didn’t get on board with CSS’s pastiche of MySpace-style real-time pop culture: In Portuguese, it means, “Bring your ass on the floor and move it real fast. I wanna see your kitty and a little bit of titty. Wanna know where I go when I’m in your city? Girl, don’t you worry about all the dough, because a cat is coming straight out of the ‘no, ready to rock those shows all the way to Rio. Bring that Brazil booty on the floor. Up, down, all around, work that shit to the funky sound. Going to see where I’m going, oh?” Lost in translation, alas, is that Cansei De Ser Sexy is funny on purpose and is actually something that right-minded people might want to listen to.


Singles


The Best Albums & Singles of 2006

1. The Pipettes, “Pull Shapes”

What makes a great single, distilled down to one line: “I just wanna move, I don’t care what the song’s about.” And it’s a good thing, too, since the Pipettes’s gimmick—a post-post-feminist reclaiming of classic girl group pop, in matching polka-dot dresses—collapses on itself if you so much as look at it sideways. But those three part harmonies? That final 12 seconds of orchestral flourish? “Pull Shapes” is just glorious stuff, and by far the year’s purest, most exciting pop.


2. Nelly Furtado, “Maneater”

Two theories to explain the failure of “Maneater” at radio: (1) With those eerie zombie drones backing Nelly Furtado’s nasal delivery in the verses and those voodoo ritual drums in the chorus, radio programmers took the song as a literal celebration of cannibalism; (2) Fergie’s lifting of the “love you long time” line for the execrable “London Bridge” robbed the single of its would-be money shot. I vote for the latter theory, if only because I’m willing to blame Fergie-ferg for just about anything.


3. Franz Ferdinand, “The Fallen”

…On which the swagger, which has always been the source of their charm, morphs into a vague threat, which the archdukes promptly follow-up by fainting at the sight of blood and falling to the floor. Which isn’t such a surprise, since getting into a for-reals fight might wrinkle their neatly ironed shirts. It’s the taunting wa-hoo!s that sell Franz Ferdinand’s “The Fallen,” but it’s the bit about robbing supermarkets that should give Alex Kapranos’s editors at The Guardian pause if they’re serious about releasing that cookbook of his.

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4. The Boy Least Likely To, “Faith”

The Boy Least Likely To’s “Faith” is all banjos and handclaps, and just when you think it wouldn’t make a suitable soundtrack for drunken underwear-dancing on a hotel bed, The Boys break out the güiro and slide-whistle, and, really, it’s just not such a hard sell from there.


5. Kelis, “Blindfold Me”

Blindfolds are the gateway drug into edgier forms of sensory deprivation kink, so I guess this means we should expect Kelis’s next album to have singles on which she and Nas explore the sub/dom dynamics of mummification and breath control play. So long as the beats are as good as they are on “Blindfold Me,” only a real prude could complain.


6. Beyoncé, “Ring the Alarm”

She’s just too suburban and just far too kept to sell this kind of guttural, Betty Davis anti-love shit entirely, but Beyoncé deserves plenty of credit for trying to sell it at all. That said, if “Ring the Alarm” really was inspired by a certain Bring It On: All or Nothing performer, Beyoncé only sounds a fraction as furious as she rightfully should.


7. Wolfmother, “Woman”

The slightly less misogynistic version of “Crazy Bitch” you can admit to liking without sacrificing your street cred, Wolfmother’s “Woman” scores bonus points for the Avalanches’s remix with the trippy Cousin Itt vocal loops.

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8. Bob Dylan, “Someday Baby”

This, Brandon Flowers, is how a man grows a proper sleazestache. More so than the predictably glowing critics’ reviews, Bob Dylan owes credit for his first #1 album in 30 years to iTunes putting “Someday Baby,” which loses none of its punch well after the four-minute mark or several hundred repeated listens, in a commercial.


9. Futureheads, “Skip to the End”

Making better use of negative space than any of the year’s other rock singles—and, arguably, a good percentage of the hip-hop singles—“Skip to the End” is three minutes of nervous energy, thanks to its barrage of unpredictable a capella runs, drumstick solos, four-part doo-wop harmonies, and jangly powerchords. Structurally, then, it’s a perfect fit for a song about the unpredictability of relationships. The unhappy ending for this one, of course, is that he Futureheads finished 2006 without a record deal.


10. Keane, “Is It Any Wonder?”

That its squelchy fake guitars are all in-the-red treble is ultimately of less consequence than is its insistence through tireless repetition that said squelchy fake guitars are playing one hell of a melodic hook. If not more U2 than U2—they’d need an actual rhythm section for that, assuming they’re trying to rip off any U2 worth ripping off—Keane’s “Is It Any Wonder?” is still more U2 than Coldplay and meatier than anything else Adult Top 40 went near in 2006.

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