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Top Ten Songs of 2006
from volume 01 issue 07 // Tom Whelan
Top Ten Songs of 2006
Top Ten Songs of 2006
Words: Tom Whelan
Okay, maybe this list is a bit premature to be doing in November, but to be able to do a list of top ten albums of 2006 next month, it would be a little late to do this list in the January issue when everything would be “out of date” and totally passé. After all, The Shins come out with a new album in January, and we all know how that will change our life. Or so they say.
2006, overall, was sort of a dry year for music. All the bands who we would expect to come out with great things seemed to fall short. Fortunately, several groups did manage to come from left field and salvage what was left. Since I write for this magazine, I end up listening to quite a bit of these groups that come from left field—not all of them are necessarily any good, but there were some diamonds in the rough. However, as is usually the case, albums have a unique way of failing. For instance, half of a record will be great, and then the other half is crappy filler, like when they let the drummer write a song to his girlfriend or something because they couldn’t come up with ten tunes to record, or when a band decides that playing an entire song on a marimba all of a sudden is a cool thing to do. As next month will be the top ten albums of this year, I thought it would only be fair to recognize some of the bands that managed to align the planets for at least one spectacular song.
Keep in mind, though, that I’m completely biased. I kept that in mind as well; as such, instead of making a list of what I thought were the absolute best songs, I looked back to see what single songs I listened to over and over again, or which individual tunes seemed to have a fairly long half-life. So, the following is a list of songs that seemed to go the distance, even when the rest of an album fell flat. Enjoy.
1. Bishop Allen - Flight 180
You may not have heard of Bishop Allen before. Part of that reason is the fact that instead of coming out with one album this year, this group decided to release an EP every month for the whole year. They only made it to September, but that doesn’t negate the fact that they put out some great material before then. Among the songs on these EPs, the most gorgeous track is “Flight 180.” It simply doesn’t get old, even though the structure is pretty stock: start out soft, crescendo, change keys, and repeat the chorus a bunch of times. I don’t think a week has gone by since I came across this song that I don’t listen to it at least once.
2. The Pipettes - Your Kisses are Wasted on Me
Ah, the kitsch. The Pipettes are big on kitsch, even though they try to take themselves seriously. That argument aside, “Your Kisses are Wasted on Me” is catchy as hell, and it reels you in equally due to the song itself and to the nuances in the purposefully ramshackle production. Also, it’s short—instead of milking this song for five minutes, The Pipettes keep it at a taut 2:11, making it merely a glimpse of a song. It will stick in your head whether you want it to or not.
3. M. Ward - Chinese Translation
Life moves in cycles according to some Eastern religions. Good for religion, though usually a pretty crappy idea for a song. M. Ward, though, crafted this little gem of a song that really gives you that tip-of-the-iceberg feeling when you pay any attention to the lyrics. You listen to it once, you get the drift, so you listen to it again, it might make you think for a few minutes about some heavy ideas, you listen again, and so on. M. Ward gives you a whole guitar solo coda to do your thinkin’ as well, just for sport.
4. Lansing-Dreiden - A Line You Can Cross
Who knew 1989 could be so cool? Part of the allure of Lansing-Dreiden is that they don’t sound like they take themselves too seriously, evidenced by their choice of ultra-corny synthesizer patches and gated drum machines. This song haunts you like it was herpes or something—an outbreak occurs periodically and you find yourself listening to it and wondering, “why is this cheesy shit so catchy?” If you took all your favorite dark 80’s songs and put them in a blender, ”A Line You Can Cross” is what would come out. Luckily there’s a cream you can buy, though, to take care of those herpes.
5. TV on the Radio - Province
TV on the Radio seem to suffer from the same brand of pompous rock-music-as-high-art disease as a band like Mars Volta—that is, they’re too eager to get angular and overly intellectual with their music, making it less digestible in the process. Which isn’t bad, in and of itself, but it really demands your time. And unless you feel some reason to invest that time, you end up absolutely not giving a shit. That’s how Return to Cookie Mountain was for me, with the exception of “Province.” Maybe it’s the fact that David Bowie added vocals to it, but this song seems to juxtapose its constituent parts quite deftly, from the piano stabs, to the intentional wrong note on the bass part during the verses, to the uplifting guitar spasms that drop into the chorus of the song.
6. Evangelicals – Another Day
At first, Evangelicals sound like a Flaming Lips knock-off. And they sort of are, although mostly in their kitchen-sink production style. While their album may be inconsistent, “Another Day” is a fantastic tune, in all its schizophrenic glory. This pop song stitches several styles together before tapping out into a jubilant mess, just like the song begins.
7. Guillemots - Made Up Love Song #43
Guillemots are a thrilling band, and will thrill your pants off for about two days. On the third day, you could give a crap anymore. “Made Up Love Song #43,” besides coming uncomfortably close to sounding like a tragically unhip Dave Matthews working title for a song, fires all the pistons of precociousness at once that Guillemots have in their arsenal. The howling bridge peaks at just the right time, the sickly sweet lyrics and their stupid imagery stay just on this side of tolerable, and the acoustic double bass kicks the ass off of the song when it comes in with the drums. On an album of overindulgent foppishness that loses it charm quickly, this song somehow saved itself from deletion off of my iPod.
8. Phoenix - Long Distance Call
Phoenix are a great band. Consistently, album after album, they have one or two songs that absolutely grab you and won’t get out of your head for days on end. Also fairly consistently, album after album, they painfully remind you that they’re French, and therefore feel the need to be nauseatingly arty-farty about some of their music. “Long Distance Call” is one of the songs that absolutely grab you, rivaling (but not surpassing) their excellent song “Too Young” from their debut. The guitars jangle just right, the drums are elastic, and the delayed keyboard on the verses makes this song stick like dried jelly on a countertop.
9. Beth Orton - A Place Aside
I damn near forgot that Beth Orton put out an album this year. Except for this song. If Comfort of Strangers was spaghetti, it would be al dente as hell—completely undercooked, and simply unappetizing. The only song that has stuck to the wall, it seems, is ”A Place Aside,” an elegant, unadorned little love song that seemed to get all the pieces to fit together correctly.
10. Thom Yorke – Atoms for Peace
If you were like me, you were interested in Thom Yorke’s The Eraser for about two weeks, and then it simply didn’t sustain itself any longer. The whole thing seemed to lose its appeal—unfair, maybe, because of the inescapable comparison to a Radiohead album—but the skeletal production seemed to ring hollow after a dozen or so listens. All except for “Atoms for Peace,” which uses few ingredients to the greatest effect. The vocals are unadorned, sine waves creep in and out in the background, with a synth and scratchy rhythm track gurgling away all the while. While the whole album seems to come from one approach, “Atoms for Peace” is the only time that Yorke seems to nail it and make the aesthetic work in his favor.
Did I leave something out of the list? You might think so. Just wait until next month for the top ten albums of 2006 before you write me nasty letters for ignoring Nelly Furtado or Chingy. But put all these songs together, and you have a badass mixtape. Since there’s only ten songs in the list, there’s plenty of room for you to cobble a Gnarls Barkley song or something onto the end if you really want. Which reminds me—I want to make an honorable mention in the context of this list. For as good as “Crazy” is, the Ray Lamontagne cover of the song is crushingly powerful, and would be on this list if it wasn’t for the fact that Lamontagne’s cover is a bootleg that you have to find somewhere on that new-fangled Internet thingy.
Until next month…
Top Ten Songs of 2006
Words: Tom Whelan
Okay, maybe this list is a bit premature to be doing in November, but to be able to do a list of top ten albums of 2006 next month, it would be a little late to do this list in the January issue when everything would be “out of date” and totally passé. After all, The Shins come out with a new album in January, and we all know how that will change our life. Or so they say.
2006, overall, was sort of a dry year for music. All the bands who we would expect to come out with great things seemed to fall short. Fortunately, several groups did manage to come from left field and salvage what was left. Since I write for this magazine, I end up listening to quite a bit of these groups that come from left field—not all of them are necessarily any good, but there were some diamonds in the rough. However, as is usually the case, albums have a unique way of failing. For instance, half of a record will be great, and then the other half is crappy filler, like when they let the drummer write a song to his girlfriend or something because they couldn’t come up with ten tunes to record, or when a band decides that playing an entire song on a marimba all of a sudden is a cool thing to do. As next month will be the top ten albums of this year, I thought it would only be fair to recognize some of the bands that managed to align the planets for at least one spectacular song.
Keep in mind, though, that I’m completely biased. I kept that in mind as well; as such, instead of making a list of what I thought were the absolute best songs, I looked back to see what single songs I listened to over and over again, or which individual tunes seemed to have a fairly long half-life. So, the following is a list of songs that seemed to go the distance, even when the rest of an album fell flat. Enjoy.
1. Bishop Allen - Flight 180
You may not have heard of Bishop Allen before. Part of that reason is the fact that instead of coming out with one album this year, this group decided to release an EP every month for the whole year. They only made it to September, but that doesn’t negate the fact that they put out some great material before then. Among the songs on these EPs, the most gorgeous track is “Flight 180.” It simply doesn’t get old, even though the structure is pretty stock: start out soft, crescendo, change keys, and repeat the chorus a bunch of times. I don’t think a week has gone by since I came across this song that I don’t listen to it at least once.
2. The Pipettes - Your Kisses are Wasted on Me
Ah, the kitsch. The Pipettes are big on kitsch, even though they try to take themselves seriously. That argument aside, “Your Kisses are Wasted on Me” is catchy as hell, and it reels you in equally due to the song itself and to the nuances in the purposefully ramshackle production. Also, it’s short—instead of milking this song for five minutes, The Pipettes keep it at a taut 2:11, making it merely a glimpse of a song. It will stick in your head whether you want it to or not.
3. M. Ward - Chinese Translation
Life moves in cycles according to some Eastern religions. Good for religion, though usually a pretty crappy idea for a song. M. Ward, though, crafted this little gem of a song that really gives you that tip-of-the-iceberg feeling when you pay any attention to the lyrics. You listen to it once, you get the drift, so you listen to it again, it might make you think for a few minutes about some heavy ideas, you listen again, and so on. M. Ward gives you a whole guitar solo coda to do your thinkin’ as well, just for sport.
4. Lansing-Dreiden - A Line You Can Cross
Who knew 1989 could be so cool? Part of the allure of Lansing-Dreiden is that they don’t sound like they take themselves too seriously, evidenced by their choice of ultra-corny synthesizer patches and gated drum machines. This song haunts you like it was herpes or something—an outbreak occurs periodically and you find yourself listening to it and wondering, “why is this cheesy shit so catchy?” If you took all your favorite dark 80’s songs and put them in a blender, ”A Line You Can Cross” is what would come out. Luckily there’s a cream you can buy, though, to take care of those herpes.
5. TV on the Radio - Province
TV on the Radio seem to suffer from the same brand of pompous rock-music-as-high-art disease as a band like Mars Volta—that is, they’re too eager to get angular and overly intellectual with their music, making it less digestible in the process. Which isn’t bad, in and of itself, but it really demands your time. And unless you feel some reason to invest that time, you end up absolutely not giving a shit. That’s how Return to Cookie Mountain was for me, with the exception of “Province.” Maybe it’s the fact that David Bowie added vocals to it, but this song seems to juxtapose its constituent parts quite deftly, from the piano stabs, to the intentional wrong note on the bass part during the verses, to the uplifting guitar spasms that drop into the chorus of the song.
6. Evangelicals – Another Day
At first, Evangelicals sound like a Flaming Lips knock-off. And they sort of are, although mostly in their kitchen-sink production style. While their album may be inconsistent, “Another Day” is a fantastic tune, in all its schizophrenic glory. This pop song stitches several styles together before tapping out into a jubilant mess, just like the song begins.
7. Guillemots - Made Up Love Song #43
Guillemots are a thrilling band, and will thrill your pants off for about two days. On the third day, you could give a crap anymore. “Made Up Love Song #43,” besides coming uncomfortably close to sounding like a tragically unhip Dave Matthews working title for a song, fires all the pistons of precociousness at once that Guillemots have in their arsenal. The howling bridge peaks at just the right time, the sickly sweet lyrics and their stupid imagery stay just on this side of tolerable, and the acoustic double bass kicks the ass off of the song when it comes in with the drums. On an album of overindulgent foppishness that loses it charm quickly, this song somehow saved itself from deletion off of my iPod.
8. Phoenix - Long Distance Call
Phoenix are a great band. Consistently, album after album, they have one or two songs that absolutely grab you and won’t get out of your head for days on end. Also fairly consistently, album after album, they painfully remind you that they’re French, and therefore feel the need to be nauseatingly arty-farty about some of their music. “Long Distance Call” is one of the songs that absolutely grab you, rivaling (but not surpassing) their excellent song “Too Young” from their debut. The guitars jangle just right, the drums are elastic, and the delayed keyboard on the verses makes this song stick like dried jelly on a countertop.
9. Beth Orton - A Place Aside
I damn near forgot that Beth Orton put out an album this year. Except for this song. If Comfort of Strangers was spaghetti, it would be al dente as hell—completely undercooked, and simply unappetizing. The only song that has stuck to the wall, it seems, is ”A Place Aside,” an elegant, unadorned little love song that seemed to get all the pieces to fit together correctly.
10. Thom Yorke – Atoms for Peace
If you were like me, you were interested in Thom Yorke’s The Eraser for about two weeks, and then it simply didn’t sustain itself any longer. The whole thing seemed to lose its appeal—unfair, maybe, because of the inescapable comparison to a Radiohead album—but the skeletal production seemed to ring hollow after a dozen or so listens. All except for “Atoms for Peace,” which uses few ingredients to the greatest effect. The vocals are unadorned, sine waves creep in and out in the background, with a synth and scratchy rhythm track gurgling away all the while. While the whole album seems to come from one approach, “Atoms for Peace” is the only time that Yorke seems to nail it and make the aesthetic work in his favor.
Did I leave something out of the list? You might think so. Just wait until next month for the top ten albums of 2006 before you write me nasty letters for ignoring Nelly Furtado or Chingy. But put all these songs together, and you have a badass mixtape. Since there’s only ten songs in the list, there’s plenty of room for you to cobble a Gnarls Barkley song or something onto the end if you really want. Which reminds me—I want to make an honorable mention in the context of this list. For as good as “Crazy” is, the Ray Lamontagne cover of the song is crushingly powerful, and would be on this list if it wasn’t for the fact that Lamontagne’s cover is a bootleg that you have to find somewhere on that new-fangled Internet thingy.
Until next month…
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