Our Favorite CDs of 2006

There’s still 2 weeks left in the year, but we thought we’d get the jump on other bloggers and release our top 10 albums for the year. This year’s crop stands out for its quality. Here we’ll present the shining moments of music 2006 — the albums that transcend genre and style boundaries and get picked up by anyone who likes good, new music. The hip-hop albums that metalheads buy, the electronic music that punks check out, it’s all here.

Our top ten picks for the year, in no particular order:

• Fishscale, by Ghostface Killah. His fifth solo album shows a lot of growth, but keeps that urgent, breathless delivery - exactly what’s needed for these brutally vivid stories about life as a drug pusher. The beats break away from the usual sound, with production by MF Doom, Madlib and Pete Rock - plus a smoking guest verse by Ne-Yo. It gets bonus points for the edgy title, “fishscale” being drug slang for really pure cocaine.

• Food And Liquor, by Lupe Fiasco. Chicago’s hip-hop whiz kid shows off his immense lyrical skills here, and you can’t help being impressed. The way he flips nouns and verbs & employs a wide range of verbal tricks elevates the bar for all MCs. Listen to Lupe Fiasco spit and you’ll wonder how he doesn’t get tangled up in his own words.

• Modern Times, by Bob Dylan. This is the album Dylan should have made 30 years ago. The blues and folk stomps show Dylan still has it, and as a bonus touch he lets his elder statesman status shine through. He sound very much like the tired old road dog of a musician that the younger Dylan always admired.

• The Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance. The emo-punk sound is pretty played out at this point, so it’s good to see the bands in that scene try out new sounds and ideas. My Chem is one of the few who’ve actually done it well, and The Black Parade shows it.

• Game Theory, by The Roots. ?uestlove and Black thought deliver way too much variety to be pigeonholed as just hip-hop. Still, hip-hop is their foundation - and there aren’t many who do it better. On Game Theory, they mix head-nodding beats and jazzy experiments. Imagine all your favorite soul, funk and gospel tunes given hip-hop production and you’ve got this album.

• So This Is Goodbye, by Junior Boys. Electronic rhythms usually feel less warm, but Junior Boys make the electronic feel organic. The slow-burning dance tracks feel like they were made to be slow-danced to, or played when things are getting intimate in other ways. Most electro stuff is seen as party music, but Junior Boys prove it can be so much more.

• Boys And Girls In America, by The Hold Steady. Classic 70s-era stadium rock and punk sounds are brought together seamlessly by this band. Swirling organs and piano combine with guitar crunch, laying the foundation for stories about those not-so-great teenage moments we all have. They manage to grab from old-school rock sounds without sounding repetitive or cliche. If any modern rock albums can be called “anthemic,” it’s this one.

• 45:33 by LCD Soundsystem. Not only is it a great track — 45 minutes of solid, pounding disco-funk beats — but it was really solely through iTunes. It’s like a whole album of great songs at once, and you can’t get it anywhere but online. That’s just cool.

• Citrus by Asobi Seksu. Rock doesn’t get much more electric than this. The guitar sounds owe a debt to the Stone Roses & Jesus & Mary Chain, but their ability to shape emotion out of feedback & distortion transcends both. The unique vocal dynamic shifts from loud to quiet, from English to Japanese — adding an airy, dreamlike quality that makes their music unlike anything else.

• Crimson Reflections by The Black Hollies. If you like the rock and roll of the ’60s but also like the edge and power of modern bands, here’s the band for you. They take everything that made bands like the Beatles and Yardbirds great & add touches of the modern sound, for timeless rock that everyone can enjoy.

  Honorable Mentions:

• Endless Wire by The Who. As much as we like The Who, and this album, it wasn’t as quite as hard-hitting and original as the other rock groups we profiled. We also wanted to keep our picks balanced across several different styles. Our list is already weighted slightly to the rock side, and we didn’t want to go overboard.

• The latest Nas album, Hip-Hop Is Dead comes out next week; it’s not a masterpiece like Illmatic but we have the advance copy and it’s great — a solid return by one of the sharpest MCs out today. As much as we like it, we decided not to include it because of how late in the year it’s coming out (12/19).

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