If you got here late (and by late I mean an hour ago or whatever), you can read my whole mission statement (why I'm still bothering to do this, etc.) in the post below this one. Or if you're too lazy to do that, just click here. This is slightly different from how I've done it before in that I'm mainly trying to pick songs that didn't end up on my albums thingy (although this is not the case with all of them). But anyway, here are some of my favorites of 2006:
Lily Allen - "Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen is surprisingly good to me, as I've written about before, and this was the song that hooked me. In fact, I specifically mentioned it before. It's just a good pop song, oozing effortless cool, with a wordy chorus that's an unlikely candidate to be suck in your head for days, but there it is.
Grandaddy - "Jeez Louise" - Grandaddy always sounded weird when they were really trying to rock out (it hurts having to write about them in the past tense). It seemed somehow out of their comfort zone, because even though everything was really loud, it was missing some intensity or something (think "AM 180"). In truth, this one would probably sound just as good if they dialed down the distortion and layered on their usual synths and whimsy and whatnot, because it's a good melodic rock song with all the usual harmonic twists that somehow make sense. That was their specialty over their last two albums, and even if it wasn't Earth-shattering, it had a tenacious consistency that grew on you at the most unexpected moments.
The Flaming Lips - "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" - At War With the Mystics turned out the be the first Flaming Lips release in almost a decade and a half that wasn't a complete reinvention of what the Flaming Lips were, and by that lofty standard it was a disappointment. That's not to say it didn't have its moments, though. Neither Wayne Coyne nor Stephen Drozd have the most naturally great singing voices, so it was an interesting choice to start the album with 20 seconds of layered a cappella harmonies (compare that with the spacious bombast that opened up The Soft Bulletin), but it ends up working. "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song" is about as close as the Lips ever come these days to being a normal rock band, which says a lot about how delightfully weird they are, especially when those odd harmonies come back for another minute during the bridge.
Belle and Sebastian - "Song for Sunshine" - I described this as something like "Sly Stone verse with a Todd Rundgren chorus" when I first talked about The Life Pursuit, and that still holds, but hey, it's still a great song. It's hard to believe this is the same band who recorded If You're Feeling Sinister (people who got on the B & S bandwagon late are likely to be confused with the "twee" tag that used to haunt them), and I like the more recent outings considerably less than the old, but who doesn't? It's not like they don't still have great moments.
Zero 7 - "You're My Flame" - A lot of this list is shaping up as a tribute to past years' "best of" artists. That's an accident. But I still like Zero 7, even as they keep on shifting from "groovy downtempo act" to "indie soft-rock." "You're My Flame" is a song that never would have ended up on their first album, but it's still a fun dose of soul-inflected electro-pop.
Scritti Politti - "Dr. Abernathy" - Listening to, of all people, Scritti Politti in the year 2006 seems like an outrageous anachronism (popular bands from the 80s seem connected to their time frame in a way nobody else is), but I'll be damned if White Bread, Black Beer isn't actually way more listenable than the ultra-sterile mechanized pop of their 80s heyday. As long as Andy Partridge isn't making music these days, this is the next best thing. Also, how is it possible that Green Gartside is 50 years old? His voice is still impossibly smooth and bright. He must drink nothing but honey and green tea.
Stereolab - "Vodiak" - I'm not sure if this counts, coming as it does from a b-sides compilation, but I didn't hear it until 2006, so here it is. Picking one song from any given Stereolab album can be damn near impossible, but this one best embodies the outright coolness of the band. Splatty 60s organ? Check. Driving Neu!-style beat? Check. Synth beeps and blips? Check. Two or more unrelated female vocal parts? Duh, of course. They could keep doing this forever, and I will always dig it.
Justin Timberlake - "My Love" - Come on, you know I had to have this one on here. Just try to think of a hit single that has been as popular as this one, but also sounded this idiosyncratic and unlike anything else, while also happening to be a brilliant song. What's the list of songs that fit those criteria? "Good Vibrations," and then what? "Hey Jude," maybe? "Tiny Dancer?" "What's Going On?" That's not bad company to be in. If you ask me, FutureSex/LoveSounds is a real snooze once you get past track 5, but Justin Timberlake has a few classic pieces of pop to his name already.
Mogwai - "Glasgow Mega Snake" - I told you I'd get to this one! (See last paragraph in the link.) The first song on Mogwai's album this year was called "Auto Rock," which just about summed up the ho-hum autopilot they seemed to be on for the most part, but "Glasgow Mega Snake" is something else. Everybody should download this and play it with your speakers turned all the way up sometime. Or blast it in the car sometime. It's the type of screaming, raging instrumental rock that Mogwai made their name with, that they do like nobody else. It's all the fury and intensity of "Mogwai Fear Satan" compressed down to three minutes. I can't think of any more superlatives to use.
So that's that. Coming soon: album runners up.
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