Said the Gramophone: 2006's Best Music: Songs

Yesterday wrote about their favourite music of 2006. Today, , I offer you my favourite songs of 2006. The list goes to #55 and there are mp3s for the top 35.

I decided no artist would appear more than once. I regret the lack of pop and hip-hop but I didn't hear very much and not many people sent it to me.
If you like a song, please support the artist - there are links for you to buy each record.

My favourite albums of the year were, in descending order: Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies, The Knife - Silent Shout, Swan Lake - Beast Moans, Grizzly Bear - Yellow House, Jason Molina - Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, Espers - Espers II, Beirut - Gulag Orkestar, Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds, Damien Jurado - Now That I'm Your Shadow, Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury, Fionn Regan - The End of History, White Flight - s/t.
I suggest you buy them all, and let them rattle you.
Beirut became a little famous this year, and more than anything it's because two songs available free - this one and "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)".

"Postcards from Italy" is a song so generous with its pleasures, so easy to love: beautiful, breathless, wistful. A pop music rendered in shades of brown, black and gold (beer-brown, night-black, coin-gold), Condon's woozy, heartflushed voice set amid ukelele, piano, gyspy trumpet, and roll-thumping drums. And just when you think "Ok, got it," about two minutes in - there's a whole other song that crests above you, sweet as full longing.

"And I would love to see that day / That day is mine / When she will marry me outside / With the willow trees / And play the songs that made / that made me so." (Beirut previously on StG: )
"You Broke My Heart" was first released in 2005 and will be reissued on Matador Rough Trade in 2007. But it is one of my songs of 2006.

Nothing else in these eleven and a half months has so captured the way heartbreak can be answered with resolve, two songs sung in one voice. It's a victory march, with tears streaming. It's a parade down the Champs-Elysees with people cheering from their windows, tickertapes fanning falling, clouds white as the pages of new books.

Becky Stark sings the same line over and over, high as high, transforming heartbreak into triumph. And the drums and bells and piano say the same thing: Yes, yes, yes, oh yes, yes, to it all I'll say yes.
This didn't come out in 2006 either.

I guess my list is a bit of a sham. But whenever it did come out, people did not speak of it. And so now here were are with the NUMBA THREE of TWO THOUSAND SIX, and thank god it's finally a song that is fun.

LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy shouts himself hoarse singing a nonsense about "kick[ing] out the chizzairs, muthaf***ers!". Who Made Who turns the tiresome original into a thing of loud funky brilliance, a pleasure that's ripe as new peaches-persimmons-pineapples.

As limes. You can hear the smile on Nancy Wang's lips as she sings along. You can hear the joy in the cowbell.

There's nothing spooky-nasty-dark: it's all free glad glorious awesome life. ( )
, James McNew's got a tawny melody, light as sparrow, but he puts it in a room with sounds of deep blues, reds, blacks. Piano, french horn, violin, and these brilliant clipped synth-strings, like sprouts.

The song's sumptuous, a ballad worthy of the radio - it has all the gentle prettiness that attracts people to Sufjan Stevens, the cresting feeling that draws listeners, even, to Snow Patrol or Coldplay (listen to the Chris Martin-like "Oh-oh" at 3:09). ..

. It's plain and unconflicted songcraft: it rubs my heart til it glows. No fucking around: just glassy, sweet song; dark petals blooming.

The prettiest song about backstabbing that you'll ever hear. The content of the message becomes detached from its delivery: "Do you think it's all right?" they sing in a chorus of chemical doo-wop, "Do you think it's all right?

Can't you feel the knife?" Simultaneously intimate and public, bitter and celebratory, like a hate-letter written in curlicued clouds across the whole Brooklyn sky. (Grizzly Bear previously on StG: )
Ola Podrida's debut album will be released in 2007 on .

This is a demo version of "Pour Me Another". It's a love song as true as any you'll hear this year. You can hear him trying to get this down, fingers on piano-keys.

Trying to tell someone exactly what he feels about her. It's clumsy, careful. It's graceful, brave.

All I can hope is that you have someone to give it to. (Ola Podrida previously on StG: )
The original of this Knife song is very, very good, but divorced from the rest of the album I prefer Trentemoller's version, that wintry electro distended into cold ice. It comes at you from all directions, heaves of melody coming shattering up from under your feet.

(The Knife previously on StG: )
This is the inverse of Antony ( the Johnsons). It's as if Garneau's been gathering songs like this, stillness and piano and cello, and he's been collecting all the gaps in these other peoples' tracks. And then with care, yes with pain, he makes his own song - a song made just of the gaps.

Of the pauses that make something flicker instead of shine.
It's a tribute to the perfect woman, body and mind: "I'm not cheatin' on her or beatin' on her / I spend the weekend on her." The organ sample's feels like nothing but a golden age - some downtown utopia with a Helen on your arm.

The song with of the year. Herman Dune's new album is made with major label lucre: horn section, expensive studio, backup singers. But it's also made with familiar stuff: tambourine jangle, sneaker squeak, rhymes like high-fives.

"I Wish That I Could See You Soon" hides nothing. It's about wishing that I could see you soon. It's about seeing a photograph and hearing trumpets; it's about talking to yourself; it's about wanting, wanting, wanting; about there being no way to say and nothing you can do.

Part of me wants to re-record it at half-speed, just murmur and lazy-strummed mandolin, singing all the sadness that the song submerges. Herman Dune don't wallow even for a second: they consider the worst-case, they sing it, but then they move on to the more important stuff. To wishing.

And wishing is fast enough to dance to.
A sprawling, baffling song, all knees and elbows and spurts of juicy-red guitar. With Destroyer, every line is an aside; no line is an aside; we listen from all sides, and he knows it .

.. a drumkit that keeps throwing itself across the studio floor .

.. Bejar's wistful and moony; he's a dandy; he's exact ("typical / rural / shit"), and abrupt ("I won't repeat them here").

He's a Bowie-like frontman and later just a man with ...

a plaintive reaching theme.
Bar none the best song about Cameron Diaz that I've ever heard. Timbaland's made a love-song with hydra-headed personality: the club-banging synth blitz, the blushing falsetto, the easygoing beatbox, the goofy gremlin laugh that fastens everything to earth.

And Justin T.I. fill it with something that's at once sincere and exquisitely Prince-catchy.

Two Toronto Mennonites play a song on glockenspiel, guitar, bass drum and throat. As Dan , Andrew Penner sounds a great deal like the Arcade Fire's Win Butler used to - it's a voice with a woodgrain of ache, desires sent wheeling up in a series of whoops.
A model duet, times three: 1) the perfect matching of clear drums and loping bassline; 2) Bjorn's tentative voice and The Concretes' Victoria Bergsman out-wearying even Camera Obscura's Traceyanne Campbell; 3) bongos (my most hated amateur instrument) and whistling (my most beloved amateur instrument).

( )
I woke up to this song when Dan Beirne, of this blog, a music video, of sorts, for it. (The video is archived .) Before then I had enjoyed it but it was like being in a dark room and not knowing that in the corner behind you was a flame.

It's sad and beautiful, shrill and soothing, a song perfectly about precipice. And if you listen to the words (which I eventually did), you'll find that Spencer Krug has quietly become one of the best lyricists in all of indie rock.
She has me at "tigerlilies".

Listen and you'll hear what I mean. Fellows lives in Winnipeg. She has toured with The Mountain Goats and The Weakerthans.

She plays her organ and sings in her strange, flowering voice - a bit Joanna Newsom, aye, and a bit Regina Spektor. But more solitary, more (yes) kind. And it's a song that is so sad, so moving and sad, speaking with small sweet grace to those hollowed weeks after a loved one's death.

Kevin sent this to me and in so doing is the first winner of our Best of 2006 contest.
Swan Lake's Beast Moans is free - not like beer, like jazz. Every few bars, someone opens a cage and lets something loose.

I don't think they even know what they're letting go. And the magic here is that amid all these weird-wood sounds, these industrial groans, are hooks and melody and catchphrases easy-on-the-ears. A pop song yoked to the cyclops, with Dan Bejar singing its tale.

( [ ]
Only one je ne sais quoi away from being a stone-cold classic - like Marvin Gaye or Al Green classic, seriously. The bassline is tailor-made for college acapella groups, and Ceelo's vocals seem so slim-nimble that they'd be tailor-made for a tailor-made suit. Something in pinstripes, with seams about to split.

Casey sings her song and then figures out how to sing it better. She plays the piano, singing, singing, words about peaches and clementines and regret. She sings all these words - and then she realises that the tangled-up things she's trying to say - well that bundle of moments isn't gonna come across in rhyming verses.

There's a better way: just some "la's", high and reaching, and then a final one, low and sure.
All kinds of lavender as his band plays the most beautiful melody of any Dylan song I can remember: peace and quiet, chance and possibility, bliss and ease, all of it right there in the blush of steel strings.
A dusty (springfield) kinda number, Chan Marshall stretched slow and wanting over a perfect field of drums - hit like so, brush like thus, chime and toe-stepping step.

Summer hot, country fair, and ended (thank goodness) before it gets too sweet. ( )
Psychfolk from Glasgow that captures the whimsy of 70s bands like Gong and The Incredible String Band - daft, zinging, and a splendidly great song. Trombone, violin and Commodore 64s oh my!

( )
All of Spektor's work relies on her delivery - a thing more often magic in person than on record. But "Fidelity" flourishes in these glossy surroundings, the stuttering strings hanging back just enough for Regina to dare dash forward.
The river Sleeping States summon is so gentle, so Saturday, that the whole world can go fuzzy.

A handful of grass in the bottom of your boat - squint and it's Pavement, it's Grizzly Bear, ...

electric guitar, bass, and drums.
Electric guitars swagger and droop, a synth-line wiggles, voices woo-woo from the back. .

.. It's a crowd of rowdy Scots whose chants will rouse the housewives, whose coo will call the fishes, whose hot-cold sass will fry your egg, flip it into a roll, set it warm in your hands.

Electric guitar that smells of ozone, blended voices that smell of foreign, Northern winds. Espers' folk-music is eerie, lovely, rife. ( )
Listen to the exclamation of this song!

The band earns the '!'. Listen to the cannonade of percussion, the charge of clap-clap, the hoarsening voices and the go-insane of the piano.

.. the closing horn fanfare like a cavalry of rainbows that the general's added "just because we can!

On, men! On on on!" They're from Santa Cruz (!

?).
Saskatchewan's got something going on.

First and now Rah Rah, from Regina, with a song that heats my bones. Despite the heat of their voices (boy-girl, with the latter recalling Cat Power and Newsom-squawk both,) "Winter Sun" is as blizzarded as the title suggests. The lyrics are double-edged: whether whispers meant for bed or fog, for the lost or the found.

JW suggested this song and in so doing was the second (and final) winner of our Best of 2006 contest.
Cynical and fancy-free; yes, both. Ingredients: sun, lilt, dash of cane sugar.

It's not a compact song, nor one that offers itself up at first glance. It's hard to twist your life through it: the laces are tied. But for me it's a string of moments: splendours that show themselves like cloud emerging hush from behind the sun.

(Previously on StG: )
An Irishman with an acoustic guitar - but he's no sad-sack. He plays as he plays, trying phrases, trying moods, setting it in the same circling strains of guitar. And in the bridge at 2:05, everything goes goooolden.

( )
Bishop Allen have released ten EPs in 2006 so far, with many good songs therein contained. And this is my favourite. It's more Arcade Fire than indie-pop, something dark and full of promises.

Justin Rice sounds ragged and a little scared. The violins sound strained. And when the drums come, they clear it all away.

I want a fiddle for my best friend. ( )
A girl with a folded voice sings of killing her brother, over and over, while piano scampers, leaps, runs. As much fun as slipping on a patch of ice and for a moment flying.

( )
In short, this is four minutes of the looped Elmo themesong, but with kids laying it down. They rap like monsters, like beasts, like cheese-shop clerks. Like kids, really - and beyond the ceaseless sparkle of the song, there's the plain flact of their flow.

For the curious, my favourite songs #35-55 are after the jump.
38. Cathy Davey - "Sing for your Supper"
40.

Two Gallants - "Waves of Grain"
55. Fiery Furnaces - "Teach Me Sweetheart"
UPDATE: ^ These zip files appear to be missing the songs by Cat Power and Beirut. I'll fix this ASAP.

Posted by Sean at December 12, 2006 4:00 AM It's a shame Islands didn't make it into the top 35. Oh well.
I can't count how many times I've listened to that Chris Garneau song.

Well, I can because iTunes has a playcount, and it's a very large number indeed.
Merry Christmas chaps.
Posted by: Billy Steiger at December 12, 2006 8:34 AM