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Pitchfork followed up its Stereogum-confusing singles list with its top-albums-of-’06 list today; heading the pack is Silent Shout, the admittedly spectacular album by icy Swedish duo The Knife.
THE GOOD: A mostly solid top 10, capped by Scott Walker’s insane The Drift. Is this the first time an album sampling a piece of meat being punched made the upper echelons of the ‘Fork’s chart?
THE BAD: Destroyer’s Rubies, which came out in February, gets this year’s “Forgotten Favorite” award–it placed at No. 18, behind the just-okay Sunset Rubdown and the soporific Band Of Horses.
THE WHAAA?: Can a list be surprising in its, well, unsurprisingness? Because this list feels like the definition of consensus–nearly every place was telegraphed by this year’s “Best New Music” and “Recommended” tags, even the Liars’ shocking-to-some No. 5 showing.
Pitchfork Feature: Top 50 Albums Of 2006 [Pitchfork]
Earlier: Year-End Analysis, Part II: Pitchfork Was Over “Crazy” Before You Even Heard It
TV on the Radio #2? My Chemical Romance completely absent?
Yeah. That reflects reality.
the slickness of sonic youth falling to number 43 or whatever, while TVOTR and the Hold Steady (clunkers both) occupy the top ten…oh wait do I care about this?
I’m with you on consensus. It used to be fun to check their list twice in the past. This is as much fun to parse as a spreadsheet file. It’s just so reasonable!
If you just reverse the order, it makes more sense. The Hold Steady SUUUUUUCK.
Soporific? I believe you meant superrific. *zing*
top ten is great, except for hold steady which is the worst band ever. Surprised, but pleased to see grizzly bear make top 10
surprised and pleased band of horses didn’t make top 10
Not to come off like some sort of weird Spencer Krug fanboy or anything, but Sunset Rubdown is definitely more than okay. It’s one of those records that takes a long time to sink in, but when it does, it’s unequivocally brilliant. Lots of weed also helps. Uh but that Liars record is garbage. I tried really hard to like it but no dice. If any one knows what kind of drugs it takes to enjoy 1 hour of drumming and weird sonic blips, I’d love to get hipped in on the secret.
The Hold Steady, “sucky”?
Arctic Monkeys, “overrated”?
Oh, man, I’m gonna have so much fun skewing y’all’s poll with my sucky Top 10s….
The Knife is laughable. They wouldn’t rate on an 80’s compilation. Or maybe they would, but it would be the song you skip over between Yello and Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark.
To make matters worse, are the Pitchfork capsules: “Karin Dreijer’s voice, which starts off sounding painfully human, turns into some kind of vacuum-cleaner demon halfway through, and then starts accompanying itself with the insistent keening of some killer bird with enormous claws that lives out in the snow.”
How long did it take to come up with that? Days or minutes? Lester Bangs, come back please. These people are hopeless.
This feature contains plenty of the same hilarious writing featured in yesterday’s song list. My favorite example (from #49! Just two albums into the list!): “The whole album, ragged at the edges and bloody with tone, is swollen in the best way, and it crests from peak to peak across 13 tracks that are at once meditative and eruptive.”
That’s probably the most suggestive thing ever written about an album put out on BPitch Control.
“If any one knows what kind of drugs it takes to enjoy 1 hour of drumming and weird sonic blips, I’d love to get hipped in on the secret.”
Mexican ‘ludes, dude.