Wholly Schmidt!

I don’t know beans about music, but iTunes tells me I bought fourteen albums released in 2006. What follows is a end-of-year list for your amusement, but my rank and opinion (or my rank opinions, if that’s the way you feel) for a given album say more about me than they do about the quality of music.

#1 Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere

If I’d started this website last year, picks 1 and 2 could’ve very well been Gorillaz - Demon Days, and Dangerdoom - The Mouse and the Mask. What do those have in common with Gnarls Barkley? DJ Dangermouse! Gaining widespread popularity with his Grey Album (vocals from Jay-Z’s Black album mixed over music from The Beatles White Album. Think about it.), he teamed up with rapper Cee-Lo to form Gnarls Barkley, the most awesome band in, well, in at least a year. I dare you to not love this album. It’s the catchiest thing you’ll ever listen to; you’ve probably been tapping your feet to the single Crazy and not known it. I can’t wait to see what Dangermouse does in 2007.

#2 TIE: The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers / The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

It seemed fitting that these two should tie. I wanted to like the Raconteurs more than I did, and I didn’t want to like The Decemberists.

The Raconteurs is Jack White, one half of The White Stripes, with some other guys, who I’m not familiar with. I went in with the wrong expectations, hoping for more White Stripes. Now one of the biggest complaints from all the “real” reviews I’ve read is that Broken Boy Soldiers doesn’t have its own sound, that it just sounds like White Stripes songs and that other guy’s songs got mixed up and put on the same album, with only a couple songs where they actually work together to create something new. That might be true, but it still wasn’t White Stripey enough for me. At least, not in the begining. By the end of the year I’d come to really love the whole thing, and I’m actually going to seek out some of that other guy’s music. As soon as I remember his name.

Meanwhile, The Decemberists were one of those bands that I’d never actually listened too, but I was pretty sure they were more like a cause people took up than a band people actually enjoyed. Notoriously indie*, they were one of those bands that all the kids who were too cool to use words like cool loved to listen to. I lumped them together with bands like Belle & Sebastian and that Surfer Stephen guy and filed them away in the “I don’t know anything about them but they’re probably pretentious and lame” part of my brain. Let me say plainly: My bad! The Decemberists are pretty awesome, and I’m sad that it took me this long to check them out. I’m still not listening to that Surfer guy though. (more…)