LISTING

Some of my favorite musical moments from 2006 (and forgive me if some of them are your favorite moments from 2005, or 2001, or 1998):

-To Go Home, M. Ward
-The quarter second at the beginning of Wolf Parade’s Shine a Light where you think it’s going to be Get Back. And yes, I timed it.
-A good half of The Life Pursuit.
-I’m Waking Up to Us, Belle and Sebastian. I finally downloaded this, and it’s damn near the best thing they’ve ever done. Bitter, blunt, and sweeping.
-Yo La Tengo’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, for the title. I expect it might show up on my 2007 list for the music.
-A Pillar of Salt, The Thermals
-Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken, Camera Obscura
-The three hours I spent in Tower Shibuya.
-The 30 hours I spent in various USA Towers, watching them die.
-Belle and Sebastian (2X), Stereolab, and The Pogues, with brain coral. Plus, The New Pornographers, Ted Leo, and Broken Social Scene, beyond the headliners.
-Wolf Like Me, TV on the Radio
-The “New York Dolls” making a “comeback” in fishnets and quotation marks.
-The Jam’s performance of ‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street from the Old Grey Whistle Test, Vol 3 DVD. I still don’t know how Paul Weller could sing and chew gum at the same time.
-Record Collector magazine
-In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel. Any discussion of my 2006 year in music needs to end with my full-on discovery of this, something I had for years dismissed unheard as ephemeral neopsych. I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong I was. There are rare albums that are profoundly moving, profoundly funny, profoundly unhinged, profoundly bad, profoundly sad, and/or profoundly unfounded. This might be the first album I’ve encountered that is quite simply profound.