SemiConscious Dot Org

Yes, kids, it’s that time of year again. For 11 long months, you’ve been on the edge of your seats, waiting impatiently to be told which music is acceptable to like. It’s time for me to indulge in yet another exercise in pointless ego gratification, pontificating windily for the benefit of the five people who read this blog. Hot damn!

First, the Honorable Mentions. I enjoyed all of these cd’s, but for various reasons (weak tracks mixed in with the great ones, filler, suffering by comparison to a band’s previous releases, or just not enough listens to fully digest it) they didn’t quite make the cut. Were I to redo this list in a few months, several of these might, indeed, make the Top 40, bumping out discs currently in the list. (Time travel, however, is not an ability I possess at present.) In no particular order:

• The Knife, Silent Shout
• J Dilla, The Shining
• Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Ballad of the Broken Seas
• Slayer, Christ Illusion
• Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
• Neil Young, Living With War
• Voivod, Katorz
• Muse, Black Holes and Revelations
• Lamb of God, Sacrament
• Beck, The Information
• Eagles of Death Metal, Death By Sexy
• ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, So Divided

Yeah, yeah, the hell with those losers. Without further ado, the albums that did make the cut:

40. Dirty Pretty Things, Waterloo To Anywhere
39. Converge, No Heroes
38. Thom Yorke, The Eraser
37. Comets on Fire, Avatar
36. Celtic Frost, Monotheist
35. The Decemberists, The Crane Wife
34. Pink Mountaintops, Axis of Evol
33. The Thermals, The Body The Blood The Machine
32. Motorpsycho, Black Hole/Blank Canvas
31. As Fast As, Open Letter to the Damned

30. Boris, Pink
29. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury
28. Tool, 10,000 Days
27. Drive-By Truckers, A Blessing and a Curse
26. Soledad Brothers, The Hardest Walk
25. Gomez, How We Operate
24. Johnny Cash, American V: A Hundred Highways
23. The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon
22. The Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers
21. My Morning Jacket, Okonokos

20. Band of Horses, Everything all the Time
19. Isis, In the Absence of Truth
18. PJ Harvey, The Peel Sessions 1991-2004
17. Les Claypool, Of Whales and Woe
16. Hank Williams III, Straight to Hell
15. The Black Keys, Magic Potion
14. Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam
13. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
12. The Melvins, A Senile Animal
11. Misson of Burma, The Obliterati

10. King Biscuit Time, Black Gold
9. Wolfmother, Wolfmother
8. The Sword, Age of Winters
7. The Drones, Gala Mill
6. Peeping Tom, Peeping Tom
5. The Black Angels, Passover
4. Built to Spill, You In Reverse
3. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
2. The Roots, Game Theory
1. Mastodon, Blood Mountain

10. I’ve been a big fan of The Beta Band since the first time I heard “Dry the Rain,” and was sad to hear of their 2005 breakup. Black Gold is the first full length release by former Beta lead singer Steve Mason. It’s so good that one is lead to wonder whether Mason wasn’t purposely withholding songs from the Beta’s mediocre final album, Heroes to Zeros.

9-8. Wolfmother and The Sword are the Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, respectively, of the current retro metal revival. While Wolfmother’s lead singer wails like Robert Plant and the band throws acoustic guitars and organs into the mix, The Sword, like Sabbath before them, concentrate exclusively on piling up one mammoth, pummeling, detuned riff after another. Both bands have cringe-inducing lyrics (Wolfmother like hot women and unicorns; The Sword favor blood-soaked tales from Norse mythology.) In neither case do the awful lyrics detract from the music even one tiny bit. This is about the Allmighty Riff, with the vocals merely functioning as another instrument. If you like to enjoy your music intellectually, parsing and analyzing lyrics and influences and layers of meaning, avoid both these albums like the plague. If, on the other hand, you want to rock the fuck out, buy them both immediately.

7. One of the overarching musical trends I’ve noticed this year is the large number of current bands who show a profound debt to Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Two of those groups, My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses, have already shown up in this list. (Ironic that so many of Neil’s musical progeny should make the cut, when his new album just missed.) The Drones are another Young-influenced band. However, these guys also show an equally heavy influence of fellow Australian Nick Cave. Gala Mill is a set of long, lyrically complex story-songs, set to ragged, country-influenced garage rock; think Murder Ballads crossed with Tonight’s the Night. (Ironically, the first single, “I Don’t Ever Want to Change,” is a loud, aggressive punk anthem that sounds nothing like the rest of the album.) When it’s 3am, everyone else has passed out, and you’re alone with the bottle of whiskey, this is the disc to throw in.

6. Mike Patton is my favorite musical chameleon. I loved Faith No More, and since they regrettably broke up, he’s worked in a dizzying array of projects and styles, none of them possessing even the slightest amount of commercial appeal. (Partial list: Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk, Lovage, General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners, collaborations with Rahzel and John Zorn, and a couple of bizarre solo albums.) Well, apparently all those years on the musical frontier left him with some bills to pay, because Peeping Tom is easily the most pop-oriented project he’s been involved with since Faith No More’s Angel Dust way back in 1992. That said, this is only “pop music” in comparison to Patton’s other stuff; it still features a healthy dose of his trademark weirdness. Imagine if FNM did a trip-hop album, and you’ll be close to the mark.

5. With a name like The Black Angels, you probably assume this is metal. Nope, the name comes from a Velvet Underground song, and that band’s sound is a heavy influence here. These guys (and girls) play a murky, menacing brand of psychedelic rock that will be instantly familiar to fans of White Light/White Heat.

4. I don’t know why it took Built To Spill five long years to come up with a new album, but if their subsequent releases will be as good as this one, they can take all the time they damn well please. This time around, Doug Martsch has thankfully abandoned all the strings, keyboards, and pop aspirations that have held the band back in the past, and given free rein to the band’s best feature: his blazing guitar work. Most of these songs stretch out past the five minute mark (including “Wherever You Go,” a song that sounds like it could have come straight off Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.) Even the album’s first single, “Conventional Wisdom,” rolls on for six and a half minutes of fret-bending bliss. In other words: everything is as it should be.

3. It’s truly rare, these days, to find a band with a completely original sound. TV on the Radio are one of those bands. Sonically, I can think of nobody to compare these guys to. Their music, at one point or another, contains bits and pieces of everyone from early U2 or OK Computer-era Radiohead to Bad Brains, Sigur Ros, Bowie at his most atmospheric, and even Living Colour(!?), but in truth they really sound nothing like any of those bands. Does that make sense? It doesn’t to me either.

There’s an epic quality to TVotR’s music that, sadly, is almost completely absent from modern rock. They’re obviously an ambitious bunch, not content to turn out just another jangly, forgettable indie pop album that’ll be slobbered over by the critics and promptly forgotten within a year. Because they’re aiming big, I can see this album being something I still listen to years from now. Don’t surprised to see it actually placing higher on Best of the Decade lists than it does on this year’s list. Now if they just can do something about the dorky sounding band name…

2. I haven’t heard much hip hop that I’ve liked this year. In fact, a quick review of the list reveals only 3 hip hop albums out of the 40 that made the cut. But what little of the genre I have liked this year, I’ve liked a lot. And this is the best of the bunch. It’s taken The Roots eight long years and three albums to finally match the brilliance of Things Fall Apart. Quite frankly, I think they’ve actually outdone that classic. This is the leanest rap album you’re likely to hear: no filler, no stupid between-song skits, just one killer track after another. The discs’s three best songs, “Game Theory,” “Don’t Feel Right,” and “In the Music,” drop on consecutive tracks near the beginning, but there’s still plenty of great songs later on (“Here I Come,” “Long Time,” and the Radiohead-sampling “Atonement” being standouts.)

1. It may have been a lean year for hip hop, but metal has enjoyed a creative renaissance. Fifteen years ago, Nirvana and grunge mercifully killed off the wretched remains of the makeup-and-spandex-plastered hair bands that had reduced the entire genre to a bad joke. Beginning roughly ten years ago, a wave of “nu metal” fratboy dipshits with gramatically-challenged names and negligible talent nearly destroyed metal for good. (Die and rot in hell, Limp Bizkit, Korn, Puddle of Mudd, Staind, etc.) Finally, in 2006, a return to prominence: the rise of young bands like Wolfmother and The Sword; long-dormant vets like Voivod and Celtic Frost seemingly rising from the dead; creative bands like Converge, Boris, and Isis combining metal with genres as diverse as hardcore, ambient, and post-rock. And, of course, a new Slayer album.

But the kings of the heap are clearly Mastodon. This band has somehow managed to combine elements from any number of subgenres throughout metal’s history to create an instantly recognizable sound all their own. Listening to Blood Mountain, one can hear the speed and technicality of thrash; the bellowing vocals common to death metal; the crunching, downtuned riffs of doom and stoner rock; the melodic singing and harmonized guitar leads of classic British metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden; the complex rhythmic shifts and multi-part song structures of prog rock icons like Rush or King Crimson; and drumming that is almost jazz-like in its intricacy. None of this, of course, would be particularly interesting if they couldn’t come up with memorable riffs, but they do. There are literally no weak tracks on this cd.

Several reviews I’ve read have mentioned that the last time a metal band this potentially revolutionary roared up out of the underground was 1986, when Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Slayer’s Reign in Blood brought thrash metal into the mainstream literally overnight. (FYI: the band that has been calling themselves “Metallica” since 1991 are, in fact, a bunch of imposters who killed the real Metallica and have been issuing shitty album after shitty album in their place ever since.)

Whether Mastodon will have that long-lasting, seismic effect on the sound of an entire genre remains to be seen, since it’s unlikely that many bands will have the sheer talent necessary to copy their incredibly complex sound. And considering how high they’ve set the bar for themselves with Blood Mountain, will they ever be able to top or even match it on future releases?

None of those questions can be answered today, however. The question that can be answered today is “What’s the 2006 Album of the Year.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Blood Mountain.