THE BEST OF 2006 (Part Three)
So this is how the end of the year is going to go down at the Marble Stature blog: I’ve painstakingly spent the last week digging through my records and CD’s, downloads and tapes in order to cull what I believe to be “The Top 25” of 2006. There’s gonna be some bitchin’ because I’m close friends with a lot of bands, and I feel a little weird listing something that I’ve had my hands in, but I think that the end result is as fair as it gets. Next year it’ll be a little easier as I am stranded out East for keepers (not really, but for the time being). These aren’t in any order because it’s hard to say that one thing that you like a lot is necessarily better than something else that you like a lot, but they will be presented to you as five groups of five albums. Here’s the third group:
Sapat Tongue-Tied & Staid 7" (Black Velvet Fuckere, 2006)
This loose-conglomeration of grisly Bluegrass metallurgists named for something precious and rare out on the other side of the world pressed one of the most chattered about seven-inches of the year via their own hillbilly commune and label,
Black Velvet Fuckere. These three tracks are amorphous; dense with almost
Amon Düül II complexities, and voiced by a croaker channeling
Van Vliet by-way-of that
Mirror Man record. Some might say, “The best $5 spent on a record this year,” and who could blame them? It plays nice and long and after you get about a minute into it, you’ll be entranced for good. I am dying to hear what they do on their debut full-length,
Mortise and Tenon, which is set for release at the end of January… on
Siltbreeze, of course.
Robert Pollard From a Compound Eye (Merge, 2006)
I can’t help but to still be impressed by
From a Compound Eye, which came out when it was still snowing this year. I figured that’d be terrible because
Matador passed on it and then about a year after it had been shopped around, Pollard’s old pal
Mac McCaughan seem to get coerced into putting the darn double album out on
Merge. Oddly enough, it was the biggest (and possibly the best) album that Pollard had put out since
Isolation Drills. Why do the scores of Pollard fans dig it so much? Because it has some absolutely fantastic songs on it such as “Dancing Girls and Dancing Men,” “Love is Stronger Than Witchcraft,” “Blessed in an Open Head,” “Kensington Cradle,” “The Right Thing,” “50 Year-old Baby,” “The Kingdom Without,” and so on and so on. I come and go with
Tobias’ production as a whole, but here it seems to sound less “cheap,” than it does on
Normal Happiness or any of the last three
GBV albums. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of
From a Compound Eye was that Pollard didn’t sound as if he were just throwing away songs and ideas; here, each song- check that, most songs- sound as if it were carefully focused on, from the riff all the way down to the lyrics… and that is a major accomplishment for the big boy at this point in his career.
Major Stars Syntoptikon (Twisted Village, 2006)
Team
Twisted Village, husband and wife lead guitarists
Kate Biggar and
Wayne Rodgers, juiced up the Major Stars formula by moving the Stars bassist
Tom Leonard to
3rd lead guitar, and then added a new bassist,
Dave Dougan, a new drummer,
Casey Keenan, and a full-time singer,
Sandra Barrett. There- I just introduced you to the most fucking bad ass band on the Eastern seaboard. There’s no frills; just the pummeling drone of a triad of deft guitarists pushing each other into transcendence while a husky-voiced pretty girl sings nice every once in a while, just when things have cooled off enough to be mistaken for a band of “just another rowdy bar band of frustrated 9-to-5-ers.” Whoa Nellie! Very impressive, and probably my favorite album that has come out of Twisted Village to date, who thought that these guys would just now be hitting their peak?
Hue Blanc's Joyless Ones Fait Accompli (P. Trash, 2006)
This group from
Algoma, Wisconsin released a pair of seven-inches before dropping
Fait Accompli, their debut full-length, by way of overseas garage-rock magnate
P. Trash. With a two-guitarist and drummer line-up that brings to mind fellow “joyless ones,” the
Cheater Slicks, but Hue Blanc’s take two decades of
Lou Reed (the good decades, don't worry), and manage to come out with a whole new street hassle. Yeah,
Fait Accompli does at times threaten to go the direction of stale garage stank, but when it happens, it doesn’t sound forced; mapping their own path about 95% of the time.
Ryan Wells from
The Z Gun dropped
Death of Samantha and
Sister Ray in his review of this back in October, and I couldn’t agree with him more, but the Joyless Ones seem to have a bigger flame under their asses.
Ex-Cocaine Keep America Mellow (Killertree, 2006)
You know what they say, “If the cover looks like
Twin Infinitives...” hey I’m just joking around, but rather
Keep America Mellow is the work of another duo, this time a guitarist (
Ramirez) and a drummer (
Mike C.) hailing from
Missoula. Sounds innocent enough, but the music here is as boundless and airy as their State’s speed limit; a bit like a jam session between
Michael Morley's pre-
Dead C duo,
Wrecking Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, and early
Tyrannosaurus Rex under the summer stars of Montana's big sky. If you can picture that I think you can just taste the mellow rural vibe that
Ex-Cocaine conjure. To put it quite simply- a hauntingly beautiful and meandering record.
