THE BEST OF 2006 (Part Five... FINALLY!)
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 fifth and final group:
Sun City Girls Djinn Funnel (Nashazphone, 2006)
This collection of five choice Sun City Girls live recordings was released this past year was the first release for
Nashazphone, a new
Egyptian/
Algerian label. I had always been a little too intimidated by the amount of stuff that these guys had out there to pay attention to pricey limited-run Sun City Girls stuff like this, but like that
Blues Control cassette that also made the “Top 25,”
Doug Elliott also recommended
Djinn Funnel while I was back in
Columbus for Xmas break. Opening with the galloping “Nites of Malta,” vocalist
Alan Bishop drawls and drones sounding like something off of
The Clean’s
Oddities. The three tracks in the middle are instrumental, and while Bishop’s strong vocal presence is missing, the album begins to open itself up to the weirdo, spastic desert groove that the Sun City Girls have jammed on for the past two decades, and that final track, “Grand Trunk (Drifters of the Grand Trunk),” could be thought of as the transmogrification of the old slow blues closing number for the new class of nightfolk to beat to.
Self Destruct Button Natural Selection of Accidents (Tower Control, 2006)
I reviewed this for the November ’06 update of
The Z Gun, which you can read in full
here. Unfortunately I missed these
Clevelanders’ show in Boston around Thanksgiving because I was swamped with schoolwork, but I as glad to see that they made a “show of the week” for our area’s scene paper, ‘The Dig’… so hopefully they had a worthy reception. I can’t recommend
Natural Selection of Accidents enough; it’s entirely insane, and I still think that at any moment they can sound like “
Brainiac,
Big Black, or
The Beatles,” but I think that is the strength of their sound… if I were to hear this back when I was in high school going through my obligatory teenage Beatles phase, it would inspire me to get into some really, really weird stuff. Don’t mistake Self Destruct Button as a pop group, they are far from it, but the way that they play their music is so tight and infectious that
Natural Selection of Accidents should continue to influence and inspire all who hear it to branch out their tastes into unknown territory.
Teenage Panzerkorps Gleich Heilt Gleich 7" (Skulltones, 2006)
I’m really liking this new label
Skulltones (they also put out the first seven-inch by
Lambsbread and a new
Sic Alps single) that gave this impossible-to-find 3” cdr an official release on that nice vinyl format we all love. Teenage Panzerkorps are a group of old
Californian punks with cool stage-names and are fronted by a
German transplant that touts the coolest stage-name of ‘em all,
Bunker Wolf.
Gleich Heilt Gleich is a strange little 9-minute pop record; Wolf has a scratchy loathsome growl, that works well with the punkest of the tracks, “Games for Slave,” but is most impressive when paired within more upbeat atmospherics, such as on “Burma Crawl,” and the most memorable “Christian Gender.” Yes, they also have a new full-length (
Harmful Emotions) coming out on
Siltbreeze at the end of this month, which will be (in the words of
Lax) “a one-time vinyl-only release, with paste-on covers, in an edition of 500 copies. Just like your Grandpa's Siltbreeze!” If it’s good as
Gleich Heilt Gleich and their full-length cdr from a few years back,
Nations are Insane, you’ll have to move fast to get yourself a copy.
Frustration self-titled 7” (S-S, 2006)
Although they are curiously missing from the
Tête de Bébé compilation that got a whole lot of love around here this year, Frustration are one of the best bands in
France right now (with
Cheveu and
Volt). I’m not quite sure why this single hit me so hard this year, but it did. It’s post-punk at its simplest;
Jay Hinman put it best when he reviewed this in
Agony Shorthand earlier this year: “(Frustration) compare themselves to
Killing Joke and
Joy Division, and yeah, the excellent “Premises” is a total
Warsaw/
Ideal For Living rip-off, but it’s also that good. And as you know, that’s real good. Real real good!” Really.
Jakob Olausson Moonlight Farm (DeStijl, 2006)
This is a very impressive LP of antisocial whisperings which weaves inside and outside your existing preconceptions of new-age Scandinavian campfire folk. Sometimes closely adhering to the structure of the simple song, and at other times, drifting into some mystical timelessness. Probably one of my all-time favorite folk albums, it’d actually be nice to see this one given the CD treatment as well so that it might find it’s way onto more ears, because you don’t have to be enlightened collector scum to channel
Moonlight Farm’s odd power. Of the 25 releases listed if I were to pick an "album of the year," this would be it.
