Ramblings on Music, Texas, Etc.

Best Records of 2006: #1 Solomon Burke - 'Nashville'

It wasn't even close this year - Solomon Burke's Nashville is such a cosmic confluence of the talent that occupies so much space in my CD collection, iPod and my waking thoughts.  Buddy Miller, one of my favorite artists, produces Solomon Burke, my favorite soul singer.  Oh yeah, and Gillian Welch, Dolly Parton, Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris stop by to contribute songs and vocals.  That is works so perfectly is nothing short of a miracle - very few things that look so good on paper actually realize their potential.  Nashville is just such a rarity.

Nashville brings several of 2006's most sublime moments, but two songs stand even head and shoulders above the rest of the album: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' "Valley of Tears" and Patty Griffin's "Up To The Mountain."  Both performances are bolstered by the presence of their authors.  "Valley of Tears" is performed in true Welch/Rawlings style, yet Solomon makes it reliably his own.  "Up To The Mountain" is just extraordinary - strings swell, Patty's voice hovers like a spirit, everything about the song and production is perfect, and is easily the year's most sublime recording.  Griffin will reprise the song for her new album in February, and while I'm dying to hear her version, I can hardly imagine any more perfect rendering than on Nashville.

Though the highlights are easily dominated by the heavier moments, there is plenty of playfulness afoot.  Burke is sly and funny on some of the uptempo numbers, and his raucous duet with Patty Loveless on the album's penultimate track is a particular highlight.  I still stand in awe of the fact that Burke and Dolly actually recorded their vocals separately for Parton's "Tomorrow Is Forever."  It's an even mix of classic country and what I call "back alley country," tunes often from the pens of such underground Nashville icons like Jim Lauderdale, Kevin Welch and Paul Kennerly.  You know you've got the year's (the decade's?) best album when a duet with Emmylou is actually one of the lesser tracks.

Solomon Burke is one of the giants of 1960's soul, but his recent records have radically redefined and expanded his image.  It's a damned shame that country radio is light years from playing anything as good as Nashville, but then you're not likely to hear anything this good on any radio station (unless it's XM or Sirius or public).  Though the record did receive a Grammy nomination for his duet with Dolly, Nashville still feels criminally neglected.  Fortunately, it's an instant classic and destined to be an album that true-blue lovers of both country and soul will seek out for years to come.

(Watch a brief feature on the making of Nashville over at CMT.)

Best Records of 2006: #2 Drive-By Truckers - 'A Blessing and a Curse'

It's tempting to dismiss A Blessing and a Curse as just another stellar effort from Drive-By Truckers, a band that's been a hot streak for four albums running.  It is shorter than the band's previous efforts, and it lacks a story arc per se, but Blessing is still a triumph for the world's finest rock and roll band (or finest band, period).  It doesn't suffer from its comparatively short 11-track runtime - in fact, it is the first DBT album that I can suck down in a single day's commute (well, on a bad traffic day).

Patterson Hood reclaims much of the spotlight for Blessing, delivering his best writing since Decoration Day.  Mike Cooley only turns in two tunes, but they are among the most memorable on the record.  Jason Isbell's two contributions aren't as bracing as his songs on The Dirty South, but his contribution as a vocalist and a guitarist cannot be undervalued.  Shonna Tucker, long the missing ingredient in the lineup, and Brad Morgan hold it all together, and A Blessing and a Curse is quite simply the sound of a great band clicking on all cylinders.

Best Records of 2006: #3 The Drams - 'Jubilee Dive'

There may be no second acts in show bidness, but Brent Best is at least giving it a whirl.  For no obvious reason, he disbanded his former (and well-loved) outfit Slobberbone, only to reassemble most of the pieces into The Drams.  No doubt, adding a keyboard player to Slobberbone would've prompted a thousand cries of heresy, but bigger bands have dragged their fans along for some wide detours before.  In any case, Best should be commended for the clean break because The Drams are a significantly different - and to my ears, better - rock band.  Showing a new affection for studio craftsmanship, The Drams gave their debut Jubilee Dive an expansive sound, one that owes much more to Beatle-esque pop than the breakneck country-punk of Slobberbone.

Brent Best's hangdog vocals and songwriting are the common thread, and it doesn't take a huge leap of faith for a Slobberbone fan to convert to a Drams fan.  But this reinvention is intriguing, and Jubilee Dive should set the stage for a new productive phase of the band's career.  Alas, Jubilee Dive has been criminally ignored by most critics, and it's a shame that one of the best rock albums in ages has to struggle so hard to get heard.

Best Records of 2006: #4 Mindy Smith - 'Long Island Shores'

I didn't expect much from Mindy Smith's sophomore album Long Island Shores.  Her debut was solid, but dull, and her follow-up was produced largely by the same team.  However, either I noticed something I'd missed before or Long Island Shores brings something new to the table (or likely a combination of the two) because I've listened to this album a whole lot more than I expected to.

Granted, the news of a new Patty Griffin album in early '07 has tempered my enthusiasm - I guess I still think of Smith as Patty-Griffin-lite, a similar songwriter lacking the refined sound that Griffin mastered finally on her last album.  Mindy Smith probably needs to venture further outside her adult-contemporary comfort zone before she is recognized as Griffin's peer.  However, with a voice that can melt ice caps, she is probably the front-runner to be that successor.  Long Island Shores may be a small step forward, but it is progress nonetheless.

Best Records of 2006: #5 Joanna Newsom - 'Ys'

The official critics' darling of 2006 will no doubt be Joanna Newsom's very strange, yet oddly enchanting Ys, an album with considerable ambition - which it largely achieves.  Newsom, a classically trained harpist, enlisted the legendary Van Dyke Parks to layer orchestral arrangements on top of her bare vocal-and-harp recordings (produced by indie god Steve Albini).  Further complicating the commercial potential of Ys (as if the "indie harpist" label wasn't enough), each of the album's five songs clock in between seven and seventeen minutes, making the record feel more like a symphonic movement rather than a work of popular music.  Just for good measure, nearly all of the critics have taken great pains to inform their readers that Newsom's voice is "an acquired taste," presumably implying that they are cool enough to dig it, but probably not you.

Hopefully, none of this meaningless description will keep you or anyone else from checking out the most original work of 2006.  Ys defies any easy description, but it is 100 percent unique, and in the current musical landscape, that actually counts for something.  This record requires some love, but it also does something that few albums do: it gives a little back.

Best Records of 2006: #6 Neko Case - 'Fox Confessor Brings The Flood'

I was ready to love, love, love this record months before its release.  That I ended up only loving it is probably more my fault than that of Neko Case.  Fox Confessor Brings The Flood picks up where Blacklisted left off - and is notably the stronger of the two records - but I guess the intervening years had me nearly rabid with anticipation.  The one missing component to Neko's studio albums is the raw energy that we heard on The Tigers Have Spoken, her live record with The Sadies.  Fox Confessor is elegant and gorgeous, and Neko's voice is still one of the best out there.  But I still find myself wondering if the two Nekos - one a country-rockin' goddess, the other a dark and noir-ish songwriter - will ever find common ground.  I'm certain it's out there somewhere, but we'll have to wait at least one more album to see if Neko Case can find it.

Best Records of 2006: #7 Richard Buckner - 'Meadow'

I'm reluctant to call Richard Buckner's new record Meadow a comeback because his work over the last few years has been ambitious and sometimes audacious, if not the most commercially viable of his career.  Meadow reunites him with JD Foster, producer of his two most accessible works Devotion+Doubt and Since, and the results are predictably similar to those two albums. Meadow is not Buckner's most challenging work, but it finds him striking a perfect balance between his more willfully artful writing and his more openly collaborative self.  Meadow is his most rocking album since, well, Since, and Buckner sounds at times positively energized to be leading an actual band of musicians.

This is Buckner's second album for Merge Records, a label that seems to give him the freedom to be himself but might also be encouraging him to stay somewhat accessible.  Here's to many more years of a fruitful relationship.

Best Records of 2006: #8 Madeleine Peyroux - 'Half The Perfect World'

I recently heard singer Patricia Barbour described as Diana Krall meets Joni Mitchell.  Just apply that tag to Madeleine Peyroux instead.  In fact, she covers Mitchell to great effect on Half The Perfect World, an album that combines her stellar song interpretations with a few originals.  Peyroux too often gets lumped in with other Starbucks-friendly fare (and yes, you can probably buy this record at Starbucks), but she's a notable cut above the sleepy-eyed jazzish, folkish singers currently in vogue.  Peyroux also enlists a group of A-list musicians, most of whom appeared on her breakout album Careless Love.  Though there is nothing on Perfect World quite as late-night-bloozy as her cover of Elliott Smith's "Between The Bars", the overall impression one gets is that Peyroux is continuing to grow and become more confident (tackling Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell certainly reinforces it). 

The world needs more talented interpreters of song, and Peyroux is one of the few achieving some success at it.

Best Records of 2006: #9 Ray LaMontagne - 'Til The Sun Turns Black'

I'll just say it.  Ray LaMontagne's debut album Trouble, the record everyone loved and bought, and people on American Idol sang songs off it, and the press went nuts for it?  It's lame.  It's mediocre and watered-down and is a Ryan Adams knockoff for people who are scared of the F-word.

His new record Til The Sun Turns Black?  It's weird and quiet and overly-ambitious and mysterious and gorgeous, but not very hooky, and let's face it, just WAY better than Trouble.  And I swear I am not trying to be contrary here, or be the guy that hates anything popular (and for the record, I like American Idol).  But it takes some balls to sell 300,000 records and get your songs on One Tree Hill or whatever, then turn around and release this thing.  There's approximately one song on Til The Sun Turns Black that could maybe be a hit (or at least get on the radio), except it sounds like a '60's soul classic so I guess that isn't real likely either.

This may be the record that gets Ray LaMontagne dropped from RCA Records, but it's probably also the record that his fans will love 10 years from now.

Best Records of 2006: #10 Allison Moorer - 'Getting Somewhere'

Yeah, yeah, I know - Getting Somewhere is not Allison's best record.  It might even be her worst (or least best).  It's more rock than country for sure, and though Allison was able to pull that off on her previous record The Duel (her best album and my favorite record of 2004), it just didn't click as well this time around.  Cynics will blame it on her marriage to her producer Steve Earle, but I think production-wise everything is sharp.  I guess some of the songs are a bit slight, and maybe her newfound sunny disposition just isn't as convincing as Moorer's dark side.

But ya know what?  I played the ever-lovin' crap out of this CD, and it sounded pretty awesome in the car disc changer in June and July.  An enduring classic?  Probably not.  Disappointing?  A little.  Great record?  You bet.

And I'll be damned if I stick Allison-freakin-Moorer on some Honorable Mention list.