The eMusic Dozen: Best Albums of 2006: 30 - 21

30 The band's brain and conscience both, Patterson Hood has been the conceptual spark for the Drive-By Truckers, and he nails A Blessing and a Curse's theme with the rollicking "Aftermath USA." Shaking off a spree-induced fog, he details the damages of who knows how many lost nights: the tub's full of crystal meth, social services are threatening to take the kids, the radio's still blasting shitty music from his totaled car, and meat's rotting in the freezer. As with his bandmates' songs, there's little sense here that his situation is linked to a world outside his personal experience. For maybe the first time in the Truckers' career, there's no politics, no economics, no history, no legends or celebrities poking their noses into the singers' lives. This time, there's nowhere to hide. — Keith Harris

29 Eclectic albums can be wonderful, but never underestimate the power of relentless specialization. The Matador debut by wilderness-based mystics Rachel Hughes and Nathan Shineywater focuses on one sound and one sound only, a shaggy triangulation between Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis, Spiritualized's Lazer Guided Melodies, and Mazzy Star's She Hangs Brightly. Track after track, Brightblack deploy the same cavernous reverb on Hughes' ethereal voice while alternating between the same few chords on her glowing Fender Rhodes, as Shineywater fills the ample spaces with guitar and slide whenever the spirit moves him. The result is a masterful extended mood piece — slow, druggy, ethereal and ultimately nourishing. — Mark Richardson

28 Booka Shade's "Mandarine Girl" was 2005's premier crossover club record, an electro-house charmer whose buzzing, zapping bass line is echoed and emboldened by higher-pitched synth noises, all moving in tandem at the song's mid-length climax like Claymation robots. The single's warm sound (a mix of house's humane undertow and electro's gleeful cyber-futurism) and nonchalant air helped it get onto the year-end lists of more than just DJ aficionados. Now it anchors a full album, many of whose songs work in a pleasantly similar manner. Sometimes they tighten their basic formula, as on "Pong Pang," whose assertive core sounds like a rapid, bouncy thumb-piano riff. When Booka loosen up, they go all the way, as on the slap-happily electro-poppy "The Birds and the Beats/At the Window." But mostly they prefer to creep up on you, each new noise emerging unobtrusively from the corners of the sound-field, not pouncing but sidling. — Michaelangelo Matos

26 The seventh and best Destroyer record, Rubies is as heavy with rock history as it is disgusted with the underground, a record that offers both ease of access and stockpiles of mystery. Before the album's nine-minute opening salvo is over, Dan Bejar has referenced Otis Redding, "Golden Slumbers" and his own back catalog, his delivery alternately rushed and hesitant. From that point on, Rubies is a dizzying trip, a record that is both fat with facts and is also the perfect mirror of an age weary and bloated from instant access to vats of questionable knowledge. — J. Edward Keyes

25 Riverside Recordings capitalizes on one of the great jazz discoveries in recent years: the tape of a 1957 concert, long buried in the Library of Congress and released last year by Blue Note as Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. That album expanded our knowledge of a short-lived but hugely influential collaboration, which went largely unrecorded because the two musicians were signed to different labels. Riverside, Monk's label, did record one quartet session, producing three selections (notably the sublime "Trinkle, Tinkle"); in addition, Monk used Coltrane on a septet album (Monk's Music), matching him with tenor saxophone patriarch Coleman Hawkins, and in a trio for a surprise appearance on a piano album (Thelonious Himself). Those performances, sequenced here in chronological order, offer glimpses from a year when Coltrane discovered his own power and Monk discarded the tag of cultish eccentricity. — Gary Giddins

24 Basement Jaxx are veterans of London's house-music clubs of the early '90s, but across recent albums they've left those origins far behind. It's not just that the duo's style has expanded — even as club-music purveyors they were radically inclusive — but that their increasingly dense, detailed constructions, which draw from pop and R&B but include a dizzying array of oddball elements, are engineered for a far different kind of space. The filigreed strings of the country-leaning "Take Me Back to Your House," the hyper-compressed, multi-tracked funk of "Hush Boy," the curtain of bells, drums, horns and voices on the carnaval anthem "Run 4 Cover" — they're all stuffed with details that require the dry confines of headphones or, preferably, a car stereo to render all the obsessively wrought, kaleidoscopic elements in their proper resolution. — Philip Sherburne

22 Two albums into their reunion, the smartest American punk band of 1981 have turned into the heaviest American punk band of 2006. Their legendary instrumental chemistry has never left them, and the bubbling tape manipulation that's their secret weapon still sounds dense and mysterious. The difference this time is that guitarist Roger Miller's Stockhausen-via-Stooges riffs now come with actual melodies attached — his "Donna Sumeria" is a blistering rock paraphrase of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love." Otherwise, they're up to a louder version of their old tricks: drummer Peter Prescott punctuating his pummeling with strangled bellows, bassist Clint Conley ranting about history and "haunted by the freakish size of Nancy Reagan's head." They're precisely the kind of tough-as-roofing-nails old guys you want on your side in a volume war — or an academic debate. — Douglas Wolk

21 It's been five years since the last Danielson family outing, and in that time Famile friend and co-conspirator Sufjan Stevens has gone from Midwest obscurity to Lincoln Center showpiece, Christian rock bands like Switchfoot and Relient K have made inroads on the pop charts and Mel Gibson turned holy masochism into mountains of mammon. While chief Famile member Daniel Smith may share their pilgrims' faith, it's unlikely that he'll duplicate their success. Smith's approach to songwriting is decidedly cockeyed, but that's one of the things that makes Ships such a singular treasure. Joyful, raucous, rowdy and triumphant, Ships is the best Danielson record by miles, full of odd angles and strange angels and the kind of childlike guilelessness that guides camels through drinking straws. — J. Edward Keyes