The eMusic Dozen: Best Albums of 2006: 10 - 1

09 Whatever you think of Belle and Sebastian, it's hard to disagree with the fact that the Scottish combo is not only remarkably consistent, but it's managed to evolve without cringe-inducing growing pains. B&S have pretty much shed their unbearably twee image, for instance, and without resorting to drastic measures. This album, the follow-up to 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress, has an undeniably jaunty bounce, but B&S are hardly dance floor kings — it's the arrangements rather than the beats that sneak in sly funky/soul touches. "Sukie in the Graveyard" is buoyed by a bopping organ and subtle horns, for instance, while the clavinet intro to "Song for Sunshine" nods toward classic Stevie Wonder, before the song takes a turn into Sly and the Family Stone territory. So yes, it's yet another B&S album, but it's also yet another good B&S album. Any complaints? — Elisabeth Vincentelli

08 Califone's seventh album finds mastermind Tim Rutili (ex-Red Red Meat) and company blithely marrying fractured funkadelia, twisted pan-global folk and Grateful Dead-like instrumental interplay in a slow-burning blaze of laptop-assisted glory that salutes apparently disparate traditions even as it consumes them. Gliding on a carpet of vaguely Middle Eastern percussion, opener "Pink and Sour" charms our inner cobra with pulsating drones and slide guitar that overlay Natchez and Mumbai like projector transparencies. "Black Metal Valentine" nudges its glitches into the realm of artificial life, myriad guitar-sourced scrapes gamboling the night away in a gentle digital vortex. And while Rutili's consistently wistful vocals often add an ironic gloss to his neo-Dada lyrics, they elevate the Psychic TV cover "Orchids" so effectively that Genesis P-Orridge would probably give all his piercings just to match it. — Rod Smith

07 The memorial T-shirts said it all: “J Dilla Changed My Life.” When Detroit producer James “Jay Dee” Yancey died this past February due to complications from lupus, he left behind an incredible, decade-long body of work, thousands of touched colleagues and fans and an otherworldly aesthetic that his disciples are still trying to wrap their heads around. Known for inventing the ticky-tack, negative-space approach to funk that came to define late-'90s neo-soul, the graceful, swooning loops and delicate chops of the sketchbook-like Donuts were a brief but tantalizing hint at Dilla’s next giant step. We’ll never know — and we’re probably incapable of imagining — what would have come next. — Hua Hsu

06 Cat Power’s fans, detractors and those level-headed types who flirt between both camps generally agree that the singer, Chan Marshall, is blessed with a lovely, unaffected voice. Opinions diverge in how that voice is applied. When stripped of grounded instrumental backing, Marshall can seem rambling and lost; when paired with dynamic musicians, however, she is emboldened. The artist chooses the latter path on The Greatest, recording in Tennessee with session vets who helped Al Green and Willie Mitchell craft Memphis soul in the ’60s and ’70s. The subsequent work is downbeat, boozy, spooky and very Southern — the archetypical Cat Power album, even if it took a bunch of old souls to bring to fruition. — Jay Ruttenberg

05 Ornette Coleman’s first new album in a decade, Sound Grammar, documents the iconic alto-sax maverick’s stunning current band, an all-acoustic group with two bassists, at a German concert on October 14, 2005. This particular album is less about pushing in new directions and more about acknowledging and extending the strengths that have shaped Coleman's style from the very beginning: melodic generosity, a healthy disregard for rules and, always, a deep blues feel at the core of his conception. The strongest attraction here, really, is the powerful performances that this particular band produces. With any luck, we'll see Coleman albums more frequently than we have in recent decades. — Steve Smith

04 Having left Minneapolis's Block E for E Street back on Separation Sunday, The Hold Steady flirt still more overtly with jukebox heroism on Boys and Girls in America. "Chips Ahoy!" rockingly outs love as an anxious racetrack bet, and the cheeky "You Can Make Him Like You" grudgingly admires those insouciant girls who simply let their "boyfriend deal with the dealer." The beer-teary "First Night" could be the "Same Auld Lang Syne" of the faded indie-rock regency, and if fellow topophiliac Sufjan Stevens can make Carl Sandburg a parlor-rock star, Craig Finn can resurrect the ghost of drowned poet John Berryman who "loved the Golden Gophers/But hated all the drawn-out winters." On the Berryman homage, Finn's empathy flows deep and wide for his hometown's most famous suicide: "He was drunk and exhausted/He was critically acclaimed and respected." Finn's banking on better — here's hoping Sal Paradise gets to the Promised Land. — Laura Sinagra

03 The Drift is terrifying. Scott Walker exaggerates his legendary baritone to the point of grotesqueness. He croaks and croons passionlessly, floating wraith-like around his shadowy compositions. The songs groan and swell and collapse and awful, nightmarish noises spiral up through the blackness. Guitars flex slow and icy like skeletal fingers; the thundering, urgent drumming sounds like someone trying frantically to kick their way out of a coffin. It's a kind of orchestral Grand Guignol, a full-on waking nightmare. A morbidly, masterfully riveting series of precipitous drops, weird shadows and moments of pure horror, The Drift demands both patience and surrender. It is the richest and most rewarding music of Walker's long, strange career. — J. Edward Keyes

02 Yo La Tengo are one of the rare bands who've consistently gotten more adventurous; their make-it-new impulses have occasionally led them into self-indulgent cul-de-sacs, but more often they've ended up making creative leaps into pop traditions outside their Velvet Underground-based indie-rock roots — plenty of which are in evidence on their eleventh-or-so album, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. "Watch Out for Me Ronnie" is an immaculately crazed garage-rock song — aside from its little horn riff, it could be a refugee from Nuggets; if the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" were a genre, "The Race Is On Again" would be its best recent example; "Mr. Tough" is '70s piano soul, with touches of salsa in its arrangement and Curtis Mayfield in its falsetto lead vocals. — Douglas Wolk