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The Tris McCall Report

Critics Poll 2006 -- The Albums

Go ahead and kiss 'em, you don't know what you're missing.

 

Argyle Style in 2006

Belle & Sebastian snagged their first Critics Poll victory nine years ago. I hadn't heard of them before then, and if any of our voters had an import copy of Tigermilk or the early EPs, I guess they didn't think they were worthy of listing on a ballot. B&S's If You're Feeling Sinister squeaked out a win in '97, beating out Spiritualized and Funcrusher Plus and a whole mess of that semi-tough Britpop stuff that we were then taking seriously. Poll voters have never gone in big for the C86 aesthetic; if you were to describe the basics of "indiepop" or "tweepop" to us then, we probably would have thought you were talking about "Linger" by the Cranberries. As it was, the early word on Belle & Sebastian making the rounds in NYC hipster circles was that they'd lifted their sound from Nick Drake. It seemed more like The Smiths to me -- early Smiths, fronted by Donovan. Back then, there weren't too too many musicians who wanted to sound like either. I wasn't complaining.

Indie music was coming out of its five-year fallow period around then, but it was still a bit of a metal monster. The good news was that pop musicians had rediscovered synthesizers. The bad news was that they were mostly in the hands of that dude with metal boogers from The Prodigy. Yet as it turned out, Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister was, in its quiet way, every bit as seminal as OK Computer. Only instead of inspiring rock goofs to purchase thousands of dollars of signal-processing gear, they showed geek boys and girls who'd flunked their piano lessons how to bounce around nervously in the midrange and spin out stories about their boarding schools. Since Sinister, dozens of B&S-influenced bands have turned up on the Critics Poll album lists. Indiepop -- the subgenre that has dominated the Poll results for most of this decade -- owes its formal dimensions and quite a bit of its mass acceptance to Belle & Sebastian. No band working this territory would ever deny it: least of all the gang of Glaswegian coattail-riders you all put at #2 this year.

Yet while the many Belle & Sebastian spinoffs, knockoffs, and proteges have scaled the Critics Poll year after year, Belle & Sebastian themselves have often struggled to connect with our voters. The Boy With The Arab Strap, the '98 follow-up to If You're Feeling Sinister, was the overwhelming choice for Biggest Disappointment; some even wanted to Send Them Down To The Minors For More Seasoning. Periodically it occurs to me that our judgement of Arab Strap might have been too harsh; then I throw it on, and by the time I get to "Seymour Stein", I'm reminded again of the wisdom of our voters. Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like A Peasant made my top twenty in 2000, but hardly got a mention on any of the other 54 ballots submitted that year. B&S followed up that uneven effort with a weird half-soundtrack what-is-it that satisfied nobody, and reinforced their reputation as indisciplined dilettantes who couldn't tell the difference between a good idea and a complete throwaway.

At that point, any projection system built for pop careers could have told you what would happen next: Belle & Sebastian would split up, Stuart Murdoch would make a few solid but inconsequential solo records, and everybody would look back wistfully at If You're Feeling Sinister and the early EPs as the group's inspired, unrepeatable high-water mark. Luckily, there's no PECOTA for rock and roll. Faced with early-onset irrelevance, Murdoch shook up the group: losing occasional singer and indie heartthrob Isobel Campbell, limiting Stevie Jackson's vocal "contributions" to a harmless lead here and there, and taking advantage of Stuart David's departure to bring in a ringer (Bobby Kildea, this year's consensus Best Bassist) to handle the bottom end. Most crucially, Murdoch toughened up his stance and his voice, and adjusted the lens on his camera. He stopped singing about flouncing around Glasgow and being unemployed and resentful; instead, he took his sly class-critique to the London workplace, and gave his stories room to breathe by stepping back from them a few paces.

Those who follow Doonesbury will remember the day when Garry Trudeau came back from vacation and a cast that seemed to be locked in a perpetual adolescence suddenly aged about fifteen years. Such was the experience of hearing Dear Catastrophe Waitress for the first time. On Sinister, Murdoch seemed inseperable from his characters; on Waitress, Murdoch seemed to be making fun of his characters. B&S albums used to sound like they'd been recorded in an old shoe -- but Trevor Horn spit-polished this one until it shouted at the listener like the Hollywood sign. Indiepop fans would've gagged on it had Murdoch not shown up with five killer songs and six others that were merely excellent. (We'll leave the goofy Stevie Jackson number out of the discussion). Jersey Critics Poll voters weren't going to deny the Wrens the top spot in 2003, but Dear Catastrophe Waitress finished a strong third. Stuart Murdoch won Best Songwriter and Best Lyricist, and Horn took Best Producer in a landslide.

And in 2006, Belle & Sebastian body-slammed the competition. If You're Feeling Sinister eked out a win by a handful of points; The Life Pursuit lapped the rest of the field. B&S scored a record 488 points on the poll and topped the second-place album by more than two hundred. (For those who dig this stuff, The Arcade Fire's Funeral set those records in 2004; I'm glad they've both fallen.)

The band that made The Life Pursuit is, for all practical purposes, an entirely different one than the bunch of upstart Scots who won the Poll in '97 with In You're Feeling Sinister. That album was raw and immediate, willfully vulnerable and painfully exposed, angry, sexually ambiguous, amateurish, wide-eyed; this year's issue is accomplished, wry, ironic, artful to the point of fussiness, sophisticated, well-tailored, crisp and detached. We've watched B&S transform from pop kids with no real instrumental skill to real studio pros; genuine rock stars. We know now that this new commitment to quality control wasn't Trevor Horn's idea -- The Life Pursuit was produced by Tony Hoffer. This is the band's own balancing act. They took some clumsy steps, lost their footing, righted themselves and straightened up on the beam, and turned to the circus crowd as new spectacle.

One thing has remained constant, though. In Stuart Murdoch, they've got a ringleader and songwriter for the ages; one of those guys who, like Elvis Costello, has produced a catalog of songs that'll stand up as long as listeners want to experience pop music. I didn't put The Life Pursuit in my Top Twenty this year, but I know it's not going to be collecting any dust on my shelves. It's another important piece of a story that's become the most compelling in contemporary music; I mean, if you're an indiepop or tweepop musician yourself, these guys are your Beatles, aren't they?

A Few Words About Numbers

Some quick stat-work and then it's on to the Top 40. This year we had 143 voters in the Poll -- our third straight all-time high. I didn't spam out a mass-mailing solicitation to my e-mail list this time around; instead, I sent invitations to those people who'd voted before, and a few others who I thought might return an amusing ballot. You guys did not disappoint. Every regular sent in a list, and every year, your lists become more comprehensive and more interesting. If I was a generous person, I'd just shut up now and devote the rest of the Poll write-up to your amazing comments. Since I'm Chaotic Evil, I'll just have to work them in where I can; otherwise, the DM will dock me experience points.

How They Finished In 2006:

1. Belle & Sebastian -- The Life Pursuit (488)
2. Camera Obscura -- Let's Get Out Of This Country (284)
3. Ghostface Killah -- Fishscale (255)
4. The Hold Steady -- Boys And Girls In America (253)
5. Neko Case -- Fox Confessor Brings The Flood (250)

Speaking of bands who've buffed up their sound, The Hold Steady caught some flak for the production on Boys And Girls In America; some of you guys liked it better when they sounded less like Classic Rawk and more like the Jim Carroll Band. Thing is, though, in concert, they've always been huge -- and it's that live show that's going to sell their music to the great American heartland. You could throw Craig Finn and Company on a bill with AC/DC, and at the end of the night, they'd leave the arena with a few thousand new fans. I can't think of any other independent rock band who I would feel comfortable making that claim about. They're not going to let a little thing like sound fidelity stand in the way of their legend.

The anxiety-of-influence thing can best be summarized by way of analogy -- Craig Finn is to Jim Carroll as Mike Skinner is to Ian Dury. Which is to say that just because you're doing something sonically and thematically similar to somebody who recorded thirty years ago, it doesn't mean you're not a hell of a lot better at it than they were. Ghostface, on the other hand, owes nothing to anybody -- even if some of the stories he tells sound familiar, you can count on it that the metaphors he selects and his loopy word-choices are entirely his own. And then there are the stories he tells that won't sound familiar: getting corporal punishment from his momma and enjoying it, going underwater and reading the Koran, senior citizens with hidden shotguns, and, um, the proper directions to Heart Street. Theoretically, rap songs can be about anything. Ghostface reminds us of that.

As for Camera Obscura, there'll be more about those guys when we do the Singles list tomorrow. Hint hint.

6. Yo La Tengo -- I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass (231)
7. Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins -- Rabbit Fur Coat (226)
8. The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife (217)
9. TV On The Radio -- Return To Cookie Mountain (208)
10. Destroyer -- Destroyer's Rubies (200)

Denied an opportunity to vote for Carl Newman for the first time in three years, Critics Poll voters channeled their praise toward a few of his fellow Pornographers. Neko Case broke the Top Five with Fox Confessor, and Dan Bejar's incomprehensible Destroyer rounds out the Top Ten. The Life Pursuit topped the most ballots by far (14), but Rabbit Fur Coat placed second in that category with nine. Almost everybody who voted for Jenny Lewis had her record in their top three or four; there were very few downballot mentions of Rabbit Fur Coat. But we already knew that about Lewis -- people either love her or disregard her completely.

For the second Poll running,The Decemberists did just the opposite. The Crane Wife appeared on thirty lists, but didn't top any of them. The enthusiasm for Decemberists #4 felt, in general, a little weaker than it had been for #3, but Critics Poll voters are still hanging with these guys. Seventy-five per cent of Decemberists voters also voted for B&S, and that was the highest degree of correspondence between the Poll winner and another album in the Top 40. Nothing surprising about that; there wouldn't even be a Colin Meloy to kick around if it hadn't been for Belle & Sebastian.

11. Joanna Newsom -- Ys (176)
12. The Fiery Furnaces -- Bitter Tea (175)
13. The Pernice Brothers -- Live A Little (158)
13. Clipse -- Hell Hath No Fury (158)
15. Mates Of State -- Bring It Back (156)

Back in December, I figured that Joanna Newsom would win the Critics Poll Ysily. Her sophomore joint was so monumental in scope, so sharply-written and passionately performed that I figured it had Album of the Year written all over it. Maybe that was the problem; that, and a few extremely silly record reviews. As it so happened, Ys did pretty well: 176 points and her second straight finish just out of the Top Ten (The Milk-Eyed Mender placed eleventh in 2004). But with the points came an avalanche of votes in negative or quasi-negative categories. There'll be plenty to say about Newsom when we get to the miscellany this Wednesday. But the prevailing impression I get while paging through the ballots was that Ys pissed a lot of you off.

Every single year, you can pencil it in -- I'll be writing about Joe Pernice in the third section of the album results recap. As always, his support came almost entirely from New Jersey, which I continue to find weird. Isn't he from Massachusetts? If you disregard the ballots cast from out of state (more than half, as it turns out), Live A Little finishes in the Top Five. New Yorkers were more likely than Garden Staters to vote for Camera Obscura, but Jersey voters and Gotham voters loved The Life Pursuit equally.

16. Band Of Horses -- Everything All The Time (151)
17. Lilys -- Everything Wrong Is Imaginary (150)
18. Bob Dylan -- Modern Times (142)
19. Bruce Springsteen -- We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (140)
20. The Game -- The Doctor's Advocate (131)

Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it this summer: 2006 was a kick*ass year for older dudes. (Well, maybe he didn't put it that way.) It takes a lot of balls to sit down and fill out a Critics Poll ballot with Bob Dylan and The Boss and Ray Davies and Paul Simon on it; the whole time, you're second-guessing yourself and feeling like it's time to go purchase some prunes and join the AARP. Throw in Tom Waits, Lindsey Buckingham, The Who, Robyn Hitchcock, Mission Of Burma, Scott Walker, The New York Dolls, Ira Kaplan, hell, even Craig Finn, and you begin to see the scope of it. Why no kids, kids? Is this all evidence of our collective senescence? Well, these guys have been around forever for a reason: they know how to make records, and they've (mostly) managed not to fry their brains. You'd think that a geriatric version of the Dolls would have something relevant to say to us, and it turns out that they do. But the bigger issue is that the critical community -- and by that I mean you, Critics Poll voter, or just you, critical thinker -- hasn't yet warmed up to the style of music that currently turns on white American youngsters. Music writers are either going to make some kind of rapproachement with emo and pop-punk or they're going to have to keep rocking to the fossils.

Conversely, they may turn to hip-hop. We're already seeing some evidence for this shift on the Critics Poll: rap music did better in 2006 than it's done since the Nineties. Where there's usually a single socially-conscious token emcee on this list, for Critics Poll XVII, the crack-slangers have stormed the mansion. Consider: the Roots put out their best album ever this year, and they got smoked by Ghostface's pyrex-fume fantasies, The Game's psychotic and near-murderous obsession with his former mentor, and two cold-eyed brothers from Norfolk who compare themselves to genocidal Hutus. This would not have happened if young rock bands were making music that did not send the mainstream 'net critic to the medicine cabinet in search of the Alka-Seltzer. Rappers surely do not need Pitchfork and Stylus, but it turned out that Pitchfork and Stylus needs them. There are only so many Scandinavian bands you can pretend to like; those countries ain't big, and The Cardigans are, like, deities over there.

21. Midlake -- The Trials Of Van Occupanther (130)
22. Paul Simon -- Surprise (123)
22. Grizzly Bear -- Yellow House (123)
24. Robyn Hitchcock -- Ole! Tarantula (119)
25. Liars -- Drum's Not Dead (117)
26. Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- The Letting Go (113)
27. The Loud Family & Anton Barbeau -- What If It Works? (112)
27. The Knife -- Silent Shout (112)
29. Tom Waits -- Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (108)
30. Gnarls Barkley -- St. Elsewhere (107)

More ballots meant more points to distribute, especially since so many of you decided to list more than ten albums. A couple of you sent me forty -- which is more than I do, even -- and one intrepid voter went fifty deep. I can't speak for anybody else's experience, but I find that once I get past a Top Twenty, the qualitative distinctions between albums are usually too minute to track with precision. It's usually easy for me to list a Top Ten; after that, it gets rough. I make room on the online Critics Poll form for ten selections and an honorable mention, but there's no character cap on the text-fields. In other words, you can list twenty or thirty honorable mentions if you choose to. Some do. And folks, I know the form is ugly and tough to work with, but I'm no HTML wizard. If you'd like to make a new form for me next year, I'd be delighted -- and you'd be a Critics Poll hero forever.

31. Milton -- Milton (103)
32. The Thermals -- The Body, The Blood, The Machine (101)
32. M. Ward -- Post-War (101)
34. The New York Dolls -- One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This (99)
35. The Flaming Lips -- At War With The Mystics (98)
35. Scott Walker -- The Drift (98)
37. Mastodon -- Blood Mountain (97)
38. The Stills -- Without Feathers (96)
38. The Roots -- Game Theory (96)
40. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Show Your Bones (92)
40. Built To Spill -- You In Reverse (92)

Milton topped all local yokels with 103 points in the poll. Other friends and neighbors scoring well: The Glaciers (90 points), Jaymay (90), Baby Dayliner (76), Mahogany (70), Oneida (65), Fresh Kills (64), The Black Hollies (60). Meanwhile, I'm Assuming You're All In Bands got 113 points. Even though I tell you all not to vote for me, I'm still secretly thrilled when you do. Well, you can take the girl out of seventh grade, but you can't take seventh grade out of the girl. This girl, anyway.

Guster's Ganging Up On The Sun only got named on three ballots -- but all three voters had it at #1. I haven't heard it, either, but based on that evidence alone, I bet you it's pretty damned good. Also, there's only so much flogging the Early November that one solitary crank can do, so let me strike at the same nail with a different hammer: I was a little surprised that My Chemical Romance only picked up 33 points. Jersey people are supposed to stick together, right? C'mon, Turnpike warriors, don't make me vote for these clowns to compensate for your disloyalty. We gave the world "Born To Run"; this is the United State of Emo. Let's not get all misaligned here.

One last note, and then I have to add the links and stuff and hit the hay: I've noticed that folks are running these polls earlier and earlier every year. I occasionally get solicited for Top Ten lists in the middle of December. People, Hip-Hop Is Dead didn't even come out until the 19th of December. Moreover, I refuse to believe that anybody can accurately assess the year in pop while they're being bombarded by holiday music and shopping solicitations. Filling out a Critics Poll ballot requires at least a month of serious cold-weather thought. You can't do it while the tinsel is still on the tree and Santa is shoving his bag down your chimney. Our tradition was always to do the Critics Poll on Superbowl Sunday; later, we changed it to the last Saturday in January. That's early enough. I'm not going to let these other Polls pull a Nevada Caucus on us. I promise you'll always have until the end of the first month of the year to evaluate the year that was.

Other Albums Recieving #1 Votes:

  • Aloha -- Some Echoes
  • Antje Duvekot -- Big Dream Boulevard
  • Barbara Morganstern -- The Grass Is Always Greener
  • Bela Fleck & The Flecktones -- The Hidden Land
  • Blood Brothers -- Young Machetes
  • Brandon Wilde -- Songs From The Deep Sleep
  • Built To Spill -- You In Reverse
  • Channels -- Waiting For The Next End Of The World
  • Danielson -- Ships
  • Dresden Dolls -- Yes, Virginia
  • Fucked Up -- Hidden World
  • J Dilla -- Donuts
  • J DiMenna -- Awkward Buildings
  • Lawrence Arms -- Oh! Calcutta
  • Mike K -- A Simple Story Simply Told
  • Mogwai -- Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
  • Mojave 3 -- Puzzles Like You
  • My Chemical Romance -- The Black Parade
  • National -- Alligator
  • Paybacks -- Love Not Reason
  • Peter, Bjorn & John -- Writer's Block
  • Raconteurs -- Broken Boy Soldiers
  • Rainer Maria -- Catastrophe Keeps Us Together
  • Red Bennies -- Shake It Off
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers -- Stadium Arcadium
  • Streets -- The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living
  • Strokes -- First Impressions Of Earth
  • Tommy Keene -- Crashing The Ether
  • Val Emmich -- Sunlight Searchparty
  • Xiu Xiu -- The Air Force

Poll results from 2005, 2004, and 2003.

Tomorrow: the singles.

Wednesday: all the miscellaneous categories you could ask for.

Thursday: my own "best of" everything.

Friday: the last word.

 

She said: "you ain't ugly, you can e-mail me if you like."