Town Makes Top Ten List on Kentucky.com
Year’s best: CDs
Critic’s pick of notable 2006 CDs includes American classics Dylan and Waits, a New Orleans tribute and an orchestra from Mali
By Walter Tunis
CONTRIBUTING MUSIC CRITIC
They come bursting with redemptive music from New Orleans and global grooves that originated from Mali but reverberated all over the world.
They sang of life, loss and affirmation. They chronicled almost regal heartbreak. They reflected homelands old and new.
They boasted the blues, suggested the apocalypse and professed a fractured, folky faith.
And one even sported orphans — 54 of them.
They are the best recordings of 2006. And while only one hit the top of the charts, all are assertive, original works where genres blend, emotions mingle and a sense of fine, unassuming aural art is achieved. What more could you want from great music?
Here, then, is a critic’s pick view of the 10 best albums of 2006:
1. The Bottle Rockets, Zoysia. Zoysia is the sound of a bar band that has grown up without losing its edge. The electric spirit of mid-’70s Neil Young guides the music, but Brian Henneman and pals have a wily and worldly sound all their own. The title tune typifies the album’s magic by using lawn grass as a means of urban dtente. That’s how
homespun Zoysia is at heart. But the guitar charge that backs it up tells you how much The Bottle Rockets still mean business.
2. Los Lobos, The Town and the City. For all its adventurous rock and Tex-Mex spirit, Los Lobos’ best songs relish in themes of home and family. Such sentiments abound here, but in much darker fashion. More ominous in tone and temperament than previous albums, The Town and the City’s sense of home is more displaced. Hints of immigration
heighten echoes of vintage soul, wary blues and surrealist pop and make Los Lobos sound more vital than ever.
3. Jolie Holland, Springtime Can Kill You. Springtime designs a parlor-music setting for songs of personal misery. The tunes expand and contract like an accordion at times and breeze along with the merest suggestion of swing at others. But the sentiment here is all
blues. Hence, Springtime is full of pouty, lovelorn laments that defy the elegance of their melodies. In other words, Springtime is the very musical winter of Holland’s discontent.
4. Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra, Boulevard de l’Independence. From Mali comes this expressive and forward-thinking groove festival. The tunes’ sly percussive strut and joyous vocal slant are built around Diabate’s playing on the lute-like kora. But
there is a Senegalese-Cuban-American connection at work here as elements of salsa, along with arrangements by veteran jazz-funk saxman Pee Wee Ellis, season the session. This is world music in every celebratory sense of the term.
5. T Bone Burnett, The True False Identity. Having reshaped and preserved Americana music as a producer in recent years, Burnett gives us the first album of his own music since 1992. The results blend mythic folk imagery, lyrics that fall between hip-hop and beat
poetry and jagged guitar that spits across the grooves like crossfire. The True False Identity gives Americana music a worldly voice and then makes it dance in an especially dark countryside.
6. Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, The River in Reverse. Of the many tributes and laments sung in the wake of Katrina, this collaboration by the master British songsmith and one of New Orleans’ sharpest composers and arrangers resonates strongest. Much of River is made up of Toussaint classics whose swampy, soul-smitten sound
lets Costello have a field day. But in the album’s elegiac title tune and the Professor Longhair- inspired Ascension Day, you sense hope for a still-ravaged city.
7. Tom Waits, Orphans. Initially rumored to be a mere excavation of unreleased works from Waits’ 35-year career, Orphans actually comes stuffed with 30 or so new tunes. This sprawling but fascinating three-disc, 54-song set is subtitled and sorted into discs of jittery rockers (Brawlers), oddly poignant ballads (Bawlers) and wondrous
eccentricities (Bastards) to form a mammoth carnival ride hosted by a deliciously twisted American original.
8. Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac. Black Cadillac’s most personal influences — the deaths of Cash’s famous father, mother and stepmother within a two-year period — has garnered as much press as the album itself. But the record is more an affirmation than a
eulogy. And in the case of Like Fugitives and the sublime title tune, the ones being mourned are the living. Alternately ambient and rockish, Black Cadillac is the year’s most fascinating meditation on love and death.
9. Bob Dylan, Modern Times. Blues chestnuts retooled into modern ruminations, reveries suggesting vintage jazz and ragtime and, of course, those glorious moments when Dylan’s poetic muse boils over and doomsday rolls your way from a dozen directions. In other words, we have Dylan at his quixotic best. “Today’s the day I’m gonna grab
my trombone and blow,” he sings at the album’s onset. And so he does, with another restless lullaby for modern times.
10. The Wood Brothers, Ways Not to Lose. One of 2006’s great sleeper records was this folk-blues exploration by Medeski Martin & Wood bassist Chris Wood and his brother, a little-known guitarist and vocalist from Atlanta named Oliver Wood. MMW keyboardist John Medeski produced Ways Not to Lose, but the album couldn’t be more removed from the trio’s avant jazz grooves. The brothers’ loose-limbed tunes abound with a roots sound that is lean, relaxed and infectious.