2006 Would Have Sucked If Not For Our Jam Box

The two albums released by DangerDoom, “The Mouse and the Mask” and “Occult Hymns,” are the co-winners of the Howlin' Leroy Eenk Best Co-Albums of 2006 Award

From The Editors:

Late this afternoon, about 3:30 p.m., when everybody is finished burping from a long lunch and people are starting to actually make calls and do some work, right before nap time, a superior blustered into our sanctuary and assigned a column for tomorrow’s paper. But not just any column, in fact, it wasn’t a column at all, something else entirely.

It was list, a Best Of... list, the most popular and unnutritious fact-based entertainment product humanity has produced.

As far as editorial boards go, we’re not the most “sober,” “informed,” or, as they say, “cooperative,” band of opinionmakers. But instead of slamming our fists on our desks, snapping at our authority figures (the advertising director, in this case), swearing up and down that we are this close to quitting, then saying something like, “Let’s burn this motherfucker down!,” we took the challenge and whipped up a Best Of 2006 list, a year we never really got to know as well as we should have.

It’s a Best Of list, all right, and it’s pretty great, because it doesn’t restrict itself to 2006. We sat down and found that it made more sense to list the best albums throughout the history of recorded music that we started listening to in 2006 because it was easier.

The year was significant in that it saw our little department make a shift from a predominately punk rock playlist to a more subdued and diverse collection of artists and genres. We listened to more jazz, bought a new copy of a classic, got reacquainted with an old friend called rap, and began listening to a couple new punk bands and even discovered for the first time a fusion band that hasn’t made a record in almost 10 years. And after several years of diminishing interest, country, blues, and classic rock music played less than a minor role. For the first time electronic music played on our stereo resulted in greater frequencies of “Ah, that’s my jam!”

So feast your eyes on the most arbitrary and unreliable information conveyance device in the Modern Paris Hilton Age, and come away less of a person.

The Top Ten Albums/Songs We Started Listening To In Earnest And Started Really Digging in 2006 That May Not Have Been Recorded Or Released In 2006

1-DangerDoom

The Mouse and the Mask (2005) Occult Hymns (2006)

The El Chupa Nibre alternate on the Occult Hymns album (which is free to download here, do yourself a favor) is speculator (Doom’s counting chickens like a colonel on D-Day), and by chance it’s a 2006 release. Perhaps we should award these two efforts with the coveted Howlin’ Leroy Eenk Best Co-Albums of 2006? Yes, we think so too. So it is.

2-Everything MF DOOM has ever done under any and all of his names. He is our hero right now.
(If I may speak freely, nasty like the freaky-deaky at your local sleazy speakeasy.)

3-Rashaan Roland Kirk

"Old Rugged Cross" – Trance inducing and should be avoided by pregnant women and those with heart conditions.

4-El-P

"Deep Space 9mm" – (Behind the walls of New Rome, you want to buy the farm but the land is not yours to own) And beside that, in the video for this Mad Max plea, El-P looks exactly like our friend Vern. We’re talking spitting image.

5-John Coltrane/Metric - Live It Out

We couldn’t decide between the sax legend and the Canadian electrorock. Last year we were pretty Stan Getz heavy in our musical selections, but we’ve drifted from the dreamy Westcoaster.

6- Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam – 2006

We’ve long been a fan of some Pearl Jam songs, and we’ve often sung the praises of “Do the Evolution,” but it wasn’t until this eponymous landslide that we actually owned a Pearl Jam album and played it regularly.

7-Sublime

"Santeria" – About the time this song was a hit we were studying the collected recordings of Robert Johnson and only heard popular music in the morning if our clock radio happened to randomly be turned to the right station. It’s a truly original song, not only in its aesthetic, but the juxtaposition of its soulful, melodic reggae/punk/rap form to the narrative, told through the perspective of an evil bastard. And like a character out of Milton, this devil has us actually rooting for him to hunt down his cheating girlfriend, who probably hates him because he’s an evil bastard, and beating her up and blowing the head off her suitor. He’s so consumed with rage at this relatively commonplace snub that he doesn’t care about his soul. His greatest joy is revenge. We play this one a lot, over and over.

8-Charles Mingus

It’s a better world because of Charles Mingus. And you owe it to yourself to check him out.

9- Fugazzi/Catheters/Dub Narcotic Sound System

We first heard these bands years ago, the Catheters at Bumbershoot 2003, DNSS in the kitchen of the 10th And Miller Pagliacci Pizza in 1996, and Fugazi sometime in high school, and were impressed and just got around to actually buying one of their albums this year. That’s how qualified we are to compile a Best Of ... list.

10 Mozart- Requiem

This has long been a favorite, but about five years ago our copy got scratched and wouldn’t play. We weren’t able to find the Robert Shaw version with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, so we broke down and got a different production. The Shaw version gets dissed a lot, but it makes us feel cozy.

Go to hell Stephen in advertising.