Wings: "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" 7'' acetate

$455.00 SOLD | "Great Britain, you are tremendous." This single—Paul McCartney's infamous 1972 knee-jerk solidarity anthem—was of course banned in England for its sympathies. Unsurprisingly, these acetates were handled by Apple's American offices, away from the firestorm.–

There's a convincing case for shuttering "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" on artistic rather than political grounds: the lyrics are spectacularly bad, and the music a middling mess of tired '70s balladry. My personal favorite is the sloppy delivery of "How would you like it if on your way to work you were stopped by Irish soldiers." As if people were going to pause, look at their loafers, and think, "Good Heavens—that would be intolerable!" None of the vocal layers are synchronized, the right-channel guitar track is full of mistakes and time-slips...it's just a disaster.

I don't know if there's a way you can treat this song fairly, because it was recorded and released within three weeks of Bloody Sunday. You have to believe Paul was moved by these events, but his response is perplexing: musically, this is as phoned-in as it gets—even for Macca. If he was really upset, you would think he'd be more concerned with expressing his depth of feeling, and inspiring debate, than rushing out some flag-waving chant of an already popular slogan. He's just throwing his lot in.

Later in 1972, Wings' atrocious boogie number "Hi, Hi, Hi" was banned for the revolting lyric, "Get you ready for my body gun," which...I can't even begin to deal with the image of McCartney singing those words. Try making it through the ska/reggae number on the flipside ("C Moon"), and you'll realize people hate/d Wings for some very valid reasons. Still, I'll always have a soft spot for "Mull of Kintyre".

Listen | Wings: "Give Ireland Back to the Irish"

Misfits: "Cough/Cool" 7"

$2,573.00 SOLD | I've scoured online auctions for over a year now, noting the exchange of curious and extravagant pop music treasures. In all that time, the most dramatic, incontrovertible social truth I've uncovered is the enduring popularity of Glenn Danzig, whose fans are not only rabid, but in many cases, quite well off.

In an effort to broaden my scope, I've only explicitly addressed Danzig twice. Very early on, in December 2005, I wrote up this $800 sale of the Misfits' "Bullet" 7", totally unaware that it was basically a pedestrian transaction in the Danzigverse. Later, in February 2006, I did right by what I still consider one of the most ridiculous auctions I've seen: $2050 for an 11x17 plain paper Misfits flyer from 1978. Since that post, I kind of felt like I'd dealt with the Misfits—they're huge, they've been huge for decades—and I couldn't muster phony excitement over another $600 colored-vinyl permutation of Walk Among Us. I've repeatedly thrown my hands up, mentioning high-ticket Misfits auctions within other entries; just a couple posts back, I linked to the eBay search results for Samhain (this is a down week; usually there are multiple $250+ bidding wars).
–
This 45, which appears to be to the real deal, would be...the real deal: one of the 500 original copies of the Blank (later Plan 9) "Cough/Cool" single from 1977. As far as I know, only three other copies of this single have traded online in the last three years: Popsike had records on two of the sales, and last September, one went for an astounding $2000, which even Misfits collectors couldn't believe. Unsurprisingly, "Cough/Cool" owners are giving the record third and fourth glances as flat panels get cheaper, transmissions fail and tuition keeps going up. With three and a half days to go, this astronomical auction will surely draw other copies to market.

Naturally, you have to wonder about bootlegs with such a simple product. It's black and white, the label is typeset from the '50s, and you could fake the glue stain easily, but it turns out that the known bootlegs of "Cough/Cool" are very easy to identify. Only one of the four boots is labeled identically to the original, and it's the cheapest vinyl on the planet, going from the Misfits Central description (which also notes a possible link to TAANG! records: big shock there if you're from Boston). Having played on one of those "Coca-Cola" 45s (after the translucent brown color) in the early '90s, I can say with confidence that if this were a fake, you would be able to see the crack in the floorboards through the record.

As for the songs, the Misfits had been together all of ten minutes when they scraped nickels together to record "Cough/Cool." This worked out well on the title track, where direct-recorded organ and nervous drumming met in a warbling, John Carpenter death drone, but "She" couldn't bridge the gap, beginning life as a brittle garage-psych stammer.

Pink Floyd: Shine On (CD box set)

$490.98 SOLD | Shine On marked the dawn of Pink Floyd's faceless, product-emitting Cronus period, when they turned into the Judge from The Wall (who was, incidentally, voiced by Miller's Crossing show-stealer and the definitive Poirot, Albert Finney).

Fans and critics alike lay late-era Floyd's oppressive amorphousness at the feet of David Gilmour, but I don't see how you can make this argument if "Comfortably Numb" and Wish You Were Here rate as all-time greats (of course, they didn't for everyone). Gilmour's been doing the breathy anthem thing since "Green is the Colour" – he's always been the vanilla ice cream standby. And do you really think it was Waters' mug selling all those records? Dave's the original Evan Dando, for Christ's sake. Bit more of a bear, though.

Anyway, Shine On was a borderline fan fleece: the set was released exactly one month before Christmas 1992, and cost over $100. Yes it was their 25th anniversary, and the seven included albums were direly in need of digital remastering (having been produced before anyone really knew how to master for CD), but it was an arbitrary survey. Shine On leaves out Piper at the Gates of Dawn (held back for individual celebration with its own pricey reissue – try tracking down the original vinyl variations sometime), Ummagumma, the band's two "soundtrack" LPs More and Obscured by Clouds, and, most irascibly, The Final Cut – despite the inclusion of A Momentary Lapse of Reason. In this instance, I'm onboard the Gilmour hate-train, not because I'm anti-Lapse, but because Gilmour is so bitterly incapable of objectively dealing with The Final Cut. They're both flawed, de facto solo albums: if fans have to deal with a Gabriel-ism like "On the Turning Away," and the appalling "Terminal Frost," balance the bloat with Waters' patriarchal snit-fit.

The real swindle here was that EMI released the remastered individual discs within 18 months, early in 1994, so really, you paid $100+ for the 112-page hardcover photo/history of the Floyd inside. Oh, and The Early Singles. Almost forgot about that. Unavailable anywhere else (though widely burned, booted and downloaded since its release), Early Singles was the cruel, delicious carrot dangling off this set: a chronological presentation of the Floyd's first five 45s on CD, after decades of vinyl-only trader obscurity.

Shine On was the biggest at-launch production run for a box set up to 1992, and today used copies are ubiquitous on eBay, trading in the $150 range (Amazon has some standing auctions asking $200). In this case, the chance to peel back that shriveled plastic was worth an extra $350 to someone outside the wall.

Lovables: "It's Beautiful" 12"

$304.00 SOLD | Next to Northern Soul and Samhain/Danzing/Misfits vinyl, Italo disco has been a boom after-market the last couple of years. Personally, I don't need to hear Scotch again – Italo deserved and enjoyed multiple revivals – but DJs, and I supposed fans, are still trading this stuff at fairly steep prices. Even late-era singles like Dyva's "I Know" (1987) will go for $200 or more.

In large part, the renewed interest stems from that early 2004 compilation I-Robots, which was a great set, but also just the sort of rosy distillation that gets impressionable listeners and critics into trouble. Genres that were diluted by years of second-rate releases and duly forgotten are often repositioned as halcyon epochs on the strength of a few reconstituted mixed tapes benefiting from 20 years' hindsight. On an even moderate investigation, Italo is farcically shaky, but its best works were hugely important to the development of electronic pop music, across the board.

This Lovables platter – which marginally bit off the Discofox (not kidding) smash "Ballet Dancer," by the Twins – is a great example of Italo moving from the semi-sinister sexuality of club life into bland consumer sleepwalking. You can hear devotion to the monastic order of Linn, 808 and Oberheim producers, who kept within Italo's exceedingly defined boundaries as a matter of principle, but also the positivity that by 1985 turned into Incredibly Bad Euro Dance, and first-gen Hi-NRG. This shift presaged dance music's devolution into a form of botany, as by the late '80s, the most marginally original idea would be endlessly copied and codified as its own genre.

In the past, dance music distinctions were based on local pride – Chicago, Detroit, Garage, even through to Balearic – but as we got into the 1990s it was like..."Oh he's using a different drum machine there, and I think he has a compressor on the hi-hats, so, yeah we need a whole new name for this kind of music." These tenuous distinctions &ndash infinite permutations of -core, Gabba, Tech-House – felt like petty fetishism, and while that quality makes more sense in the sped-up club-and-house culture that kept (keeps?) dance music alive, it was hard to deal with critically. Which, I suspect, suited and continues to suit its producers and fans just fine.

Listen | Lovables: "It's Beautiful"

John Fahey: 11 Fonotone acetates

$2000.00 NO SALE | These 45rpm 7" metal acetates represent a solid portion of Fonotone's John Fahey library, recorded under a variety of names – mostly Blind Thomas – between 1958 and 1962. According to the auction description, they were cut for an executive at Fahey's label Takoma in 1975 (odds are Norman Pierce), and there's the inference that Joe Bussard might have done this a few times after shutting down his 78rpm imprint in the very early '70s, most likely for fellow collectors.

I expect this run was a preservationist decision from Takoma, and it was a good one, as even the comprehensive Fonotone box set from Dust to Digital includes just three Blind Thomas cuts. The official Fahey Files has a complete account of his Fonotone works (with Real Audio samples); for more on Fahey, I recommend Andy Beta's stupendous remembrance from last year.

Elsewhere, two major repeat offenders continue to fetch borderline-outrageous prices: #245/1000 of Nirvana's "Love Buzz" 7" (auction here) has topped $1000, as has yet another copy of the Beatles' Yesterday and Today LP (auction here). Recent "Love Buzz" auctions have boasted more entertaining and inscrutable histories than #245, which is not listed at the orphaned NirvanaDiscography.com, or the newer (and more thorough) owners' list at Sliver.

As for Yesterday...and Today, the insanity continues (see my previous post on the subject). With this "trunk slick" auction, there are seven copies of Yesterday...and Today for sale on eBay right now &ndash see here, here, here, and here – including this reserve-price catastrophe and a framed gold album award. When are people going to realize this isn't a rare record, in any "state" and by any definition?

U2: October 1991 EP

$600.00 SOLD | –Here's a great example of paranoia and conservative thinking from a major label. Faced with the relatively experimental and sonically arresting Achtung Baby, Polygram—who'd just purchased Island and A&M (inheriting U2 from the former)—fretted that the album was so radical a departure as to alienate FM radio (and, presumably, MTV).

October 1991 was Polygram's presumptive assuage, a four-song spoonful of sugar designed to underscore the band's dramatic side—a linear explanation of how U2 arrived at "The Fly," or a reminder that they'd been charting maudlin pint-downers like "One" for ages? After "Hawkmoon 269" and "God Part II" (have the Killers covered that yet?), fans weren't going to be put off by Achtung: this EP was an apology to jocks weaned on "Born to Run," for a lack of "fucking up-tempo" numbers like "Where the Streets Have No Name," or the enormously popular "Desire," which was still in heavy AOR rotation at that point. October was a limited run of less than 500 (possibly as low as 250) copies, and in those days pressing less than 2000 CDs was tantamount to lighting money on fire. Obviously Polygram could afford it, but, that doesn't detract from the largess.

Just as this auction closed, another of U2's major collectibles hit the market: the original, colored-vinyl "4 U2 Play" singles package from CBS Ireland. Despite the seller's up-front admission that one of the 45s is warped to the point of worthlessness, the otherwise fine condition of this 25 year-old set has someone bidding $810. UPDATE: The 4 U2 Play set went for $1,150.

40 Songs I Listened to a Great Deal in 2006

I've dropped this year's list from 50 songs to 40 because honestly, I would be watering 2006 down to say there were 50 new songs that I really lived with, temporally and emotionally. And the strange thing is, I might have listened to twice as many records as I did last year. I think it's that last year I still felt the need to comment on material that other critics were fussing over, and I don't feel that impulse anymore. Also, I'm not doing the warm-up post: you can refer to my Year in Riffs submission for this year's one-liners. From the heart. Lastly, my new year's resolution is to get Shallow Rewards back on track now that our little girl is on something of a sleeping and eating schedule.

40. Aereogramme¹: "I Don't Need Your Love" | As with the extra "e" in their name, most of us have already forgotten Aereogramme Mk I, which was a kind of Mogwai/Bailter Space hybrid keeping the Bardo Pond lantern lit at Matador via Chemikal Underground. Even fewer can recall singer Craig B's Slint tribute act Ganger, whom Merge put their faith in too late for the post-rock gravy train ("there must be something in the water!" is just the worst phony scene herald. Never say this). In the vacuum following the Chemikal/Matador years, Aereogramme have evolved into a theatrical Scots re-up of the God Machine. Seclusion was originally released in late 2004, and quickly brought Aereogramme and Isis together, but the album languished as an import/download for Americans until Sonic Unyon finally brought it ashore in March. "I Don't Need Your Love" is its sidereal standout: icier than Mike Kinsella's campfire balladry, without giving over to the goth desolation of (nonetheless epic) early Aarktica. | ¹ I'm always happy to find actual fan-sites like this, especially if they're for bands that don't view the internet as a self-promotional career opportunity. This is a "rockist" distinction, perhaps, but it just seems more natural that fans should be keeping tabs on you, rather than the other way around.

39. Lily Allen: "Friend of Mine" | You would be hard-pressed to find a bigger sucker for early-'80s pop reggae than this guy. I love all the credible dub stuff, I love roots—actually now that I think of it, I listened to "Six and Seven Books of Moses" for like a month straight this year (which reminds me: check out Toots doing "Let Down"—total burner!)—but that sanitized, tacky Oxford Street sound is so Thatcher, I can't resist.

38. And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead: "Stand in Silence" | Conrad's interview with Pitchfork echoed the dour realism I harped on all year, and which still steels me against Careers in Rock. It's boring, yes, and kills the fantasy, but you need look no further than Trail of Dead for a script on why it's not a good idea to play music for a living. Poised for a crossover not even Interscope could foment, AYWKUBTTOTD were reduced to this update of "Had a Dad," an inglorious in-concert implosion, and So Divided has careened down the Billboard 200 having failed to sell 20,000 copies. Interscope have totally cut loose of these guys. It's tough all over.

37. Andrew Chalk: "Blue Eyes of the March" | Chalk's always blurred the line between song and art, but this one was a real dare: fifty minutes of band-pass tones. I recognized the spectrum, as I mined it for all of my Grace Period records: if you set a cut/kill pass to isolate frequencies in the 500-800MHz range, you get this fantastically funereal horn sound; any melodic source material becomes this distant, drifting whine. It's an increasingly common trick—the break-down in "Feel Good Inc." is a recent example—and I've stopped relying on it, instead using the horn-pass as a more complex EQ boost. "Blue Eyes of the March" reminded me of Ekkehard Ehlers' "John Cassavetes, Pt. 2" straight away, which I don't think I ever properly outed here. This file is 7.340 seconds of the string intro to the Beatles' "Goodnight," the last song on The White Album. This file, on the other hand, is 7.340 seconds of the string intro to the Beatles' "Goodnight" reversed. That's a single click in any digital audio editor going back to the mid-1990s. Set the second file to loop, pop your overcoat collar, and strut your pedantic art-house rep, you theoretical badass.

36. Audio Bullys: "All Sing Along" | "Saying your name would be helping you out, and that's just not like Frankie"? Come on, give it up: Paul Morley's writing for them, isn't he. I'll be the first to admit Audio Bullys are the Green Street Hooligans of Brit-hop, but "All Sing Along" makes three great singles to their name ("Shot You Down," "We Don't Care"), and that's more than I can say for almost anyone they were coming up under. ("Sing Along" was also an unintentionally odd refrain this year).

35. Augie March: "Mother Greer" | A hard-fought twinning of Belle & Sebastian's torch song ("The State I Am In") and Fleetwood Mac's bridled "Hold Me," "Mother Greer" was by far my favorite song of 2006. Moo, You Bloody Choir contended in the album title category, but the record itself was too long by four, and mostly paled in comparison to this overcast fairground twirler.

34. Belle & Sebastian: "For the Price of a Cup of Tea" | A lot of people are with me on the B&S Are Back thing; a lot of people aren't. Taking this stance presupposes other arguments—that they went away, that their last few records weren't very good or convincing—but I'm not prepared to tackle these points because I had so tuned this band out after The Boy with the Arab Strap. All I know is B&S felt like one thing long ago, drifted into a pudgy, uncouth professionalism at century's end, and returned home only to greet themselves at the door. Which was quite a thing to see.

33. Bloc Party: "On" | A sugar-rush Cure single to one-up "All Over This Town," and the best posh-drugs club lament since "True Faith."

32. Cat Power: "Hate" | I'm reduced to analogy here, but Chan Marshall still recording for Matador is like A-Rod sticking with the Mariners at six million a year. When you're this good—when you make your teammates look like the AquaSox—it's not loyalty keeping you around: it's fear of taking the next step. The toe-in-the-water TV commercial tie-ins (Cingular, De Beers) are laborious, lip-numbing foreplay. Hit it or quit it, Chan.

31. Crack and Ultra Eczema: "Meet U On a Pony Race" | Mata Hari tipped me off to the ripe no-wave scene flourishing in Strasbourg the last two years, and...listen, I don't throw "no-wave" around. No-wave is anarchic, positivist, inclusive, self-policing, and most of all, egalitarian. It almost never exists. If it can be quantified, the equation looks something like this: one-piece + ukulele + fez + cheap gear + restlessness + epistemological dualism + recontexting + improv + tension + sex + illegal shows under highway overpasses + making your own clothes + lettrism + anti-anti-art-art + all ages bring what you got. "Yes, I would love to do a side-project with you. It will be my 65th this year."

30. Julie Doiron: "No More" | The Ottawa Lynx to Chan's Expos, Julie took the plunge forgivably early in life, and has since mastered the art of the slow-burn, achieving dignified, multidisciplinary creative survivability up north.

29. Earl Greyhound: "S.O.S." | Matt Whyte's lisp is the sexiest thing in a decade. His body, a close second—to his own bassist. OXES have been on suicide watch since Earl G hit the scene in earnest this summer; how Some records landed them, I have no idea. Seriously, the best arena rock band since Free, and they're on the same label as Hot Water Music and the Exit? I'm all ears. The muted-cymbal off-beat stutter after the first chorus here was the rockingest move of 2006; drummer Ricc Sheridan has eight feet of bedrock beneath him—it's sick. I didn't pull this on you last year, but if you slept on this band, you blew it. S/FJ was on them out of the gate; Sam Ubl took that lead, but Pitchfork never even addressed the Soft Targets LP, and I haven't heard shit about them from the rest of you. King Buzzo has listened to this song 865,000 times, and he still cries every time.

28. Eluvium: "All the Sails" | When I Live by the Garden and the Sea might be the end for Eluvium, if 2007's sterile Copia is an indication of where Matt Cooper wants to take things. He was a great painter of distant young loves and bleak horizons; I would not have called for him in the drawing room at breakfast, and I don't know what he's doing here. UPDATE 01.22.2007: After spending a few more weeks with Copia I've reversed myself. It's still not what I looked to Cooper for—and there are some egregious 7th Guest/Gabriel Knight Yamaha strings here &ndash but it's a beautiful record.

27. Embrace: "World at Your Feet" | 2006 was the first time I ever really caught World Cup Fever, and I think it has to do with football's against-odds status as a sport America has yet to ruin. Despite rampant foreign control in the Premiership and the UEFA, football is still very much about class and flag-waving; in America it's increasingly a means to flaunt or investigate our sexier Continental ancestries, which is mountebankery, but nobody takes us seriously in the first place, so I say go for it.

26. The Fray: "How to Save a Life" | I don't care where you hear it—HBO, VH-1, NBC, the campus watering hole, alone in your room and hungover—this song can get anyone, and it will outlast any dilutive corporate co-option. Even if you aren't in the midst of an emotional trauma, its saccharine chorus will drag your deepest-buried regrets, cloudy and grey, out from the closet. You know Elton John's name because he used to write seven of these every two weeks with Bernie Taupin. They'd have thrown this in the fire, but I'll settle for burnt embers in lieu of another ten-thousand-track Coldplay anthem.

25. Gorillaz: "El Mañana" (from Demon Days Live) | The Demon Days recording of "El Mañana" was too loop-driven and studio sterile—no highs, no lows, must be Bose—but big-staged for their multimedia extravaganza at the Manchester Opera House (choir, string section, live drums), its refrain took on a Yacht Rock sultriness I'd completely overlooked. The studio version became Gorillaz' tragic finale for the time being, and the other half of the "Kids With Guns" double A-side released in April.

24. Guitar: "Sakura Coming" | Michael Lückner is old enough that I doubt he much cares about originality or reputation. He does what he wants, and the upside thus far has been a handful of fine additions to the shoegaze canon—including this half-time drowner—that a more aspiring person might disregard as derivative and unlikely to wow critics. Unabashed, unfiltered mimicry can be as admirable as carefully-constructed, suffocating originality, but Lückner's stylistic rollercoaster veered into obstinate disregard on his abhorrent country-plucking sophomore LP Honeysky, as well as the objectifying Japanese riffs on this year's Tokyo. Mike: your renown is entirely derived from your MBV knockoffs, and you are old enough to know this. To toil in denial of it is to flout your fans.

23. Hammock: "I Can Almost See You" | It's not just post-rock: antisocial music in general is getting zero attention right now. And yes, that's the whole idea, but we used to dedicate ourselves to uncovering bands that didn't care either way. Which isn't to say Hammock are shy retirers—they formed an LLC to release their own music, uhh...—but they don't offer a lot of obvious talking points apart from comparisons to other bands. The uglier truth is that this stuff is totally unfashionable in the play-nice blog world of spin-the-bottle, where music is just a component of social networking. Austin's Explosions in the Sky have deservedly been running this show the last few years, updating the cavernous Mogwai model with brighter Cure choruses and reverbs, each languid progression dotted with twinkling leads. Hammock is blurrier and even more melodramatic—definitely clocking Doves—but regrettably, weak crossover cuts "Like Starlight Into Day" and the title track from this year's unending mixed bag, Raising Your Voice...Trying to Stop An Echo, persist. If you want to do the Virginia Astley haunted spring morning thing, don't try to casually slip in "The Scientist"—there's far too much pretext and pretension in ambient music to withstand that kind of stylistic vacillation.

22. Helios: "Paper Tiger" | This is sort of the "People are Still Having Sex" of lo-fi electronica, and the only real winner on the overpraised Eingya album.

21. Junkie Brewster: "Like a Prayer" | "When you try and go back to ground zero in art, what happens is you get a tremendous liberation, and a feeling that can touch all different kinds of people: that anything is possible, and what happens next is up to them, and nobody else."—Greil Marcus on the Sex Pistols. This song appeared in 2004, if I remember right, and I got it on a mixed CD from an extremely precious former acquaintance. I figured it was some friend of theirs, and was like "Aw that's cute," and then when I got the news on this whole Franco-deconstruction UHH art revolt I realized I had totally missed the dove on the windowsill. If you're unattached, think about a backpack trip west from Alsace; Portland and NoCal are definitely flying the sister-city flags with France right now—Jona Bechtolt, Eric/Fryk Beat et al—but you can't beat the cultural and economic backdrop Derinchy, Mil Mascaras and Junkie Brewster enjoy. The innocent genre trumpeting—"Soul punk," "Garage soul," etc.—is a mortal lock: they really mean it.

20. LCD Soundsystem: 45'33'' | Same thing happened with !!! and "Giuliani" : James Murphy was probably laboring through what became Sound of Silver, then Nike called and provided a framework and a deadline and that lit a fire under his ass. I have no idea whether that chronology is accurate, but when you're a studio-based, seven-plus-minute jam act, writer's block is like an asshole friend you can't cut clean of until you pull the Wall Street flip-out: "I'M SICK AND TIRED OF PLAYING WET NURSE TO YOU ALL THE TIME! DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK, MARV!" You put on "This Must Be the Place," call your Dad a gutless failure, smash the dishes, throw your girlfriend out and eat an entire large pizza at 3AM. Shame on you.

19. Lemonheads: "No Backbone" | As a songwriter, Evan Dando was once the complete package. As a performer, he has always been a complete fuckup. His recent tour and album were definitely last-ditch efforts, but with J and the Descendents on board, I held out hope. "No Backbone" delivered on the alt-rock all-star hype—a solid wintry Masshole ballad—but most of the album was as timid as Baby I'm Bored. Much has been made of Dando's professed comfort with being—and being known as—a substance abuser, but going back fifteen years to all the Lemonheads shows I saw in Boston, I can't say he was ever comfortable or exciting on stage. As part of a young, good-looking band with lots of energy, Dando's discomfort (and penchant for mean-spirited taunting) helped harden his image as a carefree brat; he made the big-time that way, but entering his 40s, he's finding it difficult to even put together a backing band. At Irving Plaza this December, he was fronting a mercenary power trio that knew his songs, but seemed to know Dando less. He walked into the venue ten minutes before he was to go on, frazzled and sparkling, and dropped his flight case right in front of me and my editor. It was a welcome surprise to find Dando was more exasperated than intoxicated—he played for over two hours—but with the "What's Hate Your Friends?" frat-house audience and greatest-hits set-list, it felt like a fucking Jimmy Buffet show. I was bummed, although he did close with "Rudderless," which was smart.

18. Liars: "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack" | I loved Pete Kember's version of "Indian Summer." Funnily enough, he hadn't heard the original either. Every other song on Drum's Not Dead hides a thirty-second patch of greatness within four minutes of plodding bullshit. I felt like I was taking a mid-term.

17. Melvins—"Rat Faced" | This came out of nowhere, but no band screamed louder for twin drummers than the Melvins. Absorbing the ex-KARP ex-Edge of Quarrel duo Big Business (who weren't traveling a very different path), the Melvins are instantly back to their Bullhead->Stag peak with the seemingly effortless A Senile Animal. "Rat Faced" isn't snatching the "Honey Bucket" crown, but this is more than just a second lease on life.

16. Mission of Burma: "2wice" | MoB's gas needle was tickling R before The Obliterati arrived, and if it wasn't an ignore-the-pump 93 octane refill, they're at least back to half a tank of 89. "2wice" was, if not markedly better, markedly more marketable than the rest of the record, and became the go-to anthem for this tour. "Donna Sumeria," "Careening With Conviction" and "1001 Pleasant Dreams" were all great, but the record was sonically and melodically monotonous, a this-is-our-sound overreaction to the scattered, tentative OnOffOn, which...I pretty much apologized for.

15. Mogwai: "Travel is Dangerous" | Apart from his usual promotional hyperbole ("Guns N' Roses, Primal Scream, that's about it for rock n' roll"), this song is the reason Alan McGee invoked Loveless ahead of Mr. Beast. A totally ridiculous sentiment, since this sounds pretty much like every other Mogwai record, but "Travel is Dangerous" was a step in the right direction. They've been at this for a decade: it's perhaps time to start writing some songs.

14. Norm MacDonald: "The Fantastic Four" | Ridiculous wasn't even half an album, it was basically two and a half good bits plus his "Star Search" gag (which is still great—HOT PROPERTY!), but "Tex Hooper" works—and holds up to repeated listens—for twenty minutes, so Norm gets a free pass. "The Fantastic Four" is so well-acted, I've had it on my MP3 player for months. Fred Stoller's sigh steals the skit.

13. Beth Orton: "Countenance" | If anyone, Beth Orton can be forgiven for cribbing the ooh-s from "New Slang," especially if it helped her correct for the dreadfully unfocused Daybreaker and that entirely presumptuous "definitive collection," Pass in Time. I realize she's had health issues and everyone needs a social life, but, Beth Orton's critical and popular profile was, up to now, totally confounding to me. "Countenance" and Comfort of Strangers' lead single "Shopping Trolley" internalize a winsomeness that felt forced in the past. "My head's hangin' so low, I'm kickin' it when I walk down the road" (from the latter) was a major smile.

12. Phoenix: "Courtesy Laughs" | They were disappointing and unconvincing in concert—and why wasn't this a single? And why was the guitarist rocking Paul's "Fool on the Hill" overcoat with the butcher-knife collar?—but as complete albums go, It's Never Been Like That was one of maybe three or four released all year. These guys don't need my help, so I'll leave it at that—they're Coppolas now. Great "Whoo!" on this one, Tom.

11. PJ Harvey: "Snake" (Peel session) | This one never grabbed me as recorded for Rid of Me. The Albini version lacked the same locked-in thrash "50 Ft. Queenie" sailed on; Robert Ellis was too far on top of the beat, which had worked elsewhere on the record but rushed "Snake" so much that it sounds like the band's one foot out the door for the pub. The solo rendition Harvey recorded in 1996 for John Peel—which I never heard until this year's compilation—threw me up against the wall.

10. Ricky Gervais Show podcast: April 4th, 2006 | I can't find the one that has "What if they were like...rubbish chickens," but that and the Thanksgiving special were the only episodes that came close to Karl Pilkington's genius here—the famous "Does the brain control you, or do you control the brain" line, and his anti-octopus rage halfway through ("I'd kick it, and I'd say, 'You knobhead'), after which Gervais unleashes a terrific streak of Shakespearian cursing.

9. Roy Owens Jr.: "Saturday" | If you know me or read me, you know I love this band and have done plenty of proselytizing over the last year. It's in your hands now.

8. She Wants Revenge: "Sister" | I might have enjoyed watching this horror show unfold more than any music I heard in 2006. It all started with this outrageous pre-release fluff piece written by...Johann Wellesley Daughters...from...the Sheffield Rock Times. The "Sheffield Rock Times"—why hadn't I heard of this paper? Oh, I know, because it doesn't fucking exist. The whole thing was fake. And that would be fine if you were a bunch of kids burning CDRs up in Rochester and you unloaded a namedrop-saturated credibility business card like this as expository chum for the beat-off critics in the city. More power to you—that's Camper Van Beethoven. That's cute. But when you're on Geffen records and you're shooting videos with Joaq Phoenix and Fred Durst signed you up and you have Shirley Manson's phone number and you run with everyone behind the boards in London, no. With that past, this kind of behavior is an insidious con. For the most part—and Warfield should have known better, he's been around—this is another example of Fred Durst's "I've been everyone, I can be anyone" psychosis. "Sorry I wanted to be Vanilla Ice and bilked mall rats for a decade, but now that I'm set for life I'm comfortable letting everyone know I was totally into closet-case goth pop in high school just like you!" *blush* *giggle* queue effeminate viral YouTube clip. Warfield has more in common with Durst than just the incongruous past: check out this admirably adversarial interview with Subculture. It's insane, his world-view actually boils down to "I don't have to justify myself to anyone," yet his entire reason for living over the last year has been to convince us he should be taken seriously. Justin, I want to fucking tear you apart.

7. Paul Simon: "Father and Daughter" | Aww... But yeah I also checked out Hearts and Bones this year, which I'd never heard. Missed out on very little there—the Garfunkel background drama is more riveting—but the title track is pretty great. Did you know Liz Taylor negotiated a $150,000 salary for Eddie Fisher—for miscellaneous services—during Cleopatra? I mean they were married at the time—what is that? Dude has two stars on the Walk of Fame. Where does it end?

6. Sonic Youth: "Incinerate" | If you bother to read reviews of Sonic Youth (a bear-trap for any critic), they've either been repeating themselves or trying too hard not to repeat themselves since 1995. How about this: they are themselves, and you were never invited.

5. Them, Roaringtwenties: "Tonight Your Wife is My Wife" | Turns out I wasn't the only one that loved Ghosts & Vodka. Them, Roaringtwenties shouldn't be singing just yet—and I don't know about the comma—but their American Football/Pele/G&V black-face instrumental avalanches dominate. It's a little much—and too fast—to translate live, but their homemade Vagina Monologues CD was one of too few pleasant surprises to arrive on my doorstep this year.

4. White Rainbow: "Shanty Town Exclusive" | The White Rainbow Box was not only the most ambitious release this year, it was the only ambitious release this year. 5CDs + 1DVD, no Merzbow whirring *fffffffff*—"I recorded air—IT'S ART"—goldbricking here. This was hard labor. Actually, there is a song called "fffffff" on this. And one called "Ahhhhhhmmmmmmm." And plenty of droning, but, little of it feels procedural, as if he needed another ten minutes to fill disc three, taped down a couple of keys and walked away. And that is the point: Adam Forkner knows the perils of grand box-setting and Big Artistic Statements from his VVRSSNN days, and took this seriously, all the way through. Kranky recently put it in their catalog, and has signed him up for a 2007 LP.

3. Amy Winehouse: "Rehab" | Nothing like a girl that can drink—or can't, and does anyway. Amy Winehouse had Top of the Pops-minded management grooming her as the next Nikka Costa, but her self-destructive wild side won out. She's right to believe in herself in this respect, because she's a hell of a lot more interesting as a teetering souse than a millionth-rate, safe-for-the-Beeb diva (Worst Musical Moment of 2006). Pro-substance abuse nihilism is somewhat en vogue a decade after Britpop decadence, but, owing to the economic backdrop, this is a darker pattern of denial rather than a celebration. "Rehab" is Winehouse's rebel yell from both sides of the fence, a new "No Future" built from "My Boyfriend's Back."

2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Cheated Hearts" | I don't think we really wanted the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to succeed. I've thought about what we hoped to gain—or hoped they'd give us—looping "Maps" on walls of Wal*Mart flat-panels, and I come away with the feeling that we wanted Karen O to become the anti-Gwen—not in the sense that Gwen needs to go or is bad, but that she's one thing and there's room for another, darker, more dangerous voice at the top. Instead it turned out the look was Christian Joy's, the group was short on ideas, and Karen didn't have much to say about the world. Show Your Bones was strike one, though the videos were uniformly great.

1. Yo La Tengo: "Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" | Everyone that enjoyed this band's Painful/Electropura/I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One 1990s trifecta hopes too hard for a return to form, and yells too loudly after one listen that the new YLT is the old YLT. It's not happening. You could fashion one solid record from their last decade of work, and a good chunk of it would be this jam on late-era Wire.