ALBUMS (10 each)
1. VNV Nation - Judgement
2. Radiohead - In Rainbows
3. The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
4. Jesu - Conqueror
5. Dave Gahan - Hourglass
6. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
7. Motor - Unhuman
8. Apparat - Walls
9. Studio - West Coast
10. Om - Pilgrimage

TRACKS
1. VNV Nation - The Farthest Star
2. Low - Murderer
3. Gui Boratto - Beautiful Night
4. Radiohead - Videotape
5. Blues Control - Hummum
6. Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter From the Ash
7. LCD Soundsystem - North American Scum
8. PJ Harvey - White Chalk
9. Kanye West - Can't Tell Me Nothing
10. Nine Inch Nails - In This Twilight

REISSUES
1. Patron Saints - Fohhoh Bohob
2. v/a - People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938
3. Young Marble Giants - Colossal Youth
4. Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation
5. v/a - Nearly everything on the Mutant Sounds blog (http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.com/)

Top 5 Artists of 2006
COMMENTS
1. Brad E. Rose (The North Sea, etc.)
2. Adam Forkner (White Rainbow, etc.)
3. Ilyas Ahmed
4. Ronan Harris (VNV Nation)
5. Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance)

COMMENTS
This was a hard ballot to draw up. Not because I was weighing the merits of a huge list and trying to narrow it down and encapsulate a full year and so forth. If anything, this was...not the reverse per se, but perhaps the converse: this was me looking at everything that can now be heard, could be heard all over the place, at any time, and realizing how divorced I am from the effort of ranking in general, accelerating a long-held tendency. I heard more music from all over the place this year than ever before and most of it I only heard once before moving on to the next album or song or mix. The big hit singles hit me not with repetition but with generalized and often anonymous osmosis, from being out and about and getting a snatch of a song here and there [and often that was enough — like hooks have been so relentlessly perfected that one or two listens are all that's needed], rather than trying to actively pursue them or to subject myself to the kind of reigns of aural tyranny that made things like that OneRepublic song omnipresent in recent months. To create a list out of all that seems increasingly close to futile (and if I solely listened to music via my computer, last.fm would have done all the work for me).

But of course I drew a ballot up anyway. It's a mental exercise but a surprisingly tough one now, took me almost four weeks. The same rules I've used for some time now apply as before — the album I listened to the most was number one, the song I played and replayed the most was the number one track, etc. (The artists' section I used in slightly different fashion, reflecting instead the excellence of the live shows I've seen this year, with Brad Rose coming in at number one thanks as well to his inspiring work running Foxy Digitalis and being a driving force behind the wonderful Bottling Smoke festival back in May.) I've been trying to draw up my thoughts about VNV Nation and Judgement for almost half a year and am still working on it, but it's one of those albums that readily moved away from me thinking, "Hey, good music" to digging into it for all kinds of reasons, from the universal to the deeply personal. I might have more to say at some future point — more to the point I specifically plan on it — but right now I'll just say again: I played it the most, I enjoyed listening to it the most, therefore it's my number one choice (if there was an option to give it, say, 50 points out of a hundred, it would get it, just based on the sheer volume of times I relistened to it). I'm not voting to rank something on its putative importance beyond any scope than that, even if the only people who seemed to acknowledge the album at all were those fans worldwide who were already primed for it, a subset of a subculture.

There's no great insight into saying that the music universe at this point in time is clearly a collation of a series of such subcultures rather than one central universe that frays at the edges. At the same time, it needs to be noted — and as one of our Idolator hosts noted in a comment a few days back, the seeming consensus decisions across many of the lists already posted, and likely including this one as well, could well be reflective of a mindset among music writers as such during a time of a collapsing industry described as "ever-holding-on-to-the-same-things-in-order-to-not-go-down-the-drain-too." In a time of endless multiplicities, the fact that there's still a commonality at play across the endless best-of rundowns is almost a security blanket — and a number of my choices (Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem, to name but two) are reflective of it.

In this universe pop in particular finds itself in an unusual place, whether as cultural product now accessible for nothing or as locus point for critical discussion. The rockism wars having been fought to death in the earlier part of this decade by those few earnest enough to consider it (certainly I was in that number), its putative solution in poptimism, or however one wishes to describe it, is showing its own strains now. The wisest heads, to paraphrase the excellent writer Tim Finney, have always distinguished between liking something that happens to be in the charts versus liking something because it is in charts, something both supporters and detractors of the pop moment can often miss in their eagerness to either free themselves from the shackles of older canons or to react against being railroaded into new ones. But the act of celebrating chartcentric material as something not to be sneered at because of its mass context feels harder to justify on those levels when the mass context is collapsing, becomes more of an exercise in extended sociological observation for its own sake. As such, pop isn't the core, merely the biggest musical subculture of them all — valuable, inspiring, enjoyable, but still a subculture, one of many in a kaleidoscopic swirl of cultural product that in its combination of new releases and older favorites and rediscoveries, an eternal now that continues to grow and grow. And as Idolator has continually documented throughout the year, the economic engine driving that biggest subculture is slowly grinding downward, no matter what is dreamed up as a solution.

As a result, pop is the canary in the musical coalmine and that being the case, while I still hold to a core belief of mine — that on every block and in every apartment complex there's a fifteen year old kid out there hearing something utterly surprising and strange for the first time right now, something current and of the moment, famous worldwide yet still weird, much as I heard many songs like that when I was fifteen — I think that the fear of my friend who I quoted briefly in last year's Idolator essay, who felt that much that was considered to be truly special about music is now irrevocably gone, has increasing validity. But it's a situation beyond ready control of someone like me, who has almost always been an observer rather than a participant or creator, and even then, my role as observer is less monomaniacal than might be guessed.

It's no surprise to me at all that over this decade most of my reading and reflection has revolved around political issues, that I visit political blogs most of all on the Net rather than musical ones. It's no surprise that this year when I finally started my own little blog, nothing special but there anyway, that I wanted to avoid it being simply seen as a 'music blog,' and use it instead to cover everything from new recipes I've tried to extended meditations on the meaning of folk tales to whatever else crosses my mind, not simply one post after another about the newest radio rip mp3 or whatever.

It's not that I'm trying to pretend music has no role in my life — anything but. I'm well aware what public profile I have revolves around me talking about it, however haphazardly. Yet those other interests of mine that have always been there in my head — the study of history, the concern regarding the state of the world, contemplations on philosophy, the value of building and maintaining friendships and so forth — are just as important, an obvious statement but one that's still crucial, and that we all have our own analogs to compare with. In a way, that brings me back to VNV Nation, because Judgement — and "The Farthest Star," my number one song choice — brought many of those factors together, put words to feelings and states of mind in summary form, honestly inspired me to do something more in life than before. Sure, sometimes Ronan Harris's lyrics may seem the equivalent of slogans on motivational posters, but as a friend and I talked over a few months back, sometimes there's a direct value in such focused sentiments, and I found that value there.

But it wouldn't have worked if the music wasn't great and the beat wasn't good. Put all together, it means I'm facing next year — with all the sociopolitical stakes at play — with more energy than ever. Here's to hoping I can share it, and that we all find our similar sources, musical or not.