From the Salmon

Lists are strange things. I should probably have been clearer somewhere that those were my favorite albums of the past year. That doesn’t mean they were necessarily the “best,” whatever that means, just that I liked them best.

Take Camera Obscura’s Let’s Get Out of This Country for example. You could make a pretty compelling case that it’s a much better break-up album than The Submarines’ Declare a New State! And you’re probably right — in a year of great girl-group yesterpop (Jenny Lewis, The Pipettes, The Ditty Bops), Camera Obscura made a pitch-perfect homage that sounds both effortless and authentic. And the heartbreak on Let’s Get Out is more palpable and more profound. But for reasons that I’m not sure I could explain, I just never found myself wanting to listen to it. And I must have listened to that Submarines’ album a few dozen times.

Go figure. In the words of that immortal aesthete Samuel J. Snodgrass, “There’s no accounting for taste.”

For that matter, I’m not sure why I’m not more drawn to M. Ward’s fantastic Post-War. Or why I never picked up the Dylan record.

Anyhow, here are a few more worthwhile albums from 2006:

• Adem – Love and Other Planets
• The Be Good Tanyas – Hello Love
• Beck – The Information
• Calexico – Garden Ruin
• The Ditty Bops – Moon over the Freeway
• Forro in the Dark – Bonfires of Sao Joao
• Jeffrey Foucault – Ghost Repeater
• Tobias Froberg – Somewhere in the City
• Islands – Return to the Sea
• Jennifer Kimball – Oh Hear Us
• Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat
• Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s – The Dust of Retreat
• Peter Mulvey – The Knuckleball Suite
• Chris Smither – Leave the Light On
• Teitur – Stay Under the Stars
• Voxtrot – Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives EP
• Voxtrot – Your Biggest Fan EP
• The Weepies – Say I Am You
• Yo La Tengo – I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

The list doesn’t really end there, I just got tired of typing.

All in all, it was a year chock full of heady goodness. And yet when I compare this year’s list to last year, I’m not completely sure that any of these albums would have even cracked 2005’s Top Five.

But that’s okay, because I’m already pretty stoked about 2007. In fact, I’d barely started work on this year’s list when I caught my first whiff of what The Arcade Fire is cooking up for this spring. Even as a supercompressed web radio stream, the track “Intervention” almost completely derailed my retrospective mojo.

What might make my list next year? Here are a few “preseason” picks, if you will:

• The Shins - Wincing the Night Away (1/23)
• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Some Loud Thunder (1/30)
• Rickie Lee Jones - The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard (2/6)
• Patty Griffin - Children Running Through (2/6)
• The Innocence Mission – We Walked in Song (3/13)
• Low - Drums and Guns (3/20)
• The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (Spring?)
• Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha (Spring?)
• Feist (Saw her last month, and she’d just finished the album. Maybe a spring release?)
• Over the Rhine – The Trumpet Child (Spring:? Summer?)
• Radiohead (We heard them play almost an album’s worth of new songs this past summer, and they’ve been in the studio, so my fingers are crossed for this one.)

And albums by Spoon and Wilco and The New Pornographers and Do Make Say Think. And Sufjan’s probably got a state or two cooking. And there are rumors of rumors of albums by Iron & Wine and (I’ll only believe this when I see something official) Peter Gabriel.

So ... stay tuned.