This is a week for reflection about the year almost ended. Thus, my 2006 round-up, mightily constrained by my budget, listening patterns and mood… It’ll be a few songs a day, no particular order, other than starting today with music I discovered through other blogs. Thanks for reading, and enjoy…

“Trains To Brazil” | Guillemots | From the Cliffs EP | Verve/Fantastic Plastic | 3/14/06 | 4:03 | buy disc/mp3s
The backlash may’ve already overcome folks’ affection for this U.K.-based outfit, who swing from some fairly tiresome experimentation to total maximum pop bliss.

As you might’ve guessed, this one comes from the pop side of the Guillemots spectrum, wonderfully recalling that sweet spot where Dexy’s and the Cure overlap. As peppy a song of mourning as you’re likely to find, it’s buoyed by soaring vocals, insistent rhythm work and some red hot horn action.

“Trains To Brazil” served me regularly as a nice counterbalance to my morose existential dread issues. What I’m sayin’: “Can’t you live and be thankful yr here/see, it could be you tomorrow or next year.”

“On A Freezing Chicago Street” | Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s | The Dust of Retreat | Artemis | 3/28/06 | 3:02 | buy disc/mp3s
Boston’s Indy’s own Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s make a throwback style of indie pop that’s both wistful and gritty. Holding aside the egregiously long, Wes Anderson-referencing band name and occasional mean-spirited moment, their music feels pretty comforting to me. They sometimes bring to mind the best moments of Buffalo Tom’s fragile side–Buffalo Tom were awesome, watch this space for evidence later on–but with prettier arrangements.

To continue our theme of death (etc.), the part of this song that particularly connects for me is the borderline accusation, “And Sarah screams, ‘Yr every breath is a gift./If you weren’t so selfish then you might want to live.’ ”

It’s funny to find an affirmation in a lowlife character study, but I takes what I can where I gets it. That’s the way it shakes down sometimes.

“Oregon Girl” | Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin | Broom | Polyvinyl | 10/24/06 | 2:25 | buy disc/mp3s
So yeah, about egregiously long band names… All is forgiven, though, because “Oregon Girl” is a propulsive, sugary piece of pop/rock. Shy-guy vocals go anthemic and emotive (but not emo) in the service of a naive little song of devotion to a long-distance love.

Basically, this is the kind of thing Rivers Cuomo would’ve written before he was abducted by aliens around 1998, so I’m gonna guess it’d go over in a big way on Tralfamadore too.

“Corazon” | Bishop Allen | January EP | self-release | c. 1/31/06 | 4:43 | buy disc/mp3s
I repped for this one before, but “Corazon” stuck with me all year, standing up to obsessive “repeat button” play, so it belongs on this list.

Bishop Allen saved the best for first in their “EP of the month” 06 project, setting a love song to a piano against some strolling moderate rock that goes big in the right parts.

Anybody who can so intensely sympathize with objects facing obsolescence–and indeed, in various corners the music industry, the compact disc as a medium and even the rock band as a format have been eulogized lately; but hey, we all expire eventually, right?–well, they’re alright by me.

Bishop Allen “Corazon”
Starlight Mints “Sugar Blaster”

NYC rockers Bishop Allen are already darlings of the blogiverse; in fact I was turned on to them by the postings of the B.A. superfan at You Ain’t No Picasso. Two things hooked me on these guys: (1) 2006 finds them releasing an EP every month, the kind of ambitious project that impresses me; and (2) their song from January, “Corazon.”

So this post is (at least half) for those of you who haven’t heard the song yet. Still with me?

“Corazon” is at base a love song for a loser–addressed to a piano. I understand it’s a true story, and that the piano featured herein is its subject. Over a shuffling midtempo beat and trotting strums, singer J. Rice retells the adoption of the abandoned instrument.

It’s unwanted and on the side of the road. It’s a bitch to move. It can’t be fully fixed. And still it’s ultimately taken in: “I guess we’re tuning to you.”

I can’t travel back to my state of mind in January, but this is what I needed then, and it still hits me in a warm place. There’s such a deep well of sympathy in “Corazon,” an implied worldview that matches my own (and that I think we need more of, if that’s not too egoistic).

So Bishop Allen reclaim the obsolete; acknowledge that some things in this world seem to carry a life of their own; and declare that in the flawed we can find a small measure of perfection.

And “Corazon” accomplishes all of this without being, as I fear I have, heavy-handed. It’s a redemption song that keeps its scope small to best communicate bigger themes and heavier emotion. Even musically, as I believe has been pointed out elsewhere, Bishop Allen here skillfully underplay what could have been a Big Fat Sappy Melody so it comes out perfectly catchy, perfectly touching.

Oklahomans the Starlight Mints are at their best when they show less restraint. The Mints take a post-Beat 60s shag rock frame and blow it open with mind-expanded eccentricities learned from the Flaming Lips and Pixies. And they make it sound all their own. No mean feat, that.

I’ve hung with ‘em and enjoyed their music through this year’s Drowaton, but they’ve never really hit me as hard as they did the first time, on 2000’s The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of. Since then it sounds to me as though they’ve steadily grown more restrained and worked to the darker colors in their palette–I liked ‘em a little better when they had rainbows shooting out of their ears.

“Sugar Blaster,” off Stuff, bleeds childlike joy, fun that doesn’t feel forced. I don’t think enough bands know the value of a catchy drumbeat, and this tune opens with a textbook specimen.

From there we get a sugar rush of awesome ideas: sassy boy-girl chants; hand-claps vs. Kinks-y riff; lead vox doing call-and-response with instruments; ba-da-bas; blissfully sweet nonsense; a distant siren… And it all goes down clean, never feels overstuffed, right up to the wonderfully abrupt

stop.

Starlight Mints and Bishop Allen played the Troubadour Nov. 6.
January at BishopAllen.com. (and at iTunes.)
The Dream That Stuff Was Made Of at Newbury Comics. (What’s up, iTunes?)