Mosey's Top 10 of 2006-second installment

Author’s Note:
If you’ll remember from the end of my first installment of the top ten, I had a hard time with #5. I woke up this morning, after several strange, choppy dreams about wall-to-wall carpeting, with Kimya Dawson’s song, “Underground”, in my head, so I took it as a sign.

5. Kimya Dawson-Remember That I Love You

So, quick recap if you don’t know who the hell Kimya Dawson is: she was in the cool, quirky, self-effacing, self-proclaimed “anti-folk” outfit The Moldy Peaches in her formative years, who sang silly songs and wore silly outfits onstage. I love that they wanted to call themselves “anti-folk” when I could write an article on how Remember That I Love You is so neo-Bob Dylan folk, complete with colossal narratives and politics-on-sleeve lyrics….but I’ll save that for another post. For the record (tee-hee, pun!) I wrestled with putting the following records at #5: The Born Ruffian’s EP, Tokyo Police Club’s EP, and Cat Power’s The Greatest, but decided on Kimya because of the following lyric from the song “Giants”: “I like giants/especially girl giants/cause all girls feel too big sometimes regardless of their size”. WARNING!! These songs will glue themselves to the inside of your medulla oblongata, and you will not be able to pry them loose!!

(I inputed “cranium” into Thesauras.com and it gave me “medulla oblongata” so I don’t know what the fuck it means! Long Live The Internet!!)

4.Band Of Horses-Everything All The Time

Magnet magazine suggested we could call them “My Morning Jr.”, and the sound is similar to My Morning Jacket, but I think Band Of Horses comes off with a much more nostalgic, romantic sentiment. Let me paint a little picture for you: when Everything All The Time came out, in March of 2006, I liked it a lot. At the record store where I work, someone kept throwing it on, and as spring turned to summer, that like grew to love. When fall came around, the play copy got buried under piles of other c.d.’s, and like one of Leonard Cohen’s sentimental one-night stands, Band Of Horses became a sweet, covert memory. It remained thus buried, until one fateful evening while watching an old episode of The O.C….and my love for Everything All The Time suddenly came rushing out in a flood of love and neediness! (such is the perplexing nature of love!) I so missed those opening notes that signaled the beginning of the song “funeral” that I was almost weak with desire! Oh, Wherefore Art Thou, Band Of Horses, and when will I see thee again? I cried into the unforgiving wind. Luckily, I went to work the next day and secured myself a copy. Sometimes I sleep with it under my pillow.

3. Amy Millan-Honey From The Tombs

Okay, so I’m finally ready to admit that I’m not a huge Broken Social Scene fan….I liked the song “Lover’s Spit” but that’s about it…I would probably agree if someone said they were overrated…but don’t tell anyone I said that. I think that in the case of BSS, the sum of its parts is greater than the whole (whatever that means, I’m no good at math). I’m not sure why I love this album so much. The songwriting is solid, the instrumentation is cool…it’s sortof a country-pop album, but more rock/pop than Neko Case. Oh, I just remembered…she talks about drinkin’ all the time! That’s the country in the record! Whenever I listen to it I think to myself: “I have to write more songs about whiskey and wine!”. I get all excited, sit down with my guitar and…it doesn’t come out as bad-ass as the Jenny Whiteley-penned song Baby I. When Millan laments: “Sometimes I feel like my only friend is a whiskey glass”…I know exactly what she’s talking about.
(One of my favourite live shows of 2006 was when I saw Amy Millan at NXNE, in Toronto, sometime in the summer. She had a plethora of extremely talented musicians/friends backing her up for most of the set. The pinnacle, however, was the song: Pour Me Up Another, where she stood alone on an empty stage with her finger picking soft chords on her guitar. I remember exclaiming to my friend: (loudly, as I had been drinking), “IS THIS SONG ON THE ALBUM?? I DON’T REMEMBER IT!!!” 'Nuff said.

Another Author’s Note: (hey, I’m getting about as sick of these pretentious ramblings as you are, BELIEVE ME!) However I wanted to apologize for not including #’s 1 and 2, and give you the excuse that I’m tired…(and o.k. truth is, I want to waste my time watching YET ANOTHER old episode of the O.C.)