The winnowing

My judgments for album of the year and song of the year can only be gleaned from albums that I heard in 06, which immediately narrows the field. I don't purposely strive to leave off supposedly great albums, but I just haven't heard some yet. Here's a list of all albums I've heard this year and are thus in the running for album of the year (and also disappointment of the year):

Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country
Guster - Ganging Up on the Sun
Snow Patrol - Eyes Open
The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
Grandaddy - What Happened to the Fambly Cat?
The Essex Green - Cannibal Sea
Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
Elf Power - Back to the Web
Irving - Death in the Garden Blood on the Flowers
Shearwater - Palo Santo
What Made Milwaukee Famous - Trying Never to Catch Up

Okay, so these are albums that I have listened to all the way through this year that I can remember. However, I have tried to listen to a number of new albums this year but haven't been able to listen to the whole thing due to either a) the first couple songs were wretched and I felt like I didn't need to invest any more time in it or b) I only was able to hear a sampling from various sources, never the entire album. As I own all the above albums, it's fairly obvious that these are the front runners for me. Of course, like usual, there are albums out there made in 2006 that I haven't listened to that could easily be contenders if I would just listen to them such as the Killers, The Mountain Goats, or Brand New. With this disclaimer, let's muddle our way through this. It's more fun this way because I don't know which of the above 11 albums will be chosen. I say 11 because one album is the disappointment of the year which, if you've been reading by previous posts will not be a surprise, is....
Disappointing Album of the Year: What Happened to the Fambly Cat - Grandaddy

Congratulations to Grandaddy for ending their weird career with a mighty whimper. Okay, so Sumday was pretty hit and miss, but it still featured some great stuff. And even the bad tunes had interesting concepts behind them (The Group Who Couldn't Say, for example). This latest album reveals a band that is no longer mining the interesting technological territory that made them the band they were both lyrically and musically. The lyrics are terrible, the melodies are hardly melodic, and a legitimate ten of the songs are worthless. I think I like 2 songs on the album and that took me a while to like them. So much for them. I'll listen to some of Jed the Humanoid's poems and cry for them

The first cut after this is relatively easy:
Death in the Garden Blood on the Flowers - Irving
Back to the Web - Elf Power

Both of these albums are decent albums. Some tracks are great. But, overall, both these albums are slightly worse then each bands' previous efforts, hardly a ringing endorsement for Album of the Year.

My next cut will be the Essex Green. Great great songs, combined with some pretty lame ones. If they could be more like Cardinal Points and less like Sin City or Uniform...then again, this is the band that brought you Everything is Green and Big Green Tree on the same album. They still haven't figured it out.

The next albums are difficult to cut. Really difficult. And I think we're going to see a bit of surprise, even for me. Here's my next cut, and I cringe at it: Snow Patrol, Camera Obscura, The Decemberists. Each of these albums have brilliant tracks. However, I typically listen to about half the album (the Decemberists suffer because I haven't had much time to listen). So, overall these albums are not as strong as the remaining five. For the final five albums, I'm going to go through and identify how many songs I might skip on a typical listen:
Belle and Sebastian: Well, I typically skip three, but two because of swearing although they are brilliant songs, which means I really only don't always listen to one song.
What Made Milwaukee Famous: I dislike Sweet Lady and that's about it.
Muse: Uh, wow, sometimes I skip Soldier's Poem but I don't have an active dislike for it.
Guster: Two songs here, Manifest Destiny and the New Underground (I don't know why)
Shearwater: One song, the first one, because I want to get to Red Sea, Black Sea.

Cut Guster, even though tracks 1,2,4,5 are just brilliant.

With great difficulty I'm cutting Shearwater because although I love listening to the album, I don't know, I don't know it well enough to by Album of the Year. When I listen to it, I love it, but at this time I can't state that it deserves to be in the top three.

Well, this is good. After getting to my top three, I realize that these are the three albums I have definitely listened to the most this year. By far. Muse lived in the car for a month after I bought it, WMMF was my running music and B+S was the soundtrack of Spring semester. I'm having a tough time with this.

And Caleb just woke up...