***What's that coming over the hill? It's the 2006 ILX ALBUMS POLL RESULTS***

Mastodon have developed a reputation amongst the hipster community as being some sort of Second Coming of Metallica, the band that rose from the ashes of hair- and nu-metal to bring heaviness and intelligence back to an all-but-dead genre. That, of course, pisses off metalheads to no small extent. Heavy and intelligent metal, much less metal in general, never went away. What Mastodon bring to the table, especially on this, their most epic effort, is a very rare thing: a unique sound. They serve up an almost-indescribable jumble of crushing prog, thrash, death, hardcore, and whatever else their demented (and drug-fueled) minds could shove into the mix. It's also really freaking heavy. Yes, the concept is nonsensical (something about fighting through weird monsters to obtain a crystal skull to eliminate the reptile part of the human brain). Musically, though, Blood Mountain hides a treasure trove of treats for your ears, offering up new discoveries on each listen. Definitely not for everyone, but those adventurous enough to explore its twisting paths won't come away disappointed.
-Jeff Treppel

With its perfectly-placed swells and emotional string orchestration, I'm pretty sure "He Poos Clouds" was prepackaged as a film score. I can already imagine "Arctic Circle" playing while the camera pans over a schoolboy riding his bike to save the girl...or the chant-choir juxtaposition part of "This Lamb Sells Condos" being used to create suspense during an important montage scene. Everything about the album is so cinematic, so clean, so beautiful. And if it ever makes it to the silver screen, I want to see the results (as long as the film isn't called "He Poos Clouds").
-Tape Store

The production is slick but I don't think that should be a criticism. It's really beautifully produced. The sound is far richer than their earlier works and I think they've finally transcended the B and S comparisons (unless one wants to make the argument that they are presently more B and S than B and S).
-Jacobo Rock

I've managed to scrape the surface so far of each disc. This is definitely a "new" album rather than a compilation. Despite the fact he's split it into three sides, it's still very much a contemporary Waits record that reflects on his Americana schtick he's been touting since Bone Machine and more and more since Mule Variations. So if you're looking for Rain Dogs/Black Rider/Alice type material you might be a little dissapointed as it's definitely 3rd-generation material.

So is this Waits's Druqks? In a way, yes - there is nothing here that is going to surprise die-hard fans but it is still an excellent intro to his many sides. There's nothing as beautiful as "Innocent When You Dream" or affecting as "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" or even as weird as the "Lucky Day Overture", however it's still all there.

I'm a big fan of the poems on "Bastards", even though some are simple recitations of pieces by Bukowski etc. Elsewhere the "Road To Peace" is marvellous lyrically and musically.
-wogan lenin

It sounds like unicorns meets arcade fire meets cocorosie and then some.
-ihope

good reviews via pitchfork/allmusic made me get this album.
it's pretty good.
the Elephant 6 meets clap yr hands and say arcade fire is well done, and they surely know how to write good melodies.
so why not?
-i have things

Fucking Tremendous about covers it. I'm still on the first spin, but the second will come immediately after. That hardly ever happens.
-100% CHAMPS with a Yes! Attitude

Maybe my first impression of Amy was wrong. Maybe she's not the spoiled, rehab-obsessed, bitchy English girl I first thought. That would explain why a song like "Rehab" isn't just the brat-fest you'd expect. It could just be that the world gifted a sleaze with a beautiful voice, but at the edges of the songs are a taste of what Winehouse could develop into - someone with something meaningful to say. She just needs to stop bitching about her drug addictions.
-Mordechai Shinefield

hang on, hang on. this album is awesome. it's taken two months and several listens for that fact to hit me, but ... what a truly great piece of work. the eighties album they would (could?) never have made in the eighties. absolutely love it.
-grimly fiendish

OK. This is the most stylish, consistent PSB album since Very. They're reacquired their lusciousness, thanks to the likes of "Indefinite Leave to Remain,," "I'm with Stupid," and "Minimal" (the sexiest track they've created since "Young Offender," only cold and, er, minimalist). If Dianne Warren's name wasn't on the credits I wouldn't know that she'd written "Numb."
-Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

It's what I always imagined grime/dubstep should sound like - empty, vast and deeply emotional.

I doubt any record will sum up the grey steel of 2006 London more fully than this one. It seems to be a compilation of tracks recorded between 2001 and now. But on early listening this is astonishing; the blackened mirror image of SAW II, Horsepower Productions in negative, Post-Millennium Tension.
-Marcello Carlin

Finally breaking free of their orbit around Planet Radiohead, album number four is where Muse blast off on a dizzying rocket ride into a galaxy of their own and turn into the modern-day Moody Blues they were always meant to become. They deftly juggle Britpop, electronica, pomp rock, and even metal, with Matthew Bellamy's emotive vocals tying it all together. "Knights of Cydonia" alone would be enough to cement this record's classic-to-be status, but then you have the soaring "Starlight" and the System of a Down-meets-Knight Rider "Assassin," which illustrate just how much range these Brits really have. Weird and wonderful, bombastic but still touching, Black Holes and Revelations provides an excellent showcase for a very talented band.
-Jeff Treppel

Radiohead were never able to do sexy. The songs here are already their own JLC remixes in of themselves.
-danzig

I never got the "Crazy in Love" adulation, so I'm surprised that the 2006 album I keep revisiting is B'Day. It's obvious why – there wasn't a record that was more fun out last year. For the better part of it, Beyoncé is barking mad on it, hollering, yelping, straining her vocals to implore you to take her credit card, sit on mama's lap, get her bodied, get yourself an Audemars Piguet watch and a diamond cream facial, and in a flagwaving anthem of emasculation, she orders you to pull out your freakum dress. The album is an exhibition of Beyoncé in all sorts of over the top frenzies – jealous rage, sweaty lust, emancipation from poverty backed by a frenzy of horns, handclaps and sirens. And just when you can't take it anymore, she slips in the gorgeous ballads. To the left, to the left.
-Danzig

"B'Day" isn't revolutionary. It's not amazing. It doesn't have any truly mindblowing tracks. But it has one thing that separates it from most of the year's pop albums; like "FutureSex/LoveSounds," it's complete. There's really no filler, and the b-sides alone would make wonderful singles. Everything flows, and as a whole, it's rather addicting.
-Tape Store

This is pure coffee table for the most part but it's probably the apex of that (because it's not so forlorn ala 'Dummy' or whatever), in that it does sound great, predictably so, but better than I expected considering the attitudes that pervade them and my own low expectations/pessimism. I suppose this means it sounds impressive when playing in the background without you thinking too much about it. But engaging with it fully provides just as much reward as with any overtly upbeat and energetic pop album that attempts to stride both sides of the leftfield/mainsteam rift in this way.

There is interesting detail spread throughout, as I said above I think Gregory is totally on it production-wise. Eschewing this notion of (laptop) 'edginess' which I don't see as really relevant here, the sound here is glossy and rich but still sharp and deftly switches from warmth to coldness accordingly, to good effect. AG's voice still feels under-used at times and at times feels a bit obscured in the haze generated by 'Let It Take You' and 'Slide In' - maybe it's just that neutral key she drops into so regularly now, akin to Stevens during the verses of 'Some Girls', only naturally sounding much more adept here. She sounds more like herself on U Never Know more than anything else here perhaps, and this is maybe the only track that matches 'Deep Honey' for drama, or 'Crystalline Green' for that 'blown away' effect. Hard to escape that sense of 'Black Cherry afterthoughts' about the whole thing.

I say it's generally an 'up' sort of album but not in the same way the much more obvious and jaunty Robyn album is. It's still too strait-laced and cautious in this respect, but this 'strained joy' thing has worked for other artists (PSBs, Eurythmics) in the past albeit it in somewhat different ways so is not a massive flaw by any means.
-Sociah T Azzahole

When Supernature came out I was eagerly anticipating that it was likely to be a GA/CAGI (pre-CAGI, admittedly)-tastic stack of standalone succulent pop songs rather than expecting it to be the kind of record that was preoccupied with 'flow' or whatever (although obviously the two aren't mutually exclusive, and perhaps Chemistry has since illustrated this best); I would have been totally happy with something more disjointed and less cohesive or whatever than the previous two Goldfrapp albums, which I'd felt were both hampered a bit by the occasional, um, uneventful noodle. In the event I think Supernature is probably as 'flowy' as both predecessors, hence something like "Ride A White Horse" (my initial favourite on the album, still sounds entirely mighty now) stumbling a bit when singléd out in a half-arsed stylee and limping onto the radio and into the charts and off again very quickly for no particular reason.

I probably love this record infinitely more now than I did at first because I'm no longer listening for future singles (and I always do this with new albums by People Who Get In The Charts and it's self-defeating really) so I can bask in the heavy sparkly luxury of the whole thing and now it does sound like the best Goldfrapp album by a mile, and the album I wanted them to make (tighter, more dynamic, 'etc') and it doesn't matter that lots of it sounds the same as lots of the rest of it because the joy is in the aforementioned minor tweaks.

(also it feels less drama-school-hats than Black Cherry really, which is a good thing)
- Alex in Doncaster

Has a short Israeli girl ever sounded this sexy? Her voice is its own bombastic instrument; exploding at the edges and consuming the audience. She pouts, winks, drinks glasses of red wine, and then does something with her mouth that marries dozens of voice styles together at once.
-Mordechai Shinefield

It's all in the lyrics. Quick turns or phrase, biting wit and insightful observations. Not bad for a debut album and a songwriter who was only 18 when he wrote most of the songs.
-lawrencerock

You're missing the point if you look for the reasons for their success in the music, which is as has been said meat and potatoes indie. What struck me when I heard them on the radio was the words, lots of words, in an unusual (for pop music) and appealing accent and telling stories, not yr usual Coldplay platitudes. They're kind of an Eminem or Streets with guitars. They're not my cup of tea but that's where their appeal lies I think.
-Bidfurd

They are definetely talented shane has a great voice and well mark is incredible in every song just breathtaking. some good song choises some not that much
the rose is without a douth the best song of the album perfect choise for the firts single
easy is another great effort ,total eclipse of the heart is very good but compared with the original lacks passion
all or nothing is very well done and if you like westlife you surely will enjoy it
also You Light Up My Life songs great one of my fabourites
All Out of Love (feat. Delta Goodrem) nicee song but something dosn't work there i love delta's voice but it just dosn't work well with the westlife guys
so finally if you are a westlife or a true romantic this one is a no brainer this album if for you
-Paul Edward Wagemann

An album that simultaneously familiar and strange, analog and digital, etcetra etcetra. And the singles, with remixes by Trentmoller, Bookashade, Rex the Dog, Radioslave, are just killer.
-The Macallan 18 Year

can't believe nelly doesn't have her own thread
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pBo-GL9SRg

more interesting to me than this list is the evolution of ilx and ilxors

there's a really strange and almost frightening blend of raw and paranoid opinion, sometimes with one or the other expressed in the extreme by someone, sometimes both expressed by the same person in the same post.

also nelly furtado

xp NO I HATE GIRL TALK THEY MASH LOVELY AALIYAH UP WITH HORRID INDIE
― lex pretend

<3

not sure if that was at me Karl, but I probably shouldn't post when I'm wasted.

i lurked here 15+ years before making my first post a year or so ago

oh no, it wasn't ross! actually i'm not sure hat that was about (i have the same posting problem)
when you bumped the thread, the first thing i did i was go back to the beginning and re-read it. for some reason i decided it would be funny to call out nelly furtado, just because i haven't heard anyone mention her in several years. i don't really know her tbh. man my jokes are great! but yeah i didn't even see your post til i had already crapped my post out.

oof. weekday nights are brutal

there's a really strange and almost frightening blend of raw and paranoid opinion

makes me think of this bit from [i]the rest is noise/i] about schoenberg and mahler:

The Mahlers regularly invited [Schoenberg] to their apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz, where, according to Alma, he would incite heated arguments by offering up 'paradox of the most violent description'.

haha cool Karl, best regards :)