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

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

In terms of pure sound, nothing in 2006 rivalled techno goddess Ellen Allien's collaboration with ex-boyfriend Apparat: these immaculately crafted tracks with their gorgeous textures and restless, propulsive rhythms made for some dizzyingly dreamy head music. This was the default Sunday morning record of 2006, the perfect accompaniment to sitting back, sipping tea and watching the sun rise as we came gently down; it was also the default DJing tool, with 'Way Out' an inevitable anthem at most parties. Its constant presence throughout 2006 - more than any other, this was an album I lived - was immensely satisfying.
-lex pretend

Nelly Furtado conquered the world in 2006, simultaneously releasing 3 singles to burn up the clubs in different corners of the globe – the kids in America got to grips with the quadrasyllabic word "Promiscuous," Latin America got the tongue-waggingly unrelenting reggaeton of "No Hay Igual," and the rest, the straight up chunky sing along pop of "Maneater." And then she turned around and released 3 beautifully understated ballads to those respective markets. 6 amazing singles already and there are supposedly more coming. And there are plenty more to mine: "Showtime" is lovely, "Do It" is pure '80s Madonna. Criticism that Furtado's "I'm Like A Bird" personality has gone out the window in favour of an anonymous muse to Timbo's beats is silly and prudish – I've watched plenty of interviews with Nelly Furtado and let me tell you we should be glad that her personality got left behind: it's really annoying. And it definitely comes through albeit briefly through the painful interludes that are thankfully only seconds long. And for those who lament that Nelly's been cynically sexed up, listen to the ballads on Loose. They are glorious. Loose was eventually overshadowed when FutureSex/LoveSounds came out, but Justin blew his load prematurely and his cockiness got old quickly: Who still listens to "Sexy Back?" But the songs here are uniformly strong and memorable, except for the one about God.
-Danzig

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 :)