It’s after Thanksgiving, so here goes!

I did a lot better job than last year at keeping up with music. But my tastes are what they are, so if you know me, you might not be surprised by anything I list here. So it goes. I will say, though, that I’ve got a solid List of Ten for 2006; I’ll stand by this one.

(EDIT: PJ is off galavanting around this week, so I’ll put together the BSR Thursday show from this list.)

1. Grandaddy, Just Like the Fambly Cat. It might not be possible to understand where this band was coming from unless you followed the arc their 10-year career. Basically, Jason Lytle and his band spent 4 1/2 albums playing out an extended space-country-rock saga. Their topic? Escaping from suburban Modesto, California to someplace deep in the mountains. Lytle explored the tension between the two environments in weird songs about animals and appliances living together in peace (“Broken Household Appliance National Forest”) and bewildered corporate execs on nature retreats (“The Group Who Couldn’t Say”).

On Fambly Cat, Lytle finally stops hesitating and pulls the trigger: he breaks up the band and moves to a nice spot in Montana. Much of the album sounds wide-open and optimistic (downright cinematic, in fact), but the best songs (”Summer…It’s Gone,” “Rear View Mirror,” “Guide Down Denied”) reveal just a little bit of anxiety and sadness for the life that’s being abandoned. But… like the cat who just decides one day to start living somewhere else, Grandaddy has moved on.

2. Muse, Black Holes and Revelations. You could totally see this one coming. Muse doesn’t have an original bone in its body, and they finally don’t care. On Black Holes they unabashedly rip off Queen, ‘Nsync, Styx, Depeche Mode, the Knight Rider soundtrack, and even some of their own earlier songs. They end up with an album that you couldn’t defend on artistic grounds for half a minute, but that you can listen to over and over and over. “Knights of Cydonia” is so easily the song of the year that it’s hard to say what the runner-up would be.

3. Mogwai, Mr. Beast. One of my favorite live bands, Mogwai has made another batch of mostly vocalless experimental guitar tunes. But they’ve plugged in this time: tunes such as “Glasgow Mega-Snake” peel the paint off walls. Yeow! No falling asleep to this one.

4. Serena-Maneesh, Serena-Maneesh. There’s some bias here, which I’ll gladly confess to: Serena-Maneesh seem to be channeling 90s shoegazer rock on half of this record and Sonic Youth on the rest. So of course I’m gonna like ‘em. But take my word for it, this is a strong debut, not at all tentative. It just ROCKS from the beginning to the end. Maybe a bit too noisy for most ears, though.

5. The Twilight Singers, Powder Burns. It’s hard to convert people to Greg Dulli because his unique vocals are a little off-putting at first. But the people I know who are already fans… well, they’re rabid fans. Once you get used to him, you appreciate the writing talent and surprising soulfulness of this well-established indie rocker from Ohio—his biggest influences are clearly Motown-based. More than any other Twilight Singers album, Powder Burns hearkens back to Dulli’s old band, the Afghan Whigs, with its grungy production and subject matter (the topic du jour for Dulli is his own drug addiction). Seems like well-trodden ground for rock music, but as always, Dulli has his own unique approach… raw and emotional. And of course, it’s nice to have Mark Lanegan along for the ride.

6. Scott Walker, The Drift. This demented crooner has been writing eclectic rock music since the late 50s (though he’s been known to take decades off every once in awhile). On The Drift, Walker goes ambient and DARK. Damn. The Drift makes Nick Cave sound like Mandy Moore. If you can make it as far as the psycopathic Donald Duck (!), you’ll realize how great this album is. It’s a symphony for goths.

7. The Flaming Lips, At War with the Mystics. The Lips revisit the psychedelic sound of their early years on this album. I don’t like it as much as the rest of their recent work—it seems to be a step back, both musically and lyrically—but some tunes (”The Sound of Failure,” “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion,” “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung,” for example) really stand out.

8. Sparklehorse, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. I was preparing myself from something radically different when I heard that Dave Fridmann (Mercury Rev bassist, Flaming Lips producer) would be recording and producing this album. Not to mention the fact that Tom Waits, Danger Mouse, the Lips and many others would be making cameos. So the fact that the record sounds a lot like the others is a little surprising. But if you stick with it for awhile, you’ll find that Mark Linkous is branching out a little—it’s just that his songs are so minimalistic, even the branches are tiny. The last few songs, especially, have really grown on me.

9. DJ Shadow, The Outsider. This album has been absolutely slammed (check out the reviews on Amazon! Ouch), but I think that’s because it’s not at all what people expected. Ten years ago, Shadow was sample-based cerebral trip-hop, clearly the work of some kid who spent every afternoon in the vinyl section of the record store. Today, he’s right in the middle of mainstream pop and rap, like an MTV version of Moby. Is he just as good as always? Of course! Will the die-hard fans hate him for this? Of course! I’m more of a casual, fan, though, and I love all of the guest stars and cheap beats. Nobody is as talented as Shadow at putting it all together.

10. M. Ward, Post-War. Disclosure: Matt Ward lives five blocks down the street and his wife is in the UNH PhD-Comp program. So I’ve definitely given this guy more of a chance than I would your typical lo-fi indie folkster. I like M. Ward (having seen him perform on TV a few times) because he seems more earnest than his peers; he’s really just a songwriter who likes what he does, and who happens to be on a little bit of a hot streak right now. And I really like his sound: a little echoey and hollow, lending just a slightly uneasy undertone to his simple songs. His voice is exactly in between Johnny Cash’s and Chris Martin’s (hmm, have those two names ever been in the same sentence before?)—like both, he’s got a habit of starting off just barely flat and sliding into his notes—but of course, his music is very unlike theirs. Unlike anyone’s I can think of, actually.

Another list of 10 (why not? It was a good year):
Audioslave (yeah, you heard me!), Beck, Neko Case, Cat Power, Tanya Donelly, Gnarls Barkley, Islands, Mojave 3, Sonic Youth, South.

And another!
Belle and Sebastian, Decemberists, Beth Orton, Pearl Jam, Snow Patrol (well, okay, a little bit of a stretch here), Trail of Dead, Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Yo La Tengo, Thom Yorke.

I was right: they didn’t suck:
Evanescence, John Mayer.

These folks were overrated:
The Fray, Keane, The Killers (yawn!), OK Go, Sufjan Stevens (my fear is that he’s gonna be on this list every year. Why does everyone love him so?).

Favorite live shows this year:

1. Sigur Rós
2. Flaming Lips (if they’d picked somewhere better than the BofA Pavilion I’d have been happier, but their shows always rock)
3. Mogwai
4. Doves
5. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
6. Twilight Singers
7. Del tha Funkee Homosapien
8. Rob Dickinson
9. Jason Lytle of Grandaddy
10. Massive Attack

What I’m looking forward to in 2007 (another great year on its way):

1. Massive Attack (edit: didn’t happen)
2. Portishead (also didn’t happen)
3. Underworld
4. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
5. Mercury Rev (probably not happening soon)
6. Doves (soon, but not this year)
7. Air
8. PJ Harvey
9. Blonde Redhead
10. EDIT: And the new Boards of Canada album! Sheesh. How could I forget that? (edit: didn’t happen)