The 40 Best Albums of 2006

10. Beck, The Information
Until Beck gets around to releasing an official greatest-hits album, we'll make do with The Information, a talking-points primer on just about every phase of his career, from break-beatnik ("We Dance Alone") to space-pilot folkie ("Dark Star") to found-sound restoration artist ("Cellphone's Dead"). Alas, for an album full of potential singles -- the "One by one, I'll knock you out!" line from "Cellphone's Dead" is Beck's best shot at T-shirt-sloganeering immortality since "Where It's At" -- radio barely responded. Perhaps Beck's become too expectedly unexpected for his own good. B.R.

9. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury
Clipse MC Malice once rapped that his group was "hip-hop's lost civilization." And when the Virginia duo's long-delayed second album was finally unearthed this year, treasures were revealed. Malice and his brother Pusha T deal the same brand of drug rap as countless other hustler rappers -- rhyming about pushing weight, invading homes, and "fucking with college bitches with innocent looks like Mya" in chilling deadpan over the Neptunes' stark electro beats. But the layered references and complicated schemes of their immaculately constructed lyrics make dirty work sound like poetry. C.R.

8. My Morning Jacket, Okonokos
It's official: MMJ are the greatest act in jam-band land. Why? As this skull-exploding live double disc proves, it's because they know head music involves more than just noodly interplay. It's about guitar textures deep enough to get lost in, straightforward melodies that go directly to your pleasure center, and vocals -- in this case, Jim James' glorious high tenor -- that go straight to your heart. And not always gently: James unleashes shouts here that rate with Roger Daltrey's epochal holler in "Won't Get Fooled Again." In the end, MMJ aren't really a "jam band"; just a hairy, old-fashioned rock outfit that does everything right. W.H.

7. Cat Power, The Greatest
Respectful homages to American musical tradition are usually about as much fun as public TV marathons. But when the respectful homagist is a former basement folkie known for onstage freak-outs, we're not talking PBS BS. Chan Marshall's evolution from lo-fi whisperer to archetypal rock heroine is one of the last decade's more inspiring stories, and on The Greatest she completes it. An R&B album recorded in Memphis with soul-session greats, it combines the breathy intimacy of Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis with the frayed booziness of Alex Chilton's Dusted in Memphis. Every nerve is exposed. Whether singing about suicides or horses running free or hot sailors or spring flings that feel like funerals, she does the impossible -- she makes geriatric sounds strut again by scaring them loose. JON DOLAN

6. Joanna Newsom, Ys
On her marvelous, Steve Albini–helmed follow-up to 2004's The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom still plucks her harp, isn't afraid to use words like "thee," and regards songs as winding metaphorical tall tales that, stretched to as much as a dozen minutes, could never be reduced to ringtones. Call her a prog folkie, but also crown Newsom something bigger and more important: America's answer to Björk. Like her predecessor, Newsom is an eccentrically voiced experimenter who follows her nonconformist muse wherever it may lead. With longtime art-song specialist Van Dyke Parks heightening the tension and woodsy mysticism in her melodies with magic-kingdom string arrangements, Ys leads you to plenty of lush, disquieting, and utterly mesmerizing places. DAVID BROWNE

5. My Chemical Romance, The Black Parade
The little band from deepest, darkest Jersey that can make the Internet rain tears. On their epic concept album about getting sick on the candy-coated suburban lie and spending Halloween in the ER, MCR offer a grand artistic statement worthy of Metallica and Queen (as well as an excellent argument for universal health care). Singer Gerard Way opens a vein and spreads his arms and sucks in as many broken souls as he can handle, while his band turns screamo into an orchestrated spiral of punk-goth, classic rock, Salvation Army bands, and high school musicals. Claiming that they want to be "nothing at all" when they grow up, although their ambition suggests otherwise, MCR tap the soul of young America and inject a new genre: chemo. J.D.

4. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
With his fifth album, Ghostface applied his ever-evolving "crying style" and dizzying, free-associative narration to the cold world of cocaine rap. Fishscale is about the sorrow of a dealer, from getting an ass-whipping to the pitfalls of pushing major product to fever dreams about being lost underwater (where he encounters Noah's Ark, the Titanic, SpongeBob, and mermaids with "Halle Berry haircuts"). Nothing gets Ghost in an emo state of mind like the warm glow of the soul records he remembers from his youth, and with indie/underground producers MF Doom and Jay Dee providing an almost nostalgic, sample-based backdrop, the album sounds like a man on his last legs, groggily spilling stream-of-consciousness rhymes all over a '70s jukebox. C.R.

3. Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
England's biggest Internet success story couldn't be named more appropriately: Beneath the scenester cool and post-Pavement guitar fuzz, Whatever People Say I Am (a commercial smash at home, where it debuted at No. 1) is exuberant teenage garage pop that's as pure as if it were invented for TV -- see The Monkees. Like Seth Cohen on The OC or Kristin Cavallari on Laguna Beach, frontman Alex Turner captures the tricky vagaries of youth in language pithier and more clever than any real 19-year-old could muster. As distillations of his generation's casual nihilism go, "I want to see all of the things that we've already seen" (from opener "The View From the Afternoon") works quite efficiently. Increasing the music's emotional impact, Turner often saves his sweetest melodies -- like the one in "Riot Van," an ironic ode to "those silly boys in blue" -- for his harshest tales. I bet he looks good on your MySpace. M.W.

2. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
"There are no second acts in American lives," a great American drunk once said. That may be true for Karl Rove and K-Fed (flawed mortals that they are), but for a transcendent being like Cee-Lo Green, seconds and thirds are the reason he comes to the table in the first place. "Wish I could live twice/ And I still might," promises the former member of the sadly over-and-out Atlanta hip-hop crew Goodie Mob on this deeply exploratory collaboration with indie screwball Danger Mouse. Gnarls Barkley would have been plenty likable if they'd limited their contribution to having a funny name and showing up on TV in Star Wars costumes, but they also had the novel idea of making their music mind-ticklingly brilliant. Danger Mouse invented a space-cadet R&B that moved Cee-Lo to empty out his warped soul. From a Violent Femmes cover to a drum'n'bass hustle with falsetto scatting to a goth doo-wop hymn about sex and death to "Crazy," the single of the year in any genre, this was the year's most soothing head-scratch. In his old life, Cee-Lo was never going to duke it out with Young Jeezy or Omarion for chart dominance, but when you listen to these raspily rapped emotional explorations, it's hard not to come away feeling that his accomplishment is deeply earned. "Way over yonder there's a new frontier / Would it be so hard for you to come and visit me here?" he asks on the psychedelic title track. Because he and DM make their marginalia feel not just free but fun, you'll holler back with the most affirmative " No, sir!" you can muster. J.D.

1. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
TVOTR don't take you back -- not to a utopian pop moment or to the funny first flush of a summer crush or to the way good music can make you feel so right. They're not ironic in a totally sincere way, and you're not sure if they go well with those pants. But they're the only rock band today that get so many different places without even imagining they have a map -- mixing garret punk, mid-'70s prog, from Pere Ubu to Genesis, beatbox hymns, and barbershop anarchism. On their second album, they mess all that noise up and turn the dystopian wallow of Radiohead's Kid A on its ear, finding a shocked freedom in alienation. (It's a fitting achievement for a band that named their 2003 debut EP OK Calculator.) Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone croon like drunks dancing on subway rails, turning terminal dread into an engine for catharsis; drummer Jaleel Bunton and bassist Gerard Smith heroically futz with corroded polyrhythms; and guitarist/producer Dave Sitek collapses sounds upon sounds. Sprinkling allusions to metaphorical wars and "history ablaze," purple rain and sharky waters, religion and art, they dig deep into the scary empty spaces of the world until reaching an eight-minute last track in which they "Wash the Day Away." Maybe not a sure-shot formula for consensus-building pop bigness, but more and more, that seems like an ancient notion in a time when it's you and your iPod against history and the line between me/you/us/them is a sidewalk chalk drawing in the rain. TV on the Radio don't flee from this weirdness, and their anti-Album of the Year is an hour you can spend a lifetime in. JON DOLAN