thinking that some people bought that stuff, that even some of you people reading this liked it, well, it’s going to drive me to drink.

“All is quiet on New Year’s Day,” sang U2, and with good reason. ’Tis the season of boxed sets and greatest hits, a time for looking back. And Christmas albums. Everyone does Christmas albums. Bette Midler did one and she’s Jewish. “On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Happy Holidays – A Very Special Christmas by Billy Idol.” Needless to say, on the second day of Christmas I went looking for a new true love.

Every December, it’s the same sad story. I go to the CD store and flip through the new releases, hoping for some surprise, some jolt, some of that ‘I didn’t know they had a new album coming out’ feeling. Oh, wait, Aimee Mann has a new album! I’ll listen to her sing anything, even the phone book. Well, anything except Christmas songs. So I go from A to Z, hold back a tiny tear and leave the store empty-handed.

It’s not that I’m a total grouch. It’s just that my tolerance for Christmas music was completely eroded years ago, when I was at a three-hour business dinner in a Guangzhou hotel where they revolved a 30-minute tape of Christmas songs sung in Spanish by children. When they played Mamacita Donde Esta Santa Claus? for the fifth time, I had to be physically restrained from punching holes in my eardrums with chopsticks.

December’s a great time of year for new movies but it sucks in terms of new music. Nobody releases anything noteworthy in December because they figure you’ve decided what Christmas gifts to buy back in November. January is a dumping ground because they figure you’re still too hung over from New Year’s Eve to even think about disturbing your aching noggin with something new.

So how is the world’s army of rock critics and pundits expected to fill column inches? That’s right, top 10 lists. Like you haven’t had your fill of them after watching David Letterman for 20 years or High Fidelity for the 19th time; everywhere you turn there’s another top 10 list.

My problem with these lists is that I often don’t believe them. I think most often critics are playing a game of one-upmanship with other critics and the readers, a kind of ‘I listen to more music than you do’ contest. Take UK newspaper The Guardian, which proclaimed The Warning by Hot Chip is the album of the year. Pitchfork, the self-proclaimed arbiter of all things indie, said the best album was Silent Shout by The Knife. Wha? Huh? Exsquuze me?

Other media outlets went very mainstream, many of them picking Bob Dylan’s Modern Times as the best album. Very, very good, yes, but best? The Los Angeles Times, in a blatant attempt to prove they listen to things other than the Eagles, said their best album of the year was by the Arctic Monkeys. Whom I loved when the album first came out but by the end of the year I’d all but forgotten about them.
So, I’ll play the game too. But this year, I made the decision that my list would consist of the albums I played most often. These are not the 10 ‘best’ albums of the year but they are the ones that stayed on my iPod long after other 2006 releases were archived off. I liked lots of albums, some I even admired, but I’ve hit the stage where I might praise Scott Walker for his courage in releasing an album like The Drift, but I’m not gonna be blasting it in the car on a Sunday afternoon.

So when the time came to vote in a poll, I picked 10 albums I enjoyed. And, just to be contrary, I refused to rate them from one to 10, but instead gave all equal footing. My list included:

Amy Winehouse – Back to Black
Bob Dylan – Modern Times
Bruce Springsteen – We Shall Overcome
Depeche Mode – Playing the Angel
Guillemots – Through the Windowpane
Joanna Newsom – Ys
Kasabian – Empire
Keith Jarrett – Carnegie Hall
Midlake – Trials of Van Occupanther
Shack – On the Corner of Miles and Gil

I’m a little shaky on Joanna Newsom. I’m somewhere between “This is the most amazing album ever” and “10 years from now, if I hear this, am I gonna think, wow, I used to like that?” But she’s on the list because, if nothing else, her ambitions on this record dwarf almost everything else around.

Track of the year was an easier choice – there was Crazy by Gnarls Barkley and then there was everything else, though the Raconteurs’ Steady As She Goes is a not-too-distant second.

Reissues? Some of them I’ve written about before. The Tom Waits box. Neil Young & Crazy Horse live at the Fillmore. The Elektra records boxed set. The Gram Parsons box. And, being the Springsteen fanatic I am, I loved the great job they did reissuing Born to Run.

Things not on my list? That would be even easier. In any other year Paris Hilton should easily qualify as the worst but this was the year Fergie released an album. And the year the Black Eyed Peas attempted to kill Sergio Mendes. And the year Rod Stewart released yet another lame covers album. All the albums from all the American Idol winners and losers. And Michael Bolton and Kenny G both released new atrocities, oops, CDs this year.

Okay, looking at that last paragraph, thinking that some people bought that stuff, that even some of you people reading this
liked it, well, it’s going to drive me to drink. Right now, as a matter of fact…