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Mas y Mas were introduced to me by a certain ex-waitress-at-a-strip-club on a recent jaunt down to Richmond. Let me set the scene: walking to the gas station for cigarettes you might see a dude sitting on his porch blowing on his digeridoo (thusly named Digeridude), too many cute girls riding bikes to count, and if you’re lucky, girlpants’ good friend Will in a dress, trying in vain to score a Craigslist Missed Connection.
Mas y Mas, hailing from nearby NoVA, were a perfect soundtrack to this scene. They’re at once fidgety and disaffected, smart enough to know that the best of kind of fun, maybe the only kind, is the stupid kind. On this point check out the (um) pointedly titled “You Can’t Play Without Ice.” It kind of reminds me of the first time I heard the Thermals, all lo-fi and pissed off at posers, but these guys are a lot funnier about it, partly cause I can’t really tell if they’re joking or not. There’s a savant tunefulness too, even though Vinny often tries to hide it behind his Mike-Skinner–as-snotty-American-kid impression.
And the lyrics are golden, as anyone unfortunate enough to follow my Twittrrr barrage will know. On “Sunday School Hymn,” they tackle that freshest of topics—fucking religion, dude—and somehow manage to land it unposed. “Now who here’s had his grandma pass away and wonders why she is still sleeping, and who here’s read a little Walt Whitman and wonders why he is so happy?” Maybe because I’ve wondered both those things, maybe cause there’s some real melancholy in his arch schoolboy recitation, but it’s the most moving thing I’ve heard since Joel got drunk and read some of his poetry at the last gpants staff meeting.
Mas y Mas — “You Can’t Play Without Ice”
Mas y Mas — “Sunday School Hymn”
Mas y Mas are magnanimously giving away their album, Proud Sponsors of Pepsi, here.
So the Maccabees, as it turns out, were a sequel to the marginally better-known band 
Autumn Shade, aside from being the best-worst fictitious Jade Tree emo band name 
Anouar Brahem — Le Voyage de Sahar try: 
Elegant, contemplative background music, almost organically complex when you listen closely, Le Voyage de Sahar is basically an ambient record in disguise. With an array of guitars and his oud, Brahem flawlessly mixes middle eastern and classical styles, coming up with a distinct and unified sound. Less an album of songs and more an elongated composition, Le Voyage is the most fully realized work I heard this year, hands down. Most like anthropologist: Claude Levi-Strauss. Both masterfully present a complex, interlocking system that always refers back to a few basic principles. Plus, uh, both title their works in French. [
Helios takes some poppy guitar figures and simple drum beats, slips them a couple sedatives and dresses them up in soft ambient swirls. This was a perfect morning album, sleepy without being inert, radiant but not too bright. Most like anthropologist: Jose Limon. Dude effortlessly interweaves the emotional and theoretical in his ethnographic writings, and in a similair way Helios has crafted an album that distinctively mixes conventional pop and soundscape, capturing the immediacy of the former and the subtlety of the latter. [
With a more disciplined vocal delivery, winding song structures and baroque orchestration courtesy of Van Dyke Parks, Newsom brought it, You Got Served style, to those who found her debut too spartan or abrasive. But what really pushes Ys into top ten territory is the knotty, textured lyricism, which sprawls across the songs in puns, vivid images and pecuiliar couplets, but never quite managing to lose the meter or measure. Most like anthropologist: Lila Abu-Lughod. Female-centric in an understated sort of way, situated within a folk narrative tradition but intellectually accomplished and embroidered with professional sophistication (“do you know what this is, son? This is the panopticon”). [
“The sketchy crowd shows me drawings, they’re alright. An alternately dim and frightful waste. Now come on honey let’s go outside. You disrupt the world’s disorder just by virtue of your grace” Best lyric of 2006? Quite possibly, just edging out the sublime “my humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.” I’m not the biggest fan of Bejar’s oddball songwriting or spastic vocals, but I found myself coming back to this again and again over the year. For me, the mark of a great album is always finding something new, and on repeated listenings Destroyer’s Rubies quite appropriately yields some real gems (eh? eh?). Most like anthropologist: James Clifford. Hyper-refelxive, iconoclastic, preoccupied with words and embodying a possibly overblown sense of experimentalism. [
Another mark of a great album is that you can put it on in the car and feel cool enough to roll your window down and pick up chicks at a stoplight. At their best, Phoenix emit precisely this kind of rakish charm. They are the proverbial boys back in town, formalists with a preternaturally light touch, not unlike the Exploding Hearts or even, distantly, the Magnetic Fields. Stupidly fun and catchy. Who knew they were french? Most like anthropologist: Marshall Sahlins. A consummate faker who, besides the originals, did it better than anyone else. [
Ben just recently turned me on to this band, and similairly, they were forceful enough to rocket half-way up this list with about 2 weeks left in ’06. So I’m not going to try and compete with his write-up; the shoegazer + crisper production is right on the mark. The only thing I would add is that the singer’s thick Scottish accent lends an exoticism to an otherwhise painfully earnest vocal delivery. That might sound like a back-handed compliment, but the effect can be really moving. “That Summer, At Home…” gives me chills. And I haven’t gotten chills since like 2003. Most like anthropologist: Annelise Riles, who manages to make some genuinely anthropological insights on jet-setting cosmopolitans (the last unexplored tribe); in the same way The Twilight Sad achieve a weird sort of authenticity in spite–or possibly because of–their slick Max Richter sheen. Both make a virtue of the saturated milieu they’ve inherited, and in doing so come up with something substantively original. [
I didn’t think this would make my top ten, as it never really hung together as an album for me, but then I realized it merited inclusion given the sheer brilliance of the individual songs: the irresistible funk of “Sukie in the Graveyard” (sorry Niina, but the bass gets too hyperactive to make it a 
These guys are unlike anyone else, no doubt about it, but initially the whole “indie rock meets soulful barbershop quartet” thing was a little too gimmicky for me. I’m still not completely sold on their sound, but when the abysmally titled Return to Cookie Mountain does get it right it momentarily redeems the glut of Brooklyn art-rock faggery, which is important I think. The Turn on the Bright Lights of 2006, and for good reason. Most like anthropologist: Michel Rolph-Trouillot. Both have voices (authorial, singing) that are deep, dark and rich, and both produce work that has nothing and absolutely everything to do with race. [
It’s Boards of Canada, and Boards of Canada are still awesome. Most like anthropologist: Arjun Appadurai. If you were to take the global ethnoscapes and flows that Appadurai so perceptively describes and melt them down into one homoegenous substance the result would sound like “Skyliner.” Both evoke a world that swirls, spills and splashes, but never suffocates the underlying sense of order and movement. [
With Buzzing keyboards, obligatory avant-garde flourishes, and Zak Pennington’s manic vocals this is the album for those of us who didn’t feel enough pain in 2006 to really love Xiu Xiu. The #10 spot could have gone to any number of bands (how’s that for critical zeal?), but Parenthetical Girls gets it because I’m a sucker for a nicely layered motif, and Safe as Houses is all bodily fluids and a distinctly sinister adolescent sexuality, like some deranged manga come to life. Most like anthropologist: Renato Rosaldo. Whether it’s the bloodlust of a headhunter or a mother’s bitter resentment of her child, both men commune with a grief and rage not normally in their realm of experience. It’s an uncanny, almost disturbing sort of empathy, and it makes for a great record and great anthropology. [
Anour Brahem — 
The Lucksmiths — 
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