Honourable Mentions:

	#20 Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country Let's Get Out of this Country was my first exposure to Camera Obscura. I'd heard they were very similar sounding to Belle and Sebastian, and upon listening to this album for the first time two things became very apparent - first, they do sound a lot like Belle and Sebastian; and second, any chances of them being branded as a clone band should be completely obliterated by the time opening track "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken" rolls to a close. This is really beautiful pop music, full of lively riffs and sunny, cheerful vocals (which, from time to time, completely contradict the songs' lyrical content). If you're a Belle and Sebastian fan, this is utterly essential listening, but anyone who enjoys great pop music is pretty much guaranteed to find something they'll love.
	#19 Sybille Baier - Colour Green Colour Green was recorded by Germany's Sibylle Baier, in her own home, one evening in the late seventies. The story goes that Baier never tried to have the recording released, deciding instead to focus on family over music. Fast forward to 2006, where Baier's son lent the recording to J Mascis (of Dinosaur Jr), who saw that it reached the offices of Orange Twin recordings, who subsequently released the album. The music-loving world should count themselves lucky, as Colour Green is a beautifully undestated album, full of gorgeous, gentle songs - all of which consist only of guitar and vocals recorded directly to reel - which make Baier feel like a female counterpart to Nick Drake. Being an album of such beautiful, emotionally-bare music, Colour Green is a remarkable recovered artifact of years past.
	#18 Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Etiquette Owen Ashworth's third album as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone is his best work yet, with his trademark combination of jittery bedroom-electronica, subdued lo-fi effects and increedibly deep, resonant vocals hitting the mark more perfectly than ever before. Lyrically, Etiquette is one of the sharpest album's you'll have the pleasure of hearing, with gems like "Not the way that you'd imagined it / On a balcony with champagne lips / but in a pantry against the pancake mix / you had your New Year's kiss" and "I waited up until it was light / Don't they have payphones wherever you were last night?" simply yet perfectly conveying the central theme of his album (and indeed, most of his body of work) - the confusion of being a twenty-something trying to figure out relationships, life-direction and finding their place in the real world, while making a heck of a lot of mistakes along the way.
	#17 Belong - October Language Too minimal and unstructured to be shoegazer. Too fuzzy to be ambient. October Language is virtually impossible to classify, and it's challenging, enthralling listening from start to finish. Occasioanlly bearing a slight resemblence to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works: Vol 2, Belong's debut release consists entirely of guitar drone, distortion and glitch, which combine to create an overall soundscape that will absolutely immerse you. While Aphex Twin's masterpiece had repeating motifs for you to cling to, Belong offers no such luxury - the tracks drift and flow in a seemingly random manner, with elements of the instrumentation withering away without warning, only to reemerge (with just as little warning) at a later point. All this makes the album sound organic and totally directionless. This is unique, unpredictable and haunting music, and it's totally unlinke anything else you've heard before.
	#16 The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America The Hold Steady seem to make pub rock sound much smarter than you'd ever expect. Craig Finn's vocals seem to suggest that he's actually drunk while singing, yet his lyrics are often insightful and literary to a level some singer/songwriters never reach, and the music is Springsteenesque guitar and piano fireworks all the way. There's just so much to enjoy about a band unashamedly doing what they love really well - particularly when what they love is dorky, bluesy, classic rock. Opening track "Stuck Between Stations" has become one of my favourite songs of the year, with it's upbeat instrumentation and slurred vocals only being surpassed by its absurdly powerful and celebratory mid section. The bursts of guitar that explode out of Craig Finn's vocals and the Billy Joel-styled piano work are just so jubilant that you won't be able to keep the smile from your face. "Massive Nights" is another great highlight - a best-ever-night-out-on-the-town anthemic soundtrack to end all others, with the song's chorus - simply "We had some massive nights" followed by a multiple vocal "woh-oh-oh-oh-oh!" - demands to be sung along to like little else. Boys and Girls in America is rowdy, cleverly written and a hell of a lot of fun.
	#15 The Pipettes - We Are the Pipettes I read an interview with Rose Pipette (she's the redhead) a few months back, in which she said that, for their first album, the group didn't want to worry about experimentation (that could be left for We Are the Pipettes followup), but simply wanted to make an extremely catchy, 60s-styled, girl-pop album without a single moment of filler - all hits, from start to finish. With this, their debut album, the trio has admirably acheived this goal. We Are the Pipettes is a consistently great listen, packed with teriffic pop songs that just beg to be sung along to. The introductory chant of "We Are the Pipettes" is a great way to open the album, while the doo-wop vocal harmonies of "Pull Shapes", "Your Kisses Are Wasted on Me", "ABC" and "I Love You" are gleefully addictive. They may be a band with an unmissable gimmick, but with this release they've proven they have the talent to back it up.
	#14 Built to Spill - You in Reverse There's something about Built to Spill - they seem to take all the ordinary components of a standard rock song and then just do something incredibly clever with them, and then you end up with an album like You in Reverse. I find it tricky to describe exactly what it is that's so good about this group, further than a simple "They're just a really good lo-fi rock group!", so I'll try to explain it by explaining what I love about the album's best track. "Conventional Wisdom" is a very serious contender for Song of the Year honours. To put it as simply as possible, this is a two and a half minute gem of pop/rock encased inside a 7 minute guitar-rock experiment. The song opens with a guitar solo, moves into said pop/rock gem, then another guitar solo, then a math-rock guitar interlude, then another math-rock guitar interlude, then another guitar solo, and then yet another guitar solo layered over the top of the first one. Not only is "Conventional Wisdom" so cleverly constructed, but it's also just incredibly enjoyable from start to finish. Obviously that's the album's high point, but the rest of You in Reverse has the same inspiring creativity and craftmanship running through it, making it a truly fantastic rock album.
	#13 The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely John Darnielle's powerfully emotional songwriting continues on Get Lonely. Few critics will agree with me, but I think this surpasses The Sunset Tree in every way (except, I suppose, the presence of a fist-pumping, anthemic single like "This Year"). The lyrical content here is super-sharp, and Darnielle's approach - examining the aftermath of a breakup by focusing on all the little things - is crushingly poignant. One track off Get Lonely is likely to ring more true with listeners than an entire album of overwrought soul-searching, since Darnielle's observational approach is always firmly rooted in the understated reality of these sorts of situations - from accidentally making more coffee than necessary to packing up mutual posessions. The album only reaches genuine drama at the peak of its devestating suicide-finale, simply titled "In Corolla", yet even this track has an undeniable tone of somber resignation. As it winds to a close, it's more or less impossible not to feel affected.
	#12 Sunset Rubdown - Shut Up I Am Dreaming If, like many others, your favourite song off Apologies to the Queen Mary is "I'll Believe in Anything", then Shut Up I Am Dreaming, the full-length debut for Spencer Krug's Sunset Rubdown side-project, should completely blow you away. There's nothing here that quite measures up to "I'll Believe in Anything" (although a couple of tracks come close), but this is all Krug - all stunningly passionate vocals - all the time. His intense delivery is as spine-tingling as ever, and the album is brimming over with emotional highpoints. The fuzzy, psychedelic-rock on which most of the tracks are based suits Krug's style of songwriting perfectly, and the album's best pieces - from the bombastic "Stadiums and Shrines II", to the jangly "Snake's Got a Leg III" and the fantastic closer "Shut Up I Am Dreaming of Places Where Lovers Have Wings" - all inspire the sort of listener response that his fans have come to expect.
	#11 Beck - The Information Why do people keep putting this alongside Guero as another "modelled on his earlier material" album? Maybe I'm missing something, but The Information doesn't especially remind me of any of Beck's past work. I saw this album as a return to form, after the somewhat lacklustre Guero, with Beck making a genuine surge towards the high quality work that was typical of his mid-to-late-90s glory days. The album adventures through plenty of new territory - "Elevator Music", "Cellphone's Dead" and "1000BPM" all give new takes on Beck's long-known love of hip-hop, "Strange Apparition" sees him experimenting with boisterous gospel, "Dark Star" and "Soldier Jane" delve into ambient electronica, "New Round" dabbles in dub and the album's 10 minute closer ventures into post-rock territory. Only "Nausea" could really be regarded as a revisitation of past work, but its solid, addictive riff and singalong chorus make it a great lead single. The Information is an engrossing and fascinating album - one which demands plenty of extra listens and close attention to reveal all of its hidden treasures.
	#10 TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain This one's going to be placing high up in just about every Albums of the Year list you could care to track down, and deservedly so. TV on the Radio's second album took everything that was great and weird and promising about Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes and Young Liars before it, and made it even better. The bizzare, dischorded synth that opens the album is one of the most hypnotic sounds on any release for the last few years, and upon hearing it you immediately know that Return to Cookie Mountain is going to be one hell of a trip. The post-rock instrumentation, highly unconventional vocals, bluesy guitar and bass lines and rampant, unrelenting experimentation combine perfectly to create an album of jaw-droppingly original songs, which are so strikingly memorable that they'll spur on dozens of repeat listens. The best thing of all, though, is that I'm not even sure they're reached their creative peak yet.
	#9 Juana Molina - Son Juana Molina is an Argentinian former soap star, who moved on to a career in recording during the 90s. Unlike most soap-star-turned-musicians, rather than hitting the solo popstar circuit, Molina decided to craft delicate folk songs, with subtle touches of electronica. Son is her fourth album, and it's a beautiful offering of non-conventional instrumentation, gently plucked guitar and some of the most gorgeous vocals you'll ever hear. Molina's singing is truly a unique delight, with her dewey, weathered vocals sitting front and centre on every track. Meanwhile, the gentle swirls of instrumentation and faint flickers of electronica (and we're talking about incredibly subtle electronica here - the Postal Service this is not) drift around beneath her. None of the lyrics are in English, but the entire album is so gorgeous - so wonderfully serene - that it won't matter for a moment.
	#8 Figurines - Skeleton This might just be the catchiest album of 2006. Skeleton, the second release by Denmark's Figurines, is an incredibly addictive slice of highly creative, carefully structured rock music. Frantic guitar riffs fly over energetic percussion, while Christian Hjelm's anxious, quirky vocals jitter their way through fourteen tracks of great (indeed, catchy) pop/rock, with faint touches of post-punk and even a brief detour into country. There's a very high level of consistency throughout the album, without a moment of filler to be heard. Figurines even had the guts to open the album with an utterly misleading, minimalist vocals & piano track. It's a nice introduction, and even serves to increase the impact of "The Wonder", which follows it with all the energy and enthusiasm you could possibly need. Other personal highlights include "Ambush" and "Other Plans", thanks to their memorable singalong choruses, and the smooth, two-track winddown at the end. That being said, I imagine this is one of those albums where everyone will have a different favourite.
	#7 Subtle - For Hero : For Fool Every year there seems to be a single hip-hop release that manages to blow me away (see Dalek, cLOUDDEAD, Deltron 3030, etc) and it looks like this year that award goes to Subtle. It's hardly surprising that I like this - the group features an ensemble of experimental em-cees including cLOUDDEAD's own Doesone. The wordplay here is frighteningly good, as vocalists chop and change and perform lyrical gymnastics around one another. On the album's best tracks, such as "The Mercury Craze" and "Midas Gutz", the vocals seem to tumble uncontrollably out from the array of beats and samples, in a continuous stream of utterly fascinating surrealism. If stock-standard rap/hip-hop doesn't do it for you, but you enjoy the more creative side of what the genre has to offer, you should consider For Hero : For Fool absolutely essential listening.
	#6 Destroyer - Destroyer's Rubies Destroyer's Dan Bejar (who is also a member of The New Pornographers) was a new discovery for me his year. I first heard Destroyer's Rubies early in the year, shortly after it's release, but initially it just didn't click. I gave it another try further down the track, and I must say that I'm very glad I did. This is a remarkable album, full of clever wordplay and emphatic vocals. Bejar's voice is definitely an aquired taste (even I didn't like it at first), but if you can get your head around his unconventional delivery - which combines the vocal warble of Bob Dylan with the impassioned delivery of Spencer Krug - there's a wealth of great music to be discovered. The album's highpoints, such as the stirring peak midway through "Looter's Follies" or the twangy acoustic guitar and rousing vocals towards the end of "Rubies", are utterly spine-tingling. Destroyer's Rubies cements Bejar's reputation as one of the most exciting singer-songwriters in modern music.
	#5 Asobi Seksu - Citrus The shoegazer revival seems to have reached its peak with Asobi Seksu's second album. Citrus is a showcase of hazy, swirling distortion, infectious riffs and hooky pop sensibilities. The group take My Bloody Valentine as an obvious reference point, but where that group's Loveless was more focused on meticulous craftsmanship and inpenetrable layers of sound (which made it more than a little bit arduous to get through), Asobi Seksu just want to play some catchy tunes. And Citrus really is ridiculously catchy, even beneath all that fuzzy guitar. Yuki Chikudate's vocals (which alternate between English and Japanese) are really teriffic, as her soft-spoken delivery really adds to the album's dreamy, etherial feel. Citrus's highlight tracks include "Strawberries", "Thursday", "Strings" and "Nefi+Girly", which are amongst the year's best and most addictive songs.
	#4 Girl Talk - Night Ripper Night Ripper is, hands down, the party album of the year. If you're like me, and you find that the novelty of a mashup wears off after about thirty seconds, but during those thirty seconds you're absolutely loving it, then Girl Talk is definitely the artist for you. Every track on Night Ripper is made up of dozens of miniature mashups, all strung together and frequently overlapping, with a precision often lacking from similar work. Each track flows seamlessly into the next one, thus giving the entire production the feeling of a professional DJ set. The combinations of song-snippets, which usually combine hip-hop vocals with highly recognisable pop/rock instrumentation, are by turns inspiring, surprising and hillarious, and there's plenty of slices of pop-culture for the listener to identify - Neutral Milk Hotel, Will Smith, Sophie B. Hawkins, The Beatles, Smashing Pumpkins, Lady Sovereign, Phil Collins, The Pixies, Nirvana, The Verve, Greenday, Elton John, Elastica, Nikka Costa and Missy Elliott, just to name a few out of well over a hundred. Not only is Night Ripper an extremely danceable party album, but it's an extensive lesson in recent musical history to boot.
	#3 The Thermals - The Body, The Blood, The Machine The Body, The Blood, The Machine is a bombastic, visceral attack on targets ranging from organised religion to human rights abuses to war for oil. "Here's Your Future" and "I Might Need You to Kill" provide a phenomenally angry one-two punch for the album's opening, only to be followed by the thrashy grunge-punk of "An Ear For Baby". It's not until the album's penultimate track though, that The Thermal's let loose with their most brilliant work. "Power Doesn't Run on Nothing" is one of the most furiously brilliant protest songs I've ever heard, with scathing lyrics like "We are old as hell and tell the children when to kill", "Our power doesn't run on nothing - we need the land you're standing on" and "They'll give us what we're asking for 'cause God is with us and our God's the richest" bringing together all of the targets of the album's fury into one monstrous statement. Nothing else released this year manages to combine so much energy and indignant rage so concisely.
	#2 Beirut - Gulag Orkestar Zach Condon's debut album is quite a remarkable piece of work. The backstory has become a pretty well known piece of internet folklore - Condon dropped out of school, travelled to Europe and was so taken with the experience that he wrote a sprawling concept album. The music itself - folk stylings, laden with horns, accordian, ukelele and a host of eastern-European instruments - is genuinely breathtaking, and sounds unlike anything else to come out of the current American folk-music scene. Regardless of backstory, Gulag Orkestar is a brilliant record, full of creative, powerfully emotional songwriting. When you take into account that it's also the debut album by a nineteen year old, you realise you've truly hit on something special. Zach Condon is without a doubt one of the most promising young musicians to hit the scene in years - everyone should be keeping an eye out for what he does next.
	#1 Joanna Newsom - Ys Newsom's 2004 debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, became not only one of my favourite records of 2004, but one of my favourites in general. What an amazing surprise is was, then, to have Ys come along and render that album nothing more than a developmental step. Don't get me wrong - the existense of Ys doesn't make her debut unlistenable - but there's no denying that Newsom has grown as a musician by leaps and bounds. Ys is mature, whimsical, creative and sounds utterly magical. Newsom has strengthened all of her minor weaknesses, sharpened her songwriting (it speaks volumes that this is an album of lengthy, vocally-driven tracks, which never drags for a moment), and yet still maintained all of her rustic charm. Memorable moments pop up regularly throughout the album's 5 tracks, as sentimental vocal turns, perfectly timed key-changes, subtle style-shifts and glorious crescendos sweep the listener away over and over. There's even an impressive who's who of indie-rock working behind the scenes, with Jim O'Rouke mixing, Steve Albini engineering, Van Dyke Parks handling the arrangements and Bill Callahan (of Smog) providing backing vocals on one track. Each of these people deserve recognition for their involvement, as they all provide valuable additions to the album - O'Rouke's mixing is impeccable, Albini captures every precious squawk and inflection in Newsom's voice perfectly (when her voice cracks it'll cut through you like a knife), Parks' incorporates a sea of strings into the recording which complement the songs yet never overshadow them and Callahan's charismatic vocals are a real treat. All that being said, though, this is undeniably Newsom's album. No matter how the songs are dressed up, they always come back to her exquisite vocals, tender harp playing and enticing storytelling. Ys has only been around since mid-November, and I've already listened to it many more times than anything else on this list. Or to put it another way - I can say without a hint of exageration that Ys is not only my favourite album of 2006, but the best thing I've heard so far this decade.