And 2006 is over!

2006 was the year of our first born - so were there any other great deliveries in that year?

Well, the year started with some absolutely dreadful albums and a plethora of best ofs (which I avoided) - mostly "big" releases in time for Xmas.  But, as we travelled back in time the variety improved and there were some hidden gems in there, as well as some major disappointments.

The ownership ratio was higher than I was expecting this year - I thought I'd stopped buying albums by this time, but it seems like there were still the odd one or two purchases being made (mostly either for or by my wife).  Fifteen albums seems like a decent hit rate for the year and we can chuck another couple on top of that for albums that I'd already covered from Arctic Monkeys and The Jam. 

Looking at the best selling albums of the year, Snow Patrol easily won the year selling over 1.5 million copies which put it way ahead of Take That at 1.1 million - but it has to be noted that Take That only released their album in November and it sold another million in 2007.  The next four all sold over a million as well - Scissor Sisters, Arctic Monkeys (released in 2005), The Kooks and Razorlight.  Oasis give us our first compilation album of the chart at #7 (and we saw/ignored a lot of compilation albums this year - there are nine more in the year's top 50) and Westlife, P!nk and James Morrison complete the top 10.

Albums which surprised me in the rest of the top 50 are The Killers (#12 - feels very generous), Keane (#14 - ditto), James Blunt (#22 - this was released in 2004), Kelly Clarkson (#30 - I don't remember her doing much at all over here), Robbie Williams (#33 - that really is a shocker of an album) and Nina Simone (#40 - very high considering she died in 2003).

So - what about the albums I had to endure this year?  Once again (as always) it was a pretty male-oriented year - looking at male solo artists, James Morrison had the best selling album of the year and that was certainly one of the better ones.  He was, however, closely followed by Jack Johnson and that was certainly not one of the better ones.  Other albums from the guys I liked were Morrissey, James Blunt, Damien Rice and Lemar - I'm afraid most of the other ones kinda blurred into obscurity except for Robbie (of course), David Gilmour (impressively forgettable!) and Thom (Yorke, not Sandi - for just being so stereotypically Thom).  Robbie gets another mention for being the only artist who was seen twice - and I had to ignore one of his best ofs as well!

There were a lot of male groups in the charts this year and a lot of them definitely gave a 2006 sound - Razorlight, The Kooks, The Feeling, The Automatic, Orson, Kaiser Chiefs, The Raconteurs (which was a pleasant surprise) and Dirty Pretty Things all very much peaked in this year (or 05).  Take That, Westlife, Kasabian, Muse, Embrace and Pet Shop Boys all get a mention for showing slightly more longevity but I'd struggle to say any of them produced their best work in this year (but conversely, none of them were terrible).  The stand-out effort in terms of awfulness was quite obviously The Strokes - that really was an appalling offering which somehow managed to get to #1.  I'm also going to call out Tenacious D for doing something different and being surprisingly successful with it - I didn't love it, but it was certainly a refreshing change.

So how did the women do this year?  Unsurprisingly, things were better than 1973 - but not by a huge amount.  There were nine albums which can be fully considered as "female" albums and two more with a visible female presence - Lily Allen and KT Tunstall clearly offered up the best albums, with Corinne Bailey Rae and Kelly Clarkson also deserving an honourable mention.  Everyone else was at least listenable, with the exception of Pussycat Dolls who need to have a good think about what they've done on several fronts.

Looking at the #1 albums for the year, we saw 34 different albums at the top and 29 debuts at the top, all of which fits into the general trend of those numbers going up as the years pass.  Arctic Monkeys spent four weeks at the top, which was the most - with Snow Patrol and RHCP both claiming three (with one of those albums being way more deserving of it than the other).

The generally accepted (by the internet or me) albums from this year that we didn't come across were Camera Obscura's Let's Get Out Of This Country (no chart entry ever, but I liked it!), J DIlla's Donuts (also uncharted territory), Cat Power's The Greatest (this managed the dizzy heights of #45), Joanna Newsom's YS (#41 - I hated this, but the critics loved it!), The Knife's Silent Shout (no chary entry, but it's is a fine album), Amy Winehouse's Back To Black (we just missed this because of Rudebox, but we'd catch up with it when we get to '07 - if we hadn't already reviewed it many moons ago), Hot Chip's The Warning (#34 - this isn't bad at all), The Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury (never heard of it and it's never charted), Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor (#31), Regina Spektor's Begin To Hope (#54, but definitely one of my favourites), Jarvis Cocker's Jarvis (#37 - I own this and like bits of it a lot), Silversun Pickup's Carnavas (another of my recommendations, but it never charted), The Gossip's Standing In The Way Of Control (#22 - a great track, if not a great album) and Tool's 10,000 Days (a surprisingly high #4 but definitely not my kind of thing).

My other random thought on the year would be the seemingly large number of best of albums that I had to ignore (as was shown up by the year end top 50).  I kinda understand why they're all in the charts these days but I'm not sure why we all went so mad for them back in 2006 - I suspect that's a question I'll never get an answer to though.

One last pair of statistics for the year - the most read post was Snow Patrol, which seems kinda reasonable and the least read was Sandi Thom, which seems harsh, since "she" (OK, her Twitter account) was one of the few people to take a look.  So, go on people, get those numbers up for Sandi.

So, did I enjoy 2006?  There was an awful lot of average about, but there was some bright spots.  Overally, it felt a very British set of albums - the US provided the superstars (Beyoncé, P!nk, Justin, Christina and Kelly) but most of the rest of it is homegrown, often pretty low-key.  It was also nice not to have to wade through swamps of interminably boring hip-hop - The Streets and Robbie's piss-poor efforts on Rudebox are all we saw this year.  Picking a top three, I'd go for KT Tunstall's An Eye To The Telescope, Lily Allen's Alright, Still and Kaiser Chiefs Employment - and Hard-fi and James Morrison can consider themselves unlucky not to sneak in there.

So, where to next?  Well, having done the birth of one child it would seem rude not to cover the other one - in fact, it's a legal requirement due to the Equitable Parenting Act of 1937, which is a big thing in our house (what do you mean you've never heard of it?).  And after that, I suspect 1968 might be the next stop..

25/12/05 - Oh joy
01/01/06 - A pleasingly unhateful album
26/12/10 - Oh good, them again