Ear in review

A friend of mine is organizing a year-in-review mix CD party. We did it last year as well, along with some Texas Hold 'Em poker, which I dominated, due to far too many hours spent watching the World Series of Poker on TV (It got so bad that I was able to identify several of the players by name).

Putting together my list of songs last year was easy. Having spent a good part of the year living in close proximity (30-minute walk) to a busy music venue in a major city, I saw a good number of shows so I merely picked one of my favourite songs from those bands that I had the chance to see live in 2006. So this is what I came up with:

1. Pilot - The Notwist
2. Black History Month (Alan Braxe and Fred Falke remix) - Death From Above 1979
3. Don't Run Our Hearts Around - Black Mountain
4. Modern World - Wolf Parade
5. Superconnected - BSS
6. My Heart Is An Apple - Arcade Fire
7. Proposition 61 - Most Serene Republic
8. The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead - Final Fantasy
9. Soft Revolution - Stars
10. Andvari - Sigur Ros
11. Cue The Strings - Low

This year, it's not so easy. The only show I saw was Final Fantasy back in September, I didn't buy a lot of new CDs, and there weren't a lot of artists that I got excited about hearing for the first time. If I just pick the songs that I got most excited about in '06, there'd be a lot of Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado.

My favourite foreign language music blog is doing a more ambitious, 50-track year in review, with a few good selections on Day 1 and Day 2. In particular, you can expect to find some Junior Boys and MSTRKRFT among my favourite 10 or 15 tracks from this year. I also really like the track "When You Go Out" (mp3) from Sebastien Grainger, the non-MSTRKRFT half of DFA1979. I enjoyed LCD Soundsystem's 45:33, but I don't want to take up two-thirds of a mix-CD with one track.

So perhaps 2006 has been a dancy kind of year. Which would be a return to my roots, in a way, to the days when I first started buying music and I thought the only stuff that was cool was from the Hackers soundtrack.