The Top 50 Albums of 2006

>> Hate 'em, love 'em -- don't be shy in telling us -- but if you think you can really blow us away, build your own Best Album of the Year showcase here.. Yeah, you might even score some cash.

6 The Greatest [Listen]
CAT POWER
Chan Marshall faces up to death and despair on a record that justifies every lofty claim her devoted fans have always made for her. On The Greatest, she cuts deep soul with Memphis session men, which brings out the country in her Georgia-bred voice on hard-won ballads like "Could We." Ten years after her first great album, What Would the Community Think, she sounds like she's just getting started.

7 Hell Hath No Fury [Listen]
CLIPSE
Hell Hath No Fury is, in part, a showcase for Clipse's longtime buddies the Neptunes: All skeletal, insistent grooves and mind-fuck atmosphere, cuts like "Chinese New Year" are ill enough to raise goose bumps. Brothers Pusha T and Malice simply love to rhyme, and on a series of coke-slinging anthems their clever, singularly fluid flows intertwine like the two guys share a brain. And the banging "Wamp Wamp" and snap-track "Mr. Me Too" are simply head-and-shoulders above almost anything on radio.

8 Boys and Girls in America [Listen]
THE HOLD STEADY
Keyed to the Jack Kerouac line "Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together," the Hold Steady's third release in three years doesn't approach the faith-based weight of 2005's Separation Sunday, but it does make its point with an abundance of narrative flair. The saddest entry is "You Can Make Him Like You," for a pretty girl who always finds another guy when she gets tired of her boyfriend's buddies or music or drugs. The happiest is "Chillout Tent," where the sadness is comic, and the mook has his moment with the Bowdoin girl.

9 Blood Mountain [Listen]
MASTODON
When it comes to metal, subtle is just another word for not trying hard enough. So glory be to Mastodon for piling it on like there's no tomorrow, in the most acclaimed, most innovative, most iron-tusked and just plain heaviest metal album since Metallica ran out of gas. The lyrics go over the top with warrior-fantasy mythos, full of lion slicers, ice gods, ogres and dwarves, not to mention something about "the sheep's- head curse." These four Atlanta dudes grind it out fast or slow, or leap between math-prog tempo shifts without losing their sense of primal paranoid thunder.

10 Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards [Listen]
TOM WAITS
The running tale through this collection of fifty songs -- more than half are new recordings -- is the way Waits rummages through roots for inspiration, then bends them to his singular will. Waits still finds magic, waiting for overhaul, in Lead Belly, Jack Kerouac and the Ramones -- the cover of Da Brudders' "Danny Says" is a ragged stunner. So is the harrowing "Road to Peace," Waits' imagining of a young Palestinian's transformation into a suicide bomber -- and how the path of fundamentalism, on either side, is always a dead end.