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.

11 Continuum [Listen]
JOHN MAYER
Mayer's sixth disc made one thing clear: Homeboy has his shit together. Continuum is Mayer's most assured album yet, channeling familiar gifts -- fluid guitar-playing, sexy white-boy croon, strong tune sense -- with more subtlety, more focus and less lady-baiting cheese than ever. The result is a breezy pop-rock record that surrounds supremely crafted songs like "Vultures" with soul like "Gravity" and weightier stuff like "Waiting on the World to Change."

12 One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This [Listen]
THE NEW YORK DOLLS
David Johansen is no longer twenty-four, so this reunion album surprises by revealing the dirty little secret beneath the Seventies Dolls' playful pansexuality: religious emotion. "Dancing on the Lip of a Volcano" is explicitly pagan; "Take a Good Look at My Good Looks" begins, "Spirit slumbers in nature and awakens in mind" before asking, "So what if this old world is just artifice?" Everywhere Johansen mourns mortality and celebrates contingency in the most searching lyrics of the year -- lyrics deepened by how much fun the band is having.

13 Pearl Jam [Listen]
PEARL JAM
Pearl Jam's best studio album in a decade is like Vs. with politics -- iron-rock riffing and a lyric righteousness forged in real battle. "World Wide Suicide" and "Army Reserve" don't just protest the Iraq War and its disastrous consequences. These are songs about universal accountability (you need two sides to have a war) and the still-revolutionary power of individual dissent. "I will not lose my faith," Vedder sings on "Inside Job," a climactic fusion of Zep and Seventies Who. Now that's classic rock.

14 American V: A Hundred Highways [Listen]
JOHNNY CASH
The man in black was dying when he made this record, and he did not hide the truth of his condition. It is shocking to hear Cash fight to stay on pitch in "If You Could Read My Mind." But there is a deep strength and dignity in his performances and in the wisdom of songs such as Hank Williams' "On the Evening Train." V also includes the last song Cash ever wrote, "Like the 309," on which he growls and cracks wise like a guy on his way to a party instead of his last reward.

15 Wolfmother [Listen]
WOLFMOTHER
This wild-haired Australian trio flattened crowds all year with organ solos, 'nad-crushingly tight pants and riffs heisted from Zep, Sabbath and the Purp. Andrew Stockdale brings the Ozzy-Plant screech, the lyrics are true metal poetry, and when "Joker and the Thief" hits its power-drive climax, there isn't a bat in the room with its head still attached.