The Top 50 Albums of 2006 : Rolling Stone

>> 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.

26 FutureSex/LoveSounds [Listen]
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
It's been only four years since Timberlake established his solo cred with Justified, but from the sounds of FutureSex/LoveSounds, he has been keeping Cameron Diaz extremely busy. Timbaland lets his musical imagination run wild all over these tracks -- the results may be too arty and disjointed for some fans, but both the singer and the producer prove themselves worthy of the challenge in one of the year's most enduringly pleasurable hits.

27 Pieces of the People We Love [Listen]
THE RAPTURE
The Rapture's 2003 debut, Echoes, was a punk-funk shiver of late-night desolation, like catching your reflection in a mirror and noticing you've turned into a zombie. Now -- with help from Danger Mouse -- the New York quartet sounds warmer, happier, stronger, with Mattie Safer yelping, "I used to think life was a bitter pill/But it's a grand old time," over the studly bass of "W.A.Y.U.H." It's like the evolution Talking Heads made between Fear of Music and Remain in Light.

28 Broken Boy Soldiers [Listen]
THE RACONTEURS
The Raconteurs are a side project that rocks like a main dish. Jack White brings the raw garage-rock aesthetic, Brendan Benson shows pop sense and brightens the vocals with heavy-Badfinger radiance, and bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler nail it all down with elementary muscle. The album's only drawback: Everything here -- especially "Steady, as She Goes" and the closing glam-Zeppelin blues "Blue Veins" -- sounds even better live. Maybe they should have cut the album after the tour.

29 We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions [Listen]
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
The stories in these songs are as old as the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and sixteenth-century Scotland. But the truths and lessons of natural disaster, war and citizenship are as immediate as New Orleans, Iraq and the midterm elections. These big-band treatments combine Dixieland brass, cantina accordions and barn-dance fiddles and feature Springsteen in rough but vintage jubilant voice -- as if John Henry himself is hammering those spikes through the stage at the Stone Pony.

30 Robbers & Cowards [Listen]
COLD WAR KIDS
The Cold War Kids' debut wasn't quite the best indie-rock record of the year, but it might have been the most original: all cracked, soaring croons and shambling story-songs about alcoholics, killers and other shady characters, courtesy of L.A. boys doing Seventies-style rock with a dash of Southern gothic.