The Hip Young Gunslinger Tracks Of The Year 2006

We've spent the whole, ooh, however many days there have been since we wrote this, entirely soaked in gin, sniffing the insides of glowsticks. This, however, is not the reason for it being posted so late in the year. We just wanted to see if anything really amazing came out before we put it up (honestly) so we wouldn't be made to look like fools by some crazy-good Christmas singles. Luckily that isn't the case. Thanks Leona!

Enjoy then, The Hip Young Gunslinger Tracks Of The Year 2006

10. Balloon Factory - Dandi Wind
Okay, so it may be from 2005, but most people heard it this year as it featured on the sensational Alt Delete compilation, Digital Penetration. Coming over like the sound of Lil’ Chris losing a fight with a load of angry drum machines, fewer tunes this year were as mad, bad n’ rad as this one.

9. Weekends And Bleak Days (Hot Summer) - The Young Knives
Witty, catchy and a firm follower of the basic rule that The Only Good Indie Is That Which You Can Dance To, this track popped its punchy little ass out of speakers way back in early summer. Strange trips to Ibiza and disappointing follow-ups came next for The Knives (as no-one is calling them), but if our summer had been just half as glorious as this song’s shouty refrain was, well, we’d probably all still have fucking excellent suntans.

8. We Are Your Friends - Justice Vs. Simian
The method: take a four-year-old song by a rapidly-growing indiedance concern, rip out its shouty chorus, frantically mess about with its bassline, add bleeps, add a bit of your own tune, lose the brilliant bit where the bass guitar inverts and goes all bouncy and stuff after the chorus, and repeat for well over four minutes. The result: conquer dancefloors worldwide anyway. It’s easy when you’re this good.

7. Over And Over - Hot Chip
The first time we heard this, we had no idea how good it was. We had notions of it being “average” and “overhyped”. This went on for a couple of weeks at least, making it even harder in hindsight to fathom what the flaming fuck we were on about. It’s a sledgehammer of a song, a dancefloor destroyer of the highest order. To hear the bassline at the start of the intro and not start running around dancing like a loon meant only one thing: you were clearly no good at figuring out songs just from hearing basslines in their intros.

6. Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
Ever since Zane Lowe put this on his advert and we heard some guy singing it to his kid on the bus, we knew this was going to become something more than the slice of unfathomably cool 21st Century Soul it already was. And it did. Radio, Television, dads on buses; you couldn’t move this summer without hearing that most gigantic of choruses somewhere, and for once that didn’t matter. Everyone knew it, everyone loved it and it spent nine whole weeks at number one without ever being shit! Mighty.

5. Rehab - Amy Winehouse
Until Rehab, genius wit and raconteur Ms. Winehouse had somehow found herself lumped in with the grotesque “female jazz revolution”, typified by droning fools like Katie Melua et al. Not anymore. Anyone who saw her early interviews will have known she was a cut above the rest, and this year she proved it to everyone else. With the help of Mark Ronson she created a sexy slice of modern Motown that was not only a cracking song, but also further underlined the uselessness of shit revivalist groups like The Pipettes (you’re allowed to do old music, just do it new and better, like this). It’s not 168 seconds long, but it might just be the perfect pop song.

4. Maneater - Nelly Furtado
In times of need, when you don’t know who to trust, always remember this mantra: loose shirts, sandals and “a world feel” = bad; low-cut tops, tight jeans and “Timbaland producing” = very, very good. Nelly Furtado knows this. She knows this now, anyway. As does anyone else who had the immense pleasure of spending the summer being repeatedly beaten around the head by this most devastating of pop-attacks. Of all the tunes on the list, none was met with more shock and awe than the one that marked the (re-)birth of this star.

3. Sheila - Jamie T
We don’t know a lot about Jamie T. We know that he washes his hands before he goes to the toilet instead of afterwards because “technically, my dick is clean. It’s the world that’s dirty”. We know he’s fond of the phrase “Brap!” and that he can play the guitar. Ultimately though, we know surprisingly little other than the fact that, in Sheila, he’s created one of the most startling, original and downright brilliant songs of the year. A tale of London and the lives it holds within it, pinned together by the tragic story of the title character. Funny, angry, happy, sad, vital and throwaway, this song was at times as varied as the rogues gallery it portrayed. Above all else, it was mesmerising. We hear he’s pretty young too.

2. The Neon Plastix - On Fire
This song sounds a bit like what would happen if Franz Ferdinand and Fischerspooner got together on a collaboration, except it’s nowhere near as horrible as that would be. In fact, it’s quite sublime. Another cut from the Alt Delete Digital Penetration compilation, this also got a release this year as a double a-side with the equally delightful Dream. It embodied everything New Rave was about; it was fast, tight and sexy, with a chorus you could build empires on. It even featured an old-school piano breakdown so euphoric that rave veterans everywhere were seen weeping into their neon hankies, convinced it was still 1992 and that the past 14 years really had been nothing more than just a bad comedown. They were wrong, The Neon Plastix were right. The war was won. Send word to the battlefield.

1. Atlantis To Interzone - Klaxons
In a year so dominated by new rave there was only ever going to be one winner. From the moment that first siren sounded, anyone who heard this song was gripped. A three-minute moon buggy ride through some quite ridiculous terrain, it was also a track that divided all who encountered it. You either got it or you didn’t, but as Jamie Reynolds put it, “whether you like it or not, new rave is something that happened this year”, and with this track he and his bandmates provided the rallying battle cry for a whole new generation of glowsticked messmakers to go and get “MDMA-zing” all over the place. Klaxons, bells and vinyl scratches so brutal it sounded like they were actually trying to squeeze lemons into your earholes were all part of what made up this record’s genius, and the truly lunatic video merely confirmed what those who’d heard the tune already thought: this is a fucking brilliant band.

Honourable Mentions
No place for them on the list, but two other tracks get major ‘props’ this year. Firstly, The Streets’ Prangin Out, not least for becoming the dark and dirty anthem of choice for anyone who’s ever sweated out their own body weight in chemical guilt, but also for the remarkable act of making Pete Doherty actually seem vaguely relevant, if only for 38 seconds. Skinner, we salute you. The second one is Standing In The Way Of Control by The Gossip, because, well, HAVE YOU FUCKING HEARD IT?