And the last three records of my top 30 albums of the year are:

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
Okay — when I started compiling my best of the year, I said that I hadn’t yet heard the Tom Waits 3 CD set. That was rectified almost immediately, and — as I suspected — records had to be moved aside to make room.

This is not one of my favourite albums of 2006… it’s three of my favourite records of 2006.

And it is a set containing three distinct albums of cast-offs, rarities and oddities — along with a good 30-odd new tunes. Divided into Brawlers (harder-edged and harder drinking roadhouse rock and blues); Bawlers (the more heart-wrenching ballads and country waltzes) and Bastards (an assortment of weirdness, from Kerouac poems, to a discussion of the nasty and murderous habits of insects). Put like that, it sounds a little daunting — but it’s a collection you’ll fall in love with immediately.

I can’t recommend this album (set) any more highly than the reviews in the mainstream press and some of the bigger music websites, which say things like:

An outstanding musical creation… that nods to almost every known genre of American music, and some that have yet to be named.

– Observer Music Monthly

Astounding… More even than his Exile On Main St., this is Tom Waits’ Basement Tapes.

– Mojo

Waits may call them orphans, but another artist would call this a career.

– The Onion A/V Club

Though the set’s marathon length may keep casual listeners at a distance, fans of the eccentric characters, styles, and emotional arcs that compose Waits’ oeuvre know there’s no such thing as a “casual” Tom Waits listener anyway.

– Spin

The collection is one of the best releases of 2006 because Tom Waits is one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

– All Music

Compiled from various stages of his career, with varying fidelity but weirdly without varying quality, Orphans is the singularly odd cutting-room comp that serves as an equally decent introduction to a career.

– Pop Matters

The jumble of stuff that spills out — from Delta blues to nineteenth-century ballads to spoken-word rambles — is surprisingly consistent, at times transcendent, and not just for people intimately acquainted with Waits’s honeyed craziness.

– Blender

Genius.

– New Musical Express

And that concludes my top 30 albums of 2006.

The Wireless as we know it has hereby come to an end. I started it in April 2002 and it has taught me a lot about blogging — but now it’s time for things to change.

This site will now take a short break for a week while I’m in Amsterdam giving and receiving, partaking and imbibing… and The All-New Wireless will be launched on January 1st, 2007.

It will look quite similar, but what I do and what it’s all for will be very different. Of course, it will still be me, and it will still be you — and that’s what counts. I’m looking forward to it.

Have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Cheers,

Dubber