"Thanks a lot!"
If you're an insane Harvey Milk fan, this was basically the best year of your life, or at the very least the best year of your life since sometime in the mid to late '90s. They released a new album, Special Wishes, that annihilated absolutely everything in its path (including critics' ability to put it on their year-end best-of lists, apparently) and a companion 7" to that album containing the best Leonard Cohen cover on a B-side probably ever. They also re-issued their fucking heaving monstrosity of genius (Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men) that had been criminally out-of-print for about 10 years, got the deluxe DVD treatment from Chunklet with Anthem, and played some, I can only assume, mind-melting shows to people who had the foresight to start living in and around Georgia and New York City. And its maybe worth mentioning that, for me, they went from being an old, kind of weird band from Athens with a sweet Thrones vibe to being one of my favorite bands of all time, from any genre, in a single year. Its a tough thing to explain, but these guys SMOKE (in every sense of the word!) and these are my picks for some of their smokingest moments of 2006:

Harvey Milk - "The End" (from Special Wishes)
Harvey Milk - "The Old Revolution" (from I Got a Love 7")
Harvey Milk - "The Lord's Prayer" (from Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men)

Simple things that have a name.
The other group of scraggly weirdos who vaulted out of nowhere into gold-star status in my mind was Dr. Dog. Try to resist the video for "Fool's Life"! Its nigh impossible. I didn't take good (or, y'know, any) notes on what I listened to everyday this year, but I think I can safely say Dr. Dog was on the agenda for anywhere between 250 and 300 days out of a possible 365 (or...366? I don't know.). They were the hardest working Beatles-y '70s lite-boogie band in show business, if show business consisted entirely of my drive to and from work and the couple of hours(?) right after I get home when I go through my daily internet routine. Easy Beat was the first big obsession, followed by the scrappy but kind of even more jaw-dropping Toothbrush. The icing on the cake was this past fall's Takers and Leavers EP, which featured a handful of songs that I didn't think I needed to hear until I heard them and then tried to go a couple days without hearing them. And then the ice cream to go with that cake was their track from the Fast Food Nation soundtrack. February 27, 2007 can't come soon enough, for real.

Dr. Dog - "Goner" (from Takers and Leavers)
Dr. Dog - "Worst Trip" (from Fast Food Nation: OST)