Pitchfork’s perversity reaches new heights. I just scrolled through their Top 100 Tracks of 2006, wondering idly to myself what, if anything, they would have rated higher than Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, which (to these admittedly middle aged ears) bestrode the pop firmament this year like a colossus. The troubling answer to my question turned out to be: everything. Crazy wasn’t even ranked. Can you believe?

While I’m here, I might as well make reference to the other music that’s made an impression on me this year, one way or another. I’m not going to do a top ten, because frankly I’d have trouble coming up with ten new things I really even noticed this year, and what does immediately present itself is so enormously diverse that to rank them would be absurd. Something I’ve noticed about the innumerable top tens I’ve looked at in the last couple of weeks is that no-one agrees, even in a general way, about what was important this year. The last semblance of consensus has disappeared. Most lists contain ten recordings by people I’ve never heard of, or never heard, and each list is largely different from every other list. Hoping to summarise tendencies or movements in music now? Good luck with that.

The only new album this year that I’ve played end to end more than once, and continue to listen to in its entirety, is Joanna Newsom’s Ys. Anachronistic and utterly singular, it floats free of its context, sounding neither new nor old. In that respect, it recalls Astral Weeks and… and… I don’t know. Not much else. It’s the only album of the year, taken as a whole, that I would expect still to be playing in five or ten years’ time.

Mary Gauthier’s Mercy Now came out in 2005, but I hadn’t even heard of her until Dylan played the incredible I Drink on one of the early Theme Time radio shows back in May or June. She has no public profile to speak of, which I find baffling. If she’s destined to be a cult figure, sign me up for the cult.

Dylan’s own effort, Modern Times sounded okay at first listening; sounded rather better than okay, actually; it sounded groovy and fun. It still does, if I play the odd track again, but it just doesn’t draw me back. It doesn’t trouble me unduly; Dylan’s great contribution to the year was his utterly fantastic radio show.

Since The Wire named Burial their album of the year, I picked it up, and I keep trying with it, but it just sounds to me like a more than usually accomplished (and more than usually gloomy) blend of drum’n'bass shading into what used to be known as Trip-hop. Good, but not great.

Scott Walker’s The Drift is similarly impressive, but with the best will in the world, I couldn’t call it an enjoyable experience. I never understood why Tilt received the critical mauling that it did, back in the mid-90s; probably that said more about the shallowness of the (post-rave generation) critics than it did about the work itself. Ten years on, there is slightly more awareness of, and hence a more supportive context for Walker’s idiosyncratic furrow. The reviews were less panic-stricken. The record itself, however, is harrowing. I don’t think I’ll be playing it a lot, however much I might admire it.

Generally speaking, I’m playing much, much more old music than new. As Dylan responded to a listener on Theme Time, who wanted to know why he was playing so many old records, “well, there are a lot more old records than new records”. Also, new records, no matter how good they are, are going to take a while to impress themselves in a large collection, unless you’re the kind of music fan who plays the latest stuff, all the time. I can’t even relate to that mode of consumption anymore.

Toumani Djabate’s Symmetric Orchestra made Boulevard de l’Indépendence, by far the most joyful new noise of the year, so I’ll finish off with that.