It’s almost time for everyone to start unveiling their multiple-page dissertations on the year in music, with lists and analysis and probably gorgeous x-y scatter charts waiting for us in about a month. For me, November signals a chance to look back at the year before. Inevitably, in the flurry of not-exactly-almost-barely post-game writeups every December, a couple of albums fly under the radar; November has always been a good time to look back and go, “gee, I listened to this album way more than the album I thought was the best last year! I’m an idiot!”

If there was a single phrase I could take back this year, it would be the introduction to my post on Charming’s 2006 album, Turn Down the Lights. Something about that album didn’t sit well enough with me, even though by all measures it’s a decent, occasionally outstanding, pop record. But maybe the words “peculiar, slightly chemical taste” were just a bit too much artistic license. The regret set in almost immediately: right after writing that post, I left town for a weekend to watch a couple of draws in the Canadian men’s curling championships, and the first night in the hotel I sat wondering if I’d been too harsh to Charming. Oh, and it didn’t help matters that upon returning home, I discovered one of the band members had left a sweet comment on the very post where I’d ripped out their heart and tossed it on the ground.

You see, I really liked Champagne and Magazines. “Guilt by Association” was one of my favourite songs of the year: a giddy indie rock song sprinkled with garish keyboards and the singalong factor turned up to 11. And then I discovered the band’s first, then out-of-print album, Giant, and found a collection of heartfelt college rock gems like “Ritual,” one of my favourite sadsack songs in university. So to talk about Charming the way I did earlier this year felt almost perversely like jilting a former lover, someone I maybe didn’t love anymore but didn’t wish any ill will, either. Maybe we should just call my relationship to Charming “complex” and leave it at that.

So in terms of the 2006 album most rehabilitated in my eyes, I think that honour would go to Turn Down the Lights. I still can’t come out and unabashedly declare my unconditional love for the album, because like it or not there’s still times when it gets a little too bland or drags too much. I still don’t really enjoy “Working Man,” though it’s probably the closest the album comes to Charming’s most popular song to date, “Downtown.” I still think the last quarter of the album is forgettable, and I still don’t understand why the band felt the Sunday suite was necessary when really “Sunday Afternoon” is the only part that qualifies as a song.

But on other elements I’ve come around. The more I listen to the title track, the more I love it. The working-girl-soul vibe works really well, and has pretty much become the song I think of whenever I think of Charming these days. And as for Nicole St. Clair Stoops not having enough brass to sing “Stranger (I Will Never Be)” effectively? Maybe I was wrong on that too—I mean, we can’t all be Aretha Franklin, right? And actually, once you stop trying to pretend it IS Aretha Franklin behind the mic, it turns out Stoops does a pretty good job with the song. Strange how you sound a lot better when people (i.e. me) stop comparing you in their head to the queen of soul.