Sensurround

Or, the sounds of catastrophic disaster.

By Johnny Ray Huston

'IT'S RAINING SO hard, looks like it's going to rain all night." So sings the Soul Queen of New Orleans, Irma Thomas, on one of her greatest songs.

"Drip-drop," her backing vocalists harmonize. –I'm a child of the disaster movie era. My formative days and nights were spent in the darkness of the Detroit area's long-gone movie palaces – theaters like the tiki-themed Mai Tai – watching Shelley Winters embark on a heroic underwater swim and Karen Black land a supersonic plane. Gravel-voiced and casually glamorous, Genevieve Bujold in Earthquake was my babysitter, guarding me from Sensurround, blasts of sound so strong they could – according to Halliwell's Film Companion – crack ribs. "What happened to the mind of Jennifer Jones?" the great, late John Wieners asks in one of his poems. My answer might be that she lost it falling from the great glass elevator in The Towering Inferno.

This year, children didn't need to look to Irwin Allen for mass tragedy. The first one hit in January, when the man my mom calls "the Idiot" was sworn in again. Come summer, a new hurricane seemed to hit the South every month, allowing Barbara Bush the opportunity to venture beyond Angela Lansbery territory with some hideously and hilariously out-of-touch comments that her son might as well have screen-printed and worn as a T-shirt. The City of the Dead soon became the cause of the moment for pop stars, though only Kanye West injected truth into clear channels. More typical were Destiny's Child, who, during an Oakland concert, dedicated a gospel number to Katrina victims that – in a serious lapse of taste – was paired with images of crashing waves.

Heard today, the "drip-drop" harmony of Thomas's "It's Raining" seems like Bush-era water torture. I wouldn't want to leave her legacy – or Big Star's, or the Meters' – in FEMA's hands.

"I've got the blues so bad / I can hardly catch my breath," Thomas sings. "The harder it rains, the worse it gets."

Three more years, people – hope to see you at the end of them.

Johnny Ray Huston's 10 letters from an alphabet of 2005 delights

A is for Annie's "Heartbeat" (Big Beat/ADA).

B is for Benjamin Biolay's À L'Origine (EMI International), Vashti Bunyan's Lookaftering (DiCristina Stair), and Kate Bush's "A Coral Room" (from Aerial, Columbia).

C is for crazy Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together" (Island), Keyshia Cole's "Love, I Thought You Had My Back" and "You've Changed" (from The Way It Is, A&M), Cobra Killer's 76/77 (Monika), and Cut Copy's Bright Like Neon Love (Modular).

D is for Dungen's Ta Det Lugnt (Subliminal Sounds/Kemado) and Dungen (Subliminal Sounds).

G is for the Gossip's scorching versions of "Standing in the Way of Control" and "Jealousy," live at Bimbo's May 26.

H is for Hey Willpower's Hey Willpower EP (Cochon) and live dance party at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts April 15.

J is for the way Jobriath's "Inside" (from Lonely Planet Boy, Sanctuary) puts Rufus Wainwright to shame.

S is for Sleater-Kinney's The Woods (Sub-Pop).

T is for the Taxi sample within Tweet's oft-terrific and sadly ignored It's Me Again (Atlantic/WEA).

V is for the various artists gloriously gathered by Saint Etienne to create my favorite comp of the year, The Trip (Family Recordings).