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The End of 2007 Wrap Up

As far as I'm concerned, 2007 has been an almost ridiculously good year for music. I've heard so many amazing albums this year, that I've been forced to expand my usual Top 20 to a Top 25, simply because I couldn't stand the thought of numbers 21-25 missing out on the recognition they deserve. Hell, even a sizeable bunch of the albums that didn't make that cutoff were excellent. I'm still finding it a bit hard to believe the releases I've had to relegate to the status of...

Honourable Mentions

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
Frog Eyes - Tears of the Valedictorian
Panda Bear - Person Pitch
The National - Boxer
Battles - Mirrored
Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Deerhunter - Cryptograms
Iron and Wine - The Shepherd's Dog
Med Baird - Dear Companion
Akron Family - Love is Simple
Thurston Moore - Trees Outside the Academy
Phosphorescent - Pride
Rhys Chatham - A Crimson Grail (for 400 Electric Guitars)
Liars - Liars

In any other year, most of these would've been pretty likely to have made the top twenty. It's also worth noting that of the albums that did make the list, everything in the top six had a definite chance at being number one. Not a bad year at all, if you ask me.

One of those honourable mentions is worthy of particular note, as it contained my choice for 2007's...

Song of the Year

The 9-minute epic "Bushels", by Canadian band Frog Eyes well and truly blew me away this year, and it continues to astound me every time I listen to it. Few songs this year came close to matching its infectious energy, bare emotion and utterly fierce intensity. The song's main section was just as touching as anything I've ever heard before, but its finale was the biggest revelation, as the jangly, unconventional instrumentation combined with Carey Mercer's spine-tingling, feverish vocals to deliver something uniquely memorable and completely uplifting. While the album on which it appears wasn't quite good enough to make it past the "honourable mention" stage, I found the song to be so utterly captivating that I felt it deserved its own detailed mention. Track it down and have a listen - if it only affects you one tenth as much as it did me, it'll still have been worth it.

Now, all that's left is to find out which albums made it onto the list. Read on!


The Top 25 Albums of 2007


#25 A Place to Bury Strangers - A Place to Bury Strangers

With the shoegazer aesthetic hitting the listener loud and clear, no one could possibly deny that A Place to Bury Strangers are a band who wear their influences on their sleeve. However, it's what they do with these influences - essentially writing a stack of Jesus and Mary Chain tributes and then channeling them through a wall of crushingly forceful guitars, immense percussion a wider range of effects pedals than initially seems neccessary - that make the band something really special.

Best track: "Don't Think Lover"

#24 Amon Tobin - Foley Room

After a few years of comparitive inactivity (video game soundtracks and live recordings totally don't count), Amon Tobin returned with Foley Room, an album that continued the transition into sci-fi imagery that began on Out From Out Where, and added to his drum & bass blueprint a newfound focus on found sounds and an overtly experimentatal mindset. Just as catchy and creative as his previous efforts, and arguably more internally consistent, Foley Room marks a triumphant addition to his already highly impressive body of work.

Best Track: "At the End of the Day"

(Full Review)

#23 Blonde Redhead - 23

I swear that wasn't intentional (no, really!). Blonde Redhead's 23 proved to be one of 2007's most gorgeously swirly, etherial works, drawing together shoegazer, dream pop and straight-up rock music to create an album that married dense noise and infectious rhythm and melody with pinpoint precision. Interestingly, 23 is bookended by its best pieces - the upbeat title-track which opens the album and the slow, romantic closer "My Impure Hair". If you need a sample to try before you buy, look no further than those two.

Best Track: "My Impure Hair"

#22 Hiromi Uehara - Time Control

I'm not a huge Jazz aficionado, but I know what I like, and I really like Time Control. Uehara proves herself to be an utterly exceptional jazz pianist, incorporating multiple styles into her impressively complex playing and rounding it out with a semi-improvisational flair that's impossible to resist. The album is infused with both a loveable quirkiness and a sentimental, "soundtrack" vibe that really shine through on every track, and the other musicians do an excellent job of providing the guitar, bass and other touches that round out Uehara's sound.

Best Track: "Real Clock vs. Body Clock = Jet Lag"

#21 El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead

The third full-length from Brooklyn-based rapper El-P is an unrelenting barrage of jarring production, punchy vocals and paranoid, cynical subject matter, with the emcee focusing his blistering disdain on a shadowy, all-too-real distopia of violence, population-control, mistrust, drugs and near-total dysfunction. While this is easily one of year's most angry and abbrasive hip-hop releases, I'll Sleep When You're Dead is nonetheless infused with the sort of excellent, twisty delivery and memorable beats and samples that also make it one of the most sonically memorable.

Best Track: "Tasmanian Pain Coaster (Featuring The Mars Volta)"

#20 Vic Chesnutt - North Star Deserter

North Star Deserter was the first album by veteran singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt to be released through post-rock specialty label Constellation, and it features a host of that label's standard players in accompaniament. Members of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, A Silver Mt Zion and others make contributions, primarily on squally, electric guitar and majestic strings, that make for a unobtrusive but extremely moody background, constantly anchored around Chesnutt's meditative guitar plucks and weathered vocal. The greatest pleasure comes late in the album, with the back-to-back epics of "Debriefing" and "Marathon", a prolonged highpoint of spine-tingling intensity.

Best Track: "Marathon"

#19 Von Sudenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions

Mark E. Smith of The Fall lends his obnoxious delivery to English electronica duo Mouse on Mars for this album of rowdy, dancefloor-burning electro-rock. Smith's glorious attitude shines through on Tromatic Reflexxions, and hearing his boarish vocal layered over the top of these dance beats and synths paints a picture of the reknowned troublemaker perhaps getting fantastically drunk and crashing a rave. Better still, Smith turns out to be one of those drunks who actually does sound as good as he thinks he does. It doesn't get much more fun than this.

Best Track: "Fledermaus Can't Get Enough"

#18 Sir Richard Bishop - While My Guitar Violently Bleeds

It might be a very funny title for an album, but it doesn't really give the right impression - no, While My Guitar Violently Bleeds isn't a thrashy metal album. It is, in fact, an album of three stripped back, single-guitar instrumentals that incorporate styles of folk music from all across the globe. Consisting of one short track and two very long ones, the album serves as an extensive showcase of Bishop's tremendous ability - particularly in the area of his trademark rapid playstyle. The final touch is the perfect recording technique, which captures every fret movement and pick strum in beautiful clarity, making for an album that feels wonderfully intimate.

Best Track: "Zurvan"

#17 Feist - The Reminder

Leslie Feist returned this year with an album that seems to have been well-recieved in virtually every corner of the music world, from mainstream music lovers to hipster kids to casual, "musical tourists". I think I've even encountered some metal-heads on the net who liked it. This makes perfect sense, of course, as The Reminder sees Feist's silky-smooth style spread across strutting grooves ("My Moon My Man" and "Sea Lion Woman"), exhuberant guitar-pop ("I Feel it All" and "Past in Present"), a handful of exquisitely beautiful tear-jerkers (of which "The Park" stands above all others) and tops it all off with the ubiquitous hit "1 2 3 4". It's a huge cliche to say so, but this album really did have something for everyone.

Best Track: "I Feel it All"

#16 Patrick Wolf - The Magic Position

Patrick Wolf's third outing is an attention-grabbing work of dense, semi-orchestral music that trades off between dark, theartrical pieces and exhuberant slices of pop. The Magic Position delivered one of 2007's biggest suprises, as it saw the usually-serious-to-the-point-of-being-melodramatic Wolf let his hair down on a handful of tracks - namely "The Magic Position", "Accident and Emergency" and "Get Lost" - resulting in some unexpected turns of heart-on-the-sleeve romanticism. Who knew this guy had such an excellent grasp on pop songwriting?

Best Track: "The Magic Position"

#15 Radiohead - In Rainbows

The year's most hotly anticipated release (for all of ten days) also turned out to be one of its best, and hearing Radiohead bounce back after the lacklustre Hail to the Thief was immensely satisfying. In Rainbows proved to be a short-and-sweet work of art-rock that somehow sounded unlike any other single Radiohead record and yet sounded a little bit like all of them. The band took a much-needed step away from their dreary world-view and harsh, mechanical style to deliver their most human, most undeniably comfortable album in over a decade.

Best Track: "15 Step"

(Full Review)

#14 Racoo-oo-oon - Behold Secret Kingdom

Racoo-oo-oon create noisy, chaotic, instrumental guitar-rock combined with utterly brutal percussion and numerous passages of chanted, nonsensical vocals. Behold Secret Kingdom turned out to be something of an unexpected pleasure - an album that's hugely energizing, gleefully sinister and extremely tight and well-played (despite its seemingly rough, rawkus style) across its eight tracks. For fans of post-rock who want something a little more wild and untamed, these guys are definitely worth your time.

Best Track: "Visage of the Fox"

#13 Beirut - The Flying Club Cup

Beirut's debut Gulag Orkestar was a work of suprising brilliance, with Zach Condon displaying songwriting ability and maturity that belied his young age. It was a huge pleasure, then, to find that the followup, this year's The Flying Club Cup, is its equal in every way, possibly even its superior. With a lusher, full-band sound and a notable expansion on the ideas presented in the debut, The Flying Club Cup is a truly gorgeous work of heartstring-tugging, Eastern-European-styled folk music, by turns melancholy and thrillingly uplifting.

Best Track: "(untitled final track)"

#12 Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond

With the release of Beyond, the long awaited return of Dinosaur Jr - one of the pre-grunge era's greatest and most influential bands - proved to be a resounding success. With amazing musicianship, top-notch songwriting, near-total cohesion and an utterly familiar sound, Beyond suggests a gap between releases of a year at most, let alone the actual ten that have passed. J. Mascis' love of overnblown, 80s hard-rock remains firmly intact, and Beyond is filled with plenty of his trademark guitar solos, that pack an emotional whallop and seem to just get bigger and bigger with no upper limit in sight. This is how to make a comeback album.

Best Track: "Pick Me Up"

#11 Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover

With Random Spirit Lover, Spencer Krug took the lo-fi, psych-rock blueprint he made with last year's Shut Up I Am Dreaming and improved on it in virtually every way. The songs are tighter and more well-structured, the instrumentation is glorious, Krug's vocals are feverishly impassioned and everything about the album screams ambition and creativity. Throughout 2005 and 2006, it looked like Krug was shaping up to be one of indie-rock's most compelling, critically acclaimed voices - this latest album provides us with another very convincing reason for all that praise.

Best Track: "Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days"

(Full Review)

#10 King Khan & The Shrines - What Is?!

In the realm of the ever-trendy garage-rock revival scene, there are few bands who can match the catchy, raw and untamed exhuberance of King Khan and The Shrines. What Is?!, the German thirteen-piece's third release, is an album of upbeat, exciting rock music. Sporting thrashy guitar riffs, killer percussion, playful keys, a full brass section and one of rock music's most awesome vocalists in King Khan himself, this is a band that boasts a crushing, undoubtably full sound. What Is?! rocks out in the very best of ways, and it's just an incredibly fun time, pure and simple.

Best Track: "Outta Harm's Way"

#9 Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights

In my review of 100 Days, 100 Nights I proclaimed that Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings were the most authentic sounding genre-revival band - in any genre - on the scene today. One listen to this, their latest album, and I suspect you'll find it hard to disagree, as Jones and crew create soul music that sounds like it came straight out of the late-sixties. Authenticity isn't everything, though, and the group back up their convincing sound with exceptional songwriting, brilliant musicianship and downright spectacular vocals from Jones herself. Whether it's tender gospel numbers or funky dancefloor-burners, she displays skill, versatility, attitude and a depth of voice that only comes with years of experience.

Best Track: "Nobody's Baby"

(Full Review)

#8 Okkervil River - The Stage Names

The Stage Names proved to be a triumphant followup to Black Sheep Boy, the album which propelled Okkervil River out from the underground and into the limelight of indie critical darlings. While Black Sheep Boy was undeniably great, The Stage Names is even better, as it takes that previous album's blueprint of impassioned vocals, alternatingly rowdy and softened instrumentation and poetic, storybook lyrics, sharpens every aspect and then increases the intensity twofold. As I said in my review - I have a very strong suspicion that this album is going to last the test of time, becoming a treasured classic to listeners everywhere.

Best Track: "A Girl in Port"

(Full Review)

#7 Black Moth Super Rainbow - Dandelion Gum

The enigmatic psych-electro group from Pittsburgh return with their third album of blissed-out, fractured pop music and dreamy, filtered vocals. The driving beats and hazy, otherworldly synths bring Boards of Canada to mind, and when you bring those half-human-half-machine vocals into the mix, Dandelion Gum ends up sounding a bit like Daft Punk trying their hand at making psychedelic pop. No matter how many comparisons I make to other artists, though, Black Moth Super Rainbow definitely have their own totally unique sound, bridging the gap between psych-pop and electronica better than just about anyone I've heard before.

Best Track: "Melt Me"

#6 Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

After creating my personal favourite album of 2005 with The Runners Four, this year Deerhoof delivered a followup that's very nearly as good. Friend Opportunity takes the band's trademarks of manic energy, cute playfullness and giddy eccentricities and then condenses their formerly difficult style into an even more accessible structure than that found on their last album. The reigns are notably tightened this time around, with half as many tracks and a more "to the point" feel, while the production is crisp and clean, a far cry from the rawness of their previous efforts. Friend Opportunity is something I imagine many never expected to hear: Deerhoof's "pop" album.

Best Track: "Believe E.S.P"

(Full Review)

#5 The Fiery Furnaces - Widow City

After thier last action was to deliver an uninspired disappointment with 2006's Bitter Tea, my expectations for The Fiery Furnaces' next album weren't exactly soaring. What an immense pleasure it was, then, to discover that Widow City - an epic work of classic-rock augmented through overt experimentation and manic genre-hopping (ever thought you'd hear Elanour try her hand at hip-hop?) - ranked amongst the Friedberger siblings' very best work. Everything about the Fiery's that I've come to adore, from the catchy melodies to the convoluted song structures to the quirky sense of humour to Elanor's sassy vocal delivery, is in full swing for the album's entire duration. This is the sound of a band breaking their slump in spectacular fashion.

Best Track: "Automatic Husband"

(Full Review)

#4 Ned Collette - Future Suture

I didn't manage to track down a copy of Ned Collette's 2006 debut, Jokes and Trials, until earlier this year. However, if I'd heard it last year I can say for certain that it would've made the #2 spot in the Best of 2006 list, second only to Joanna Newsom's Ys. This year's followup, Future Suture, is quite possibly even better than the debut, as Collette sharpens his ability in virtually every area, cleans up the production for a dense, crisp recording and employs a host of additional instrumentation to flesh out his sound, all while retaining his trademarks of raw emotion, Cohenesque lyricism, moving intimacy and exceptional, creative songcraft.

Best Track: "Sell Your Life"

(Full Review)

#3 Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam

Animal Collective's latest effort saw the band discarding their usual balance between "songs" and "soundscapes", opting to swing the pendulum all the way to one side for their catchiest, most accessible and concise work yet. This couldn't have pleased me more - all of my favourite songs by the eccentric four-piece have been their shorter, more overtly "poppy" pieces, like "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "The Purple Bottle". Strawberry Jam is, more or less, an album with nothing but those sorts of songs - nine slices of exhuberant, quirky, unconventional pop music, conveyed through jittering synths, warm acoustic strums, kaleidescopic production and off-kilter vocals that drip with emotion at every turn. For my money, this is far and away the best thing Animal Collective have ever done.

Best Track: "For Reverend Green" and "Fireworks" (they play back-to-back and feel inseperable to me)

(Full Review)

#2 Nina Nastasia & Jim White - You Follow Me

With the release of You Follow Me, the unlikely duo of guitarist/vocalist Nina Nastasia and percussionist Jim White delivered one of the singer/songwriter genre's most idiosyncratic albums. The impressive skills of each participant are highlighted with equal measure, and the juxtaposition of White's chaotic style of drumming against Nastasia's tender vocals and guitarwork is endlessly fascinating. The two musicians ride the line between experimentation and accessibility to perfection, resulting in a collection of touching, attention-grabbing and truly memorable songs. Few other albums this year have affected me as much as this one - there's something undeniably special about this partnership. One can only hope it continues to flourish.

Best Track: "Odd Said the Doe"

(Full Review)

#1 Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?

I've got to say it - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, the latest effort by prolific Elephant 6ers Of Montreal, really surprised the hell out of me. For a band I've come to consider reliable for releasing solid, "B+" albums year after year, to come out of nowhere and drop the year's very best album was something I couldn't possibly have expected. Kevin Barnes has earned a place amongst this decade's most exceptional songwriters, with a conceptual magnum opus of depression, fear, confusion, anxiety and post-relationship meltdown, expressed through witty, striking lyricism and bouncing-off-the-walls vocal delivery. The jittery electro-pop aesthetic was another big surprise, and the group deserve major kudos for creating their best work under the risk of a major stylistic shift. 2007 has been a year of utter brilliance, with great release following great release throughout the course of the year. I'm pleased to say that Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is the best of the lot - an expectation-shattering masterpiece that I'm sure will be regarded as one of the decade's greatest works for years to come.

Best Track: "The Past is a Grotesque Animal"

(Full Review)