Best albums I got in 2007 – Part I (honorable mentions)

I never meant to wait until April before getting this list written. Various things have kept me from making it and writing it out like I wanted to, not the least of which was having so many albums to choose from this time around. My list for 2006 was drawn from the 25 albums I got during that calendar year, for 2007 it was nearly 40, and thus a much harder list to narrow down. Because there were so many albums, and because I wanted to write a little about all of them, I made two editorial decisions for this list. One was that instead of a top 10 I would make this a top 20 list, and the other was that I would split the list into 3 separate entries to avoid making it one obscenely large entry.

This first list will be the “honorable mentions”, all those albums that didn’t crack the top 20, but which were, for the most part, good albums in their own right. Again, these are albums that I got within the calendar year 2007, and not all of them were released that year (only about 1/3 of them were, actually). But since these are the albums I got in the year, they represent a large chunk of the music I listened to during the past year. I ranked albums by what my initial impression of them was, whether I liked them more over time, how likely I am to listen to them more in the future, whether they were good enough to make me listen to them a lot of times, and sometimes simply by how good they sounded in the car or by how many times I played them while falling asleep at night. I can’t even read music so I can only analyze this stuff by my own impression of it and by how much I personally like it.

So let’s get this thing started. The honorable mention albums will be listed in alphabetical order by artist, and other than that are in no particular order. With each album I will list in parentheses its original year of release.

Bleach – Audio/Visual (2005)
This album is a compilation of songs by one of the best Christian alternative/rock/power pop bands of the last decade. I always considered them to be sort of a Christian version of Weezer, though my freshman year college roommate thought sounded like Weezer fronted by Billy Corgan. They disbanded in the fall of 2004 but left behind a catalogue with several solid tracks among the 6 albums they released. While I like most of the songs on this compilation I don’t rate it higher because some of my favorites from both their Static and Again, For the First Time albums are missing, and in the several months that I’ve had this I haven’t been moved to listen to it much. Best songs: “Good to Be Alive”, “Super Good Feeling”, “We Are Tomorrow”, and “Get Up”.

Borne – Loss of Signal (2006)
I first heard about this Australian pop-rock band when their single “The Guide” was featured as the free download of the week on the iTunes store early in 2007. I liked the song and later when their album was being offered on iTunes for only $5.99, I downloaded it. Overall it’s a more-than-decent pop album with a great chorus here and some good pop hooks there, but it wasn’t one I played more than a few times in its entirety. Best songs: “The Guide”, “Morning Star”, and “Upside Down”

Caedmon’s Call – Overdressed (2007)
I felt kinda bad for not liking or listening to this album more, partly because it was the first Caedmon’s Call album in a few years to have Derek Webb playing with the band, and because I got this as a birthday gift. I liked the band quite a bit back in high school but didn’t keep up with them in college and they’ve pretty much fallen off of my own personal musical map. From the songs that I did listen to multiple times, it sounds a lot like Caedmon’s Call’s typical folk-pop work from their earliest albums. The last track, “Ten Thousand Angels”, was actually featured at the end of a Grey’s Anatomy episode this season, which is kinda cool. The music and lyrics are both solid, but they just don’t engage my musical tastes as much as they might have a decade ago. Best songs: “Expectations”, “There Is A Reason”, “Hold the Light”, and “Ten Thousand Angels”.

Cold War Kids – Robbers & Cowards (2006)
I bought this album purely on the strength of the song “Hang Me Up To Dry”, which had a pretty cool music video. I like the band’s sound, which features a lot of jangling guitars and often sounds like a sort of blues rock, but it was another album I didn’t feel compelled to listen to much after giving it a few listens on the stereo and in the car on the way to work. Cold War Kids is a band to keep an eye on though. Best songs: “Hang Me Up to Dry”, “Tell Me in the Morning”, “Saint John”, and “Rubidoux”.

Common Children – Delicate Fade (1997)
Delicate Fade was hailed in its time as one of the best Christian modern rock albums, and is still a favorite of fans who remember the band and that era of the Christian rock sub-genre. I found it at a pretty cheap price at a used CD store and tried a few times to listen through it, but most of the songs went in one ear and out the other without leaving much for me to remember it by. I seem to remember Common Children getting a lot of comparisons with Creed, but to me they resemble more of a poor man’s Collective Soul. The album opens with “Stains of Time”, a nice instrumental track, but highlights after that are few. Best songs: “Stains of Time”, “Eyes of God”, and “So Dream”.

The Decemberists – Castaways and Cutouts (2002)
This was one of several albums I got via the emusic.com site. A number of people with musical tastes similar to mine had cited The Decemberists as a favorite band, so I wanted to give them a try. I like Colin Meloy’s voice and the band’s style – featuring folkish elements and story songs that are often backed by organs and accordians – is one that is very listenable. I honestly loved a couple of tracks on this album (“July, July!” and “The Legionnaire’s Lament”) and wanted to like the album more than I did, but ultimately I found myself skipping tracks every time I listened to it and it wasn’t one I ever felt the need to play while driving in the car or when trying to go to sleep at night, and to rate high with me, an album must meet at least one of those two criteria. Best songs: “July, July!”, “A Cautionary Song”, and “The Legionnaire’s Lament”.

The Decemberists – The Crane Wife (2006)
See: previous paragraph. I really wanted to like this album more than I did but it just wasn’t one that made any kind of impact on me or made me want to listen to it a lot. I gave it another full listen when I was making this list just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything and I liked it more than I remembered. There’s a pretty good chance I’ll like it more 2 years from now, but all I can do it rate it by how I feel about it at the moment. Some songs I like, and others (particularly the overlong “The Island…”) I have trouble sitting through without just moving on to the next track. It does partially redeem itself in the last few tracks. Best songs: “The Crane Wife 3″, “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)”, “The Crane Wife 1 & 2″, and “Sons & Daughters”.

The Elms – The Chess Hotel (2006)
The Chess Hotel is the third album by the Indiana rock and roll band The Elms. For an idea of the band’s sound, think of a Christian version of Jet, only more raw and with more of an emphasis on Southern rock. They get comparisons to modern groups like the Black Crowes, as well as classic rock. Says the All Music Guide: “They love loud guitars, including greasy slide guitars, ragged rhythms, and big, big hooks that are hard to forget, and since it draws clearly and unashamedly on classic rock traditions, whether it’s from the U.S. or the U.K., it might seem like it’d be easy to peg the Elms as retro-rock, but they’re hardly throwbacks… this album proves that this quartet is a good rock & roll band by any standard.” High praise, though when I was first making my top 20 list this one didn’t make the cut. So when I set about writing a bit on each of the “honorable mention” albums, I gave The Chess Hotel another listen and liked it quite a bit more than I had remembered. It’s a rockin’ album and good while you’re actually listening to it, but too many of the songs tend to leave my head soon after I’ve heard them, so for now I’m leaving it on the “honorable mention” side, but it has as good a shot as any to move up in the future. If I re-rank the albums on this list 2 years from now, The Chess Hotel will probably be at least borderline top-20. Best songs: “Who Puts Rock and Roll in Your Blood?”, “Nothing to Do With Love”, “She’s Cold!”, and “The Towers and the Trains”.

Explosions in the Sky – All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (2007)
I was closer to putting this in the top 20 than I was almost any other album that didn’t make it. I could listen to it two more times and probably convinced to include it, although that would mean having to remove another album I already like enough to have on the list, so it’s a difficult proposition. I almost want to make this album 20B and fit it in right behind 20A. It’s a good album regardless of where one random government employee ranks it on any list. Explosions in the Sky is an Austin-based instrumental post-rock band noted for their epic sounding (and feeling) songs that build up to a stirring crescendo in much the same way that a lot of Sigur Ros songs do, but without the string section or the lyrics in fictional languages. Since there’s another Explosions in the Sky album in the top 20, I’ll just leave this one where it is and be at peace with it. Best songs: “The Birth and Death of the Day”, “Catastrophe and the Cure”, and “So Long, Lonesome”.

Mae – The Everglow (2005)
I have a friend who really loves this album, and indeed we probably wouldn’t have met if she hadn’t gone to a certain Mae concert in Dallas in 2006 (long story). She kept telling me I should get this album, and I kept finding reasons not to, or finding other albums I wanted to buy more if I was at Best Buy. We had a long-running joke that every time I turned down an opportunity to buy The Everglow, somewhere in the world a cat would die. I finally did buy it in the fall of 2007 and gave it a number of listens. There are a few songs I like a lot, but I just don’t find the band’s emo-rock style all that compelling, and for every song I really dig there’s a song I don’t find particularly memorable, although I’ve changed my mind on things like this before. Best songs: “Someone Else’s Arms”, “The Everglow”, “Ready and Waiting to Fall”.

Muse – Black Holes & Revelations (2006)
This band has their legions of fans, and this album brought a lot of new ones to that number. I waited quite a while to buy it, and when I gave it a full listen I was fairly underwhelmed. Sure, “Starlight” (the main reason I gave the album a shot) is great, and “Supermassive Black Hole” has a nice beat, and “Invincible” has some good vocal work, but overall the album has never jumped out at me as something to put on the stereo or play in the car while driving around. Some have told me that Muse’s previous albums were better, so perhaps I’ll give them a try one day. Best songs: “Starlight”, “Supermassive Black Hole”, “Invincible”, and “Exo-Politics”.

Oasis – Stop the Clocks (2006)
This album is a greatest hits compilation by the uber-popular (at least everywhere other than the U.S.) British rock band Oasis. There are plenty of good songs to be found here, several of which I was unfamiliar with when I bought the CD. I considered myself a fan of Bleach and their compilation didn’t make the top 20. I was never a huge fan of Oasis beyond liking a few of the songs on (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, and despite liking a lot of the songs here, I doubt I’ll be playing the album any more than I already played the other Oasis one I had, so it will stay on the bottom half of my list. Best songs: “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”, “Lyla”, “Wonderwall”, “Go Let it Out”, “Morning Glory”, and “Champagne Supernova”.

Peel – Peel (2007)
I probably never would have heard of this Austin-based rock/power pop/whatever-you-want-to-call-them band if it didn’t count among its members one of my high school classmates. Most reviews of Peel’s self-titled debut album compare them with Pavement or the Pixies, the closest I can come to describing them is maybe the Pixies meets a more lo-fi version of Belle & Sebastian. Some songs play fast and furiously, some feature lots of fuzzy guitars, some throw in horns, and one or two have lyrics that are more yelled than they are sung. It’s an interesting listen, to be sure, and I will say the band puts on a pretty energetic live show. Some of the songs on this album are right up my musical alley (the standout being “Workers, Wake Up!”), but just as many are ones I could take or leave. See them if you’re in Austin on a night they’re playing, or see their MySpace page if you’re nowhere near Austin. If you like your indie music with some frenetic guitars and horns and youthful exuberance, you might like them. Best songs: “Workers, Wake Up!”, “Oxford”, “Bells”, and “In the City”.

Radiant – We Hope You Win (2006)
I can well imagine Radiant one day recording an album that becomes one of my very favorites of its year, but that album is not this one. It’s not a bad effort, and it starts out with a trio of songs to rival those of any other album on this list. The band obviously comes from the Radiohead school of epic rock (they even covered that band’s “Let Down” when I saw them live in December), with some nods to U2. After a good start, the rest of the album is mostly songs that range from mediocre to decent, with another one or two good ones. I’m putting Radiant on my “bands to keep an eye on” list. Best songs: “That Girl”, “Kid With a Knife”, “Magician”, and “Golden Hour”.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium (2006)
This is the first RHCP album I have bought. I’ve liked several of their past songs, but never enough to make me want to buy a full Chili Peppers album. Their double-disc album Stadium Arcadium has a lot of good songs, but its main problem is it has too many songs, period. The best songs here rank among the greatest of the band’s career, the worst are repetetive and indistinguishable from the ones that come before or after them. Were this album cut in half and the tracks put in a different order, it might easily rank in my top 10, but as it is I don’t find myself listening to it a lot because there’s just too many songs I find skippable and the really good ones aren’t necessarily few, but they are far between. Best songs: “Dani California”, “Snow (Hey Oh)”, “Slow Cheetah”, “Desecration Smile”, “Readymade”, “Make You Feel Better”, and “Animal Bar”.

Relient K – Five Score and Seven Years Ago (2007)
This band has come a long way from their debut album, which had them pegged as a sort of Christian alternative to Blink-182. I still remember buying that first album my senior year of high school, and later being shocked when I ran across 3 other people in school who actually knew who Relient K was. (One of them had a friend chalk “Marilyn Manson ate my girlfriend” on the rear window of his car, which was funny both in itself, and because you could have counted on one hand the number of people at school who knew that was a Relient K song lyric.) In the years since then their songwriting has progressed beyond just the silly pop culture references that peppered their first two albums. Five Score and Seven Years Ago (the band’s fifth album in seven years) isn’t as catchy and fun as 2003’s Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right, But Three Do, and doesn’t have songs as strong as the best ones on 2004’s Mmhmm. It’s a middle-of-the-road album as far as Relient K’s discography goes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some memorable additions to the band’s catalogue of songs. There’s no equivalent here to “Mood Rings” or “Chap Stick, Chapped Lips, and Things Like Chemistry”, but the cute love song “Must Have Done Something Right” is an effortlessly catchy tune that is this album’s “Sadie Hawkins Dance”, and “The Best Thing” and “I’m Taking You With Me” are both cut from that same cloth. With each album up to here, Relient K has trended a bit more away from punk-pop and toward emo, but that trend goes backward just a bit here, thankfully. It’s not their best by a long shot, but from the opening chorus of “Plead the Fifth” to the end of the 11 minute mini rock opera “Deathbed”, it proves to be a good album nonetheless. Best songs: “The Best Thing”, “Must Have Done Something Right”, “I’m Taking You With Me”, “Bite My Tongue”, and “Deathbed”.

Switchfoot – Nothing is Sound (2005)
Nothing is Sound was Switchfoot’s follow-up to their multiplatinum breakout The Beautiful Letdown. It didn’t sell nearly as well, and actually was a bit of a letdown. It wasn’t as good of an album as its immediate predecessor, and wasn’t as listenable as the great Oh! Gravity (which was a top 10 entry on my “best albums I got in 2006″ list). It has plenty of the typical Switchfoot anti-materialism songs, with a bit of subtle politics mixed in. Aside from “Stars” and “We Are One Tonight”, this album didn’t present much in the way of radio-friendly rockers. This doesn’t mean it’s a bad album, and though I much prefer Oh! Gravity to this, I think this album was more experimental and took a lot more risks than that one did. When listing off my favorite Switchfoot songs, perhaps 1 or 2 will come from this album. Despite all that, I actually had this in my top 20 originally, before deciding at the last minute that another album had earned placement there more than this one had. Best songs: “Lonely Nation”, “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine”, “Politicians”, and “We Are One Tonight”.

TobyMac – Portable Sounds (2007)
I’m not exactly sure why I bought this album. TobyMac is 1/3 of dc Talk, the seminal Christian rock band that’s been on hiatus for most of the past decade while its members focus on their solo projects, and in fact the three of them might never record together again. Toby McKeehan has had the most successful solo career of the dc Talk-ers, and is also the one most heavily influenced by hip-hop. Even if you’ve never tuned to a Christian rock station before you’ve probably heard his music if you saw any of the trailers for the movie Transporter 2, or if you watch the X-Games on TV religiously. Most of the songs on this album continue with the kind of rap-rock and pop-rock he’s done throughout his career. They’re not bad songs, just not ones I’m always in a mood to play. It’s very slickly-produced and every TobyMac album is good for at least a couple songs that are bound to become iPod mainstays. Several of the songs on Portable Sounds have a nice beat to them, but this album isn’t one I’m often tempted to take off the shelf. Best songs: “Made to Love”, “Boomin’”, “I’m For You”, and “All In (Letting Go)”.

U2 – Pop (1997)
U2 is my favorite band in the world, but this late 90s album seems to top most fan lists of their worst or weakest albums. Pop has a big dance and techno music influence and, for the most part, is more listenable and a LOT more danceable than their Grammy-winning Zooropa from 1993, probably their most experimental album to date (unless one counts the album they recorded under the name Passengers). The band seemingly spent the mid- to late-90s trying to re-invent the wheel and while not being quite as experimental as their other 90s efforts, it still has less of a traditional U2 sound and less of the familiar U2 sonic cues than any of their other albums. That being said, it starts off with a bang on “Discotheque”, “Do You Feel Loved” and “Mofo” in its first 3 tracks, but the rest of the album is hit-or-miss, hitting on “Gone” and “Wake Up Dead Man” and missing on songs like “Miami” and “The Playboy Mansion”. I listen to “Mofo” and “Discotheque” all the time but rarely the others on the album.