I never intended to wait and start this series of lists in April, and I certainly didn’t mean to finish it in May. It’s a little embarrassing to finish any kind of 2007 retrospective when 2008 is over 1/3 over. But I’m going to finish it like I meant to, and hopefully not be as delinquent whenever I write the 2008 version early next year. Below are the links to the two previous installments of the list.
Part I (Honorable Mention albums)
Part II (#11-20)
If you’re an impatient reader, you can skip to the bottom of the page to just read the list and so you won’t have to wade through my terse commentary.
Note: As previously stated, this is a list of albums that I got in 2007, and while they represent a huge portion of the music that I spent my year listening to, most of them were released in earlier years, and thus this should not be mistaken for a “best albums of 2007″ list. After the album titles I have put in parentheses the year each was originally released, and when I note my favorite songs on each album, the order I put them in is, for the most part, their chronological order on that album and not in the order of most favored. I have ranked the albums by how much I favor them right now, with my views subject to change over time (in fact I’ve already decided I should have switched #s 7 and 11, but I decided that after the list was written).
At long last, I present my ten favorite albums I got in 2007.
10. The Cinematics – A Strange Education (2007)
I bought this album knowing little about The Cinematics other than the fact that they were one of the opening acts for Mute Math’s fall tour. They reminded me quite a bit of Editors, and though I didn’t listen to the album much at first, it was one that I gradually began to play a lot, to the point that I liked almost every song on it. One review I read of A Strange Education essentially said the Cinematics were another Joy Division/Interpol imitator, which is true in some respects, but I think a number of their songs have beats more danceable than anything Interpol has ever done. Doesn’t make them a better band, just one that can’t be called a carbon copy.
The title track sounds very Editors-ish, and they later do a nice cover of Beck’s “Sunday Sun”. “Keep Forgetting” will probably be mistaken by many for a Bloc Party song, and “Ready Now” and “Maybe Sunday” have similarly danceable post-punk bass grooves and guitar work. They veer a bit into grunge territory on the epic “Asleep at the Wheel”, to great results. This album doesn’t break any musical ground and will likely remind you of lots of bands you’ve heard before, but it’s one you may find yourself playing a lot nonetheless.
Best songs: “Race to the City”, “A Strange Education”, “Sunday Sun”, “Keep Forgetting”, “Ready Now”, “Maybe Someday”, and “Asleep at the Wheel”.
9. Interpol – Our Love to Admire (2007)
I liked both of Interpol first two albums in different ways. Turn On the Bright Lights felt like the more complete album of the two, while Antics had more individual songs that I really dug. I got both of them in 2006 and neither one was among my 10 favorite albums that I got in that year, not so with Our Love to Admire, which finds Interpol just as dark, moody, and meditative as on its previous works, but with a sound that’s more fleshed out than before. The opener “Pioneer to the Falls” actually includes some keyboards in addition to their unmistakable guitars and typically skilled work on the drums and bass. “The Heinrich Maneuver” is among the most energetic pieces they’ve recorded, while “Pace is the Trick” is more in the vein of “Leif Erikson” and “Obstacle 1″ (both off of Turn On the Bright Lights) and would easily rate among my top 3 favorite Interpol songs. The guitar work on that song begs to be used in a future Guitar Hero game. The album isn’t a complete success (I’ve found “The Scale” and “Rest My Chemistry” to be quite skippable), but when it hits the mark the result is some of the best work of the band’s career.
Best songs: “Pioneer to the Falls”, “No I in Threesome”, “The Heinrich Maneuver”, “Mammoth”, “Pace is the Trick”, and “Who Do You Think?”
8. Radiohead – In Rainbows (2007)
I’ll follow the first Interpol album to make one of these top ten lists with the first Radiohead album I’ve really liked. I’ve never connected with their supposed masterpiece OK Computer and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to listen to the dark, experimental electronic-rock of Kid A all the way through even once. Up to now my favorite album of theirs has actually been Amnesiac, which I think was recorded at the same time as Kid A but amonst all its experimentation was the beautiful piano-driven “Pyramid Song” and the rocker “I Might Be Wrong”. This is a rating based solely on my own personal taste, but for me In Rainbows is their most interesting and listenable release to date. There are hints of their past work on every song. “All I Need” sounds quite Kid A-ish, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and “Jigsaw Falling into Place” recall the best songs on Hail to the Thief, and “Videotape” would have been right at home on Amnesiac. “Nude” and “House of Cards” are as close as they get to the beauty of “Pyramid Song” on this album, but they are both admirable songs. The frenetic “Bodysnatchers” doesn’t sound much like anything I’ve heard from them before, perhaps coming from an old punk influence. It gets my vote for “most likely to get played tons of times on lots of iPods” out of the songs on In Rainbows. This is a great album, and Radiohead must be thanked for finally making an accessible album after so many years of mad experimentation that somehow made them one of the most influential rock bands to come out of the 1990s.
Best songs: “15 Steps”, “Bodysnatchers”, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”, “Reckoner”, “House of Cards”, and “Jigsaw Falling into Place”.
7. Explosions in the Sky – The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)
Explosions in the Sky is an instrumental post-rock band that makes epic music devoid of lyrics but still big on emotion. I included their 2007 album All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone in the honorable mention section of this list. If you’ve ever seen the movie Friday Night Lights or watched the TV series it inspired, then you’ve heard some of Explosions in the Sky’s work, and a lot of what was used in the movie was taken from songs recorded on this album. Their music also inspired this email from a reader to ESPN writer Bill Simmons, which he posted in a recent blog:
Q: Do you realize that listening to Explosions in the Sky, the band that does most of “Friday Night Lights” music, can make any normal experience epic? I walked my dog [while] wearing headphones and listening to them, and by the end of the walk, I felt as if I had experienced something truly life-altering. I am currently trying to apply the “Explosions Theory” to many other aspects of my life, such as showering, vacuuming and doing laundry.
– Owen, Cleveland
Simmons: Couldn’t agree more. I wish there was a way to pump that music into every bathroom in my house. I’m also amazed none of the presidential candidates has used Explosions in the Sky for their campaign. You could show me a 30-second ad of John McCain trying to pass out a kidney stone to that music and I’d probably want to vote for him afterward.
It’s hard to pick favorites on an album only 5 songs (all of which surpass the 8 minute mark) long, but I would highlight the beginning, middle, and ending tracks of it. The All Music Guide said it best, calling The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place “a contemplative and heady rush of masterful melancholia”, and describing its songs as “multi-minute, slow motion workouts of gentle electric guitar plucks and subtle/sudden washes of percussion — they’re still instrumental, but as lyrical as anything in the indie rock universe.”
Best songs: “First Breath After Coma”, “Six Days At the Bottom of the Ocean”, and “Your Hand in Mine”.
6. Keane – Under the Iron Sea (2006)
Any anthemic pop/rock bands that use pianos to drive a lot of their songs are going to get Coldplay comparisons, which in the case of Keane is fair because the members of the band actually have a long history with Coldplay dating back before either band became what they are now. But there’s also a distinct U2 influence that wasn’t so much present on Keane’s debut album Hopes and Fears. After about the fourth track I was beginning to think they’d titled the album Under the Iron Sea only because A Rush of Achtung Baby to the Head would have been too obvious. But the album is more than that, and really Keane isn’t likely to be confused for Coldplay by anyone familiar with that band. The songs here are darker with more of a rock edge than the songs on Hopes and Fears. They sure love their soaring vocals and melodic hooks, which make “Is It Any Wonder?”, “Leaving So Soon?”, and “Crystal Ball” three highlights in particular. The slower, piano-and-vocals-driven almost-ballad “A Bad Dream” may actually be my favorite Keane song since I played Hopes and Fears‘ “Somewhere Only We Know” a thousand times. It’s more of a Coldplay-Radiohead than a Coldplay-U2 sort of song, so temporarily the album almost turns into X&Y Computer. This was another album in the top 3 of “albums I put on when trying to fall asleep” in 2007. I was actually let down by Keane’s first album, but Under the Iron Sea made me a fan and showed signs that the band could become a really great one by their next album, which I’ll be keeping an eye out for.
Best songs: “Is It Any Wonder?”, “Nothing in My Way”, “Leaving So Soon?”, “A Bad Dream”, “Crystal Ball”, and “The Frog Prince”.
5. Silversun Pickups – Carnavas (2006)
When one buys a new album there can be a desire to run it through some audio “tests” to see how it sounds in different environments and settings. Such tests might include the CD player test, the iPod test, the car audio test, or the iTunes on your home computer test. My very first impression of Carnavas was that is passed the car audio test with flying colors. The songs on borrow a lot from the Smashing Pumpkins style of thick, layered guitar noise. It’s another nominee for the “albums that make you want to air drum” list. Says the All Music Guide: “From the grainy opening of “Melatonin” that blends into strikingly harmonized male/female vocals, the quartet immediately showcases their innate sense of melody amid textured atmospherics and layers of distortion and fuzz, which all come across as both bittersweet and enchanting. Silversun Pickups take the shimmering dream pop of My Bloody Valentine and filter it through ’90s grunge instincts like that of the Smashing Pumpkins — and it all combines to produce an album that, well, is really freaking good.” Couldn’t have said it better. My one and only complaint about the album is the last track “Common Reactor”, which is actually one of the best, but it ends with 2 minutes of rhythmless and pointless guitar distortion, which gets a little old after the first 30 seconds.
Best songs: “Melatonin”, “Checkered Floor”, “Future Foe Scenarios”, “Lazy Eye”, “Rusted Wheel”, and “Common Reactor”.
4. Sufjan Stevens – Songs for Christmas (2006)
Christmas albums can be difficult to review, as most of them are, almost by definition, covers albums. The best Christmas albums will mix well-performed renditions of familiar favorites (the more original the arrangements, the better) and memorable new songs that usually have something to do with Christmas or winter (the less sappy, the better). Sufjan Stevens’ orchestral pop and folkish sensibilities (not to mention his prolific songwriting tendencies) are well suited to such a project as a Christmas album. This album is actually put together from music Stevens and friends recorded during 5 different years as a series of CDs that he annually made to give to friends and family at Christmas time, which in 2006 was repackaged and sold as a 5 disc Christmas album. The songs mainly consist of traditional Christmas tunes but there are also 17 original compositions by Stevens. He puts an inspired and fresh spin on such Christmas classics as “I Saw Three Ships”, “O Holy Night”, and “Joy to the World”, and includes three traditional hymns not usually associated with Christmas, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, “Amazing Grace”, and “Holy, Holy, Holy”.
His versions of familiar Christmas songs would be enough to make this a good album, but what makes Songs for Christmas a great one are his original songs that range from the fun and quirky (”Get Behind Me, Santa!” and “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance”) to the meditative and melancholy (”Sister Winter” and “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”). Indeed he does some of the best work of his career so far on this album (”Sister Winter” in particular would rate among my top 5 Sufjan songs). His Illinois album may be my favorite piece of music to come out of this decade thus far, and with Songs for Christmas he only further cements his status as my favorite singer/songwriter working today.
Best songs: “Put the Lights on the Tree”, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, “I Saw Three Ships”, “O Holy Night”, “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”, “Hey Guys! It’s Christmas Time!”, “Sister Winter”, and “Star of Wonder”.
3. Belle & Sebastian – The Life Pursuit (2006)
Mark Hamill describes The Force from the Star Wars movies as “religion’s greatest hits”. The Life Pursuit album could almost as easily be described as “the 1970’s greatest hits”. In its glowing review of the album, Pitchfork said, “Spanning glam, soul, country, and 70s AM rock, this record is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop.” The songs are alternately bright (”Another Sunny Day”) and bluesy (”The Blues Are Still Blue”), with nods to the best of classic rock, sunny Fifth Dimension-style vocals (particularly on “Act of the Apostle Part 1″), old school Motown, and modern indie pop. Indeed I found it a little disappointing that I should have to rank this as low as #3 on the list, as in most years I wouldn’t buy 2 albums that provided listens as consistently good as The Life Pursuit, but this was one of those years, and my album collection is all the better for it.
Best songs: “Act of the Apostle Part 1″, “The Blues Are Still Blue”, “Sukie in the Graveyard”, “We Are the Sleepyheads”, “Funny Little Frog”, and “For the Price of a Cup of Tea”.
2. The National – Boxer (2007)
Boxer, more than any other album I got in 2007, is a work that gets better with each and every listen. Ten years from now it will not have aged a bit. None of the songs here have “hit five-star radio single” written all over them, but this is definitely an album with a lot of four-star songs. The National get frequent comparisons to the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, and Wilco, and when I first heard the album I thought lead singer Matt Berninger’s vocals sounded like a cross between Johnny Cash and Pete Yorn. The songs are a collection of slow, low-key Americana type of rock (Slant Magazine referred to a few songs on their previous album as “slow core”), with understated pianos memorably employed in songs like “Slow Show”, “Ada”, and “Fake Empire”, the last of which ends with a nice arrangement of horns. Brian Devendorf’s drum work is also a highlight on here, and I’ve found myself air drumming to this album at least as much as I have with any other in the past few years. The only real rocker in the set is “Mistaken For Strangers”, but the music is powerful enough for that same Slant review to call it “as focused and rugged as a great punk record.” It topped or ranked high on several critics’ “best albums of 2007″ lists, and for good reason.
A word I see people use a lot to describe Boxer is “nostalgic”. The songs might not blow you away in the traditional sense of the phrase, but they grow on you the more you listen to them. Ask 10 people who love this album which track is their favorite and you’re likely to get 6 or 7 different answers. That’s how solid it is.
Best songs: “Fake Empire”, “Slow Show”, “Ada”, “Apartment Story”, “Mistaken For Strangers”, and “Brainy”.
1. Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004)
I played this album beginning to end more times than I did any other album in the past year. I absolutely love the epic orchestral arrangements spread throughout, and the guitar riffs on songs like “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” and “Wake Up”, the latter being a song as epic as rock songs get and one I’ve played countless times. The strings on “Crown of Love” and “In the Backseat” (featuring haunting vocals frequently compared to Bjork) make great songs even greater. There’s not a weak track to be found in Funeral’s 10-song length. No band is better at starting a song well and then completely shifting gears and changing tones 2/3 of the way through to reach even higher heights of musical greatness. These are songs you have to be patient with, as most of them don’t end by sounding anything like they did when they began.
Critics have described the album much better than I ever could. The Drowned in Sound review said, “Encompassing chamber pop melodies, angular art-rock, lavish orchestration and post-punk vocals, its sheer sonic size and ambition goes some way towards justifying the amount of gushing praise that’s been heaped upon this album”, and called the music “paradoxically life-affirming and euphoric”. I have to agree.
Best songs: “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”, “Neighborhood # 3 (Power Out)”, “Crown of Love”, “Wake Up”, “Rebellion (Lies)”, and “In the Backseat”
The Top 20
1. Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004)
2. The National – Boxer (2007)
3. Belle & Sebastian – The Life Pursuit (2006)
4. Sufjan Stevens – Songs for Christmas (2006)
5. Silversun Pickups – Carnavas (2006)
6. Keane – Under the Iron Sea (2006)
7. Explosions in the Sky – The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003)
8. Radiohead – In Rainbows (2007)
9. Interpol – Our Love to Admire (2007)
10. The Cinematics – A Strange Education (2007)
11. Once Soundtrack (2007)
12. James Blunt – Back to Bedlam (2004)
13. Zwan – Mary Star of the Sea (2003)
14. Delirious? – The Mission Bell (2005)
15. Editors – An End Has a Start (2007)
16. Newsboys – Go (2006)
17. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible (2007)
18. Dan Wilson – Free Life (2007)
19. Sigur Ros – Hvarf/Heim (2007)
20. Black Tie Dynasty – Movements (2006)
Honorable Mention: (alphabetically by artist)
Bleach – Audio/Visual
Borne – Loss of Signal
Caedmon’s Call – Overdressed
Cold War Kids – Robbers & Cowards
Common Children – Delicate Fade
The Decemberists – Castaways and Cutouts
The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
The Elms – Chess Hotel
Explosions in the Sky – All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
Mae – The Everglow
Muse – Black Holes & Revelations
Oasis – Stop the Clocks
Peel – Peel
Radiant – We Hope You Win
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium
Relient K – Five Score and Seven Years Ago
Switchfoot – Nothing is Sound
TobyMac – Portable Sounds
U2 – Pop
EDIT: I wrote this entry late Sunday night, then discovered Monday morning that I had somehow left off the Secret Machines’ Now Here is Nowhere album, released in 2004. I had it included in the first preliminary list I made a few months back, but it somehow got deleted and forgotten about when I was editing it and ranking the albums in the order I wanted. Had I remembered it, I likely would have put it somewhere between 13 and 18, which would have squeezed one of those out of the top 20, though I’m not sure which one, as I think the ones I put 14-20 are pretty much interchangeable.
