Since I started scrounging through the racks of CD Warehouse on Berry Street years ago with my brother, I have accumulated a ginormous amount of music. But, by far, this year has resulted in more first meetings with great albums and bands than any other time in my life. And the majority of those, of course, are ones that came out this year.
So I’m starting a countdown of my top 50 albums for 2007. All in all, I’ve collected close to 100 (for better or for worse), and these are the ones worth taking a look at. If you’re looking for something worth paying attention to, or are just bored with listening to the same CDs over and over again in your car, browse through this list and pick something out you think you can get yourself into. It’s a fairly eclectic list, I think, so anyone should be able to find at least one thing.
Hope you guys like it …
For as much effort as has gone into previous posts, you may have been expecting a grand thesis to accompany my number one slot. But since this was my first-ever published album review – with a few tweaks since then, of course – I thought it only appropriate to let it speak for itself. Honestly, after mulling over this album for nearly a year now, I can’t think of a better way to say exactly how highly I think of this record.
For all the notice Radiohead’s post-EMI record In Rainbows has been given (even in some of these blog posts) for its trailblazing “give it back to the fans” marketing technique, the fact is that many bands, if any, could have pulled it off besides them; as many have already said and will continue to say, the Oxford quartet seem to be lightyears ahead of other acts, and that’s the only reason anyone gave two shits about the free, pre-release download. That said, some may find it surprising I’m not endorsing Rainbows as my number one for ‘07, given the fact that Kid A is my favorite album of all time and OK Computer is everyone else’s; probably the only reason I’m reticent to do so is because, from the moment I unzipped my batch of mp3s from W.A.S.T.E., a good handful of the songs were already familiar to me in some form or another. Both “Nude” (aka. “Big Ideas”) and “Reckoner,” for instance, were staples on my catalogue of Radiohead b-sides that I devoured back in ‘05; while both songs have undergone major surgery since then – the latter almost an inversion of its original and the former revamped into one of the band’s most luminous acheivements – Rainbows felt slightly lived-in already. As most first meets often lose their significance, though, the album continued to sit with me and I steadily lost interest in the fact that it wasn’t the glorious left-field slap that their other work had been for me. “15 Step” opens furiously with barbed percussive loops and Thom Yorke’s singature wailings that always find the most enduring phrasings, often dangling from bar to bar like poetic orphans, then launches into Jonny Greenwood’s grizzlied riffs that introduce “Bodysnatchers,” a volatile throwback to the charged footwork of “Paranoid Android.” A few Rainbows originals like the fingerplucked “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” that snowballs with each, like its title suggests, ascending and descending scale into a billowing orchestral expression, and “Faust Arp” that explores Yorke’s newfound quick-syllable vocal rythm that surfaced on Hail To The Thief’s “Wolf At The Door” both lend to the album’s light ebb and flow. At first listen, “House of Cards” feels a little too relaxed, but when juxtaposed with the constrained angst of “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” the pairing provides a needed balance before descending into the foreboding closer “Videotape.” Guided by slow-moving piano chops, the track’s drum loop eerily reminds of a film reel splashing against the projector when the spool reaches its end, which compliments Yorke’s last-goodbye account in the lyrics before plodding to its uneventful end. Though Rainbows may not offer anything groundbreaking for Radiohead, it doesn’t need to with music this good.
As vocalist for indie favs Wolf Parade, Dan Bejar team-up Swan Lake and co-founder of Frog Eyes, Spencer Krug hands-down deserves the maple leaf award for most prolific Canadian to have emerged in the recent north-of-the-border flurry. An exhaustive craftsman whose wildly abstract song constructions are only matched by his vocal acrobatics, his latest effort under the guise of Sunset Rubdown – what started out as a vehicle for his solo work that quickly attracted willing bandmates – displays the breadth and apex of his abilities. Pouncing to an abrupt start with progressive melodic knotting of “The Mending of the Gown,” only to make a quiet shirk with “Magic Vs. Midas,” the album picks up pace with the following tracks and then careens headlong into the ominous keyboards of “Stallion” mid-album to baffling effect. For all its discordant ducks and fitful patchwork, it’s still hard to find even a few, if any, weak spots on Random Spirit Lover. Much like Bejar, Krug’s vocals look to capitalize on the song’s every available space, snagging each hook and far-off nook, but manages to keep this off-kilter delivery balanced and brimming with verve. Often mishandled by critics who fault it as too cluttered an album, Krug’s manner is, without a doubt, too much to swallow in one bite and hardly casual in its approach; but Spirit Lover rewards persistence, proving its worth through one mind-bendingly alluring track after another.
As far as purely individual musicians go, Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam is probably the single most consistently great songwriter I’ve ever heard. And I owe the introduction to my old friend Josh Williams, who dropped in on me one afternoon while I was workin the music racks at Hastings to get me to use my employee discount for him on some records he was interested in. Alongside Roomsound by the also unbeknownst to me Califone, Josh giddily picked up Our Endless Numbered Days and we’ve both been hooked ever since. Without even making plans together, he and I even made the trek down to Ft. Worth, Texas, to see Beam paired up with Calexico after In The Reins and found each other in the will-call line; we smoked vanilla cloves in pin-drop silence – the only time I’ve heard a club crowd be quiet – as Beam tore it up with his sister before Calexico joined him to finish off for the Reigns set. It seems that collaboration rubbed off on Beam, who, when I caught him on “Letterman” after his third LP The Shepherd’s Dog to play “The Devil Never Sleeps,” had abruptly transfigured himself into an energetic showman, a long way from the meek bedroom artist he began as. In the same way Numbered Days was a leap forward for Beam, moving up from the rusty four-track recordings of The Creek Drank the Cradle into a professional studio, Shepherd’s Dog takes forward bounds into dense production minutiae, such as the intericately layered overdubs on opener “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car” and and subaqueous vocal effects on “Carousel;” still, Beam’s foundation for his music is true to his roots as ever, grounded in fingerpicked banjo, and sighed vocals amid oblique pastoral imagery and bandied Biblical allusions. For as much as Beam tills fresh ground with the whinnied guitar blushes and fabricated splices concluding single “Boy With A Coin,” though, the barebones beauty of preceding track “Ressurrection Fern” never lags far behind, literally. With some of my favorite records of the decade under his belt – the nearly flawless Woman King EP and Cradle inching their way toward the top of my ever-expanding ’00s best-of – Iron & Wine has always been one of the few entirely reliable outfits to produce unblemished, yet humble every time it shows its plain face.
Undeniably my proudest moment as a budding rock journalist, which validated my entire leap of faith in moving to Nashville a year ago to escape the armpit of hell that was Arkansas and pursue my writing dreams on my own terms, an interview I conducted with The National’s frontman Matt Berninger for American Songwriter last April will always be a crowning moment for me. So as a change of pace away from my usual reviews with a personal touch, I’m going to paste the feature I did here as it was published.
Arguably the only survival story after the Elephant Six co-op went defunct in ‘02 – before being recently revived by label founders Apples In Stereo with their latest effort – Atlanta, Ga.,-based quintet Of Montreal have managed to keep critic’s heads turning over the years, despite what was considered to be a dramatic twist in sound after Kevin Barnes took tighter control of the reigns with ’04’s Satanic Panic in the Attic – honestly, I can’t see much measurable distance between Gay Parade and Sunlandic Twins, but that’s just me – and a near nervous breakdown by Barnes before the recording of their eighth LP Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Much the same bizarro collage of funk-dance and psych-pop that pushed their boundaries with ’05’s Twins, the album catapults into the whirlwind opener “Suffer For Fashion” with a baby gab sound bite, before detouring into the minute-long “Sink The Seine” and resurfacing with the sonic glitter of “Cato As A Pun.” For all its day-glo trimming, Hissing Fauna gives a reason for glam rock to be interesting again. Just take a moment to sort through any YouTube video of the band’s garishly ornate live performances, which loop abstract animation on-screen behind the band, bric-a-brac littering the stage while Barnes readies himself in a giant Oriental wizard costume with an oversized lobster claw on his arm … yeah, I don’t get it either. Hidden in their arabesque couture, Of Montreal somehow manage to tap into a third-eye sexuality, chock full of blatantly queer glitz that still feels psychologically dormant, like an overdrive version of what Bowie attempted with his androgynous rock-star persona of Ziggy Stardust. In fact, when I was able to catch them live this year (with opening act Loney, Dear!), Barnes broke suit with their own material to do a set of Ziggy covers with “Moonage Daydream” and “Starman” back-to-back, which was probably my favorite live moment all year long, added to what was already the best concert I’d seen since Beck’s Midnight Vultures tour in ‘99. Every track flaunting its pirouette disco, there’s not a weak moment on this entire sprawling record, peaking mid-album with the nearly 12-minute “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal” that hovers near hysterical collapse were it not for its persistent beat that gives Barnes a platform for his soliloquy rants, such as the tongue-lashing, “Let’s tear the shit apart/ Let’s tear the fucking house apart/ Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart/ Let’s just have some fun.” In relief, the remainder of the album buoys him back to his steady self and ends with a lighter, more self-assured dynamic that breathes new life into the tongue-in-cheek hedonism of “Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider” and break-up bitterness of “She’s A Rejector.” With Hissing Fauna, Of Montreal continue to perfect their decade-old mold without having to break it quite yet, as they, incredibly enough, still to sound avant garde even as they’re comfortably familiar.
After a plodding grassroots effort to spread their art-punk staccato since the late ’90s, Spoon are still not only tirelessly innovative with an uncanny ability to perpetually unearth interesting ways to expand their singularly addictive sound, album upon album, but their determination has paid off in large dividends with an ever-expanding fanbase and, finally, an album that bled over into mainstream with their sixth LP Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. A purely underground pet since their inception in Austin when they they were dumped by Elektra records before the release of A Series of Sneaks in ‘98, Spoon are the self-made result of bootstrap efforts ever since to (like Natalie Maines) take the long way around to their fame. It’s not that Ga Ga is conventional by any stretch: people just finally caught on, gushing its praises as if to make up for lost time, wishing they’d been with the in-crowd all along. For those who’ve been following Brit Daniel and bros over the years, though – those who owned a $50 copy of debut Telephono before its reissue in ‘06, or caught them live in Memphis danks where they drew but a humble crowd and still performed like the sweaty rock stars they are – Ga Ga is just another masterpiece. Doyens at galvanizing such influential giants as Gang of Four or Wire with the rascally recklessness of Pavement, Spoon craft taut pop that often seems to run in place – a number of their songs take only a brief intermission to climax before subsiding back to their natural rhythm – but cover more territory in minutes than other bands often spend careers trying to mine. For example, opener “Don’t Make Me A Target” marries itself to a flinty, duplicating guitar throb that presses together so many variations on its theme that its peak emerges, not from an all-relieving break in melody, but from its own tightly wound, unrelenting pulse. From there, “The Ghost of You Lingers” plunges into an ethereal piano cadence, eerily similar to LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” but surrounded by swirling lryical fragments that echo cryptically to its sudden finish, only to emerge from the ether with the exuberant “You Got Yr Cherry Bomb,” accompanied by the same jaunty brass that propels “The Underdog,” featuring the always welcome Jon Brion. One distinct aspect of Ga Ga that plays a more vital role than previous albums had allowed are its overdub futzes, which producer Jim Eno loops in with studio talk-back on “Don’t You Evah” and fade-outs to the open-air party grounds of a Brussels fair before resuming business as usual on “Finer Feelings.” Though it may not be their finest work – that honor probably belongs to ’05’s Gimme Fiction – Spoon hit a long-awaited nerve with audiences this time around, and, honestly, it’s about damn time.
For as much attention as Noah Lennox was given for the tribal, plaintive beauty of side project Panda Bear this year, I hold Animal Collective’s back-breaking Strawberry Jam in much higher regard. Snuffing out the distracting quirks that made Person Pitch a slightly monocrhome indulgence for Lennonx, the band’s sixth LP capitalizes on each of the four band member’s musical dissimilarities for a highly eclectic collaboration. Much the same way the album cover alters what should be a sweet treat into a mangled, bloody mess, Animal Collective converts playful pop into a visceral jolt to the senses through the quartet’s latticed psych-rock toppled with Dave Portner’s feverish shrieks that play a more dominant role than previous efforts. Set underway with “Peacebone,” a faraginous cue into Strawberry Jam’s relentless aggression that tinkers with quaint vocals only to crush them underfoot with ravaged synths, it then diverges to the carnie psychadelia of “Unsolved Mysteries” that drowns overlapping organs together with garish drum thrusts ’til it boils to a nefarious, mongrel cross-breed. Then in comes Lennox with his tempered blossom of a voice trying desperately to keep up with the frenetic pace of “Chores” for the first minute-and-a-half before it melts to a manageable stride, allowing for his dolorous chants to catch amid hazy bell chimes and a kickdrum beat that peters out to an ambient wash. That makes way for the album’s centerpiece, “For Reverend Green,” set against a buzzing guitar refrain before Portner enters, emoting each syllable that teeters between melodic and full-throated cries, sqauwking manically, “I think it’s alright to feel inhuman now/Now I think that’s a riot.” As you can tell, Strawberry Jam is as mentally divergent as it is tireless, and we’ve only covered less than half the album. With the exception of their last LP Feels in ‘05, I’ve yet to delve into Animal Collective’s earlier catalogue – having released a hefty handful since their formation in 2000 – but, if not just to make better sense of the band’s varied roots, then as a hopeful search for Jam’s equal, I’m more than eager to further unveil Animal Collective’s frantic brilliance.