When I chose my favorite albums of 2006 last December, I feigned anger. I joked that the year had given me nothing good except the 10 albums listed on the remainder of the page. It's funny, but I only seemed happy about those 10. As it turned out, 2007 was a lot more challenging. If I'm upset about anything - and I'm really not - it's that I only get this many slots to highlight my favorite music. How limiting.
This year, a bit to my surprise, my tastes skewed strongly toward the world of indie rock at the expense of more mainstream music. It was nothing personal. But I think it does really demonstrate how diverse the term, once limited to being punk's scruffier, sloppier little brother, has become. To even be able to jump from Panda Bear to Caribou to Battles says a lot. And hey, Radiohead's back.
With that, I'd like to thank everyone who didn't make it onto this page - Okkervil River, Beirut, The Clientele, Pharaohe Monche, Menomena, Spoon, New Young Pony Club, Black Milk, The Twilight Sad, The Field, Liars, St. Vincent and all the others - but still made this year worth listening to.
- Billy Kalb, Diversions Editor
10) Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha I kept reading that 2007 was supposed to be the year that local golden boy Andrew Bird ceased to be a hometown secret. That sounded pretty good to me, seeing as how he got heckled while opening for jam-band-lite Guster at Loyola a couple years ago (heathens, all of you!). But when I got to see Bird play in Minneapolis' First Avenue club this past August, I reconsidered, relishing the chance to hear the man in such a small space. It was a live experience well suited to the music of Armchair Apocrypha, the always-excellent singer/songwriter/violinist/whistler's seventh and probably best full-length yet. Like everything Bird does, it's not particularly fancy; there aren't any hot dance beats and none of the songs were destined to be the big single of 2007. To call the album's sturdy straightforwardness a fault, however, would be like rejecting a glass of fine wine for not being served in a punch bowl with a paper parasol - albums this comfortably well-crafted (and intimately secret) are all too rare as it is.
9) Arcade Fire - Neon Bible Arcade Fire shot up through the indie ranks so quickly that it's easy to forget at this point that the band is actually pretty awesome. All right, so Neon Bible is no Funeral. Guess what? It's better. Heresy, I know, but hear me out: Arcade Fire's second album is the single most relevant record of 2007. Having won over (most of) the indie rock throngs two years prior, the band now gives us songs of people getting lost in the shuffle of a world that doesn't have a place for them. In "Windowsill," when frontman Win Butler sings that he "don't wanna live in my father's house no more," he's not making a religious reference; he's talking about the generation who came before him, the one that let things get so bad. And that's what Neon Bible is about - alienation, disillusionment, emptiness, a soundtrack for the tail end of an all-too alienating, disillusioning and empty segment of American history. Is it weird that a ragtag band of Canadians summed up life in George Bush America 2007 better than anyone else this year?
8) Panda Bear - Person Pitch I'm told that Animal Collective put out a new record this year. I must have missed it, caught up instead in Person Pitch, the second solo disc from Panda Bear. Totally unlike the Animal Collective vocalist's work with his regular gig - drenched in reverb, totally sprawling (and partially underwater?) - Person Pitch featured the usually frenetic musician slowing it down, taking a deep breath and piling on the drugged-out Beach Boys homages for a record so sublime it managed to seep into my entire life. I listened to it while I read. I listened to it while I made dinner. It soundtracked my studies, my showers, my sleep. It pulled me in, made me feel warm and safe and kept me there for months. Like I said, Animal Collective put a record out this year, and I don't even really mind that I didn't pay attention. As far as I can tell, I got the better part of the deal: hard evidence that Panda Bear is the most significant heir to Brian Wilson's pop throne in decades. And I had some pretty good times with the record, too.
7) Feist - The Reminder I've never met Leslie Feist, but it doesn't matter - I know her all the same. Tall, elegant and lovely with a voice like first frost on weathered glass, her excitement is infectious and her sorrow is heartrending. I get the impression that she's well-read, that she knows all the right people, that she helps children get the out-of-reach candy on the high shelves of old-fashioned drug stores. I assume she carries an umbrella when it snows, and she doesn't have time for people who worry about life rather than just living it. She plays piano and guitar and probably the cello, too, and she's not just another singer/songwriter. She's confident, she's smart, she has elaborate dinner parties that guys like me never, ever get invited to, and she's hopelessly out of my league (and already dating Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew; le sigh). She's wrong for me on so many levels that sometimes, when I listen to The Reminder, I convince myself that I should just forget the whole thing and move on. And then she sings the part about how the rain makes her cry, and my knees go weak all over again.
6) Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala How the hell can anyone this clumsy be so undeniably suave and charming? Jens Lekman is a hopeless romantic's hopeless romantic: He swears he remembers every kiss he's ever had, he pretends to date lesbians to pacify their Catholic fathers and when he breaks up with his girl, he's forthright enough to tell her that it's because he doesn't love her ... and then, upon seeing her take a couple of puffs on her asthma inhaler, he wavers, knowing that he'll never touch those lips again. Such is love. Lekman seems stuck in a simpler time, which is part of the charm - you can easily picture him asking a girl, complete in his clunky, Swedish-accented English, if she'd go steady with him. No such thing actually happens on this year's Night Falls Over Kortedala, but that's OK - he puts himself in almost every other awkward romantic situation you could come up with, set to a sparkling, string-laden, harp-cascade-crazy Golden Oldies backdrop. No other artist this year made heart-on-sleeve emotion so appealing.
5) El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead So what does El-P do five years after releasing Fantastic Damage, one of my favorite hip hop records of all time? He punches me in the jaw hard enough to loosen half my teeth, that's what. Said punch was I'll Sleep When You're Dead, the undie rap producer/MC's second full-length, a hell of a wake up call in a year when hip hop at large didn't really do much for me. With all the subtlety of an oil well going up in flames, I'll Sleep is a reactionary rap album if there ever was one - tense, paranoid and weirdly violent. Thanks to some of the densest, most innovative production I've ever heard on a rap record, the bizarre police-state future suggested in the music is so palpable you can practically hear the surveillance helicopters outside your window. I'll Sleep goes beyond the same old sci/fi hip hop subject matter, however - El-P makes it abundantly clear that his apocalyptic vision is not so far removed from our present day. It's not empty posturing that makes El sound so on-edge; the fire in his eyes is just the reflection of his world as he's forced to watch it burn.
4) Caribou - Andorra Andorra, like most of the music made by Dan Snaith under the name Caribou, has a tendency to overwhelm me. The level of detail that goes into the final product is almost too much to take in - it's kind of like inching up really close to the family room TV for the first time and discovering that the cartoon on the screen is actually made up of more tiny red, blue and green dots than you can count. Snaith shifted gears yet again on Andorra, turning from the hip hop-infused krautrock of 2005's The Milk of Human Kindness to psyched-out vintage Britpop, a switch that left me a little cold at first; what could he do that The Zombies and The Kinks hadn't already done decades ago? A whole lot, as it turns out: The music swirls and shimmers like nothing Caribou has ever attempted before; ornate harmonies oversaturated with color hang in the sky like giant exclamation point pendulums, while Snaith reveals at long last that his oft-obscured voice is actually the most valuable instrument in his band. It's layer upon layer of dazzling pop excess - but that's the fun of it.
3) Radiohead - In Rainbows Is there a conceivable future in which a new Radiohead album doesn't make all the year-end best-of lists? True, In Rainbows' music might have been a bit overshadowed by its revolutionary release - the band posted it for download at a user-determinable fee - but that doesn't mean the record's a slouch. Haters of post-Kid A Radiohead argue that the band has played it safe for most of this decade, and yes, like 2003's great-though-not-revolutionary Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows does sound like a bit of The Bends, a bit of OK Computer, a bit of Kid A. But the more I listen to it, the more I understand the real story: Radiohead, five guys who officially left earth 10 years ago, have done their time in outer space. It was time to head homeward, and In Rainbows is the most recent result of that return trip: The greatest rock band on the planet augmented with cutting-edge subterranean homesick alien technology. It'd be so easy to call Radiohead our generation's Pink Floyd, but see, the thing is - they're even better than that.
2) Battles - Mirrored I'm convinced that Battles are superhuman. Ian Williams does stuff with his guitar that no ordinary person should be able to do. Tyondai Braxton sings like a cartoon character on helium. John Stanier can turn around a drum beat like no one I've ever seen before - and he keeps his crash symbol suspended four feet above his head! I also harbor suspicions that bassist Dave Konopka can fly; I've got people looking into it. As much as the band likes to brush off the suggestion that it's doing something remarkable - as Williams did when I got to speak with him last month - there's no getting around it. Mirrored got people excited in a big way, and it wasn't because these guys used to play in other Important Bands. The almighty Battles fuses the heaviness of rock 'n' roll with hardwired technology, bending it to rigid right angles and giving it a Six Million Dollar kick. Heavyweight lead single "Atlas" features Braxton claiming that "people won't be people when they hear this sound." Whatever that means, I get the feeling he's right.
1) LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver For me, Sound of Silver and 2007 might as well be synonymous - this one got played and played and then played again. What's most remarkable about the record is how here-and-now it manages to sound: James Murphy and his LCD Soundsystem are the only ones left from the start of the decade who can still make dancey post-punk as compelling as this. A lot of it has to do with LCD's myriad influences, which include - unlike many of its one-time peers - considerably more than just new wave: Disco, punk, house and ambient electronica all inform the multifaceted Sound of Silver. But more than that, Murphy is just really, really good at what he does - Sound of Silver houses the two best songs of the year, "Someone Great" and "All My Friends," and even sets them back-to-back. Murphy should produce every album by every artist. He should DJ every party that ever happens. He should be the president of the United States of America. But if all he ever does is make another record that matches Sound of Silver, we'll still be luckier than we deserve.
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