Best Music of 2007

I thought this was a really good year in music which made limiting my choices really hard. Many years I've been really excited about this or that band who put out a hell of a song or record only to later realize that they obviously had this enormous weight to get off their chests and once done, had little else in the tank. I believe this year’s breakthrough artists like Yeasayer, The Magic Numbers, Battles, Band Of Horses, and Georgie James have enough to keep producing excellent music.

Again it was a year where records took a back-seat to songs. That said, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera, Menomena’s Friend or Foe, and Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna…. were great.

But thanks to Podcasts like KEXP’s Song Of The Day, I was introduced to a lot of the music on this list.

John Doe's Golden State just shook me to the core. There are songs
where melody, lyric, and voice come together and hit that sweet spot between your ears so damn hard that it's immobilizing. It's got that D-G-A chord
progression that I think the human brain is just very receptive to in
melody, and the clever lyrical interplay with the male voice singing
that she is " the hole in my head" and the female voice agreeing that
she is " the pain in your neck." And then the two voices come
together achingly on the lyric " I am the aching in your heart." And
it sounds just like heart-ache feels. This is a 3 minute masterpiece

I picked Jose Gonzalez’s Down The Line over an equally brilliant version of Massive Attack’s Teardrop, I guess because he wrote Down The Line. I love both because the recording sounds so organic and “live.” In a time when you keep hearing about how established artists rue the quality of sound on records, this seems like a return to those warm and messy days of vinyl. You’re allowed to hear his less-than-perfect guitar fingering, and his voice is not auto-tuned to the point of flat perfection. And Down The Line is just a perfect quiet yet highly emotionally pitched song.

Atlas by Battles, might be dismissed as a novelty with it’s chipmunk style vocals. But I think you would be wrong to do that. There’s a churning combination of drums, bass line, and allover sonic fuzz which is satisfying in and of itself, and then this weird vocal starts with a percussive synthesizer riff. All together it’s a sound unlike anything you’ve heard and very experimental and cool.

I love Public Enemy’s Chuck D because his booming baritone is easily the best voice in rap. If he and Flavor Flav could consistently produce records like Harder Than You Think, rap wouldn’t be as dead as a doornail. Harder Than You Think is a tremendous return to form from Public Enemy with that infectious horn break on Harder Than You Think that simultaneously raises the hair on your neck while kicking your ass.

MIA’s Paper Planes combines a Soft-Cell synthesizer riff with the most imaginative chorus I’ve heard this year. Did anyone imagine that you could use the sound of gunfire, the hammer of a gun being yanked back, and a cash drawer being released as percussion? But it really works. Another ass-kicker.

Cass McCombs’ That's That locks into a tight groove from the first note and gives you an unrelenting four minute boogie, highlighted by a Belle & Sebastian-like twang-guitar. Like Golden State, the song emphasizes a chord progression that I think the human brain perceives as very pleasurable.

The Magic Numbers’ This Is A Song starts off very hippy-trippy, but locks down quickly with a frantic beat and driving rhythm guitar line. There’s a cool male-female vocal interplay that makes this one of the best pop songs of the year.

Air put out a pretty boring and disappointing record this year. But Mer Du Japon is exactly right. It sounds bad-ass and is remarkable because of how tremendously heavy these guys can make soft background music sound.

The New Pornographers are masters of the pop song. Myriad Harbor is another pop gem, combining great melody, and snidey-smart and funny lyrics. “I took a plane, I took a trip…” the singer sings, “Ach! You always end up in the city! “ chastises the chorus.

Band Of Horses is a major debutant this year and the massive buzz around this band is testament to how good they sound. If you were still in Junior High, you’d be listening to Is There A Ghost all the time. This rocks hard.

Georgie James is the combination of two local DC outfits that gigged around in the early part of this decade. They’re still local and they craft perfect pop songs. Listen to More Lights and see if you don’t agree.

Circustown is the most cinematic sound I’ve heard this year. I have no idea who The Measures are and they are annoyingly obscure. I scored this track off the excellent Song-Of-The-Day podcast but cannot find any info about them anywhere else. This song sounds like the music that you’d see in an action-movie where the hero has decided to take the law into his own hands; he straps up, gets into his car, drives fast, pull into the seedy motel courtyard where the bad guys are staying, kicks down their door, and shoots everything in sight. 4 minutes of BOOM-BOOM-BOOM. And completely bad-ass.

Vampire Weekend sounds like a Soweto Guitar band crossed with Madness-like white-boy ska and A-Punk is the best example of their work. Nothing monumental here, but very, very fun. I bet their live shows are riotous.

Thurston Moore’s Fri/End keeps the Sonic Youth feedback experiments to a minimum and ends up sounding like a less-drunk and more competent Replacements song from the early nineties. That’s a good thing.

Daniel Johnson wrote Devil Town, but his voice makes Rosanne Barr sound like Pavoratti. Tony Lucca rescues an excellent song by singing it well and playing it with a bit of country-style swing. I love the imagery of a town inhabited by vampires who live normal lives, driving around, going to school, hanging out, doing normal vampire things…

All the lists picked All My Friends as the standout track from the Sound Of Silver record. They’re wrong. I got hold of Someone Great at the beginning of the year and it’s still the best bit of electronica I’ve heard. All that knob twiddling he does produces the right bubble, the exact squeak, and the perfect whirr that keeps this song churning right along.

AMP Fiddler is a mad f*****r, but he knows who to collaborate with. If I Don’t sounds immediately modern and classic with Corinne Bailey Rae doing the singing. It gives off an excellent Cotton Club vibe.