2007: A meaningful moment through a meaningless process

Favorite Concerts -

5. !!!, Someday Lounge, 5/2/07
4. Hot Chip, Wonder Ballroom, 6/11/07
3. Subtle/TV on the Radio, Roseland Ballroom, 3/23/07
2. Junior Boys, Doug Fir Lounge, 4/24/07
1. Björk, Sasquatch Music Festival, 5/26/07

Album Honorable Mentions -

Apparat - Walls
Battles - Mirrored
Björk - Volta
Caribou - Andorra
The Clientele - God Save The Clientele
Denzel + Huhn - Paraport
The Go! Team - Proof of Youth
Gui Boratto - Chromophobia
John Vanderslice - Emerald City
M.I.A. - Kala
Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before The Boat Sank
Sigur Rós - Hvarf-Heim
Subtle - Yell&Ice
The Tuss - Rushup Edge

Top 10 Albums:

10. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero

Future music historians will probably look back on 2007 as a watershed year for the industry. Radiohead didn't invent the concept of a band induced leak, but they certainly had the critical cachet to get credit for taping into the digital zeitgeist [how about that oblique Corgan allusion]. Likely overshadowed in this narrative is Trent Reznor, orchestrator of one of the most compelling narrative environment driven advertising campaigns since convergence culture became a syllabus staple. Merchandise with hidden website addresses, flash-drives planted in concert bathrooms, phone numbers concealed in spectrographs. All of which would be irrelevant if Year Zero itself wasn't so strong. Imagine Aphex Twin orchestrating 1984. Well, Reznor is no Orwell, but the creative decision to not cite his diary verbatim results in a provocatively splintered narrative set in our not to dystant dystopian future. And while Thom Yorke and company merely provided you with early guilt-free access, Reznor is hosting multitrack raw files of the album for your own remixing pleasure. How cool is that?

9. The Shins - Wincing the Night Away

If Nine Inch Nails didn't already make you close the browser, this next Zach Braff approved selection should have you deindexing the blog. Like Modest Mouse's recent output (their new record could have equally fit this spot), I have liked each successive Shins album in exact inverse to the general trend in critical opinion. Possibly the most underrated album of the year.





8. The Field - From Here We Go To Sublime

I am go to steal a phrase because it seems so apt to describe The Field. Rhythmic invariance. All of Axel Willner's songs seems to follow the same musical algorithm: input golden oldies, output minimal trance loops. But what a glorious formula he has discovered. Perhaps that is why my favorite moment of the album is when he breaks from the beat in A Paw In My Face to a muzak outro [think the end of Optimistic]. And this album doesn't even include the best songs The Field released this year. For that you will have to track down Pop Ambient 2007 and his various remixes (and Things Keep Falling Down EP while you are at it).

7. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

An album tailor-made for the consummate Logan. Pretentious Bataille name dropping. New-wave sensibilities. Hell, there is even a song entitled "The Past Is Groteque Animal."







6. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

As a band, Spoon have a reputation for restraint and minimalism. No stray ends, no curious accidents. While the album title has a throw-away dadaist feel, it was no doubt deliberately selected after careful consideration. The title is in effect the perfect distillation of the musical tension in the album. Calculated improvisation? Meticulously libertine? Whatever it is, the album is practically effervescent at only 36 minutes. A reminder of the band's central mantra: less is more.


5. Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline

In contrast to other albums on this list, And Their Refinement of the Decline most closely approaches the nebulous concept of timelessness. Celestial and beautiful in a non-anthropomorphic manner, it is the sounds of a universe finally succumb to entropy. Notes are held for minutes, never quite mustering the resolve to build to any noticeable movements or motifs. Or perhaps it is the sound of the universe at its most nascent, just beginning to test the frontiers of arrangement and order. This central ambivalence is captured in the infinity sign on the rather tongue-and-check artwork, one of the few signs that this album is of terrestrial origins.

4. !!! - Myth Takes

I completely dismissed !!! during the short-lived dancepunk era. By the end of 2003, I had already sworn my allegiance to The Rapture and beyond a cursory listen to Louden Up Now, I wrote off Chk Chk Chk as carbon copies with a terrible name. Beyond superficial similarities, however, the bands have little in common besides a unifying goal: they both want you to unashamedly dance your ass off. And let's face it. The world can never have too many of those types of bands. [True story: one of the only concerts to outlast me in energy.]

3. Eluvium - Copia

Not quite ambient. It is far too cinematic and panoramic to be both interesting and ignorable. Even if the gorgeous piano of Radio Ballet occasionally washes over me, the climatic fireworks (not a metaphor!) of Repose In Blue never fail to get me a little teary-eyed. One of my biggest disappointments of the year was not seeing Eluvium [who curiously opened for both Explosions in the Sky and SunnO))] live.



2. Radiohead - In Rainbows

My reaction to seeing Radiohead live in 2006 was largely ambivalent. I was disappointed with the setlist [not enough Amnesiac cuts, but better than Usana when I had to endure through Fake Plastic Trees (the worst) and Sail to the Moon (the second worst)], but I distinctly remember being cautiously optimistic with the new songs. Mind you this memory could have been shaded differently depending on which tracks were included in the final tracklisting. Leave in Down is the New Up or Bangers + Mash and I would probably be telling you how boring I found the new material live. As it stands, however, 15 Step and Open Pick (aka. Jigsaw Falling Into Place) were harbingers of the brilliance to come. I can't really argue with Mark over this album. His critique boils down to two essential arguments: the songs are nothing new and he doesn't like Thom Yorke. I disagree with the former, and sidestep the latter. All I know is that when the bass and the card-shuffling drum beat come in at the 2:39 mark of 15 Step, all my faith in Radiohead is restored.

1. Pantha Du Prince - This Bliss

My personal and humble pick for the album of the year. What else can I say?