What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, Part III: The Top Ten of 2007
Jan 11 '08 (Updated Jan 17 '08)
The Bottom Line The _____ year since ____ (fill-in-the-blank quiz).
Way back at the end of 2006, fellow Epinioner voxpoptart – for whom I have more respect than perhaps any other regular contributor to the site – didn’t pull any punches when he reprimanded me rather sharply for declaring that the year in music had been definitively forgettable. In crowning the Decemberists’ Crane Wife album of the year, I glossed through the year and prepared a best-of list containing a scant five albums, consisting mostly of the standard critical darlings of the year. In retrospect, of course, Brian was (as he often is) completely correct – whether because of the limitations of a busy schedule that prevented me from hearing a lot of music, or simply because I had been disillusioned by what I had heard (The Flaming Lips released At War With The Mystics, perhaps their worst album in fifteen years, or ever), I closed my ears to a lot of the great music that was made in the year 2006. Luckily, I never published a formal list, so I was never exposed as the fool that I essentially was. Looking back, I still think that 2006 was weak, if only because it immediately preceded 2007, a year which may go down as one of the strongest for music in a very long time – certainly since at least 2002, when the 1-2-3 punch of Broken Social Scene (You Forgot It In People), The Flaming Lips (Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots), and Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) – not to mention Beck’s Sea Change, and a resurgent Pearl Jam (Riot Act) – effectively set the musical agenda for the 2000s.
But what’s remarkable about 2007 in music is that its success came in spite of the fact that it was – at least in this reviewer's opinion – a rather dismal year for the established acts and the traditional critical darlings. The Arcade Fire released an album that was as middling as it was highly anticipated (Neon Bible), Interpol released the same record for the third time now (Our Love To Admire), and The New Pornographers did the unthinkable by releasing a record that was – aside from a couple of Carl Newman-penned gems – simply boring (Challengers, which a number of critics labeled a ‘grower’ precisely because, I suspect, they couldn’t bring themselves to admit that it simply wasn’t very good). Kevin Drew, meanwhile, upped the trend of disappointing Broken Social Scene solo records to at least three (Broken Social Scene Presents: Spirit If...), Wilco continued to strive for the middle of the country-rock Bell-curve (Sky Blue Sky), and even being one of the most interesting records of the year – a wholehearted, if somewhat shallow, forgery of contemporary popular music that does reflect rather compellingly on both the band and modern Billboard Hot 100 culture as a whole – couldn’t prevent Rilo Kiley’s Under the Blacklight from achieving anything more than a sort of notable mediocrity (the pop-forgery is even authenticated by its two brilliant cuts – The Moneymaker and Silver Lining – which are scattered haphazardly amongst the waste). And, lest anyone think that I could forget, Radiohead released just one more record (In Rainbows) that – aside from its revolutionary distribution channel, and the great 15 Steps – really only served to remind me exactly how wonderful The Bends and OK Computer were.
That’s not to say that all established artists didn’t do well for themselves in 2007; in fact, the year was quite good to a number of acts that already had a respectable critical audience. But with the glaring failure of some of – at least indie – music’s biggest names, some of its long-time backups – the Nationals, the Wintersleeps, the Weakerthans, and the Feists of the world – were given opportunity to start on a much grander stage. Start – and star – is what they did.
There are, of course, curious counterexamples to the trend. The Shins, for example, lived up to expectations and did rather well for themselves in 2007 (Wincing The Night Away), and an almost startling number of established hip-hop artists were a defiant exception to 2007’s mass critical implosions. Although neither made my final list, both Lupe Fiasco (The Cool) and Talib Kweli (Ear Drum) worked at near peak efficiency, while Jay-Z rebounded from a career-worst to reach a near high himself (American Gangster). Nevertheless, and without further ado, I present my own top ten albums of 2007.
10. Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Kevin Barnes' marriage nearly fell apart. Kevin Barnes suffered from a chemical imbalance. These two facts are possibly related. And when Barnes began taking antidepressants, things began to happen: not only did his marriage improve, but Of Montreal's eighth album, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? began to take shape. Propelled by Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse, the album's first single and tightest cut, Hissing Fauna is a circus of the bizarre and a parade of the absurd: a pseudo-concept album that chronicles Barnes' transformation into glam-rock alter ego, Georgie Fruit. But the overall tone of the record isn't so much glam – as you might expect from this narrative – as it is simply strange: pulsating grooves, ambient noises, curious drum loops and layer upon layer of swirling, unusual sonic textures. It is not simply noise, because it is quite musical, and indeed wonderfully melodious, but it is fascinating. The Past Is A Grotesque Animal is a twelve-minute epic that builds to a fevered pitch and maintains it for upwards of six minutes, while the aforementioned Heimdalsgate bounces from cacophonous blasts into a lively, almost MIDI-driven melody, as Barnes pleads with the chemicals in his own brain.
9. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away
Wincing The Night Away, the Shins follow up to 2003's Chutes Too Narrow, is the elusive proof that the term 'grower' applied to an album does not have to mean that a reviewer simply couldn't bring himself to pan an awful record by an otherwise good band. The reason, of course, is that Wincing The Night Away is really quite brilliant – big, bouncy pop songs filled with cripplingly morose sentiment – only after you've set it aside for a month. Or it was, at least, after I did so. I was initially rather indifferent toward the quintet's third LP; picking it up again one month later, however, revealed a rather compelling pop record that employs a curious kind of backward math to arrive at its destination. If Chutes Too Narrow, with its peppy instrumentation countered by rather sombre lyrical content, was great, then the only way to possibly improve is to up the peppiness while becoming even more gloomy. What's remarkable, though, is that the approach – by and large – works. Turn On Me's cynicism - “So affections fade away / or do adults just learn to play / The most ridiculous, repulsive games?” - is juxtaposed by the song's jangly, galloping beat, while even the haunted reflection of A Comet Appears isn't enough to draw attention away from the way the music so smoothly glides and sparkles. Truthfully, Wincing The Night Away sounds so beautiful that it really doesn't matter what James Mercer is singing about. This is both the album's greatest strength and weakness. Mercer's wonderful wordplay and minimalist vocal touch is overshadowed, but it is overshadowed by what are effectively some of the prettiest, most lustrous melodies of 2007.
8. Wintersleep – Welcome To The Night Sky
When I saw Wintersleep in the Winter of 2006 – having neither heard nor heard of them before – I left the show somewhere between impressed and bewildered. They were a band, anyone could see, that had an absurd amount of talent and a polished set of songs. But so much of their talent seemed wasted; not only because of the senseless jam sessions that stretched out short, well-crafted gems into bloated corpses, but because their sound was so much of a sonic wash - fuzzy, unintelligible, and virtually unrecognizable. Their two previous albums fared better, but it really wasn't enough at the time. Some artists benefit from an intimate, low-fidelity approach, but Wintersleep is not one. Their songs, so tight and so careful, simply beg to be polished. With Welcome To The Night Sky, that has finally happened. Producer Tony Doogan, famous for work with Belle and Sebastian and Mogwai – to whom Wintersleep bear more than a passing resemblance – must have seen the same problems. In recording the LP, Doogan toned down the jams, tightened up the instruments, and carefully polished a set of songs that was already better than good. The result is an album that, though hardly groundbreaking, simply sounds wonderful. The tone is bright and crisp, the lead vocals carefully enunciated, the harmonies tight, and the instruments are all recorded so cleanly that the pop sensibility shines through. Welcome To The Night Sky is like Cheap Trick – filled to the brim with the kind of lively, infinitely infectious pop-rock that seems mathematically programmed to incite toe taps, hand claps, and unashamed singalongs. Weighty Ghost, for example, serves as brilliant sing along, fueled by an organ and its propulsive 1-2-hand-clap rhythm, while Dead Letter & the Infinite Yes features a slow chanted chorus over precisely composed music; pianos dancing with war-march drums and droning guitars. Even at its most experimental – the eight-minute Miasmal Smoke & the Yellow Bellied Freaks – the band holds listeners' hands; carefully delineating suites and building to a crashing, droning – and ultimately quite satisfying – crescendo.
7. LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
James Murphy was a punk-rocker who eventually figured out that the most punk-rock thing he could ever do was make dance music. Co-founding DFA Records, and a well-received debut proved that – whether his hypothesis was right or wrong – there were interesting ideas to be explored in the synthesizing of punk rock with dance music. Sound of Silver, released in March, is Murphy's second full-length attempt to do just that. And he succeeds, with so much cool, and with so much flash, that Sound of Silver has spread beyond dance circles and may – or certainly should – one day be regarded as a definitive dance record. Knowing so little about dance music, it's difficult to fully explain just what makes Sound of Silver so utterly wondrous. But any serious attempt to do so has to simply focus on its aesthetic brilliance. The careful selection of beats, the tempo, the layering – they're not just excuses to dance, they're building to something greater. They're part of the story, part of the vibrant world that the songs sketch, the life pulse that travels through the whole record. It is a defiant entry in a genre of carefully constructed, mathematically assembled music, one that sounds so devastatingly natural and organic. All My Friends is an eight-minute rock-and-roll epic within the confines of a dance backbone, a celebration of life that would be at home on any great rock record of the past twenty years; North American Scum is a happily pulsating, hand-clap driven piece of self-aware genius, and even the sci-fi blips that explode from the droning progression of Someone Great seem to lend to an abstract authenticity that I have no authority recognizing. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is often regarded as the jazz album loved even by those who hate jazz. Some day, LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver may do the same dance.
6. Band of Horses – Cease To Begin
With the departure of a founding member in 2006, smart money was on Band of Horses not being able to duplicate the success of its critically slobbered-over debut, Everything All The Time. But the band soldiered on as a trio lead by Ben Bridwell, and released Cease To Begin just one year after its predecessor, taking the style of Everything All The Time to its next logical step. Cease to Begin is equal parts country-rock and indie-rock, the former played unironically with just a hint of twang and a nod to the sad cowboy narrative: “no tears into the booze” Bridwell sings in his Neil Young-Wayne Coyne drone. But the latter is plainly evident too, with loud, droning guitars and sparse, sombre drum beats doing as much as the country touches to craft a mournful, tragic mood that permeates the record. Even the tender sentiment of No One's Gonna' Love You – Cease to Begin's best cut, a shimmering ballad – is haunted by the droning funeral procession that is the album's rhythm section. The emotions – the outpouring of sadness, and devastating, yet unspoken loss – here are laid heartbreakingly bare, and they're wonderfully complimented by soft strings and restrained synths. The tracks themselves are not the epic, indie-rock compositions of Everything All The Time – an album that is undeniably better on the whole – but Cease to Begin benefits from its singular scope: the worlds that it explores, and the possibilities that it examines, are simply vast in scope.
5. Kanye West – Graduation
It's difficult to say anything new or interesting about Kanye West because he's so omnipresent in the narratives of modern popular music. So I'll simply say that, for all the grandstanding, for all the foolish things that come out of his mouth, Kanye West remains the best mainstream hip-hop artist in the world, deftly combining his unique flow with thoughtful, usually socially conscious and often hilarious lyrics, and his trademark, sped-up soul sample production. But I'll say something else, too: that Graduation, Kanye's third LP, is probably the best of his career so far. The highlights on Graduation aren't as high as on his previous albums – no Jesus Walks, no All Falls Down or Gold Digger – but by removing the skits, minimizing the guest artists, and reducing the running time to a scant (for hip-hop) fifty-one minutes, Kanye has effectively created a breakneck album that jumps, without pause, from one highlight to the next. Debut single Stronger had the unenviable – and admittedly, nigh-impossible – task of living up to the Daft Punk sample it uses, but remains worthwhile nonetheless. The jubilant, vocoder-heavy Good Life finds Kanye out-T-Paining T-Pain (who guest stars in his own musical de-pantsing), and Can't Tell Me Nothing, with its slowed sample and subdued beat, shows a measure of musical growth and personal maturation (“I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven / When I woke I spent that on a necklace”). But as with the rest of Kanye's discography, it's the non-single album cuts – ones which often end up as singles – that elevate his game. The Elton John-sampling Good Morning opens with coordinated oohs, and finds Kanye's wordplay at its best: “I'm like the fly Malcolm X / Buy any jeans necessary.” Champion finds Kanye letting his Steely Dan sample do the brunt of his work, while I Wonder adds bombastic drum and bass and orchestral swells to a Labi Siffre ballad.
4. Feist – The Reminder
2007 was, in many respects, the year of Leslie Feist. Despite being active in the Canadian music scene since the age of fifteen – including the 2004 release of her major-label debut, Let It Die – Feist experienced real fame for the first time in her career. Grammy nominations, SNL performances, and a near-ubiquitous iPod commercial made the young songstress virtually inescapable, turning the lovely singalong 1234 into a virtual Hey Ya moment. And though there's certainly a good reason for her adoption as a pop darling, and for the well-deserved success of The Reminder – her deeply emotive voice, at times bright and sunshiney, at others husky and smoke-filled, her wonderful sense of melody, her oft-ignored songwriter's touch, her beautiful instrumentation, and her playful sense of musical humour, to name a few – the downside is that impact of her work, through no fault of her own, has been somewhat neutered. And yet The Reminder is such a pretty, peppy, and infectious record that, even when I'm sick of it, I can't get enough of. Though Feist lacks traditional vocal range, she's aware of her limitations and plays to them: she's just sultry enough to pull off the Nina Simone cover (Sealion), but smart enough to know that her strength lies in the jubilant (1234 – still gorgeous, overplayed or not), the quietly lovely (Brandy Alexander), and the pensive, subdued moments of introspection (The Limit To Your Love). She's helped, additionally, by a collection of backing musicians – including a number of Broken Social Scene contributors – who play to those same strengths. The album's alt-jazz accompaniment is as vibrant and cozy as Feist is, and the sentiment here, regardless of the fact that the stories of joyous love and even more tragic loss are hardly unique, is still deeply felt in the quiver of her wonderful voice.
3. The Weakerthans – Reunion Tour
In 2003, the Weakerthans released Reconstruction Site, an album that I recall I only ever heard because it sat every day on the shelves of the library where I worked for a year. I have no idea, in fact, why I borrowed it in the first place – I was not at the time a fan of any of the categories of music to which the Weakerthans might be relegated – but I suppose in retrospect that it was a gateway drug into indie rock. Regardless, Reconstruction Site was (and remains) a masterpiece that never got the due it deserved outside of Canada – a wonderful blend of genres that engaged philosophy and painted a vivid portrait of Canadiana, perhaps designating the quartet (lead by former Propaghandi member John K. Samson) the punk-rock equivalent to the Decemberists' brand of literary alt-rock. But punk rock is maybe a misnomer, at least strictly musically. For while the Weakerthans have the punk-rock attitude in spades – the DIY ethic, the rebellion – their music is a rich blend of rock, folk, pop, and country that proves punk-rock is all about perspective. In my respects, Reunion Tour picks up where Reconstruction Site left off, four years later – a bit heavier, maybe, with a dash of electronic toying, and admittedly not quite as brilliant overall – crafting rich hooks and even richer stories, gorgeous harmonious and wonderful sketches of characters, real and fictional. Virtute the cat, first heard from on Reconstruction Site (in Plea From A Cat Named Virtute) makes another appearance (Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure), somberly leaving home and experiencing subsequent feline tragedy. Guitars twang and brush drums as her owner calls to her in vain, “singing the song that you find for me.” And for all the silliness of its subject, there is nevertheless a powerful earnestness that makes the song so wonderfully heartbreaking. Sun In An Empty Room is simply a wonderful pop-rock song, its call-and-answer chorus perfect for sing along. And then there is the record's most fascinating cut, Elegy for Gump Worsley: a spoken word tribute to the late NHL goalie (the last to play without a mask, “never afraid of the puck” but terrified of flight) set to a simple banjo – or what sounds like a banjo – accompaniment. Again, the possible absurdity of Samson's tribute is defused by the tenderness, sincerity, and wry humour of his reflections, tying Worsley's life to childhood dreams of every Canadian boy: “'I'm strictly a whisky man' / Was one of the sticks he taped up / And gave to a nation of pudgy boys.”
2. The National – Boxer
After going a week without listening to the National's Boxer, follow-up to their 2005 record Alligator – acclaimed in its own right – I almost forgot why I included it on my best of list, let alone so highly. And then as the opening piano chords of Fake Empire began shimmering softly by, joined gradually by Matt Berninger's rich baritone – an almost Nick Cave-ian growl, paired with Leonard Cohen wisdom and a plaintive sadness that's all his own – and plodding bass drum, it immediately came back to me. And indeed, for several moments I hesitated and wondered whether it wasn't better suited as number one. What strikes me so immediately about Boxer – beyond how remarkably fresh it sounds each time that I listen – is they way that the songs, for all their internal tragedies, their sparseness, and middle-class morbidity, are so incredibly infectious. The National, of course, play to their obvious strengths; the heavy bass drum and snare, the wonderfully constructed piano runs, the audible fingers sliding up and down buzzing guitar strings, and Berninger's mumbling world-weariness and plaintive sadness. But they do so in such a way that is rather deeply affecting. It might be said, for what it's worth, that on Boxer, the National are as effective at crafting moods – vividly recalling locations and situations, real or imagined, without even a word – as they are at crafting songs. Boxer conjures a tragic urban decay, low brick walls and darkness, juxtaposed by sharp streetlights; it conjures the worn wood countertops and acrid smell of a working class bar, and of the defeated, self-destructive figures – violent, but in thought only - who frequent them. Boxer is almost uniformly bleak; vulnerable sadness drips from every low-fidelity sadness, and there is no happy ending. Even the optimistic moments are self-conscious and guarded, ultimately tragic themselves: “Whatever went away,” Berninger sings on Start A War, “I’ll get it over now. I’ll get money, I’ll get funny again.”
1. Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
What’s great about Spoon’s 2007 album – and what makes it the toast of a brilliant class – is the manner in which it defies expectations even as it fulfills them. It’s loose, comfortable, and laid-back while being remarkably tight and focussed; it’s straightforward yet adventurous, casual yet stern. Haphazard, but meticulously compiled. Guitar-driven, yet filled with a reverence for the unorthodox instrumental flourishes that really sell it. Melodic and hook-filled, yet fiercely unconventional. It is, in other words, a straightforward rock-and-roll album that is anything but. The argument against Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga as album of the year seems a rather intuitive one. It sounds so much like a holding pattern for an established group; it does not contribute anything ‘unique’ to the canon of popular music. But I tend to disagree, and I think a lot of this criticism is predicated on the fact that no matter what Spoon is doing, they sound exactly – and only – like themselves. In addition to simply being a great rock record – crunchy, tight, hook-filled, and wonderfully sequenced – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is propelled by the little flourishes that seem so insignificant on first glance: The Underdog’s fuzzy horn nucleus gives an already retro, mid-tempo rocker an unmatched vibrancy – a gorgeous pop sheen – and a sense of exoticism that rules the day here. The Ghost of You Lingers is made more urgent by the fact that you can literally hear the percussive sound of fingers on piano keys, and Rhthm and Soul is propelled by a nuanced, subtle kind of flamenco. Even the studio conversation of Don't You Evah, set to a driving drum and hand-clap rhythm seems carefully constructed to elicit reaction when set off against the song's infectious – and self-consciously conventional, in spite of its unusual measure – fingersnap-hand-clap backing. In fact, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga's only shortcoming is its length, an agonizingly brief thirty-six minutes, though the result of this is the creation of a bizarre, insular universe where influences are bent and congeal into something unrecognizable, disquieting, and yet somehow familiar. From the crisp guitars and percussive crunch of Don't Make Me A Target to the final seconds of Black Like Me – a gorgeous, slow-building rock and roll orchestra, falling instantly to a deathly still quiet – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a devastating album that invites no real comparisons and desires no pithy words of praise from the critic. For all its subtle complexity, its sharp rhythm structures, careful studio trickery, and cerebral games, it's an album best served by a rather pedestrian observation: “that rocked.”
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Member: Bryan Jansen
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