Category Archives: albums

Top Ten Albums of 2007

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You might reasonably ask why I’m coming out with this list in mid-February. The truth is, I think you have to build in at least a good month of overhang, because you still may not have found and digested some of the year’s best albums properly by midnight on December 31st. This past year took some digesting too, unfortunately more from dearth than from girth. Here, in alphabetical order, are my picks for the best albums of 2007:

1. Chrome Dreams II (Neil Young)- Neil Young is a pleasure even when he’s piddling around. It’s an especial pleasure to find him here, well past the age of 50, still able to narrate interesting stories with his plaintive wail on a coherent set of songs that alternate between relaxed folkiness and Crazy Horse style assaults of heavy guitar feedback.

2. Icky Thump (White Stripes)- A so-so White Stripes album is kind of like so-so sex. It’s still pretty compelling, and you certainly never think of leaving before it’s over. As with Get Behind Me Satan, there’s a little too much self-conscious experimentation here to really achieve the straight ahead, undiluted quality of their best work. Nevertheless, I’ll still take a near miss from Jack and Meg over the best effort of many another outfit any day of the week.

3. I’m Not There (soundtrack, various)- Soundtracks usually have trouble succeeding as truly acceptable stand-alone albums since a significant layer of their meaning relies so heavily on the movies they spring from. Without that they run the risk of just being a weird assemblage of songs. This soundtrack, however, benefits from coming out of a movie that was itself about music and the life (through the work) of a single musician. Between unusual songs, unusual approaches to familiar songs and a surprising variety of artists participating, this ends up being a fresh and invigorating showcase of Dylan’s song craft. I particularly recommend disc two.

4. Juno (soundtrack, various)- See caveat above about sound tracks as albums. How delightful, then, that this soundtrack pulls it off. The heart and soul of the effort, of course, is Kimya Dawson’s delightful folk-punk songs, with their innocent and exuberant insistence on simple, fun lyrics. More remarkable is that the songs here by other artists, despite their diversity of styles and eras, feel like they belong with Dawson’s songs and create a quirky, yearning and ultimately sweet organic whole.

5. Losin’ It! (Vancougar)- Many have their eye on the music scenes in Canada’s big cities as the source of the next big thing. This quartet from Vancouver certainly encourages you to think that hope may not be in vain. Part punk, part girl-group harmony and all energy, every time I listen to this album I wish there were more people out there making rock with this sense of loving attention to it’s basic idioms and joyous adventure. And still producing songs that are actually about something, with distinctive voices from each of the individual members. Keep your eye out on what these gals are up to next.

6. Twelve (Patti Smith)- Well here’s someone who knows a thing or two about loving attention to rock’s idioms. A good cover should honor the essence of the original, but approach it sonically in a new and different way. If covers are going to sound just like the original, after all, that’s what we have originals for. Patti Smith breathes new life into all twelve songs she covers here, not tripping at all in the transition from Tears for Fears to Neil Young to Jefferson Airplane to Dylan to Nirvana to Stevie Wonder (et al) and holding the whole thing together with the hypnotic power of her own singular voice and vision. Outstanding fun for any music lover.

7. Under the Blacklight (Rilo Kiley)- Try it and see if these songs aren’t so damn hooky that they get stuck in your head the next day. And yet leave behind shards of lyrics that unsettle as they slowly dissolve. There’s more than a trace of the now thankfully peaking and passing dance-rock indie sub-genre here, but with a lean more toward the rock side of the equation such that they end up with a genuine power and urgency that the efforts of many others in this vein ultimately lack. More than that, Jenny Lewis’ incisive and insightful lyrical vision and lush and world-weary vocal delivery carries the whole thing to another level entirely.

8. 93-03 (Frank Black)- I’d agree in principle that it’s questionable to include a greatest hits collection in a list of the top albums of the year. Nonetheless, the first 11 tracks of this compilation of the first ten years of the solo career of the former Pixies front man is one of the most consistently excellent listens of the year.

9. Almost Made Its- No, this isn’t a band or an album name. Although it’s a good name, isn’t it? Pay me a nickel if you use it. What I mean is all the albums that made a vigorous stab at being superb but just missed it. Art Brut’s It’s a Little Bit Complicated, the Foo Fighters Echoes, Silence , Patience & Grace, Kings of Leon’s Because of the Times, Bruce Springsteen’s Magic, and Tegan and Sara’s the Con are all worthy of attention.

10. There is no number 10. Lest it escape anyone’s attention, it’s a bad sign when the best albums of the year include two soundtracks, a greatest hits collection and a covers album. It’s no accident that Frank Black got on the list with a set of songs from the mid-90s, the most recent of rock’s periodic outbursts of renaissance. That last musical fluorescence has run it’s course, and once again the old Gods are nearly dead. It’s time for a revolution!

Virgin Megastore of Despair

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Late October from MySpace. We’re getting closer to real time… I have to say, the Springsteen is not holding up as well to repeated listenings. Lots of good songs, but it doesn’t quite add up to an album. It does retain the quality I most like though, of being like a greatest hits album because it covers so many Springsteen eras and moods, but composed entirely of new songs. KT Tunstall is still good clean fun, and Rilo Killey remains excellent. Neil Young is Neil Young, and needs no further justification. Like God and Popeye.

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This afternoon I spent a few hours at the Virgin Megastore downtown bopping around from listening station to listening station. This is something I do about once a month to check out the new releases, hoping, of course, to find something good. In particular, I’m always hoping to find new bands making exciting, interesting music.


I’m not going to lie to you. It looks pretty grim.

Outside of dance music, which is not my scene, and hip hop, which is mostly not my scene and has also been mostly ghastly for a few years now, I was faced with album after album of slightly bleary emo and slightly bleary pop punk and slightly bleary indie darlings and slightly bleary overly-orchestral metal. The few standouts came from stalwarts, which gave me a fine burst of age-pride, but left me concerned for the future of our youths.

The new Foo Fighters album Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace seems to be in good working order. Sliding even further up the age scale, Mick Jones was showing up the kids with his new project Carbon/Silicon which brings to mind welcome echoes of his Big Audio Dynamite days and even of the Clash. I ended up going older still, walking out the door with the new albums from Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young.

Neil Young is sometimes really off, like during 1979-1989, or when he made that weird “Let’s Roll” song shortly after 9/11. Even when he’s off, he’s pretty compelling. But when he’s on, as he is throughout Chrome Dreams II, he’s irresistible. The plaintive haunting voice is entirely authentic throughout, buoyed by rich acoustic music and welcome occasional trips into seething guitar that puts one in mind of Crazy Horse in full glory.


As for Springsteen, his album, Magic, is. He’s playing with the E-Street Band, which leaves him both more rocking and more relaxed than on Devils and Dust. The overall impression is of a master, thirty years on, able to draw on moods and themes from throughout his career and turn them into elegiac vignettes that are musically polished without losing the quality of being heartfelt. I’m especially gratified with the surging “Radio Nowhere” which echoes my own concerns about the musical wasteland: This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?… I want a thousand guitars/I want pounding drums/I want a million different voices/Speaking in tongues


It does look grim, but it is not entirely forlorn.

Putting little KT Tunstall in a miniskirt and boots on the cover of Drastic Fantastic as she hoists her guitar aloft seems like a dirty trick. On the other hand, it’s one to which I am entirely susceptible. Actually listening to it, though, filled me with delight that she’s grown more fully into the voice in evidence on her debut album. By the time I got to track six, “Hopeless” I just hung up the headphones and added the CD to my stack because she was too darned good to ignore.

Rilo Kiley’s Under the Blacklight was an equally delightful surprise. I don’t really know them that well so I pictured them as being part of that indie vein that sounds vaguely like everything else in that indie vein. You know, all the Deathcabs and Postal Services and Iron and Wines and what have you. In fact, Rilo Kiley sound like themselves. And it is good.