War on Radio

*cue the soundtrack*

As 2008 is hours away from being over, this list is but a mere ten albums from its completion. These are the elite of my listening habits this year, the ten albums that–more than any of the others–wormed their way into my consciousness. If you know me, there aren’t any surprises here, and its true that a lot (probably all) of these albums have ended up on other “best of” lists, but I stand by my choices, even if the ranking is a little fuzzy in places.

But before we get down to it, one more look at the last 40 albums on the list:

THE LIST SO FAR:
50. Fall Out Boy - Folie a Deux
49. Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul
48. Owl City - Maybe I’m Dreaming
47. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
46. Counting Crows - Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
45. Sigur Rós - Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust
44. The Raconteurs - Consolers of the Lonely
43. Juliana Hatfield - How to Walk Away
42. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
41. The Kills - Midnight Boom
40. Man Man - Rabbit Habits
39. Shugo Tokumaru - Exit
38. Lambchop - OH (Ohio)
37. Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Lie Down in the Light
36. Drive By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
35. Panic at the Disco - Pretty. Odd.
34. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
33. The Mighty Underdogs - Droppin’ Science Fiction
32. The Gutter Twins - Saturnalia
31. Titus Andronicus - The Airing of Grievances
30. REM - Accelerate
29. School of Seven Bells - Alpinisms
28. Spiritualized - Songs in A&E
27. Benoit Pioulard - Temper
26. The Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of Understatement
25. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
24. The Tallest Man on Earth - Shallow Grave
23. Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
22. Augie March - Watch Me Disappear
21. Deerhunter - Microcastle
20. Rodney Crowell - Sex & Gasoline
19. Aimee Mann - @#%&*! Smilers
18. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash
17. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
16. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
15. Juana Molina - Un Dia
14. Larkin Grimm - Parplar
13. Nada Surf - Lucky
12. Okkervil River - The Stand Ins
11. The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

And with no further ado, my top ten records of the year.

10. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Part 1: 4th World War
Erykah Badu’s fourth album opens with an announcer promising “More action! More excitement! More everything!” and the hour that follows delivers fully on that promise. It’s an adventurous, playful record that draws from all corners of urban music, from ’60s Motown to modern hip-hop, blending them into something both unique and timeless. The songs wander hither and thither, sometimes brightly melodic, other times muted and hypnotic, full of more ideas and creative touches than I could possibly comment on. The title suggests a political manifesto, but rather this album draws from a sense of community–political, racial, artistic, familial, however it may manifest–and the complexity of the music is mirrored in the clearly heartfelt stories and observations laid over it that draw from cautionary tales about crime and drugs to tributes and celebrations of the power of music and artists. The sum total is something exciting and passionate that cannot be easily pigeonholed but yields more with each listen and sounds soulful, powerful and important.

9. Sun Kil Moon - April
Coming five years after the warm, inviting Ghosts of the Great Highway, this epic, 74-minute album blends those warm sounds with the cooler, more deliberate feel of the early Red House Painters records, standing as not only a summation, but one of the best records of Mark Kozelek’s 16 year career. The album takes its time–five of the eleven songs run between 7 and 11 minutes–creating atmosphere via interwoven electric and acoustic guitars playing variations on simple riffs, sometimes close to the vest (the brief, relatively spare fingerpicking of “Harper Road”), other times letting loose in massive drones (the towering, Neil Young-inspired centerpiece “Tonight the Sky”). Kozelek’s honeyed vocal wanders down alleyways of memory, pulling up observations that are sentimental without crossing into saccharine. They’re full of rich, sometimes arresting images (”When the skies come apart she leans over so helpless and cowering / Until the storms come to cease and somehow she’s the only one standing”), but like the music, often focus more on painting an atmospheric picture, rather than delivering a punch-in-the-gut blow. This is an album meant for daydreaming–lie down with it and let it infuse your thoughts and you’ll wind up in some melancholy yet stirringly beautiful places.

8. The Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride
The eleventh Mountain Goats album (not counting numerous EPs and rarities collections) is the first in some time not to have an explicit narrative or thematic concept, instead creating a series of vignettes that expand both the band’s sonic palate and John Darnielle’s already impressive emotional range. The band’s last 3 records have slowly been incorporating new elements into the low-fi sound but this album plays with and pushes them further than ever before. “San Bernadino” is built on a rich, tender string arrangement; “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” is easily the hardest song in the group’s vast catalogue, rocketing along on charging drums and electric guitar pulses; “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident” uses lovely background vocals to great effect, etc. Darnielle’s lyrics are clever and wordy as ever and he alternates between a gentle lilt and a ferocious nasal howl as he frames stories about childbirth (”San Bernadino”), death (”Sept 15, 1983″), and everything in-between. The album is the latest entry in a startling consistent career that proves John, Peter and company still have new places to go in their music.

7. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
If you want to get really technical, this album was self-released in 2007, but because it was picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, most critics count it as an ‘08 release and thus I’m doing the same. This accomplished debut was recorded alone in an isolated cabin and that chilly loneliness comes through in the beautiful sounds herein. Justin Vernon layers his creamy voice over flowing threads created by acoustic guitars, banjos and very subtle percussion. Loose fibers of electric guitars and electronic effects spiral in and out here and there, adding gentle flavor when they appear, and the whole thing is drenched in a light echo that creates wide open spaces, especially in the sparer moments like the haunting “The Wolves Act I & II,” which starts out barely there and crashes into a noisy climax. The words mimic the etherial nature of the music, using gorgeous, often abstract details (”Sky’s the womb and she’s the moon”) mixed with powerfully direct statements (”With all your lies, you’re still very loveable”) to paint soft, brokenhearted pictures. It’s a powerful, quietly intense collection of songs that not only stands very well as its own entity, but also suggests vast potential for follow-up records.

6. Shearwater - Rook
On the follow up to the gorgeous, masterful Palo Santo, Shearwater have tightened their sound, delivering a record that’s leaner and more propulsive while maintaining the haunting beauty that informs their best work. There is no easy way to describe the music–pianos, dulcimers, bells, horns/winds, electric and acoustic guitars, drums and strings peck and circle each other in something that sounds like a marriage of traditional, even mythical/mystical folk music and modern indie rock. At the center of the ghostly mist is Jonathan Meiburg’s voice, one of the most stunning male vocals in said indie rock–he floats effortlessly between deep croons and falsetto peaks, never losing his rich, powerful timbre. The words are perfectly suited to the music–enigmatic, natural, beautiful and dangerous, littered with lines like “I am starlight, I am moonlight over burning fields and bodies” or “Can this sullen child, bound as the ox I ride / Climb to the heart of the white wind, singing high / And blow through my frozen eyes?” It’s spectacular, a record that equals the heights of its predecessor and bodes extremely well for the future of the group, even if it’s an even harder act to follow than the last time.

5. Portishead - Third
It’s been 11 years since Beth Gibbons, Adrian Utley and Geoff Barrow have put out an album–an absolute eon in pop music terms–which makes the simply titled Third all the more striking. It picks up right where the band left off–building off the mysterious atmosphere of Dummy and Portishead and taking it to stranger and more ferocious places. The songs are dark, foreign and exotic, throwing in unexpectedly harsh elements into the jazzy, velvety sound the band laid out on their ’90s albums. Take “Machine Gun,” where Gibbons’ soulful melody is almost drowned in thundering percussion, or the sudden electronic boiling that jaggedly interrupts the lilting, seductive croon of “Hunter.” And just when you think you’ve got a line on the music, they take a sudden left turn with the ukulele piece “Deep Water.” The words only reenforce the tortured torch singer image that Gibbons’ voice creates–”Wild white horses, they will take me away / And the tenderness I feel will send the dark underneath,” etc, fitting in perfectly with the eerie, unsettling nature of the music. That a band could sound this vital and important long after most fans lost hope they’d ever come back speaks to the amazing musicianship in this trio–a band that helped define a genre (trip-hop, if weren’t paying attention) and continue to sound like no one else.

4. The Dodos - Visiter
This album originally started further down the list (somewhere in the 20s), but every time I listened to it, I felt compelled to move it up a few spaces. Meric Long and Logan Kroeber’s second album crams in even more wild ideas than Beware of the Maniacs, but rather than flying between this and that, it integrates all that craziness into something that’s undeniably messy but also strangely cohesive. The heart of this record is the thundering, crashing, stomping rhythms that drive the songs–both the shorter jaunts and longer epics–forward like a rocket engine. Over these is a layer of truly frantic acoustic guitar that shifts between manic strumming, sped up blues riffs and spiderwebbed picking, more often than not, in the same song. Mixed into this organized chaos is a stew of electric bass, piano stabs, horn blares, grunts and howls, tinkling bells and heaven knows what else. The sound has a gritty space–it feels like it was recorded in an empty warehouse–that makes the songs sound even messier, but for all of that, it’s anchored by undeniably pop melodies that keep things reined in just enough. The lyrics reveal that these are actually cleverly disguised love songs–consider the inner monologue of “Park Song,” where Long mutters to himself “Saw the girl I know from my job / I think that she must think that I’m retarded / I act so dumb when I get started.” The everydayness of this kind of writing makes the album all the more charming, and it is a charming record–one that hooks you in with its unabashedly wild flavor and keeps you engaged throughout.

3. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
There’s a lot to be told from the title of this record. It’s bright, shiny and wide-eyed, full of all the capriciousness of youth. It’s also nostalgic, drawing very skillfully from the past (specifically, the late ’80s) while still sounding like something fresh. The songs are drenched very heavily in shoegazer/JaMC style washes, something immediately apparent from the droning, hypnotic opener “You Appearing,” which builds from a lonely piano into Cocteau Twins-style ambience, covered in hazy electronic sounds. This spacy opening yields immediately into “Kim & Jessie,” one of the album’s best tracks and an indicator of the pop sensibility on the rest of the record, where spare, gentle verses segue into towering choruses, complete with wailing distortions that wouldn’t be out of place on Loveless. Tracks like the long, winding “Couleurs” show Anthony Gonzalez’s French-electronica roots, but this record is warmer and more immediate than anything he’s done before. The lyrics, while somewhat secondary to the music, are nonetheless sly and smart, full of both teenagerisms (”I look into your eyes / Diving into the ocean”) and cleverly put observations about youth, eg: “She worships Satan like a father / But she dreams of a sister like Molly Ringwald” (from the stellar “Graveyard Girl”). All in all, it’s a hooky, beautiful, bright album that builds on traditions yet blazes new territory for the man who made it.

2. Why? - Alopecia
After a series of intriguing near-misses like Oaklandazulasylum and Elephant Eyelash, Why? finally deliver an album that capitalizes on their huge potential. This is apparent immediately as “The Vowels Pt. 2″ storms in with heavy bass beats and Yoni Wolf declares “I’m not a ladies man, I’m a land mine filming my own fake death.” The first two tracks emphasize the hip-hop influence–there’s melody in Wolf’s voice, but he’s still doing a strange, slow, moody but involving version of rapping amidst layered, dark instrumentation. It’s not until the staggering “These Few Presidents” hits that the album fully turns into a pop record–an absolutely gorgeous melody plays against a running bass, culminating in a stormy, heavy chorus. From there the record takes off into jittery piano-rock (”Song of the Sad Assassin”), cheerful and shimmering pop (”Fatalist Palmistry”) and all sorts of other neat places. But as pop as the record gets, it never quite shakes the beat-influenced poetry that characterizes Wolf’s lyrics. He’s at times uncomfortably direct (”Jerking off in an art museum john til my dick hurts / The kind of shit I won’t admit to my head shrinker”) while other times playfully obscure (”Never in the night when the knot grows tighter than the thinkers can untie / And the last half dammed rivers have gone dry”), but always with an absolute mastery of timing and rhythm and a penchant for urban(e) images and ideas. The record dodges classification but it’s addictive as all hell and vies almost equally for the top spot with…

1. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
There’s a lot to be said for artistic experimentation–bands that push envelopes, do unexpected things and otherwise challenge the listener to pay attention and figure them out. I love that kind of music. But not all records need to be difficult or even terribly complex to be completely brilliant. There’s not a lot to discover about MGMT’s songs–they’re painted in broad, bold colors, comprised of in-your-face hooks in bright, shiny instrumentation. The lyrics are smart enough, often thoughtful (see: “Pieces of What”) and occasionally silly (see: “Electric Feel”), but they don’t make a thing about making any philosophical statement–the key line on the album comes in “The Youth,” which opens with the bold statement “This is a call of arms to live and love and sleep together.” This kind of casual, unabashed earnestness in the lyrics is definitely appealing, but that’s not what makes the record really great. What pushes it over the top and puts it in the number one slot for this year is the fact that every single song on here is catchy as fuck. I’m impressed every time I listen to it–it never once lets up, delivering ten absolutely perfect pop gems in 40 minutes. Even the somewhat more obscure moments like “4th Dimensional Transition” or “Future Reflections” end up wrapping themselves around your head and drilling into your brain if you let them. “The Handshake” is stomping and soaring, “Time to Pretend” is absolutely goddamned anthemic, “Electric Feel” is wiggly and funky. And at the center of this is “Kids,” which has a mind-bendingly stunning riff and melody that basically defines the earworm, so much so that it took me months to hear the second half of this album cos I kept hitting repeat whenever this track came up. Even if it’s not the deepest record on this countdown or the even best in a purely artistic sense, the music is so ridiculously joyful, the excitement communicates so wonderfully and I’ve listened to this so much I can’t not call it my favorite record of the year.

Alright, so that’s my list, make of it what you will. A lot of great music was put out this year and I’m still discovering new stuff–if I were to do a “Best of 2008″ list a year from now, I’m sure it’d probably be pretty different (just like my list about 2007 would be different if I made it now). But as the year closes out, this is how things stand. Time to look forward to a whole slew of releases set for 2009, ones that are already shaping it up to be an even more amazing year than 2008 was.

So happy New Year and see you folks in January!

Part of the reason I haven’t been writing lately is because I’ve been prepping for an epic 2008 year-in-review kinda post, sorting through the roughly 300 albums I’ve nicked this year and making top album and song lists, among other things.

But before 2008, there was 2007: a year full of great releases. So I thought I’d wander through the dense forest of my iTunes and pick out my favorite songs–not from this year, but from the last one, in order to see what’s held up and what’s faded by the wayside.

The result is a 32 song trip down memory lane. Some of these tracks I’ve talked about before in the Mixtaper column or in other posts, but some, I hope will be a bit fresh. Because of the rather large number, I’ll strive for brevity in my comments on each. Ready? Okay then.

1. American Hearts by A.A. Bondy, from American Hearts
There’s something achingly gorgeous in this relatively simple folk track. Listen to his voice break ever so slightly when he sings the “don’t tread on me” lyric in the chorus. It gives me chills.

2. Coffee by Aesop Rock (ft John Darnielle), from None Shall Pass
The concluding track (excluding the hidden song) on an amazing and intelligent album features two of the best lyricists working today combining their powers. After Aes’s frenetic rapping, John’s ending verse sounds like an old soul sample recovered from a dirty basement. Plus, there’s the zombies.

3.  Fiery Crash by Andrew Bird, from Armchair Apocrypha
This track goes down smooth, driven by a pulsing beat and lilting melody. Even as it starts to build up as it moves along, it retains a very relaxed, urbane charm that characterizes Mr. Bird’s best work.

4. Keep the Car Running by Arcade Fire, from Neon Bible
One of the lighter tracks from Canada’s most melodramatic indie rock orchestra. This song rockets along over light, lush backing track as Win Butler shout-sings with his usual emotive intensity. The result is teeming with life, organic and refreshing.

5. The Ballad of Love and Hate by The Avett Brothers, from Emotionalism
Easily the strongest track from the alt-country band, a spare and haunting effort anchored by its strong and emotionally loaded lyric. The beautiful melody, sung with just the right restraint, coupled with the spareness of the arrangement makes the words that much more effective.

6. Wild Mountain Nation by Blitzen Trapper, from Wild Mountain Nation
This song is basically southern rock on acid. It’s got a stomping beat, twanging slide guitar and an appropriately dirty lead guitar, but the whole things sounds messy and fractured in a spectacular and interesting way. I dare you not to tap your foot to this.

7. Flume by Bon Iver, from For Emma, Forever Ago
The album as a whole is characterized by a haunting, wintry feel, and this song captures the best of that atmosphere. The moody acoustic strumming is buried under droning sounds and layered falsetto vocals that give the song a ghostly presence. I can’t find it, but if you can track down his 9/8/08 performance of this song on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, it blew me away.

8. On the Bubble by The Broken West, from I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
This song practically slaps you in the face with its bright indie-poppiness, right out of the gate. That towering, sugar-sweet riff is only the tip of the iceberg–the handclap beat and bounding guitars support an eager vocal, harmonized in just the right places. It’s like sunshine condensed into two minutes and 40 seconds.

9. Pale Horse by Canon Blue, from Colonies
The song opens with moody backwards riff that’s soon augmented by a hypnotic guitar, etherial piano chording and eventually an electro-backbeat, which kicks up just as the vocal launches into a reverb-soaked chorus. This is music for traveling on trains or walking around in winter–it’s open and chilly, but also inviting.

10. Melody Day by Caribou, from Andorra
There’s something retro about this song, like it’s been brought here from 1967 via time warp, but it’s been dressed in modern clothes. There’s a bedroom-electronic flavour layered under the psychedelic melody, twittering flutes, understated guitar and crashing cymbals. The result is something that’s both alien and familiar in a really peculiar and cool way.

11. Serpentine by Chris Bathgate, from A Cork Tale Wake
The richness of the voice, coupled with the singsong melody is what strikes me the most here. The song appears simple at first listen, but reveals a subtle complexity on each repeat–cellos intone under the gentle piano, just as a violin (or viola maybe) soars above it; it’s easy to not even notice the drums as they come in; the build is really beautifully executed.

12. Saint John by Cold War Kids, from Robbers & Cowards
If one could distill badass into a song, it might sound like this. A jailhouse murder ballad driven by a wicked bass and thundering drums, over which comes a snarling vocal, clearly from the wrong side of the tracks. By the time the honky tonk piano sweeps in, it’s become almost a gospel song in a perverse but awesome way.

13. Going Nowhere by Elliott Smith, from New Moon
Technically this song is at least 10 years old, but it saw its first official release last year and stands as one of the strongest tracks from the articulate, dark world of Elliott’s music. His raw vocal whispers its way through a melancholy melody and over his beautiful guitar, as though he were in the room playing for you, maybe after some drunken party, while your friends are passed out around on the floor.

14. My Moon My Man by Feist, from The Reminder
This was a tough call–the innocent sweetness of “One, Two, Three, Four” or the femme fatale stomp of this track? And it is a stomp; the song is rhythm driven but covered in velvet, especially Leslie’s vocal, wandering through the arrangement like a silk ribbon. It’s dangerous and kinda sexy.

15. Song Among the Pine by Gravenhurst, from The Western Lands
Something about this track has the air of some ancient, pagan hymn. Nick Talbot creates, out of guitar, voice and gentle hums and drones, a snow-covered forest on a crisp sunny day, where mystical things lurk just on the periphery. It’s positively haunting.

16. Your Rocky Spine by Great Lake Swimmers, from Ongiara
Although the album isn’t as strong as their prior two, this banjo-driven love song is one of the band’s better songs. Tony Dekker’s voice is ridiculously beautiful, as usual, and the melody and lyrics embrace you as the song moves forward along its open path with a certain moody sweetness.
 
17. Small Talk by Immaculate Machine, from Fables
Indie pop, yes, but with a tense flavour to it, created by a tight melody and the interplay between lead violins and guitars over an unrelenting bass. The lyrics reflect this tension, talking of secrets worming their way into a conversation that suddenly turns heavy.

18. Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car by Iron & Wine, from The Shepherd’s Dog
The thing about Sam Beam is that he progresses with each release, becoming slowly more complex and adventurous, while retaining the intimate southern charm that made him famous in the first place. This album, like its opening track, features more playful touches–piano runs, gentle beats, distorted sounds–while still sounding like some old uncle telling you a story at a family reunion picnic. The lightness does the music good, it doesn’t get mired in melodrama, although the lyrics retain an emotive character.

19. Teardrop by Jose Gonzalez, from In Our Nature
As with his cover of The Knife’s “Heartbeats,” Mr. Gonzalez manages to strip this Massive Attack song down to its naked spine, retaining the character of the original while also making it very much his own. The song itself lends itself perfectly to his quiet, echo-laden world–its powerful yet still spare.

20. Pink Light by Laura Veirs, from Saltbreakers
There’s something about that guitar riff that’s just irresistible and something literate and intelligent in the singer/songwriter/occasional Decemberist’s voice. Like a lot of the tracks on this list, this one seems to come from its own kind of mythical world where sails are tattered and winter wracks the bones of memory, all under ringing chimes and over skittering beats.

21. Hatchet by Low, from Drums & Guns
“Groovy” is not a word I would usually use to describe the slowcore Minnesotans of Low, but this track definitely qualifies as that. With their usual awesome male/female harmonies, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker intone a wry lyric over a groovy beat and skeletal guitar riff, making this short song one of the most interesting in their catalogue.

22. 99% of Us is Failure by Matthew Good, from Hospital Music
When an album has a name like that, you’ve got to know you’re in for something like this, but this song is still a sucker-punch to the gut. There are a lot of songs about watching a loved one die, but the devil is in the details here; Good’s voice is expressive without being over the top, the lyrics are smart enough to have some pathos and the melody doesn’t hurt the picture, soaring over the ’90s alt-rock callback instrumentation.

23. Fake Empire by The National, from Boxer
There’s a grace to this song. Part of it comes from Matt Berninger’s low voice singing the almost detached melody. Part of it is the unobtrusive beat, driving under the pianos that grow stronger as the song builds. By the time the horn sounds come in, the track has become something else completely–a slice of smooth, modern pop/rock.

24. Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe by Okkervil River, from The Stage Names
This was a tough one–five of the nine songs on the album were under consideration for this list, but in the end, I had to pick this. The metaphor-dripping lyrics, the hurling vocal of Will Sheff, the anthemic nature of the instruments that support him–it’s all there. There’s a reason Okkervil River are one of my favorite bands and this is a great example of it.

25. Overture by Patrick Wolf, from The Magic Position
Now THAT is a violin riff. There’s something suitably epic about this affair; Mr. Wolf’s voice is laden with bravado, the beat pulses and thunders, the strings sweep in grand movements, etc. The contrast of electronic and acoustic instruments creates a cool effect also. Like Sam Beam, Patrick gets better with each successive release, and if this is this good, his next album better be damn well amazing.

26. Romantic Type by Pigeon Detectives, from Wait for Me
There is something appealing about straight-ahead, no frills rock ‘n’ roll and this song delivers on that front. It sounds in kind with the whole Franz Ferdinand-ish, “let’s draw from the late ’70s” thing, chugging forward there 2.5 minutes of crunchy guitars and a frenetic rhythm section, complete with the slowdown on the post-chorus. But it does it all really well, and that’s the key here.

27. House of Cards by Radiohead, from In Rainbows
Amidst all the tales of isolation, geopolitical statements and dystopian ruminations, Radiohead rarely get to write a straight love song, but here they’ve done it. Sort of–there is a certain doom-laden mood here, but it wouldn’t be Radiohead if there wasn’t. Everybody on the planet gushes about Radiohead, so I don’t have to explain why this song is awesome, really.

28. Rehab by Rihanna, from Good Girl Gone Bad
Say what you will, this chick can sing. Although not quite as cool as “Disturbia” (which is ineligible as it came out on the 2008 special edition of the album), there is something really appealing about this. Her voice isn’t being showy here, even though she’s capable of it, and the backing track feature a sweet, whirling piano. Proof that there is hope in the mainstream pop/R&B arena.

29. Overpowered by Roisin Murphy, from Overpowered
Formerly half of the dance pop band Moloko, Ms. Murphy creates the sound of robot sex on this track. It’s danceable, driven by a skittering low pad and plucking stabs over the top of a cybernetic vocal. Yet when she launches into the chorus, it’s with a “come hither” intonation that’s made more startling by the style of the verses. Great stuff.

30. Your Last Chariot by Scout Niblett, from This Fool Can Die Now
One of the shorter songs on Ms. Niblett’s best album since her 2001 debut, its a great showcase for her wailing vocal (see also: “Peoria Lunchbox Blues” by Songs:Ohia). The guitar, like the rest of the song around it, has a dirty, rural feel to it, not unlike ’90s Cat Power (an overused but apt comparison). There’s something dangerous about the affair as she repeats “comin’ to get ya…”

31. Sometimes by Siobhan Donaghy, from Ghosts
A standout track on one of the best pop albums of this century, the former Sugababe flexes her creative muscles, moving down a track that marries her teenybopper roots with Kate Bush-ish eccentricity. Listen to that high, spiraling vocal or the weird noises that dance in and out of the mix. The effect is to turn a simple bubblegum track into something weirdly spectacular.

32. Bouncing Off Clouds by Tori Amos, from American Doll Posse
Proving herself still vital, nearly 20 years after her first album and through a career marked by indulgent quirkiness, Tori put out one of the catchiest songs I can think of in this one. The melody is strong, the backing track isn’t showy but frames the vocal wonderfully, the lyrics… well, they’re Tori, but they’re not over the top. This manages to be both adult contemporary and appealing/interesting, a combination not easily achieved.

So that’s that list. 2007 was definitely a good year. I’m now off, ready to dive back into this year’s offerings–an even more diverse and intriguing set.

This Trailer for the new Okkervil River album is pretty cool. You’ll notice in the related features that they’re also doing a thing where various artists are doing solo covers of the new album’s songs–they’ve got Will Sheff dueting wth AC Newman on “Lost Coastlines” and Bon Iver on “Blue Tulip,” which are my favorites so far.

There’s also this not-that-great-sound-but-passable audio track of the studio version of Lost Coastlines, which is a great song.