I'll be honest: even taking the Biblical annoyances which have plagued my music-consumption habits over the last few months - the move, two computers dying, Time Warner being Time Warner, certain harumph cough hack being shut down by the cough blagh hork snxxx, etc - the fact remains that my musical 2007 was spent decidedly
elsewhere. 2007 was, for instance, the year I entered into My Steely Dan Phase, a project which certainly took priority over determining whether White Williams was worth being adorned with an 8.4 or damned to irrelevance with a 6.2 or whatever. The elegance and tidiness of Evie Sands and the Shivvers' bewilderingly compact discographies kept winning out time and time again over the history allegedly being rewritten with lightning by this year's alleged bumper crop of Britpop heroes. And Boz Scaggs...well, fuck you,
Silk Degrees is just awesome.
Of course, the only reason I feel empowered to talk like that in the first place is because I did my absolute damnedest to keep up with every vector of musical subsistence 2007 had to offer. I practically hemorrhaged money on music in 2007. I approached Rough Trade's webshop the way an oil-rich sheik walks onto a Monte Carlo casino floor. I bothered the poor folks at Midheaven nonstop, to the point where I was one of the first people on the planet with a vinyl copy of
45:33 (more on this later). Time and time again, I ended up buying the randomest albums from the randomest bands on the randomest whims whipped up by the most predictably deceitful press releases. Fuck, if I'd saved up the money I spent on records this year, I'd probably have enough to put a price on Conor Oberest's head.
And that, as much as anything, is what makes 2007 feel like as much of a waste as it felt like: in a literal sense, it just didn't feel worth the price of admission. The "best" records of 2007 - even most of the ones I'd consider to be my favorites - felt like the musical equivalent of the kind of movies which get Oscars for Best Picture, and for someone who's spent every second since graduating from f*** s***** doing his best to repudiate any respectability he ever afforded the medium, that's pretty much the kiss of death right there. In a lot of ways, it felt like their primary value lay in proving that albums were, in fact, released this year.
In that spirit, then, I had the bright idea to do quick (or at least James-quick, anyway) writeups for every record of 2007 which I ended up keeping as a way of documenting just what, if anything, the albums of 2007 added to my own personal musical continuum. To do this, I tried to cast as wide a net as possible; this is literally everything on my CD shelf with a "2007" printed on it somewhere (and which I paid for - no promos). The implication by an album's inclusion is simply that it's proven at least to be good enough to keep, and in no way do I use the word "simply" to diminish that implication's practical value. After all, in days like these when the act of buying music is imbued with a nigh-unto political significance, simplicity of that kind can be downright virtuous, almost to the point where this can be considered a pretty comprehensive list of albums I would consider to have "won" 2007.
Well, either that or I found another excuse to talk about the Knife again.
(listed in alphabetical order)Air Traffic,
Fractured Life (
"Never Even Told Me Her Name") - Yes, despite how much I
really don't give a shit about this album apart from the obvious two songs, I ended up buying it; such is the intransigence of the inexplicable allure piano-driven power-pop holds over me. And besides, weren't we all saying that they'd never live up to those first two singles anyway? (
Click here to buy
Fractured Life from Amazon.co.uk)
The Arcade Fire,
Neon Bible (
"Black Mirror") - I'm as shocked as you are that this record's lived with me for nine months; I seriously doubt whether I've played it twice since the ride home from Best Buy, and I can't say I've got any plans to remedy that in the forseeable future. The packaging's still rad as hell, though - I do have to give them that. It is quite possibly the first album in history to both look and sound like a coffee table book, in both the best and worst ways possible. (
Click here to buy
Neon Bible from Amazon.com)
Bang Gang DJs,
Light Sound Dance (Tepr, "Minuit Jacuzzi" (datA remix))- There's an argument to be made for the ethical necessity of this album - after all, given the amount of damages like %95 of the constituents of
its tracklisting could claim from Hype Machinists, the price of one CD seems like a pretty fair bargain. One could also argue that it's a worthwhile artifact to own regardless of ethical precepts; as a document of the "blog house sound"
Light Sound Dance is arguably comprehensive to the point of probably being a primary source on the subject in the future. Or, of course, one could simply point out that it's an awesome exploding shit-ton of fun to listen to. I would go with that last one myself. (
Click here to buy
Light Sound Dance from a GEMM merchant)
William Basinski,
El Camino Real - Remember how, when you were a kid, in the process of fucking around doing kid stuff you'd stumble onto some previously-unknown aptitude for some meaningless activity like holding your breath or standing on one foot? Remember how excited you'd get about your prospects for destiny as you ran into the house in a frantic rush for the Guinness Book? And remember how that feeling of crushing finality would creep up as you struggled to do the computations which would reveal
just how comically out of reach the actual record-holders' feats were?
I've come to accept that supremely pretentious, inexcusably snobby, resolutely unsharable ambient drones have some sort of unspoken power over me which dwarfs anything else, even the one previously ascribed to piano-pop. Every year since falling ass-backwards into
Music for Airports and failing to get up, it feels like there's always one album of this stuff which proves to be so outrageously unintrusive as to prove intractably functionable, and ends up dwarfing everything else I accumulate during the year in terms of sheer volume just because it always
could go on and god the day's been so
long and do I really want to get up the energy to listen to that new Maximo Park album ergh
no.
El Camino Real is not that album this year; that album is Basinski's
The Disintegration Loops, which (along with
Aja and
Gaucho, pretty much comprise the entire list of stuff I discovered this year I'd put in my all-time no-arguments-whatsoever canon), and
El Camino Real only ended up in my collection as I was in the process of Hoovering up all of Basinski's works that I could find and heard about a chance to get an autographed copy, so I'm not %100 sure what to say about it. But really, I'm not sure too much has to be said; given its complete consistency with the rest of Basinski's catalogue, it's a worthy enough symbol of one of my most all-consuming addictions from last year. And, as all you normal people will no doubt appreciate, it's the album like this on this list. But don't forget - if we were talking about what I'm actually listening to here, for sheer volume, everything else on this list got lapped by Basinski the way you got lapped at holding your breath back in the day. Welcome to my 2007, y'all. (
Click here to buy
El Camino Real from Basinski's label)
Burial,
Untrue (
"Archangel") - To say that I was surprised by how much I enjoyed
Untrue would be a mild understatement; given how cold Burial's first album left me I would have been less shocked to catch myself raping a (figurative) horse than enjoying his sophomore album as much as I did. But oh well; I'm always happy to be wrong when it's over an album this good.
Untrue manages to avoid the primary pitfall I associate with "evocative" albums, namely that it remembers to do things besides lay around evoking shit willy-nilly; songs like "Raver" and "Homeless" and "Archangel" ebb and crest with huge swells of bombed-out beauty. Hopefully this represents a moment of evolution for dubstep, by which I mean an evolution into something to which I enjoy listening. (
Click here to buy
Untrue from Amazon.com)
Caribou,
Andorra (
"Niobe")
- Out of everything that I like about
Andorra - and I like
Andorra a
lot - my favorite thing has to be the way the transition from jangly,
Nuggets-y pop into, well, "Niobe", a song which not only as one of the most graceful pop songs I heard last year, but along with the Junior Boys' "FM" and the Knife's live rendition of "Heartbeats" forms a tidy little through-line of devastatingly powerful glacial-sounding electro-pop. Little continuities like that make me love songs like "Niobe", because they give me hope that there might be other songs like it that I just haven't heard yet. And, of course, sometimes they come attached to really good albums, too. (
Click here to buy
Andorra from Amazon.com)
Chromatics,
Night Drive (
"Mask") - I will admit that
Night Drive really actually is pretty good in a way I wasn't expecting it to be, yes. And I am also not only happy enough with it to keep it for the moment but to also make seeking out a hard copy of
After Dark a priority, yes. Having said that, I cannot for the life of me imagine listening to this album in any sort of organic manner; it is musically self-conscious in a way which demands that I set time aside for it rather than just throw it in for the fuck of it. Make of that what you will. (
Click here to buy
Night Drive from the band)
Culture,
Two Sevens Clash (reissue) (
"I'm Not Ashamed") - Anyone who reads this site and gives half a shit about reggae doesn't need to be told a damn thing about this, one of the most universally acclaimed albums the genre has ever produced. Anyone else couldn't possibly care less about any arguments to be raised in
Two Sevens Clash's favor; I have no idea why reggae inspires such hatred in men's hearts, but I've given up trying to convince people too stupid to know what's good for them (especially when doing so lets me gloss over the fact that I somehow managed to avoid hearing this album until this year despite its status as kinda one of the most famously good albums in history. I will, however, say that this is, at best, the second-best unimpeachable column of the genre I picked up this year, with first place going to the even-more-inexplicably-absent-from-my-musical-consciousness
Police & Thieves. Oh, hey, an end parenthesis). (
Click here to buy the
Two Sevens Clash remaster from Amazon)
Daft Punk,
Alive 2007 (
"Encore") - Because, shockingly, all of their t-shirts were stupid. (
Click here to buy
Alive 2007 from Amazon.com)
v/a,
Body Language Vol. 4 Mixed By Dixon (
Herbert, "Moving Like A Train" (Smith N Hack remix)) - Again, I can easily see how this could be construed as a cheat in service of something otherwise ineligible, namely the Smith N Hack remix of "Moving Like A Train" which came out in 2006 (although I wasn't aware of it until hearing about Erol Alkan bigging it up in like January so wtfEVRRRRRRRRR). The problem with this argument is that, again, the album is really fucking good - hell, between this CD and the
Resident Advisor podcast alone Dixon can be said to have had an out-of-this-
world year, to the point where if Tim Goldsworthy's show hadn't taken off as precipitously as it did around August (to levels I hadn't even considered
possible) he'd pretty much have had everyone else trying to use the medium of house music outright
lapped. It's an impressively fluid document, too - he even manages to have some fun with Thom Yorke's "The Eraser". Who'd'a thunk it? (
Click here to buy
Body Language Vol. 4 Mixed By Dixon from Amazon.com)
The Field,
From Here We Go Sublime (
"Over The Ice") - I am not going to lie: This album, which I have spent large chunks of this year defending as the best piece of music I heard which actually came 2007, is currently in mortal danger of winding up in a basket on a doorstep with a note reading "IM SORY" taped to its forehead. Part of this stems from seeing him live back during the summer, a fun outing at the time but one which, in retrospect, confirmed my darkest suspicions about the Field's music so completely as to scare me off the record itself almost entirely. I mean, he literally played
nothing which he didn't produce; he might as well have just thrown up a white flag (lol Switzerland) and done a spoken word piece about how there's nowhere to go from his music. What's keeping me back, of course, is the fact that
From Here We Go Sublime is still an impressively intricate work; I'm flat-out not done with it yet. But in no way am I made happy by the fact that (a) I know that there's an end point and (b) there's not really anywhere to go from there. (
Click here to buy
From Here We Go Sublime from Amazon.com)
House of Love, s/t (1988) (reissue) (
"Christine") - Like many British guitar-pop albums from the mid/late 80s or later, the main problem with
The House Of Love is everything that came after it - it is, in other words, distressingly easy to draw a line directly from this record to weak-sauce Snow Patrollery. Thankfully,
The House Of Love itself is pretty unimpeachable (as compared to its sequel and its big single
"Dale Gribble: The Song"), to the point where I may have had a harder time picking which song I'd be posting from it than anything else on this list. I mean, it's gotta be neck-and-neck with
Forever Breathes The Lonely Word on the list for most economical C86 albums. Oh yeah. That's right. I am absolutely sticking to this controversial opinion and DON'T YOU TRY TO CHANGE MY MIND. (
Click here to buy the reissue of
House of Love from Rough Trade)
Justice,
Option-T (
"Genesis") - Has anyone actually dared to suggest that Justice might actually turn out to be a
better group than Daft Punk? Granted, until they have both a live show as good as The Pyramid and a record as good as
Discovery to their credit, you certainly won't catch me coming down on that side definitively...but give me a choice between Justice's debut and
Homework and I'm going with Gaspard and Xavier every time. I don't even think it's a matter of technology rendering
Homework obsolete or anything - I flat-out do not think
Discovery can hold Justice's jock. If I want a banger which keeps dumping ever-larger piles of instruments on me, I'm going with "Stress" over "Da Funk". If I want to be hit in the chest with exsquisitely-manicured beats, I'm going with "Genesis" over "Rollin' and Scratchin". If I want to let stupid, empty phrases temporarily conquer the inside of my head, I'll admit that "Around the World" is pretty much king in the castle, but these days "DVNO" gets the job done even more quickly. You'll notice that I haven't even mentioned any of the album's big singles yet - I honestly don't think there's a song on
Homework which comes close to either of the "Phantoms" or "Waters of Nazareth". (To be fair, you'll also notice that I haven't mentioned "The Party", a song I decidedly wish would disappear forever.) And don't even get me started on"D.A.N.C.E.", my choice for song of the year by every standard I value despite the fact that remixers have practically Gnarls Barklified it by this point. And this is their
first album.Look, I'm even willing to be That Guy over the issue: thanks to a lucky purchase of
the Saint OST, I've been listening to
Homework for a decade now. I've been a big enough fan of it in the past to be literally the only student at my high school with even the slightest inclination to
recognize its existence, let alone
own it and
talk publicly about how it's awesome. I made most of my friends in college sending videos off of
Homework back and forth over the T1 lines. This is not a fight where I'm without an iron in the fire. Meanwhile, Justice's new album is so widely and contemporaneously beloved that my enthusiasm for it probably doesn't even put me in the top fifteen
percent of fans; I'm not even devoted enough to it to figure out how to type the fucking symbol on a PC.
But it's just better.
I'm sorry but, well, yeah. (
Click here to buy
Cross from Amazon.com)
The Knife,
Silent Shout (deluxe edition) (
"Heartbeats" (live version)) - Toldja! (
Click here to buy the
Silent Shout deluxe edition from Amazon.com)
LCD Soundsystem,
45:33 (
"Track 2")
LCD Soundsystem,
Sound of Silver (
"All My Friends")
Without hesitation, I would say that
Sound of Silver is a better album in every measurable way; it is simply that, with the same freedom from hesitation, say that
45:33 is equally better as an musical artifact, and I honestly don't know which option I find to be more substantive. I can certainly say that I feel a more complete sense of ownership over
45:33, although it is kind of a shitty criterion to hold up when one record is, even as we speak, getting near-universal acclaim as one of the best albums of the year (it probably even showed up on
Modern Oboe Enthusiast's list) and the other hogtied by its format, which limited its appeal to that minute slice of the popular audience with a hunger for forty-five minute disco suites to which they could take notes. It's doubly unfair when said forty-five etc kicks off with, but for "Losing My Edge", my hands-down absolute unequivocal runaway Steve-Hutchinson-clearing-a-fucking-path favorite LCD Soundsystem song
ever, thereby condemning it to an obscurity so complete that it doesn't even have a title. Judging by the lack of coverage it's gotten on the Hype Machine, I can only assume that I'll be getting the same takedown notice as everyone else; I certainly can't argue with the premise that this here is a song worth protecting (and strenuously urge everyone to buy the shit out of the album which surrounds it). It is simply too amazing a track, one which knocked me far too thoroughly on my ass and one which has received a desperately disproportionate degree of praise relative to its quality, for me not to post.
This is not, of course, to imply that
Sound of Silver is suddenly chopped liver 'round the stately halls of Cobo Manor, of course; not even a week ago I was taping another unfathomably rambly interview for Blog Fresh calling it my favorite album of the year, and you'll see the same reflected on my Idolator ballot at the end of the week.
Sound of Silver is a
fantastic album, both on its own terms and as a chapter in the band's ongoing evolution, and I categorically do not mean to inadvertantly demean it just because apparently a bunch of fratboys somewhere had a
totally rad time dude DEVIL HORNS WHOO to "All My Friends". It's just that
Sound of Silver feels to me like an album saved from its down patches (basically every song on there less than six minutes long) by its overall continuity, whereas by contrast "Track 2" stands out so far from the continuity of
45:33 - a record built from the ground up with continuity in mind - that I keep catching myself cutting the album slack out of sheer good fuckin' will. Whether this counts as fair use or not - well, uh, that's not up to me. If I were you, I'd get it quick. (AND THEN BUY THE FUCKING ALBUM ARGH HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE
45:33 ALREADY WHAT ARE YOU TOO BUSY LURING CHILDREN BACK TO YOUR GINGERBREAD HOUSE TO THROW A COUPLE BUCKS
INSOUND'S WAY SERIOUSLY
GOD PEOPLE.)
Midnight Juggernauts,
Dystopia (
"Into The Galaxy") - I do like this album a fair bit, but facts are facts, and the best thing
Dystopia really did for me in the end was free me up to sell my copy of
Bright Like Neon Lights. (
Click here to buy
Dystopia from Amazon.co.uk)
Kate Nash,
Made of Bricks (
"We Get On" - yes, again)
St. Vincent,
Marry Me (
"All My Stars Aligned")
I'm not going to front like this is still the end-all be-all album it was for me when I discovered it, although it's so far above and beyond what anyone else in this whole London folkie thing has accomplished so far as to make me wince at the fact that I already wasted my Guinness Book thing. I will, however, attest to its quality by pointing out that I am a
damn sight more likely to sell back St. Vincent's
Marry Me (to the point of disrupting all this alphabetism to underscore it), a fine little album with a fine little stretch of tracks towards the middle which peaks with "All My Stars Aligned", a fine little song indeed. Quote me:
Made of Bricks is neither fine nor little. It is a big-ass, awesome album with some big-ass, non-awesome parts over whose existence I am inexplicably unbutthurt. As it turns out, however, it just wasn't
that good.
(
Click here to buy
Made of Bricks from Amazon.co.uk)
(
Click here to buy
Marry Me from Amazon.com)
Nico,
The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970 (
"Nibelungen")- Up until I actually sat down and listened to it, I had always assumed that whatever experience I would have with
The Marble Index would be pretty close to the one I had with
The Exorcist back in high school (i.e. would largely consist of me focusing my attention on attempting to search out what other people had said about it instead of attempting to get into it myself, which in turn would be followed by much inelegantly-couched rhetoric about the pliancy of the masses on the internet). I had not, however, counted on
The Marble Index being (1) quite possibly the most explicit album ever recorded when it comes to giving cues about how it is to be absorbed and discussed (seriously, there are Interpol songs less explicit about how their workings are to be interpreted.
Interpol, people) and (2) way more engaging than I would have ever imagined. Forty minutes' worth of the intonations of some Teutonic tranny-sounding art-school girl set to music even
more foreboding and dirgelike than "European Son" = automatic and irreversible DNW...except, apparently, for
The Marble Index, which against all odds manages to be just as much fun to listen to as it is to describe the blight it inflicts on your outlook. It is to this remaster's great credit that it manages to improve on
both of these aspects, much less to the outrageous degrees it actually manages to do so; songs like "Evening Light" practically acquire that eminently chaseable dragon record dorks refer to as "presence". Of course, it's still
The Marble Index; regardless of how it matched up with my expectations I still bow before the simple truth that
The Marble Index is er um uh
not for everyone, arguably to a point which ought to make me think twice about gleefully bashing
Ys. But it's certainly for me; this is a top-ten record of all time with a revelatory remaster, and I call that a win. And
fuck Ys. (
Click here to buy
The Frozen Borderline from Amazon.com. It comes with a free coaster, which you can spot by the word
Desertshore stamped on the cover.
OHHHHHHH)
Paper Cranes,
Halcyon Days (
"Milkrun" (album version)) - This, however, was. I know I said "no promos", and in a way this is
really cheating since I'm not even sure if you can buy this album yet, but my copy says 2007 and this is my 2007 so GO FUCK A PUMPKIN. I am, after all this time, still unashamedly a fan of at least two-thirds of this album, an outright homerun for an album which calls upon
me to be rendered un-mercurial and un-surly; if that doesn't count for something to you people, go back and read the archives. There will be much more to follow in the coming months, believe you me. (
Click here to visit the Paper Cranes' MySpace to stream more songs)
Papercuts,
Can't Go Back (
"Dear Employee") - oh man oh man oh man touring with Beach House touring with Beach House touring with Beach House can't wait can't wait can't
wait. Seriously - I bought
Can't Go Back in the first place as part of my ongoing pursuit of whatever the hell
Beach House injected into my veins (mission kinda accomplished -
Can't Go Back lacked
Beach House's supernatural prettiness, although it went blow for blow in terms of getting maximum mileage out of that woozy sound), so this dovetails far too nicely to avoid,
especially with Beach House's new record having turned out to be as awesome as it really, really is. To reiterate: can't wait can't wait can't
wait. (Oh, and
Can't Go Back was actually a pretty awesome little album in its own right - with the exception of that disgraceful "257th sumbasumbasumaaaaah" thing whose title I'm not even going to bother transcribing, I just couldn't shake how many different ways songs had of jumping out at you. And of course "Dear Employee" is, let us say,
quite a song
.) (
Click here to buy
Can't Go Back directly from the distributor)
v/a,
D*I*R*T*Y Edits Vol. 1 Mixed By Pilooski (
The Human Beinz, "Nobody But Me" (Pilooski edit)) - Someday, of course, this will be a pimpin'-ass new car, but for now, I am enjoying playing this apparently preposterously difficult-to-get CD an
awful lot thank you kindly. This is in large part because of the fact that it's
incredibly all over the map - arguably moreso than either
Cosmo Galactic Prism or
Light Sound Dance despite the fact that it only features half as many tracks as
one of either of those album's discs.
D*I*R*T*Y Edits is simply peerless when it comes to hurling you all over the place; one minute you're idly bopping along with Pilooski's edit of the Alan Parsons Project's "I Robot" (no, seriously), then all of a sudden you're getting hurled around by Pilooski's stupefying edit of the Pointer Sisters' "Bring Him Back" (no,
seriously), and then all of a sudden you're being serenaded with a schmaltzy piano version of "Black Hole Sun". It is a thrilling little stretch of musical valence by any measure, and yet I still end up going with his take on the Human Beinz' "Nobody But Me"; take this as a hint about just how out-of-pocket this album is, let alone the fact that Pilooski's incalculably perfect re-edit of Frankie Valli's "Beggin'"
isn't even on there. (
Click here to preorder
D*I*R*T*Y Edits from Rough Trade - lol, "limited no re-pressing" [unless of course it actually starts selling RITE GUYS?!? {no diss, of course - hey, sell 'em if there's interest]})
Pylon,
Gyrate Plus - It's certainly not that I don't like
Gyrate Plus, a pretty solid record to listen to under any rubric (assuming you don't mind music built, at least on a certain level, to grate). But for some reason, I just don't seem to have it in me to be an advocate for it - not that I don't think people shouldn't check it out, but rather that I just got nuthin' to add to the discussion. This is a record I bought to scratch the itch I caught from the Long Blondes* and (to a much lesser extent) Love is All; it does the trick and has the lightning bolt on it for good measuer. If you're in that demographic, then by all means buy with impunity; otherwise, well, yeah. (Click here to buy
Gyrate Plus from the DFA's Insound store)
*that's a figurative itch, of course - you must have me confused with another Stylus ex-pat.
v/a,
Fabriclive 33 Mixed By Spank Rock - Wait, I have this? (
Click here to buy
Fabriclive 33 direct from the label)
Spoon,
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (
"The Underdog") -
the combination between Wire and Billy Joel probably-- Zeno, Thursday, 17 May 2007 15:25 (7 months ago) Link
Never in my life have I jealously said "FUCK" so loudly. (
Click here to buy
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga from Amazon.com)
v/a,
Prins Thomas Presents Cosmo Galactic Prism - I'm not even going to try to pick something out of this; to do so would be to disrespect one of the greatest mix CDs I think I may have ever heard compiled. Literally the only criticism I can raise against it is that it requires an awful lot of commitment - I mean, sure you
can jump around all over it and keep coming back to your favorite songs, but no song on here is as impressive as the overall flow from one track to another. It's just a virtuoso display of programming, and one hell of a compelling listen (time permitting) to boot. (
Click here to buy
Cosmo Galactic Prism from Amazon.com)
Voxtrot, s/t (
"Kid Gloves") - FUCK YOU, I STILL SAY THIS ALBUM'S GOOD. (
Click here to buy
Voxtrot from Amazon.com)
White Rabbits,
Fort Nightly (
"Kid On My Shoulders") - God, this thing's so long that I'm starting to repeat myself, but HEY! did you know that piano-driven pop music works better on me than a roofie on a drunken sorostitute? Of course, in the case of
Fort Nightly, said musical roofie is just as superfluous as said
real roofie would be in said previously established circumstance; even if "Kid On My Shoulders" hadn't booted things off with the most insistently intractable piano melody of the year, I'd still probably have fallen victim to the sickeningly awesome melody or the spectacularly furious chorus - and by now, it's like my
third favorite song on the record. I'm not %100 co-signing on all the songs on it, of course, but consistency is for suckers in the face of a power-pop record this flawless, let alone one with All That Piano. (
Click here to buy
Fort Nightly from Amazon.com)
Yeasayer,
All Hour Cymbals (
"2080") - 'Member that Blog Fresh interview I alluded to way (way way
way) back there? Well, during the process of giving it, I caught myself belittling the bejesus out of freak-folk, taking great pains to kick as much dirt in the face of
Strawberry Jam and
Person Pitch as I could muster up the strength to kick. This will, of course, come as something of a surprise to my friends who dragged me to Coachella two years ago and then found themselves dragged thusly to watch Animal Collective Animal Collective it up for forty-five minutes (and then kept using it as a weapon against any praise aimed Sigur Ros' way, although in my defense, Sigur Ros really should all be shot); all I can do is assure them that
Sung Tongs really was a good enough album to vouch for that level of enthusiasm and guarantee them that a year of its eccentricities being held up as virtues capable of being reproduced at the (relative) drop of a hat.
Besides, this was also the year that Yeasayer managed to take all those signifiers and turn them into a pop record. I'm not necessarily sure it's a
good pop record, of course - thusfar, I haven't even been moved to play it enough to start noticing stuff past the big single - but it's definitely an accessible one, possibly one which might never be matched if you stay within the confines of the genre. I mean, I'm giving
All Hour Cymbals to my
little sister for Christmas; by measure of comparison, five years ago I got her Ryan Adams'
Gold (and she loved it, too). We'll see if Yeasayer's able to maintain it after having everyone give them their advice about which aspects of their sound they need to play up and which ones they need to squelch, but for now, they're at least potentially capable of making something to appeal to
that demographic. Yes, you heard it here first, folks - Yeasayer to take over TRL! Come back next year when Chris Keating has a five-figure coke habit and Anand Wilder has an inexplicable hat! (
Click here to buy
All Hour Cymbals direct from the band)
n.b: Soulwax'
Most of the Remixes..., The Wombats
A Guide o Love, Loss, And Desperation, and James Murphy & Pat Mahoney's Fabric mix would all have been on here if the postal service had their shit together. Alas, they don't, and so they ain't, and so here we are, at the end of a stultifyingly long piece.
Now please excuse me if I go rest up until 2008. Frankly, I deserve a break.
two, three, fourKIDDING, of course.
Labels: 2007, Daft Punk, dance, LCD Soundsystem, Nico
