2007: It Was A Year
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 unspok