Use The Tubes
The 2007 Favorite Albums Dozen - The Bottom Half.
Favorite, not best. I don't screen enough music to justify a real best-of. Maybe if I gave up the live music collecting that ebbs, flows, and occasional engulfs my listening hours, but that's not gonna happen.
Since we're talking albums and not songs, the start-to-finish factor weighed significantly for this list: The lack of skip-inducing tracks, the ability to create its own album-sized sonic universe, etc. Beyond that, the picks connected with me on at least one of two levels -- aesthetically as someone who appreciates songwriting talent and interesting choices in making a record, and/or emotionally as someone who heard it and just felt grateful to be alive in 2007, with two slightly worn but generally functional ears and a soul of similar condition.
Finally, I don't hear 2007 being heralded as an exceptional year for music, but a solid half of these twelve were my first full-length exposure to the artist, and they beat out unshabby projects by Springsteen, Finn, and McCartney, so it's a pretty good year as far as I'm concerned. (Artwork links to AllMusic reviews.)
12) Field Music - Tones Of Town. First off, this was a gift, but its spot here is totally earned. When the disc arrived, 
I was coming off the Genesis and Yes backcatalog exploration that dominated a big chunk of the summer. I don't know how much that really colored my perception, but I immediately heard older kindred spirits in the mix. The somewhat prominent piano, the involved song structure and occasional shifting time signature, these pointed to Genesis. Some of the same, plus the guitar (in both tone and the fills), often recalled Yes's Steve Howe.
So I met this band with influences (real or imagined) right where my ears had been. I mean, except for all the far-out stuff about space travel, ghosts in your beach house, etc. They let the old fogeys keep that, and probably just as well.
Not necessarily any nominees for song of the year here, but good players, distinct sound, a hint of British jauntiness here and there, and a great example of the no-skip album.
11) Radiohead - In Rainbows. Like you need to read any more about this release. I'm sticking to my original 
assessment that while In Rainbows is more consistent than their recent work, it delivers only a few real songs (referring usually to some underdone parts by Yorke, who apparently couldn't quite manage finishing all the song titles). The remainder struck me ... well, not as filler so much as ideas and fragments given significant TLC. At that rate, In Rainbows wasn't headed for this list, and I wasn't planning on buying the CD after offering my $6 for the mp3's.
But over the last couple of weeks, two facts came into clearer focus. For one thing, the best here can stand up to the quintet's highs better than I thought. Also, the "songs" material and the "ideas" material is sequenced with an expert touch. In this single-track era, In Rainbows offers fresh evidence that an excellent running order can create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Extra credit to the guys for exercising Springsteenesque ruthlessness in omitting other available tracks to preserve the effect.
10) The National - Boxer. A singer with a Morphine-like baritone smoothed by a Knopflerian nonchalance. Music 
that can go from prettily acoustic to propulsive with some sort of large lead pipe sounding the alarm in the background. A Spoon-like sense of taut energy, but with a hint of tenderness now and then. I checked these guys out via eMusic in July, after hearing "Fake Empire" on the radio. Then "Start A War" sucked me in further, and then I kind of forgot about the album for a while.
When I revisited it this fall, Boxer got its hooks in me. Maybe precisely because when you're not going to wow people with your vocal range, you have to concentrate more on developing hooks within that range and cultivating a certain charisma of delivery that sucks listeners in by underselling the material (see "Knopflerian"). It took me a while to realize that the piano is a key to what I like in these arrangements, often critical to the textures and tension that set these scenes, insisting on six over everybody else's four, and so on.
I know just enough, and don't know just enough, about what's going on in these songs to look forward to the next listen, and the next album.
9) Sondre Lerche - Phantom Power. Hey, look, a short writeup. I'll stick to what I said before about this disc.
Maybe its placement here comes as a slight surprise given the couple of criticisms in that review. I guess at the end of the year, it's become even more clear that to my knowledge, the 25-year-old has no peer among his, uh, peers when it comes to straight-up melody. (Well, maybe one peer, but we'll get to that later.) (If you write "peer" three times in two sentences, it starts to look funny.)
8) Besnard Lakes - Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse. Here's the original review. A few of 
these albums aren't things you just toss on, and for that matter I don't even necessarily want tracks popping up on shuffle much or at all. They are destination albums, so to speak, but they really nail it when you're ready to go there. After the song to that point, the multiple-drum break and subsequent re-lowering of the main riff into the listener's cranium around 4:30 into "Devastation" turned out to be the most exhilarating sheer-force rock moment of 2007 by a band not named Arcade Fire. And it may be a tie.
(The band released an alternate version of that track, a good three minutes longer, as the b-side of the "Casino Nanaimo" single later in the year, available at least on eMusic.)
7) Everybody Else - Everybody Else. It was probably some Friday night, and I was probably sitting around waiting for 
NUMB3RS to come on. Like the Besnard Lakes situation, I started fishing around eMusic, but this time in search of Grade A power pop. And boy, did I land a big one. These guys are young (one's from Virginia), but the trio's name stems from a Kinks song, and they made some of the unabashedly hookiest music of the year. (Per the #9 writeup, we'll avoid an international standoff by awarding them the Under-30 North American melody crown, and Sondre Lerche can have the European title plus broad U.S. touring privileges.)
So the lyrics aren't exactly literature. And there aren't sonic layers to peel back over multiple listens. But if you're ever in the mood for the work of a rock band whose sole ambition (besides maybe checking out the girls at the show) is getting you to hum a song three hours after you heard it without even realizing you're doing it, then don't hesitate to give these guys a spin.
(Head on over to the list's exciting conclusion.)
Where are the rest? Curious as to what you've been listening to! And not in
a weird way.
Hey, Kevin!