best of 2007

yea, it's a few days late. sue me. i buy alot of music. however, i don't buy a whole lot of new music. mostly because it's uninspired claptrap. these are the few exceptions this year:

5. dungen-tio bitar- i like this album for the same reasons i like guided by voices. you hear the joy of people playing music and filtering their influences. slightly hippy? yea. overblown? sure. but it rocks like a motherfucker and i can guarantee you there's nothing on the u.s charts that's anywhere near as sincere. sweden rocks.

4.magic-bruce springsteen- i gave a pretty detailed review of this already. check it out. all i will say here is that it restored my faith in ROCK!!!!

3.wilco-sky blue sky-just pretty. what else? a great sunday morning album. 5 guys in a room playing. gentle, lovely and uplifting. just what i needed at the time. 'impossible germany' is the song of the year.

2.modest mouse-we were dead before the ship even sank- i was talking with mike the other day about how isaac brock is the greatest soul singer of our time. 'soul music' is too narrowly defined. to me, it's a style, a way of building a song to it's emotional conclusion. take a song like 'dashboard'. brock knows when to reign in his voice and when to let it go. no one else sings with such wild abandon. i find his voice touching, like i find sam cooke's voice touching. am i the first to compare the two? really, just beautiful stuff. and johnny marr is a marvel. his subtle touches add something timeless to the music.

1.frank black-bluefinger- i am old. people like frank black give me hope. he just puts out fantastic albums non-stop. every time he puts an album out i hesitate to buy it, thinking 'well, he's shot his load, he can't have anything new to offer', and i am always wrong. nothing this year rocked harder than this album. check out 'you can't break a heart and have it', my runner up for song of the year. this is as good as any pixies album and i declare it an instant classic and my 'ALBUM OF THE YEAR'. frank, all of your choices were pure.

so that's it. oh, and number 6 would have been scott walkers' 'and who shall go to the ball? and what shall go to the ball?' for it's staggering beauty and scope. in fact, we might want to swap it for dungen. tough call. you decide.