The year was 2007… I listened to a lot of music, but didn’t write so much about it, and for that I am remiss. In writing my “Best of 2008″ post I realized that much of the music I was listening to I had listened to in 2007. Perhaps a sad critique on the 2008 season, I’m not sure, but in any case, here goes. Listed after the jump below you’ll find some selected reviews of albums that I heard in 2007.

Add one to my “all-time favorites”, a few to the “I could listen to them anytime list” and a few from years gone by…

If this is your first time ’round with me, I would recommend reading my prior “Best Of” posts and also suffer my treatise on how I criticize music, otherwise soldier on…

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
Upon the release and my listening to Arcade Fire’s debut Funeral and being subject to much fanboy rattling from the likes of Pitchfork, my tolerance of Arcade Fire had been weakened. Like a hot baseball prospect, much hyped to be the “five-tool player of tomorrow”, experience tells me that if it seems too good to be true, it usually is. Usually, like say 90% of the time. I liked Funeral well enough, yes, but at the end of the day the album wasn’t as great as the hype. It was set aside, like my wanting to hear more about the band itself. Not to say that the album wasn’t good – it was – but it was uneven with those much-sought-after flashes of brilliance that I so covet tucked inside.

Fast forward to early spring, 2007. The game had changed. I don’t remember when I started hearing rumblings about a great album coming forth from this band, but something made me seek it out.

Even on the first track, Black Mirror, it was clear that something had gelled in the Arcade Fire. That lush, deep sound they had attracted in Funeral on tracks like “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” was here, but deeper, wider and underscored by a driving purpose that would lay itself out before me in the following tracks. Funeral only hinted at their brilliance and Neon Bible had focused it into a powerful, solid album without voids.

Tales of cold despondency, struggle both emotional and physical, time-worn and majestic. Just what one might expect out of old Montreal! It has become one of my favorite albums of all time.

Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Yeah, a little late on the uptake, I know. Released in May 2006, Jackson Cooper recommended this one to me and I’ve been in love with it ever since. A little on the alt-country side of things for me, it slipped past my radar. But to shove Neko Case into the alt-country bracket is terribly unfair and likely worked against her to bring her to me. In listening to Fox Confessor… I found a sweetly dark, haunting, minor key opus. Her words and phrasing draw you in like some unplaceable taste until before you know it, you’re into this album with no way out – and it’s a good thing. Neko Case is a parking-lot siren, and I’m a better man for it.

Radiohead – In Rainbows
It is likely that In Rainbows will forever be known as “the first album by a major artist to be released only on the web, and for free”. Be that as it may – it was still an excellent record from a band who always makes an excellent record. Too adventurous for the pop crowd, but too pop for the, uh, adventurous crowd, Radiohead has been straddling that line for more than a decade, and have yet to let me down. I can’t say I expect a “great” album from Radiohead in the future – they haven’t made grand steps like that since OK Computer, but instead have shown what I’m going to call steady progress. Always different, always somehow just beyond where they’ve gone before. I hold out hope that their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is out there, but history shows us that the party ends after an event like that. And maybe it should – maybe the party should fold up after that? Eventually the music becomes a machine and you turn out to be the Rolling Stones. Radiohead is on that track, I think, but they haven’t made their Exile on Main Street just yet.

Band of Horses – Everything All the Time (2005) / Cease to Begin (2007)
Broad, airy, rocking. A jam band with purpose, maybe. The fragile voice of lead singer Ben Bridwell backed with the Southern Rock backbeat that evokes all the great American themes: broad open skies, travel into the new day, joy, despair, resolve. Just listen to “The Great Salt Lake” from Everything All the Time and try not to bust out of your home or your office and just run! Bust out into the sunlight and enjoy it. Similarily, “Marry Song” from Cease to Begin bounces along like a freewheeling road trip to parts unseen. Perfect for the first day of a road trip.

Panda Bear – Person Pitch
Let’s do the math… Reverb + tambourine + animal sounds + overdubbed vocals = The Beach Boys Pet Sounds! Every review of this album mentioned the Beach Boys’ magnum opus in somer manner and… it’s not entirely unwarranted. I noted that connection off the bat too, but to end it there would be a disservice.  There have been a fair number of pseudo-psychedlia bands that work in complicated, often experimental measures in the past few years. Panda Bear itself the solo work of a member of Animal Collective – and yet where some of those others fail to my ears to be listenable, Person Pitch works itself seamlessly from track-to-track made a wide-open, inviting record that surrounds and enlightens. It’s not much on the lyrical end – and that’s OK – it makes for an excellent sonic experience.

Iggy and the Stooges – Raw Power
You can’t read a history of punk rock without having a mention of Iggy and the Stooges (or the MC5 or The Ramones, for that matter) and despite my ravenous need to read anything I could get my hands on on the subject during the tender years of my youth, I never really listened to a lot of The Stooges. Iggy had a bit of a resurgence in the early 90s, but he seemed like a lost grandfather, one rarely seen and lost in his own world, never having clawed his way out of the album cover. Trapped, as it were – and his latter production alludes to that fact. But when listening to this album amongst it’s contemporaries and even compared to what happened to the form after The Stooges said goodbye… well, it’s amazing. Urgent, raw, but technically fascinating, it was the briefest of a crest of the majestic pharoahic glory that Iggy was going for before punk hammered everything flat. Everyone loves “Search and Destroy”, but for my money it’s “Gimme Danger” and “Shake Appeal” – two tracks that took the folk-hippy and Motown crowds and turned them on their ear… and then beat them senseless.

Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
You want to talk about consistency? Spoon has got your consistency. If the Motown sound was buried in the ground, was nourished with a rain consisting of new wave and indie roock, it would grow and blossom in the early 21st century as a white band from Austin, TX with a 10-year track record. A good backbeat, a playful rock rhythm with punchy, sometimes biting lyrics to match. I can always turn on a Spoon album and let it ride… and while Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga isn’t their fantastic Kill the Moonlight, it comes close and shows that ever-delicious forward progress that electrifies.

Karen Dalton – In My Own Time
One of my favorite tracks from the most excellent Oxford American Southern Music CD #9 (2007)

Okkervil River – The Stage Names
What’s with my thing about albums with themes? I’m not sure. Undoubtably hummable record that took a while to grow on me. Fun, poppy. Arcade Fire without the unbearable burden of life, perhaps. There was a band / they called the pots and pans…