10. White Rainbow - Prism of Eternal Now: Ambient heads were talking this up over on Sound Opinions and I gave it a chance and forgot about it. Then I gave it another and got lost in it. It's a beautiful ambient album, with weird noisy freakouts and tribal-sounding drumming.
09. L.Pierre - Dip: The dirty half of the late, lamented Arab Strap, Aiden Moffat, who wrote lyrics in pornographic detail, re-sets sail on his solo career with a bedazzling ambient album that no one heard (Seriously, when I tried to search for this album the other day, most of the results were from me talking it up all over the internet).
08. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank: Modest Mouse is so close to synthesizing their newer sound with their older sound into a landmark album that it's exhilirating and frustrating all at once. Your enjoyment of this album, though, really depends what you like about Modest Mouse, as a band. If you like their ramshackle off-key pop songs, than this will be a good one. But if you're a fan of the out-of-control noisy MM of past years, stick to their older output. "The Parting of the Sensory" is probably my favourite thing of the entire year: a laid-back country song that turns into a menacing foot-stomping hoedown.
07. The Weakerthans - Reunion Tour: As a citizen of Canada, I pretty much have to like this. I mean, this is as Canadian as Canadian gets. Somehow, the majority of the world embraces true Canadian acts as Shania Twain, Celine Dion, and Nickleback, yet any one of those three could just as easily be from anywhere in the world. But The Weakerthans can only come from Canada, there's no way this band could be from anywhere else. And this is probably their most Canadian album yet, I mean, there's a song titled "Elegy for Gump Worsley" the legendary portly former NHL goalie, or "Tournament of Hearts", the title a nod to fellow Canadian outfit The Constantines, the subject matter a struggling relationship coded in curling imagery. Musically, it's no huge leap from previous Weakerthans' albums, except one exceptionally snarly Neil Youngesque guitar solo, but it's still a solid solid Canadian album. This is the album that encapsulates more about what it is to be Canadian than a million Bryan Adams ballads, a million Barenaked Ladies ironic rap songs, or six billion Sk8er Bois.
06. Paramore - Riot!: This is straight-ahead fun power pop rock. With a singer that looks like she wandered into Hot Topic by accident and got suckered in by the emo boys fascinating hair cuts and complicated shoes, singing over top of hooky, punchy guitars, it kind of reminds me of a million cute-girl-fronted bands that were around in the early nineties with one massive difference: Paramore know how to write a song that sticks with you. This thing just blindsided me. I hope Fall Out Boy's reign at the top of the charts never ends as long as they keep bringing with them bands that are catchy and fun like Paramore.
5. Stars - In Our Bedroom After the War:Stars released one of my favourite albums of 2005 "Set Yourself On Fire", so I was anticipating this one greatly. Then, I got wind of the title, and was worried about another Canadian group resorting to warmed-over tired political talking points, and approached the album with a lot more trepidation. But, then, it just turned out to another Stars album, so all is well. The war of the title is both a literal war, and a metaphorical one. This is the sound of Stars also taking some chances, though. For the most part, it sounds like Stars being Stars, but there are some genuinely surprising moments: the song "Personal" is written like a personal ad, answered by another, and back and forth to its heartbreaking conclusion (my brother tells me another song sounds like a screenplay, but I must have missed it while running out some trash), there's Torquil Campbell's surprising falsetto making its first-ever appearance (by my count). But the standout moment for me was "Barricade", a piano-aided ballad set against the backdrop of a massive protest where Campbell sings the shit out of the chorus in a way I've never heard him before as he's usually content to kind of whisper out his words, and then closes with a crowd chanting at the cops. If you didn't like past Stars albums, this isn't going to win any new converts, but if "Set Yourself On Fire" moved you, get ready to be moved once again.
4. Feist - The Reminder: felt kind of bad looking at my 2006 Best Of... lists and wondering where the women were at, there was nary a vagina to be found anywhere (Especially seeing as I counted James Blunt as 2006...) but 2007 has already produced two female solo albums better than 8 of the Top 10 from last year. "The Reminder" was such a pleasant surprise from an artists I considered kind of superfluous prior to this year. You can count 2007 as the year Feist realized she had a decent voice and decided to sing the hell out of it, pushing her songs light-years beyond anything from "Let It Die". She does ballads better than anyone else this year, where her voice trembles and almost breaks, but also surges and crests, sometimes over as little as an acoustic guitar. But, then she also proves herself on upbeat dancey numbers like "My Moon, My Man" and thrilling indie-pop like "I Feel It All". A revelation.
3. m83 - Digital Shades Vol. 1: In which Anthony Gonzalez lays his Brian Eno-influences on his sleeve with a concise emotional ambient album. Not a proper follow-up to 2005's epic "Before the Dawn Heals Us" as much as a side project under the m83 banner, "Digital Shades" is like all the awe-inspiring ambient interludes off that last album stretched out to a full-length. Like sun in the winter, it arrives, it's brilliant, and, before you know it, it's gone.
2. Rihanna - Good Girl Gone Bad: See then smack me once upside the head, then multiply by a hundred, and you have the best pop album of the year.
1. Eluvium - Copia: Ethereal ambient album infuzes solo-piano with atmospherics for a completely out-of-this-world experience. Songs fade in gently, settle into a pleasant little melody, before exploding out with synths, or turning inwards on themselves and begging you to turn it up. How fitting that the most emotional album in this era of unprecedented communication options, is the one that says the least; that an album with nary a vocal can say so much about the human condition and can evoke the gamut of human emotions without ever addressing the listener once. Spectacular.
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