In correlation, my own music taste changed throughout this year. I was always checking the Billboard Alternative Rock Chart and reading Rolling Stone album reviews to find recommendations on new music. I've gotten into much different genre paths over the years, but oddly enough, my favorites still come from the 2007 catalog. Over the last 10 years, I have apparently collected 15 freaking albums that were released in 2007!
Of course I don't own all the greats (no Panda Bear, Of Montreal, or The National here), but looking at this list, you get a sense for both my old music taste and the taste I've developed.
And of course I ranked them.
15 Queens of the Stone Age Era VulgarisNot that this is a bad album, but looking back at QOTSA's full discography, this was probably their dumbest album. I mean, dat album cover tho...
14 Bruce Springsteen Magic"Your Own Worst Enemy," "Girls In Their Summer Clothes," and "Long Walk Home" have kinda stuck with me. But this is pretty standard "old-man's-Grammy-music"-era Bruce.
Looking back at Against Me!'s full discography, I can't believe this was their sole album I ripped from my buddy Wyatt. "Thrash Unreal" is still the band's most single-sounding single, respectively.
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This might be Wilco's worst album, but it was the first Wilco album I ever owned. I'm glad they don't always stick with the Grateful Dead thing, but "Impossible Germany" still stands as one of my all-time favorite guitar solos.
I've listened to every nook & cranny of early Modest Mouse demos while in my adult years. In the process, I've forgotten that they were actually one of my favorite "new" bands as a teenager. My little brother bought this album years after I was surfing "Dashboard" and "Missed The Boat" on my parent's desktop via YouTube.
Jack & Meg left us with their zaniest album, and I still like it! Jack tried to go for the zaniness shtick on his Lazaretto album, but I think a lot of us stopped caring about his vinyl-coated butt by then. My little brother bought this on CD years after I was discovering its album tracks via YouTube.
An album densely layered by beautiful instrumentation, full of summer night stories about being chased by dogs, stealing cars, smoking pot and getting lost at the county fair. The last we'd expect from the minimalist folk crooner.
This is my personal favorite Spoon album. Some dark-tinted space rock tracks ("The Ghost Of You Lingers, "Eddie's Ragga") as well as a personal side we usually don't hear from Brit ("You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," "Finer Feelings").
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Never got into Jens until my adulthood, but I don't think I could have been emotional prepared for this until my adulthood. The peppy beats and classical samples on this album will always sound hip, but its his sincere, neurotic take on relationships that wins me over.
Guys, "Skinny Love" has 181 million plays on Spotify. Some guy recorded this song in a cabin in Medford WS over 10 years ago. This is legitimate zeitgeist. This album always reminds me of the smell of fresh mountain air infused with alcohol. What gives this album life is Justin Vernon's soulful voice and advanced English vocabulary.
This album was recorded within the 1 year of Avey Tare's life when he was married. Listening closely to his lyrics, this is his ultimate "Oh shoot, I'm a married responsible adult" anxiety attack. This is accompanied by the band's most glitchy instrumentals yet. It's like in an attempt to sound inhuman, they sound more human than ever.
This album was a brilliant idea. I have a hard to listening to "beats" albums, but Burial kicks this off with a thematic soundscape leaving me wanting to hear how it ends. There are faint voices throughout, and it's up to us to decode their plot as the music twists and turns. And to think... this is what "dubstep" was supposed to sound like...
MIA will always be described as a "rapper." I think MIA's purpose as a rapper is not to give us word-heavy bars, but present her swagger in its natural state. She has an obvious influence from world music (name a country, she's got it covered), a sense for world economic issues, and Kala produces it all big enough for the whole world to hear. She puts people on the map who ain't never seen a map.
Thom Yorke doesn't need to mumble randomly assorted depressing words into a vocoder to sound alien. Heck, looking back at The Bends, the ladies were always kind of a big deal to him. Now his band is old, they've made some of the most avant garde music ever. How could they go back and move forward all at once? Johnny Greenwood's warm pedal tones (he had been secretly hiding from us) and his knack for string arrangements needed time to shine. And boy, they do. Also: What the heck it going on in the percussion part for "Reckoner"?
LCD was already a major part of the decade's indie scene; their string of singles boosting themselves and Pitchfork Media simultaneously into popularity (things were different then). Little did we know, LCD's music would only get better by not sounding like it was recorded in a garage. All their influences come to life here, like the great producers of the 70s are reborn sonically reborn. And as a songwriter, James Murphy shows an unexpected emotional side, tied in with his self-conscious humor. The back-to-back of "Someone Great" and "All My Friends" is possibly the greatest song combo of my lifetime. A lovable album that covers existentialism, party-poopers, drugs, and New York.
