Top 20 Albums of 2007

Wait, what is this? Is this... an album? Are these... songs? Is that... singing? Are those... production values? Runamok Connecticut kids Magik Markers earnt their reputation as a volume-throttling, impossibly noisy, live rock'n'roll happening whose many, many recorded documents were home-made CDRs in which the band was recorded improvising, in-the-red and wholly distorted. Dozens of discs in, BOSS marks the Markers' first proper album, and it's a good one. Produced by Lee Ranaldo and released by Thurston Moore, it's reminiscent of their Sonic seniors' more outre efforts. As Elisa Ambrogio stumbles and staggers from noise to boogie-rock to piano ballad, she flirts with sheer shambles, smiling as things teeter on the brink of collapse.

Expectations can be a burden. Or a temptation. For the Arcade Fire, those Canadians seemingly born into ambition, their second record clearly courted the latter; there times on Neon Bible where the grandiosity —Church organs! Orchestras! Hungarian military choirs!— seems self-conscious. Yet, whilst there's nothing so glorious here as Funeral's “Haiti,” this dream of Win and Régine is, beneath its bluster, a dystopian nightmare; a multi-track'd meditation on a decaying globe, escalating belligerence, organized religion as a tool of oppression, and hyper-capitalism run amok. As with their death-mark'd debut, Arcade Fire specialize in finding optimism amidst tragedy; managing to sound joyous even when things are serious. And/or pompous.

Yeasayer's first LP accomplishes one almighty feat: it transcends genre. This cabal of faux-hippy hipsters from Brooklyn are beholden to no singular musical model, taking wide-ranging extraneous influences and synthesizing them into something insular and singular. Owing a spiritual (rather than musical) debt to Animal Collective, Yeasayer function as if a quartet of musical magpies, gathering various baubles and trinkets, instruments and pre-sets, and fashioning them into a self-styled sound. And how does it sound? Try: an oddly-psychedelic, percussion-rattling, fuse-firing, four-part-harmony-wailing, hand-clapping, '70s-horror-film-synth squelching, reverb-abusing racket of junkyard dystopian futurism. Or, y'know, something like that.

With Kala, Sri Lankan-born, London-based Maya Arulpragasam —the shouty electro-thunk princess trussed in self-styled dissident-chic threads— authored a worthy follow-up to her electric debut, 2005's Arular. Working with suddenly-ex-boyfriend Diplo and producer-du-jour Switch, the second M.I.A. LP stirs up a wicked polyglot brew in the global melting-pot, taking “ghetto music” influence from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and indigenous Australia. As her music crosses borders, M.I.A. sings about the limits of immigration, and the global power of the almighty dollar. Taking “I hate money/'cause it makes me numb” as its totemic refrain, Kala is Arulpragasam's defiant rejection of hip-hop's status-object-worshipping commodity culture.

Few bands have ever undergone the in-public (r)evolution Chromatics have, going from shambolic no-wave screech to icy electro moodists in the space of three years. Powered by the programming of Glass Candy's Johnny Jewel, Chromatics' faux-score to a movie (never made), Night Drive, is a sterling set of dark, decadent, dreamy disco that, in the long run, is defined by a single song. And a cover version at that. Chromatics' six-minute rendition of Kate Bush's “Running Up That Hill ” is heartfelt to the point of reverent, treating the source text as some holy hymnal; every glowing electro pulse and narcotized Ruth Radelet vocal a form of musical worship. Perhaps unexpectedly, it's one of the year's most beautiful musical moments.

In a prime year for the Italians Do It Better imprint, Johnny Jewel —the Portland-based producer behind Glass Candy, Chromatics, and Farah— was on fire the whole while. The latest for his cosmic-disco duo, Glass Candy, was one longplaying procession of sparkling Jewel jams. Whilst there's a narcotic, almost solemn sensibility to his evocations of long-lost dancefloor glamor, all the buzzing key-bass and washed-over electro ambience doesn't obscure the fact that these are prime pop-songs. On Beatbox (or, in Glass Candy typesetting: B/E/A/T/B/O/X), this comes to full flower with “Candy Castle,” in which an epic synth riff tangos with Ida No's unironic punctuations of: "woooo!" In the ought-seven, nothing said 3AM to me like Glass Candy.

It often seems as if CocoRosie —art-school sisters Sierra and Bianca Casady— would be considered serious avant-gardists or deranged visionaries as men, but as women are mere silly girls. Meaning, despite the predictable chorus of dismissals (Antony charging Pitchfork's condescending critique was “tinged with misogynist resentment”), the third CocoRosie effort proved just as deeply rewarding as it was immediately ridiculous. A haphazard mélange of pre-war blues, ironic hip-hop, earnest dancehall, warbling operatics, uncomfortable poetry, rampant sexuality, unicorn/rainbow imagery, delirious new-age mysticism, and an unending collection of rickety toys, it's a collage cobbled together with little regard for the dogmatic upholdings of genre.

Released on Devendra Banhart's Gnomonsong label and wearing an appearance from Vetiver's Andy Cabic, the debut LP for Rio en Medio —New Mexico-born, New York-based songstress Danielle Stech-Homsy— was instantly assumed to be another freak-folk platter. But Stech-Homsy isn't just some lassie fair with stars in her hair. The most notable collaborateur on The Bride of Dynamite is, in fact, sample scientist Tim Fite, who works with Stech-Homsy on building atmospheric landscapes from radio static, field recordings, and the ghostly voices of children. Through such foggy, opiate realms, her sweet voice and gently-pluck'd baritone ukulele tread gently, as if wandering through a waking dream in hushed awe, treasuring every instant.

Serafina Steer hung her head in her hands the first time she heard Joanna Newsom, knowing that, as harpist-songwriter herself, she was now doomed to a life of second-fiddle status; that in the (small) minds of many (men), there'd be no room for another girl-with-harp. Yet, Steer's debut has little in common with Newsom's virtuosic folk, if only in that it's impossible to imagine Newsom tenderly caroling “Bring it on, wanker! Bring it on, wanker!,” as Steer does in her domestic drama “Council Flat.” Shyly quiet and charmingly rickety, her home-made debut finds Steer crafting tiny, observational songs sung in a half-spoken, storybook-ish English lilt; giving an air of fanciful fantasy to narratives more often couched in mundane reality.

On his second Collection of Recordings, this one dating between 2004-2007, Jens Lekman treats his audience to more laugh-out-loud quips and sample-based pop romanticism. Ever the sad clown, smiling through his depression, here Lekman's songs play like a series of carefully-rehearsed dinner-party anecdotes. Confident in every carefully-worded, road-tested recollection, Lekman tells the one about posing as his lesbian friend's boyfriend at her dad's house, and the one where he cuts the top off his finger slicing an avocado, pausing on punchlines as he goes. His charms are more affected than natural, and his musical debt to Jonathan Richman is still inestimable, but Lekman's gift with melody and ability to turn a phrase silence such doubts.