10. "Is There a Ghost" by Band of Horses
It is a haunted, insomniac, exhausted world. We are isolated and alone. Or are we? What can bring light, peace, and rest to this ghostly vision? Really freakin' loud rawk guitars.
9. "Earth Intruders" by Bjork
A preview of what music will sound like in 2017. Rhythmic, percussive, yes, but also post-human and utterly alien. Bjork still thinks she can organize freedom, but what that freedom will look like is no longer anything our dead 20th century liberal souls would recognize. More like necessary voodoo.
8. "My Moon My Man" by Feist
While "1 2 3 4" played to all our worst desires for bright colors, Sesame Street cheerfulness, teenage wishy washy wish fulfillment, bad dancing, etc. etc., "My Moon My Man" found Feist playing the sexy, seductive jet-setter. Take it slow, take it easy on me, she sings in invitation. The music slinks, and the last sounds you hear are high-heeled steps racing away to her next rendezvous.
7. "Atlas" by Battles
Now we're talking. This song and those crazy vocals still freak me out. The brilliant Battles play a frenetic but disciplined brand of dance/post-rock that puts the listener square in the middle of an amazing sonic landscape/onslaught. You don't listen to the music so much as experience it in three dimensional space.
6. "D.A.N.C.E." by Justice
2007 was the year that white indie-rockers were called out for not listening to enough black music. So leave it to the French to deliver the best beats, and rehabilitate an affection for Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. Like Daft Punk before them, Justice are more than happy to celebrate a cool, European brand of worldly eclecticism and, as every P.Y.T. knows, this is what music was supposed to sound like when we imagined the carefree oughts.
5. "Silver Lining" by Rilo Kiley
What a terrible album. What a fantastic song. On this one track, Jenny Lewis and the band out-do all of the recent Dusty Springfield imitators with this gorgeous and expert performance. Like all great country songs, the lyric spins cliche into something familiar, heartbreaking, and in the end hopeful. That grass-hoppery guitar line gives one the sense that the singer is both nervous and excited to be moving on.
4. "Going to a Town" by Rufus Wainwright
The piano and vocal put me in mind of the melancholy of old jazz torch songs like Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life." There is a sadness here that seems like the culmination of years and years of frustration and disappointment. When he says he's tired of America it's not glib. It's not something said easily or to shock. It is painful and honest. Perhaps it was his Judy Garland performances that allowed Rufus to take these essential ingredients of tragedy, solipsism and camp, and transform them into full-throated social and political protest.
3. "The Good, the Bad and the Queen" by The Good, the Bad, and the Queen
Damon Albarn's latest side-project is where the two strands of Brit-pop Englishness (Blur) and hip-hop and world beat (Gorillaz) come together to interrogate and exhaust their possibilities. On the one hand musical exploration and the ability to embrace the world as an artist is a net good. On the other, war, racism, illiberalism are bad. What overshadows our every effort is the Queen: empire, colonialism, patriotism, chauvanism, whiteness. Listen as Albarn's music hall piano and bouncy delivery give way to a punk's notion of a what a middle eastern dervish sounds like. And listen again as it all collapses and with it the possibility of a shared universal language based on song.
2. "Bamboo Banga" by M.I.A.
M.I.A. resists and rejects the notion that the west can reach out and embrace the world, shaping African and Asian beats into its own myopic vision of pop music. On Kala, it's Indian music that's the assumed cultural inheritance, and The Pixies, The Clash, and (perhaps) Duran Duran become the weird, exotic flourishes. On "Bamboo Banga," M.I.A. works with Switch to create a driving, forceful beat full of boasts, warnings, and announcements, and reclaims a little bit of R&B history along the way. If she's knocking on the doors of your Hummer: the future does not belong to you.
1. "Fake Empire" by The National
The song is oddly American in its nakedness and deep baritoned vocal. The loveliness of the images are straight out of a holiday beer commercial. Good times, good friends, a little something in our lemonade. But as the piano carries forward the implicit message is that we are privileged, complacent, lazy, comfortable. That's where we find ourselves at the end of 2007. Half awake in an empire that has burnt itself out; that never was a real empire anyway. In confessing it, the National remind us that we can't miss what we never had. We can't regret losing what we never aspired to in the first place.
