2007 Albums: 21-25

25. A Place to Bury Strangers - A Place to Bury Strangers

There's always some shoegaze album that I get into every year because there are times when no other music will work for my brain. When I need the obliterating effect on the mind, the droning guitars, the fuzzy vocals, thick texture, the overall indistinctness. If I'm "using" the music to suit my mood rather than listening to it for what it is, that's fine. Even so, I will say that this is far more than shoegaze derivative--their use of guitar distortion is careful, even if it sounds haphazard, and there's a haunting quality to the record, a kind of austere tension, that reminds me of Joy Division. Plus, like last year's shoegaze choice, Asobi Seksu, they're from Brooklyn.


24. Cool Kids - Totally Flossed Out EP

Ever wish hip-hop sounded more late 80s? Here's your chance. In the same way that lots of recent bands are throwbacks, the Cool Kids remind us that hip-hop used to be more fun. Their beats are purposefully low-fi, their swagger immature, their flow laconic. They characterize themselves as a black Beastie Boys, though that comparison isn't so much about sound as about a retro style, with a dash of immaturity. And for the most part, it doesn't seem ironic: it's not a skin-deep aesthetic, it's a whole mentality. All this is made more fun by their sound, which reminds me of slowed down, skewed up N.E.R.D. beats (and how's that for a cool pun: Cool Kids, Nerd beats?). In my own limited whiteboy hip-hop listening world, they're the Kanye antidote: while his production gets slicker and his songs overflow with samples to the point of nauseating saturation, the Cool Kids use their own voices and are decidedly classics. It's refreshing.

23. Battles - Mirrored

I had like a one-month love affair with this album, and then, quite suddenly, it felt like the most boring music imaginable. It's difficult to describe why this happened, but one moment they were this marriage of immense creativity with ridiculous technical proficiency, and the next, totally indulgent and uninteresting. It was totally unexpected, but I didn't know what to do, so I stopped listening for a few months. Putting together this list, I've been listening again, and I really do think it's a great album. They set up some confines for the music--literally, their album cover has the band inside a glass room--and proceed to invent endlessly within them. But it's a very limiting kind of creativity, and it leads to indulgence and frenetic results.

22. Low - Drums and Guns

I can’t speak much to where this album belongs in the progression of Low releases, which have been steady since 1993. I’m pretty new to this band, unlike some of their long-enduring fans, so I don’t have a sense of their evolving style or the slowcore movement in general. I do know that at its most basic, this is beautiful, fragile music that stands up to repeated listens. The band sounds so flimsy that a strong breeze would blow them over, as if the warm center of their music has been plucked out, yet the harmonies and quiet instrumentation keeps it all tied together. But honestly, it’s like the album is inside a freezer: the drum beats are tinny, the vocals beautiful but shaky, the tempo always even and slow, the melodies all downbeat.

Why do I love it? This might be a terrible metaphor, but it’s as if the band is a skinny, willfully quiet, possibly goth kid on the playground, who a bully likes to beat up. As a listener to the album, I feel compelled to beat it up, to call its haunting bluff. But I can’t. It’s music that I want to write off quickly, but instead keep returning to. Those weak dorky kids make bullies mad because they seem to have some secret to hide.

21. Kevin Drew - Spirit If...

I came pretty late to this album, frustratingly. When Elin and I saw Feist in concert at a giant old swimming pool turned into a concert hall in Brooklyn, Kevin Drew opened for her, but we got there too late to see him. When we got home I downloaded the album, but somehow failed to listen to it. Little did I know that there was a lost Broken Social Scene album sitting in my iTunes library.

In the frantic rush to relisten to all my 2007 albums the last month or so, I finally heard this. The characteristic “beautiful mess” that they’re always tagged with (I’m guilty)--which would eventually be an album-length haze over that 2005's Broken Social Scene--that’s here, but things are a bit more singular in focus. Its probably because Kevin is at the reins, with the rest of BSS flanking. He tries to push them into pop structures. Ironically, when he fails, and things unravel, the album is most arresting. I guess that beautiful mess thing really is the key.