Thursday, December 27, 2007

20 Favorite Albums of 2007

THE LIST:

20. Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
19. Boris with Michio Kurihara - Rainbow
18. Throbbing Gristle - Part Two. The Endless Not
17. Terror Visions - World of Shit
16. Scott Walker - And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And Who Shall Go to the Ball?
15. Cornelius - Sensuous
14. Yoko Ono - Yes, I'm a Witch
13. MARVELKiND - State of the Artificial
12. Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond
11. Miss Alex White & the Red Orchestra - Space & Time
10. The Busy Signals - The Busy Signals
9. Grinderman - Grinderman
8. Enon - Grass Geysers . . . Carbon Clouds
7. The Book of Knots - Traineater
6. The Black Lips - Good Bad Not Evil
5. Thurston Moore - Trees Outside the Academy
4. The Coathangers - The Coathangers
3. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
2. Bobby Conn - King for a Day
1. The Veils - Nux Vomica

Honorable Mention (I can't put it on the list because it's a single and not an album): Vee Dee - Glimpses of Another World

Dishonorable Mention (Because it's just that bad, and the people need to be warned): The Stooges - The Weirdness



Disclaimers and other small print that will render this list meaningless:
  • Each album has a link to a lengthier review that I've already posted down this page in no particular order.

  • My original plan was not to rank them, but merely to give them "awards" for whatever set them apart. Then I went ahead and ranked them anyway, so you have to go to the write-ups to see their individual "awards."

  • Despite the fact that I ranked these albums, I did agonize over the order I put them in and I'll never be entirely satisfied with it. I'm a little infuriated that some albums didn't score higher than they did, but I did the best I could. Consider each album as having a margin of error of ± 3 spaces.

  • It's also ridiculous to compare these albums side by side. Comparing the Coathangers to Cornelius isn't just comparing apples to oranges, it's like comparing apples to motorcycles to soy bean futures.

  • This list is 20 albums long because these are 20 albums I couldn't bear not to mention on my yearly recap. I would have preferred to do something a little more concise, but sometimes life just does that to you. There are worse problems to have than having too many good new albums to write about.

  • These are my 20 favorite albums, not necessarily the 20 best. There's plenty of good music that I respect but don't love, and there's plenty more that I just haven't heard. These are the albums that have made themselves a permanent fixture in my record collection.

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