The Top Ten (pt 1)

Drink every time you see the word "pop".



10. The Shins - Wincing the Night Away

The shimmering indie-pop sound that James Mercer has worked so hard to create comes to full fruition on Wincing the Night Away, an album that is by turns about relationships, drugs, and Nietzschean ideal of the Übermensch. Mercer's lyrics are almost constantly murky, but the music that accompanies it is full of shimmering guitars and drum machines, making it impossible to really care how bizarre the words are, because the music is just so damn upbeat. This is, by far, The Shins most cohesive album to date, and I look forward to seeing how they develop with subsequent releases.



9. Get Set Go - Selling Out & Going Home

What Mike TV lacks in subtlety (there's a track on this album titled "Fuck You (I Want To)"), he more than makes up for in pure songwriting finesse. And while his subject matter is rarely deeper than drugs, sex, death, or music, he's never at a loss for words to describe those things. Get Set Go excel at making pop music, the kind that you'll be humming along to no matter how obscene ("Come on fuckers/Everyone get movin'!", TV chants at one point), the kind that makes you wonder why it makes you feel so happy, even when the songs are meditations on being someone's heroin (in all the worst ways) and or venting off a bad relationship ("Get What's Coming to You"). Infectious pop music, impeccably created and produced.



8. Explosions in the Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone

Contributed by The Audiophile

Explosions in the Sky resurfaced this past year with their first full blown effort since 2004's soundtrack for Friday Night Lights. Unlike a solid majority of the albums mentioned in this list, the word 'pop' (you don't have to drink for this one...) would be an inappropriate way to describe any musical aspect of this record. As quite possibly the most emotional musical work I have ever laid ears upon, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone steps up the groups maturity, taking the quiet-loud-quiet format and making the quiets more detailed and calculated, while making the louds more intense and overwhelming. Every atmospheric utterance of the ambient instrumentals weaves a tale in a way that words never could: drawing you in with nuanced intricacy before shattering your perception through sonic explosion (see band name). The record reaches is apex during the 13-minute epic "It's Natural To Be Afraid" which contains a charged guitar duet over top a soul-crushing piano ostinato.

Now that we're through all that, this would be a good time to mention that this album is best taken with a full-screen Magnetosphere iTunes visualizer. Do it.

7. The White Stripes - Icky Thump

I've gotta be honest: I really don't care for The White Stripes. I mean, okay, White Blood Cells and Elephant were both pretty good albums, but not until Get Behind Me Satan did I really care what Jack and Meg White did. Icky Thump is a step back to the blues-heavy rock that made them famous, but with the inclusion of the styles on GBMS, the Stripes have created an unbelievably solid rock record. "Conquest," with its' Spanish influences sounds like a bullfight, the music pounding away as White sings of sexual conquest turned on its' head, and "Rag an Bone" is a hilarious ode to trash gypsies (as my mother calls them). With heavy 70s rock influences and a record collection that has a lot of Rolling Stones, The White Stripes created the rock record of 2007.



6. Panda Bear - Person Pitch

Panda Bear, of Animal Collective, released his debut solo album this year to pretty much universal praise. There's not a lot that I can say that hasn't been said elsewhere: it's an unspeakably pretty album, it features a lot of Brian Wilson as a major influence, and it's a damn fine album, damn fine. If gorgeous, eloquent, happy pop music doesn't interest you... see a doctor. You might be clinically dead.