The Top 50 Albums of 2007

Written by onecaseman

Tuesday, 01 January 2008

Article Index
The Top 50 Albums of 2007
Top 40-31
Top 30-21
Top 20-11
Top 10-1

Page 5 of 5

Rafael Anton Irisarri, Daydreaming [Miasmah]

If you're feeling melancholic, pouting about your sad and miserable existence, and need a soundtrack to give those tears another nudge before they finally break through... well... close down the shutters, turn up the rain, and soak in the vibrations of synth padded piano hammers gently stroking uncoiling strings. Regardless of the fact that I'm hearing this album for the first time this late in the year, it confidently catapults itself to the top of my Best of 2007 List. Hailing from Seattle, Rafael cites Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as influences for his compositions that are rich in sound design, bathing in a magnificent love triangle between organic, electro-acoustic, and electronic. Every minimalist click and background noise play as primary instruments in an overall bigger picture. On repeating rotations, the seemingly random notes slowly arrange the million piece puzzle into a picturesque canvas of premeditated relaxation. A masterful debut to be shelved alongside Deaf Center, Marsen Jules, Goldmund, and Max Richter.

~ Headphone Commute

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Download: Voigt-Kampf

Port-Royal, Afraid to Dance [Resonant]

They’re the best at what they do, so why doesn’t this band get more deserved attention? Italian post-rockers Port-Royal have improved their distinct sound in their sophomore album Afraid to Dance, which is full of lush, shoegazing guitar, drum glitches, analogue drones, and a new thing to this band, which is a little bit of singing. Simply put, this album is beautiful while also being the saddest dance album to exist. In a year when post-rock was full of Explosions in the Sky-wannabes and lame, drawn-out climaxes, this album came out as bright as any star in the sky. Afraid to Dance was the album that renewed my views on the post-rock scene, so well done on their part.

~ Neveryan

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Download: Internet Love

Porn Sword Tobacco, New Exclusive Olympic Heights [City Centre Offices]

This is the album with which Porn Sword Tobacco really makes a landmark. A marvellous ambient album that at times sounds very Eastern with a Western outlook, it's based on melodies that are both devastating and playfully uplifting. All the tracks blend into a great whole, and Cubical Fever is an absolutely essential track for 2007 ambient.

~ acidtongue

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Download: Cubical Fever

Matthew Dear, Asa Breed [Ghostly]

All hail the man who made shameless love songs legitimate in minimal house this year! Asa Breed was Matthew Dear's most accessible album to date, but perhaps also his most witty. Its predecessors Backstroke and Leave Luck to Heaven were known to be called micro-pop, but Asa Breed took one step further and showed Matthew Dear creating a rock star persona out of himself. What with Audion and False, one of the busiest people in techno reassured that he just can't go wrong.

~ acidtongue

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Download: Deserter

Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam [Domino]

Animal Collective has finally made the most cohesive album of theirs to date, while also being the catchiest. Focusing on the use of electronic sounds with Avey Tare’s brilliant singing/yelling, Strawberry Jam is an exceptional album full of new ideas that range from chaotic to melodic. This is the first Animal Collective album where the lyrics are worth listening to instead of taking a back seat to the instrumentals, which happened a lot in past albums. This is a strong claim, but I think the Collective are the future of music. Although the songs are abstract, it does not hamper the fact that these songs will stay in your head for days. It’s only a shame that Safer didn’t make the final track list.

~ Neveryan

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Download: Fireworks

Swod, Sekunden [City Centre Offices]

Was this somehow the year of ambient? With everyone fawning over Tim Hecker last year and piano music the year before, 2007 has had the most consistent stream of quality ambient music I can ever remember. And at the top of the pile this year for me was Swod’s Sekunden, a brilliant display of ambient treatments using not just a sound here, a sound there, but a chaotic mix of piano, field recordings, bass, and a host of other instruments and sounds not normally associated with ambience. And the sound is better for it. This is ambience that is emotional and stimulating.

~ onecaseman

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Download: Belgien

Radiohead, In Rainbows [Self-released]

With this album, Radiohead have created the most straightforwardly beautiful release of their career, and also one of their best (second only to ‘OK Computer,’ in this reviewer’s opinion). There’s no sense of a ‘big message’ or post-millennial tension/paranoia, here; the production is simple and clean, and Thom Yorke’s voice is more impressive than ever. At least two of these tracks have been around since the 1990s, and in general the album feels a bit like a collection of odds and ends, but none the worse for it; an impressive album from (arguably) the best band still releasing music.

~ playbynumbers

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Download: All I Need

Panda Bear, Person Pitch [Paw Tracks]

Repetition is the name of the game for Person Pitch. Panda Bear (Noah Lennox) has made an album full of echoing samples from artists like The Tornados and Cat Stevens seem like an entirely new work of art. With his use of erratic drums, swooning vocal samples, and his voice, every song on here is memorable; not only because of the lyrics about fatherhood, friendship, and addiction, but also because of how he makes the samples converge around his singing to make the album into a whole. Although Lennox does his best work in Animal Collective, this album makes it clear how significant a factor he in the success of that band.

~ Neveryan

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Download: I'm Not

Lusine ICL, Language Barrier [Hymen]

It seems that Jeff McIlwain reserves the "ICL" suffix in his moniker for his more minimal and ambient works released on Hymen (whereas the two Lusine albums appearing on Ghostly International are more beat oriented). Born in Texas and now residing in Seattle, McIlwain builds his expertise on studies of 20th century electronic music and sound design for music and film at the California Institute of the Arts. Incorporating field recordings, superb depth reverberation, and deep bass thumps in just the right places, Language Barrier explores the entire frequency spectrum and fully elevates you into an audiophile's heaven (Grados required for full access). McIlwain masters the art of beatless rhythms and sonic engineering, creating vast soundscapes that spread over your cochlea like dew over waking hills. Reserved for very special occasions, this delicacy should be consumed slowly, enjoying every measured and very treasured sip.

~ Headphone Commute

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Download: Caught In The Middle

Burial, Untrue [Hyperdub]

From memorable remixes of Jamie Woon and Bloc Party to an exceptional debut album full of ghosts and demons, the mysterious Burial has had quite a couple great years. His sophomore album, Untrue, became a universal album for many people not even into the dubstep scene in a short amount of time. This album exceeds where many people would see it as detrimental, as the whole album sounds damaged, broken, with slightly off bass and drum patterns, fuzz in the background caused by the scratching of vinyl, and obscured-beyond-recognition soul samples that wail around in the headphones. In its imperfect quality, Burial has produced a much more cohesive album that his self-titled debut, as all the songs blur together in its depression. The highlight of the album, though, is in ‘Shell Of Light,’ which begins like the other songs on the album with a woman’s sample driving the entire song, but when the song hits its last minute, the drums and bass drop completely, and the listener is left with a woman singing out to them and everything on the album comes to the surface. From the crushing ‘Archangel,’ with a sample that cries out “Tell me I belong,” to the closer ‘Raver,’ which sounds exactly like you would think, this is the perfect album for headphones on your way home at 4 ‘o’ clock in the morning, with the only light coming from above in the streetlights.

~ Neveryan

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Download: Shell Of Light