top 30 songs of 2007

The following is my end-of-the-year list of favourite songs from 2007.

Same deal as last time: 30 different artists, 30 songs. You can download the songs separately; OR . . .
save me some bandwidth and cop them all in a single 161MB file AND unzip it.

******************************************
30 Maximo Park - Our Velocity
The best thing that Maximo Park has recorded so far. And one of the most exciting tracks I've heard this year in terms of unconventional song structure and convoluted (but insanely catchy) melodies. And the energy level is also insane--the way it veers into the chorus and whips itself into the next verse, like stretching an elastic band and releasing it over and over again.

29 Sally Shapiro - He Keeps Me Alive
I almost cried the first time I heard the chorus. The way Shapiro's voice faintly aches over the pulsing synth line threatens to brings tears to my eyes. Gorgeous.

28 Percee P - 2 Brothers From The Gutter (feat. Diamond D)
I like this a lot for how Madlib samples what sounds to me like Link charging at baddies with his sword in the Legend of Zelda. I have an unapologetic bias favouring Nintendo-inspired (or plundered) beats. And certainly, Percee sounds stellar over top of them. I also have a soft spot for the ingenious coda tagged onto the end of this track. I don't know what it is, but it sounds awesome.

27 Electrelane - To the East
If ever I was in a band, I would be very happy if we sounded like Electrelane. Ringing guitars + drums + sweet androgynous vocals = amazing.

26 Arctic Monkeys - Fluorescent Adolescent
In the absence of a new Strokes album, this English stuff is the next best thing. Great melody. Exceedingly British. And I have no idea what the song is actually about.

25 Stars - Take Me to the Riot
Stars have a remarkable talent for putting words and sounds together. The boy-girl singing on the verses is so intimate, nuanced in such a way that the lyrics nestle up in your ears. The chorus is pretty as well, but the verses hold me in rapture. Alliterative lines like "Good news is my shoes is/ lined with all my nickels and my tens" are simply delicious.

24 James Brown - Call Me Superbad (Cornelius Rework)
Fact #1: Keigo Oyamada digs James Brown and so determined to rework "Super Bad" into this explosive little number. Fact #2: As there is currently no one else on earth who can do what James Brown does here, Oyamada really had little choice but to hit up the Godfather of Soul's catalogue to achieve such a spectacular serving of dissonant, bursting-at-the-seams art-funk.

23 Mark Ronson - Valerie (feat. Amy Winehouse)
This was a huge favourite of mine earlier in the year and I still love it. I won't tolerate any of the insane Winehouse hate. I simply won't have it. The way she effortlessly sings her way up and down those arpeggios at the the end of the song is one of the most infectious things I've ever heard.

22 Crystal Castles - Alice Practice
By the way, I know I'm cheating with a couple of the songs on this list, like this one, which I think was technically released sometime last year. But I listened to "Alice Practice" so many times this year that it feels like a 2007 song. Supposedly, the recording of this song was an accident, or some sort of happy fluke. I'm not sure I buy that, seeing as it's completely amazing.

21 Feist - 1234
Ah, Feist. Why did you have to put the divine "1234", with its perfect vocal melody, on an iPod commercial? I wish that it didn't bother me, but I have to admit it sort of does. Not enough to keep this song off my list, though--it's a masterpiece. It's just too bad that it has been associated with something as annoyingly ubiquitous as an iPod.

20 Devin The Dude - What A Job (feat. Snoop Dogg & Andre 3000)
The dude is inspired. The blissful first 20 seconds of this song is enough to make me wig out. And it just gets better and better when these guys start in with their mellow rhymes. I can only imagine that a lot of good narcotics went into making this one.

19 Dizzee Rascal - Pussy'ole (Old Skool)
This song is relentless and completely bad ass. Kinda nasty (gendered insults = not cool), but I'll forgive that. Dizzee is seemingly endlessly inventive, and this is some of the best use of samples I've heard in a long time.

18 T2 feat. Jodie Aysha - Heartbroken
I really dig these lovely understated pop mantras that seem to appear out of nowhere. Last year it was Cassie's "Me & U", and this year it was T2's "Heartbroken" featuring the ever-so-sweet vocals of Jodie Aysha. Gorgeous, dancefloor-worthy and catchy enough that it'll get some mainstream radio play, but minimalist enough that it'll likely never be a big hit on this side of the Atlantic. Which is too bad, 'cause it's endlessly playable.

17 Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
This one grew on me. A lot. I fell in love with the keyboard at the end.

16 Nellie McKay - Mother Of Pearl
Two Words: Dance Break. I want to marry this woman. Please watch the sideways YouTube video of McKay performing this song.

15 Don Cash - 2k7 (In The City)
Don Cash was one of my favourite discoveries of 2007. My sweet, sweet nihilistic disco jam. Cash deadpans, almost oblivious to the stabs of cheap synth and clatters of percussion. And it's "banal rhyming and Fisher-Price beats" work like fucking magic. Apparently, the Guardian didn't 'get' it.

14 Frankie Valli - Beggin' (Pilooski Edit)
I could listen to this on repeat forever. You get Frankie Valli's immaculate voice, the Four Seasons in tow, and a droning guitar line inspired by (sampled from?) ESG's sublime "UFO". What more could you possibly ask for? There are some cool spaced-out, echoey effects at the end, too, just for kicks.

13 Little Dragon - Twice
Little Dragon is probably the next great band hailing from Gothenburg, Sweden, to make rounds on the net. Yukimi Nagano has the voice of a goddess, deep and pristine, gentle but firm. It commands reverence. When she dips into her lower register, the magnificent tones bathe her audience in transcendent beauty.

12 ABX - Beautiful Girls In Magic Positions (Sean Kingston vs. Patrick Wolf)
Two great songs from 2007 in one GREAT song. "Beautiful Girls" was the song of the summer. ABX (Aaron Brink) of The Hood Internet fame pitches up Kingston's auto-tuned vocals even higher and arranges them over the whirling, rotating strings and revving bass of Patrick Wolf's "The Magic Position". It's more glorious than it has a right to be. Whoever wrote this song (I'm pretty sure it wasn't Kingston) was clearly inspired. "Beautiful Girls" perfectly captures the spirit of the teen pop of the early 60's, marrying the classic Ben E. King melody with a narrative involving adolescent heartbreak and awkward, self-conscious threats of suicide. And for its part, Patrick's Wolf's mechanical symphony propels the song upwards, rocketing it to dizzying heights.

11 Menomena - Wet and Rusting
Masterful and awe inspiring. An ingenious song, layered meticulously with beautiful melodies and counter-melodies. There are so many hooks that you lose track by the end.

10 DJ Drama feat. Outkast & Marsha Ambrosius - Da Art Of Storytellin' Part 4
This Outkast joint from DJ Drama's new album shocked me when it leaked to the internet last month. Weeks later, I'm still shocked at how good it is, especially after hearing the rest of DJ Drama's Gangsta Grillz: The Album, which is pretty mediocre. Andre 3000 (especially Andre 3000) and Big Boi are on fire here, and they're not the only ones. Cannon's production scorches. The horn line is crazy infectious. A piping organ vamps a note throughout the verse, and then a chorus of backing "ooohhs" join in to vamp the same note, while Ambrosius vaunts on the subject of Outkast's unfuckwithableness. The whole thing knocks hard. And that's not even touching on the cleverness of the raps.

09 M.I.A. - Boyz
"hey now! . . . Here comes the new warlord!" "Boyz" is easily the most fun and inviting song on M.I.A.'s new album, but it might also be the scariest. It's like a Third World version of Sesame Street, but instead of some jazz-lite counting song for the kids, we get something like a riot, with M.I.A. asking us kiddies how many intoxicated, "no-money" boys it takes to start a war. Brilliant.

08 Talib Kweli and Madlib - Over the Counter
Another Madlib production. I had a hell of a time picking just one track from Liberation (not to mention that my self-imposed limit of one track per artist meant leaving the glorious Kweli/UGK collabo, "Country Cousins", by the wayside). Seriously, every track on Liberation is golden--even that crazy "instrumental" number. The overall wow-factor of Madlib's production choices can't be overstated, but Kweli is the standout here. He owns these beats, effortlessly. His powerful, laid-back flow and insanely-articulate narratives are so enthralling that each time he slows down for the chorus, it's actually a disappointment. At the beginning of the track Kweli proclaims: "The era of the bullshit is over. It's the Year of the Blacksmith." Hyperbole, perhaps, but Liberation was certainly a great start.

07 Rihanna - Don't Stop the Music
"Quick, bring your drink and get your ass on the dance floor, now!" Either that or someone's going to end up dancing on the table. The dance floor heavyweight champion of 2007. Hands down.

06 Radiohead - Reckoner
To be perfectly honest, I don't expect I will listen to In Rainbows much in the future. Most likely it will end up on my shelf gathering dust like so many other albums I buy and never listen to. But I will probably remember this song--the echoing clatter of these cymbals, the softly persistent tambourine and chiming guitar line--forever.

05 Chromatics - Night Drive
As I've mentioned before, I think my attraction to the hypnotic "Night Drive" stems from the way that it presents seemingly mundane phenomena in a way that is completely bizarre, and therefore intriguing. The song seems almost pathological. Fixating on a particular late-night drive, a certain leather glove, implies a mystery where there may or may not be one. It's disorienting and surreal, and compulsively listenable.

04 Robin Allender - We, Emmanuel Light, Love Ocean
"We, Emmanuel Light. . ." is one of the most moving pieces of music I've had the pleasure of listening to. Its unadorned circular melody, which progresses through never-ending repetition, makes me incredibly happy. At the same time it's also bittersweet, and communicates a certain existential sadness.

03 Spoon - Finer Feelings
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is my overall favourite album of 2007, and it's kinda difficult to pick just one song. I've chosen "Finer Feelings" because it embodies everything that I love about this band--the rickety bass-driven arrangements, their danceability, Britt Daniel's agitated (but never distraught) vocals--while also featuring some genius reinvention: the dub-influenced atmospherics and sampling that play havoc on traditional song structure. But the biggest key to Spoon's appeal for me is Britt Daniel's romantic swagger. He possesses an emotional sensitivity capable of hitting on the intensely personal, while simultaneously maintaining an aura of detachment that serves the band's rhythm, and their impulse to get the audience to move.

02 Róisín Murphy - Overpowered
"Overpowered" is not just one of the best pop singles to be released in 2007--the best, if you ask me--it's one of the most flawless pop compositions I've had the pleasure of listening to in any year, period. It's ever so seductive; and amusingly, it's framed entirely in psychomedical terms, shunning popular morality (or any notion of romance, really) in favor of biological determinism. Our current social environment is one where women creating pop music are expected, and through various means, made to sing about sex, but in a very circumscribed fashion. Murphy interests me for the simple fact that she manages to pull off such a sexy song while simultaneously rejecting many of the mainstream conventions. Oh and how sexy it is. Just try not to succumb to the lure of its exquisite synth labyrinth: its criss-crossing, hiccuping, seesaw synths, the cavernous echoes of plinking, leaky-faucet synths, its droning security-alarm synths, its shimmering harpsichord synths, the gleaming washes of alien spaceship synth. . .

01 Pharoahe Monch - What It Is
"What It Is" has burned itself onto my consciousness. A conceptual work of frightening genius. Not only did Pharoahe write this, he (and Lee Stone) also produced this clever, meta-minimalist shit. The two minutes and 56 seconds of "What It Is" is a straight-up visceral force to be reckoned with, and its rhymes score so high on the intelligence-and-humour scale it makes my head want to explode. Lyrics and technique are flawless--the kind of art that you actually spend days and weeks with, exploring all its abstractions. Let's call Pharoahe the W. B. Yeats of hip hop. If a better rap verse exists from 2007, I haven't heard it. Check it.

As we move forward towards the new millennium
We will no longer communicate with vocal inflections
It will be necessary to communicate through telekinesis
We will open your mind and concentrate harder
Focus, focus, focus, focus
Hey brother, what it is

[Verse 1:]
Raps like Star Wars
Only the stars die, it's no sequels
B-3 cases, C3P0's
Before Morpheus and Neo was killing 'em
We was duckin' roulettes in the hood like Remo Williams
Understand an underground bomb-cipritate
Get serious or die laughing like John Ritter
Young Eastwood, just tryin' to eat good
Breathe easy, relax
Mac like Fleetwood
Keep snoring
Keep sleeping, I'll keep touring
Come back, lay in the cut like Neosporin
Came out of the fallopian blastin'
Pharoahe hungrier than Ethiopians fastin'
Flies all in my teeth, stomach stickin' out
Niggas want dibs on the weed but ain't kickin' out
See this is not American Idol
This is me tryin' to eat, human survival
Spit at your favorite rapper, take his title
Stick needles in his eyeballs 'til his signs are no longer vital
This ain't that
I'm not them
These ain't those rhymes, I'm not him
This is more like cocaine all night
Shine like the new 5-halogen fog-lights
No
More like sunshine
One line in your mind to remind you of when you were nine
Before you were bustin' cherries it wasn't necessary to grind them
Now we all on our grizzly
And you got the nerve to press Frisbees
What it is

"What it is"

[Verse 2:]
If I'm not home on the range
Catch me at the range, practicing my aim
Gat you in your brain, shame
They thought I was backpacks
Slept, didn't know that he kept inside the knapsack
Today's niggas do skate-by-hits
Run in your crib on some Queer Eye for the Straight Guy shit
But not homosexuals they master in gunplay
Rearrange your furniture, fix your feng shui
They be swearin' it's cute
But a B up in the glovebox, cutter in the boot
With the sex appeal, and no ice either
The fight to bear arms, I'm not talkin' wifebeaters either
When they see me they say "That's that nigga"
My last name should be "That's that nigga"
Sounds kinda nice, "Pharoahe that's that...ohh"
Never catch me with them plastic cat fast niggas
With the flow that's so influential
Niggas fucked up they get no instrumentals now
Next time you spittin' on mine
Bet your bottom dollar you be spittin' over rhymes
What it is