The 25 Best Albums of 2007

OH YEAH... 209 SONGS WE LIKE Songs to WHOO-HOO! To 1990s “You’re Supposed to Be My Friend” Against Me! “Thrash Unreal” Arcade Fire “Keep the Car Running” Arctic Monkeys “Brianstorm” Brakesbrakesbrakes “Cease and Desist” The Clutters “9999 (Ways to Hate Us)” The Cribs “Men’s Needs” Endeverafter “Baby Baby Baby” Fall Out Boy “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” Foo Fighters “The Pretender” Fountains of Wayne “Strapped for Cash” The Fratellis “Flathead” Jason Isbell “Brand New Kind of Actress” Jonny Lives! “Get Steady” Linkin Park “Bleed It Out” M.I.A. “BirdFlu” My Chemical Romance “Teenagers” Nickelback “Rockstar” Nine Inch Nails “Survivalism” Noisettes “Sister Rosetta (Capture the Spirit)” Operator “Soulcrusher” Paramore “Misery Business” Radiohead “Bodysnatchers” Shop Boyz “Party Like a Rock Star” Smashing Pumpkins “Tarantula” Bruce Springsteen “Livin’ in the Future” Vampire Weekend “Oxford Comma” We Are Standard “On the Floor” The White Stripes “Icky Thump” Old Dudes … Remixed! Mark Ronson “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” Frankie Valli “Beggin’ (Pilooski re-edit)” Wu-Tang Clan “The Heart Gently Weeps” Sad White People Gary Allan “Watching Airplanes” The Bravery “Time Won’t Let Me Go” Bright Eyes “Four Winds” Chiodos “Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered” Kelly Clarkson “Don’t Waste Your Time” Daughtry “Home” Fergie “Big Girls Don’t Cry” Fountains of Wayne “Someone to Love” Charlotte Gainsbourg “AF607105” JJ Grey and Mofro “Country Ghetto” Interpol “The Heinrich Maneuver” Avril Lavigne “When You’re Gone” LCD Soundsystem “Someone Great” Paul McCartney “Ever Present Past” Modest Mouse “Little Motel” Radiohead “All I Need” Jenny Owen Youngs “Fuck Was I” CONTINUED...

20) Bad Paisley
5th Gear Arista Nashville
Manly heartthrob likes kielbasa, fishing, breaking the speed limit; hates getting facials
It’s not just that this 35-year-old West Virginia guitar marvel can wring laughs and surprises out of barroom pickup lines (“Ticks,” which offers a thorough body search) and a mistrust of modern male grooming (“I’m Still a Guy”). Despite being burdened with the least authentic surname in Nashville history, he’s been dazzlingly consistent since 1999, mixing twang rave-ups with weepers full of hard-won wisdom. Paisley proves that “redneck comedy” doesn’t have to come with a hick accent and Skoal stains on its T-shirt.

19) Modest Mouse
We Were Dead Before the Ship Sank Epic
Washington state vets make the Titanic look like a Carnival Cruise
For more than a decade, Isaac Brock has been indie-rock’s great chronicler of trailer-park diasporas and strip-mall dead zones, a guy who doesn’t see owning a shotgun and a Pavement album as mutually exclusive. On their sixth album, his band hits the metaphorical high seas with ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, chasing white whales only to get covered in existential blubber. Along the way, Brock sings antisocial chanteys and lost-traveler’s songs over slippery grooves and bracing guitar clatter. Great tunes push him onward in hopes that the weather can stay decent long enough to reach safe land. Spoiler alert: It never does.

18) Justice
† Vice/Ed Banger
Parisian pair ask: Voulez-vous couchez avec nous, ce soir?  Techno: so impersonal, so cold—But not for these French hedonist whack-jobs. Justice pummel you with grooves drunk on ’70s disco, ’70s industrial, ’70s metal and ’70s decadence, looking backward to better times for party people rather then obsessing on the lousy future. Church organs and crunchy riffs blur the sacred and skuzzy; songs crank up mind-numbing distortion and body-rocking bubblegum boogie, pursuing an almost Platonic notion of dumbness like a holy grail. Then a track called “Let There Be Light” offers a moment of sincere beauty, and it feels like the Second Coming itself.

17) Bruce Springsteen
Magic Columbia
Rock god to born-again president: You suck
There’s a cost to being the Boss: you gotta respond to lousy times with life-saving songs. After 35 years on duty as America’s favorite all-American rocker, Springsteen meets the Iraq era with an album of emotional water-boarding for political fence-sitters. Punk-rock mean in spots, sports-bar rousing in others, downhearted all over, the songs aren’t just angry, they’re empathetic too, reaching out to soldiers’ wives, vets and third-shift waitresses named Shaniqua, proving that Bush’s reign has made “lefty” politics as mainstream as apple pie and “Born to Run.” No wonder Bush-backing radio conglomerate Clear Channel refused to play it.

16) Jay-Z
American Gangster Roc-a-fella/Def Jam
Dealer turned wheeler-dealer reprises his law-breaking past
If 30 really is the new 20, as Def Jam president (and hip-hop hobbyist) Jay-Z claimed on 2006’s soul-deprived, endorsement-doused Kingdom Come, it makes sense for the 37-year-old Brooklyn MC to revisit the hustler-with-a-heart rhymes of his mid ’20s. Inspired by Denzel Washington’s portrayal of ’70s-Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas, this non-soundtrack album forgoes flash for the stealth wit and masked morals that marked Jay’s untouchable 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt. Even with his 401(k) in fine shape, Jay delivers his rhymes with the vigor of a young turk, clearly renewed by his harrowing trip down memory lane.