The 25 Best Albums of 2007

OH YEAH... 209 SONGS WE LIKE Weird White People Aly & AJ “Potential Breakup Song” Animal Collective “Peacebone” Devendra Banhart “Tonoda Yanomaminista” Battles “Atlas” Beirut “Elephant Gun” Björk “Earth Intruders” Blitzen Trapper “Wild Mountain Nation” Manu Chao “Rainin in Paradize” Matthew Dear “Deserter” Celine Dion “Taking Chances” The Fiery Furnaces “Ex-Guru” Gogol Bordello “Ultimate” Klaxons “Gravity’s Rainbow” Pop Levi “Blue Honey” Mika “Relax (Take It Easy)” Of Montreal “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” White Williams “New Violence” Yacht “See a Penny (Pick It Up)” Wayne’s World Lil Wayne “Dough Is What I Got” Lil Wayne “I Feel Like Dying” Lil Wayne “La La La” Lil Wayne “Live From the 504 [Rap City Freestyle]” Lil Wayne “Promise” Lil Wayne “We Takin’ Over (Freestyle)” Lil Wayne “The Zoo” Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne “You” Swizz Beatz feat. R. Kelly and Lil Wayne “It’s Me Bitches” Girl Power Sara Bareilles “Love Song” Bat For Lashes “What’s a Girl to Do” Mary J. Blige “Just Fine” Vanessa Carlton “Nolita Fairytale” Ciara “Like a Boy” Keyshia Cole “Let It Go” Miranda Lambert “Gunpowder & Lead” Lori McKenna “I Know You” M.I.A. “Paper Planes” Katy Perry “Ur So Gay” The Pierces “Boring” the Pipettes “Pull Shapes” Plastiscines “Loser” Riskay “Smell Yo Dick” Tegan and Sara “Back in Your Head” Carrie Underwood “Crazy Dreams” Hip-Hop High School Jason Fox “Aunt Jackie” Hurricane Chris “A Bay Bay” Lil Mama “Lip Gloss” Soulja Boy tell’em “Report Card” Hey Shawty! Dream “Shawty Is Da Shit” Lloyd “Get It Shawty” Plies feat. T-Pain “Shawty” T-Pain “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” CONTINUED...

15) Robert Plant/Alison Krauss
Raising Sand Rounder
Musical opposites build a rural spookhouse
In Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant’s almighty howl could slay a legion of Valkyries or topple the frosted peaks of Mordor. But Plant is now 59, and in the year he reunited Zeppelin, he twinned himself with the subtle mountain melancholy of 36-year-old singer and fiddler Alison Krauss. Their downcast harmonies give a strange, midnight-graveyard ambiance to recent and ancient songs of regret and loss; the result, casual but fraught, sounds like the Carter Family caught in a Jim Thompson paperback. Special conceptual bonus: Plant and Krauss have the same hairstyle. 

14) The White Stipes
Icky Thump Third Man/Warner Bros.
Jack learns how to rock again
Jack White without his guitar is like Thor without his hammer, Zeus without his thunderbolt, Dirty Harry without his .44 Magnum. Ax in hand, White is a force of nature; take it away, and he’s a funny-looking Michigander with weird taste in clothes and serious sister issues. Following the last album’s piano-and-marimba detours, Icky Thump is a distortion-drenched course correction—the Stripes’ loudest, fiercest, funnest set yet. Meg bashes more gleefully than ever, and Jack has a blast covering kitschy Patti Page pop, shrieking about cream soda and wielding his Fender like a chain saw on fire. Even the bagpipes and Mexican trumpets shred.

13) Feist
The Reminder Cherry Tree/Interscope
The indie-yuppie dinner-party record of the year
Yes, the iPod ad with that song (“1234”) got a little tiresome. Yes, the notion of a “Norah Jones for hipsters” is deeply annoying. But even if Canuck Leslie Feist’s sheer, soft third album doesn’t aspire to do much more than wrap you in a designer security blanket, it’s a damn snuggly security blanket, one with cute little patches and weird wrinkles you just can’t iron out. Feist and her low-key backing band play catch as catch can with jazz, world music, Tin Pan Alley and folk, gently pushing old genres into fun new places that leave the singer plenty of room to go to whispery war with her complex self.

12) Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Merge
Hard-luck rockers get cocky. And some saxophones
Long the poster boys for great ’90s bands that got screwed in bad major-label deals, Spoon have spent this decade making strangely sexy records and drinking up indie-geek goodwill. Their sixth full-length is a sly, serious examination of what happens when skinny, brainy white guys fall in love with “black music.” (It’s even got a song called “Black Like Me.”) Lovingly-played soul horns, funk bass and Motown dance beats exude ’60s optimism as scratchy-voiced Britt Daniel bristles with honky heat, reminding the world to never underestimate a hungry underdog. 

11) LCD Soundsystem
Sound of Silver DFA/Capitol
NYC wizards fill the club with brains, laughs and beats
Like Frank Sinatra, and Joey Ramone before him, LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy is a New York scene maker whose coolness covers a soppy, vulnerable side. The kingpin of NYC’s retro-new-wave “dance-punk” revival writes droll disco spiels that riff on the plight of the hipster in an age when being awesomer than everyone else is getting more expensive and less meaningful all the time. His unexpected sweet side comes out in beautiful synth-pop sobfests about extramarital affairs and out-of-touch friends. You won’t know whether to smack him or hug him, but you’ll dance until you pass out.