2007: The Year in Movies and Music

People will have various opinions about There Will Be Blood. They already do: Though there's a strong Oscar buzz about the film (Day-Lewis will likely be nominated for Best Actor) and some reviewers are ecstatic, others have squirmed in their seats at the film's length (two hours and 40 minutes) and its unapologetic brutality — not violence, though there's some of that, but Anderson's defiant independence, and the film's absolute refusal to throw anyone any sort of feel-better bone. But — and this may be hard to believe — the film gets better the more you watch it. I know this because, after meeting Day-Lewis, I borrowed a friend's "for your consideration" DVD and watched it again, and again, and then replayed scenes over and over just to try to find the actor in the work. I couldn't. Not only that — I would find the world falling away as I watched, forgetting that I was watching an actor. Forgetting why I was watching at all, if not to relive the story.

This isn't only because of Day-Lewis' performance; it's also because of a script that serves him (and Dano) with a character who, for all his darkness, still claws at rising above his cruel beginnings in a way we all recognize. "It appeared to me to come from a very much unconscious self," Day-Lewis says of Anderson's script. "I didn't know Paul at all. I didn't know him as a man. But I knew when I read it that he had already inhabited this world. I think the very best writers do that, in very much the same way that we do it when we're working, or try to. I felt like he understood each and every one of those people that he was describing, and understood the world that they came from. He had taken the seed of an idea and progressed it moment by moment to such an audacious conclusion."

Plainview, were he real, would be among the men of history celebrated on dignified brass plaques and in statues all over the world. "But when you take off their tall hats and long-tailed coats," Day-Lewis observes, "they're just covered in the stuff." Oil, that is.

As are we all. When Plainview strokes the head of his injured boy, or sobs over the found journal of a lost family member, he reminds us that he still belongs to us, not only as a fellow human but as an iconic American. In our cars and planes and heated homes, we all benefit from the oil prospector's largess and pay for his sins every day.

Like many other films this season, There Will Be Blood announces in the credits that it's a "carbon-neutral production," which means that for every unit of carbon emitted during the making of the film, an offset was purchased, probably in the form of a tree. And Anderson, who got the idea for the film when he read Sinclair's book while traveling in London, clearly had a point to make about human greed laid bare in the petroleum industry.

But both director and star insist that There Will Be Blood is neither a political film nor a metaphor for anything. "Parallels are a menace," says Day-Lewis. "For the sake of doing the work itself, we had to set aside, put under lock and key, all our personal feelings about [oil]. Otherwise, we'd have been in the business of trying to teach, which is death to any kind of storytelling."

Still, he laments the proliferation of SUVs in Ireland. In Ireland? With those tiny streets?

"I go to school in the morning with my lad, and I park the car in a lot that's jammed full of SUVs they absolutely have no need of whatsoever," he attests. "Everyone is buying cars. They can't afford houses, so I guess they're buying cars instead. They're everywhere. Perched up in those bloody things, looking down on you, lording it over the rest of us.

"The roads in Ireland are only that wide. They're buying these things you can just jam between the hedgerows. It's madness."

A few years ago, Day-Lewis said in an interview that after decades of self-doubt — decades of asking himself whether, even after an Oscar and all that, he could be useful in the profession — he had finally realized that "Is there any reason to be doing this?" is a healthy question to be asking oneself, enthusiastically and repeatedly.

"It came to me in the form of a revelation," he explains. "When I was a young utopian and still had that conflict, I found it terribly unsettling, because it made me question my commitment to the thing I was apparently giving my life over to. And I worked a lot more in those days than I do now. So it really came as a great relief [to discover] that it was vital to have that conflict, to continually reassess the reason for doing this work, which may well have changed over the years.

"My ambition for many years was to be involved in work that was utterly compelling to me, regardless of the consequences. But I worried a lot as a young man about where such and such a thing might take me; you're encouraged to think that way. You're supposed to build a career for yourself. But there's no part of me that was able to do that. And thank God I was able to recognize it before I sort of went gray with anxiety."

Far from building a career, he now sees himself starting all over each time he determines he can be sufficiently useful to a director and accepts a role. "It's absolutely new each and every time," he says. "For all that you carry with you as you get older — and if you've had the good fortune to work in films that people have seen and in some cases liked, you carry with you the burden of expectation — all that went before is meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Because you're a baby. From the moment you decide to go to work again, you're a baby. You have to empty yourself if you're going to be any kind of vessel at all.

"I suppose that's the salvation of all of us. With all the kind of grandiosity that surrounds the way of life that actors lead, there's an insistent humility to the work itself, because you cannot do it unless you begin with nothing each time."

The beginner's mind: Some people meditate for a lifetime to find it.

Day-Lewis laughs. "I don't think I've achieved separation from the material world just yet," he says. "The loss of myself happens in a place that's very concrete." Right: in the movies.
 — Judith Lewis

Hit List
The top movies of 2007

It's that time of year again. Our six critics* don't always (or often) agree, but we've combined their top-ten lists (allowing for ties) to pretend like they do! So without further ado, the ten (or fifteen) best movies of the year, kind of:

1. There Will Be Blood

2. I'm Not There

3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

4. Killer of Sheep, Southland Tales

5. Zodiac

6. Ratatouille

7. Colossal Youth

8. Eastern Promises, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

9. Regular Lovers

10. Hot Fuzz, Knocked Up, Manufactured Landscapes, Private Fears in Public Places

Honorable Mentions:

Into the Wild, Black Book, West of the Tracks, No Country for Old Men, Syndromes and a Century, My Kid Could Paint That, Grindhouse, Offside, Day Night Day Night, Away from Her, Once, Paprika, Lars and the Real Girl, The Host, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Honor de Cavalleria, The Band's Visit, Lake of Fire, No End in Sight, The Bourne Ultimatum, Terror's Advocate, The Savages, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, Music and Lyrics

*Scott Foundas, J. Hoberman, Nathan Lee, Jim Ridley, Ella Taylor and Robert Wilonsky

2007: The Year in Music

Simply the Best

Best Drive-By Truckers Album: Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-). With the DBTs (and Wurlitzer wizard Spooner Oldham) in tow, the Detroit soul screamer does what Hood, Cooley and Isbell have always done: take the personal, make it political — and then make it rock. But LaVette is a singer, not a band; her voice is singular, radically individual and, on this career album, heroic.

Best Wilco Album: Goldrush, The Heart Is the Place (Better Looking). From Oxford, England, Robin and Joseph Bennett deserve better than the inevitable Wilco (or Flaming Lips) comparisons. But it's no slight on the hopeful, experimental, catchy and honest Place to say that it's the kind of record Jeff Tweedy once seemed to care about making.

Best Bob Dylan Album: Various Artists, I'm Not There (Sony). The absurd and noble failure of Todd Haynes' Zimmy flick had the unintended consequence of creating a soundtrack that actually captures what the film could not: The shape-shifting genius as interpreted by the shape-shifters to come long, long after him. And if you don't think punks should be singing gospel, you don't know John Doe — or Dylan.

Best Leonard Cohen Album: Elvis Perkins, Ash Wednesday (XL/Beggars). This young writer of songs about tragicomic sex and melancholic desire sounds like Sam Cooke in comparison to his unacknowledged father L. Cohen. (Elvis' real father is the late actor A. Perkins.) But on this beautiful series of dreamsongs, his surreal aim is just as true.

Best Bruce Springsteen Album: Jason Anderson, Tonight (Eca). From out of nowhere (actually, New Hampshire), this homage to the E Street sound captures the collective joy and ensemble exploration that made the Wild and Innocent true to its name. Anderson may yet be discovering who he is as a songwriter, but charting his progress will be one of the best things about 2008 — and about the many years to come.

Best Pogues Album: The Ike Reilly Assassination, We Belong to the Staggering Evening (Rock Ridge). Chicago wise-guy Ike Reilly put on the best show in St. Louis that no one attended; he also made the best word-smart, half-cocked rock and folk album that nobody heard. What's more, he offered the most concise response to the current climate of religious railroading: "Fuck the train!"

Best Spoon Album: Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge). The politics slip in under the skin as the rhythms go straight for the ass; the brass and strings sting with the precision of sugar needles as the mix hits, again and again, like a heavyweight contender. Single of the Year: "The Underdog."

Second-Best Spoon Album: Jon Hardy and the Public, Working In Love (self-released). Jon Hardy's voice suggests no one so much as Britt Daniel, a fact that barely matters as this St. Louis band pours out horned-up hooks, boundless melodies and unfussy lyrics of finding romance in an alienated world. Another Single of the Year: "Cassius Clay."
 — Roy Kasten

The Beat Goes On

Pop music's increasing reliance on MySpace is, in some ways, the dreadful democratization of the biz that many have long-feared. But there are two things in the Web site's favor: It does mean fewer homemade CDs (and their jewel cases) cracking underfoot. And in '07, MySpace was the best place to hear two of the year's most delightful new bands: Jacksonville's multiracial Black Kids and the Windy City rap duo the Cool Kids. The former sounds like what would have happened if the Cure's Robert Smith had gotten his existential angst out by fronting a teen R&B group. The latter samples Eric B and Rakim, offers a song titled "88" and another tune about their bikes, making a crucial link between rap's Golden Age and today's indie scene (which seems to be the only place left where people care about hip-hop history).

The year in hip-hop, as a whole, was about as dismal as any in recent memory. More mixtapes, more guest shots, more regional scenes gaining a foothold — and outside of good efforts from the usual (Kanye) and not-so-usual suspects (Wyclef, a surprising Wu-Tang comeback), almost nothing worth talking about in the mainstream. However, down below in the underground — if it's really worth drawing that distinction any more — El-P made possibly the best album of his career, the tightly focused, vividly imagistic I'll Sleep When You're Dead. Kansas City's Mac Lethal delivered a hugely entertaining debut on Rhymesayers, 11:11, which showed that while "emo-rap" is still a horrible term, rhyming about deeply personal subjects doesn't have to be a turn-off. And on Situation, Rich Terfry, a.k.a. Buck 65, achieved the sort of paradox we've come to expect from an artist of his brilliance. He's never been more conceptual (an album about life in 1956 and Situationism?) or created more hard-hitting hip-hop.

Since we still appear to be in a holding pattern until the inevitable '90s/grunge/black helicopters revival (mark it down for '09, especially if we have a new President Clinton), the '80s influence still dominated. Often in overt ways: See Chromeo's picture-perfect, vocoderized electro pastiche Fancy Footwork, or Tiger Army's wonderful, New Orderesque single "As the Cold Rain Falls," from its otherwise sweet and swell psychobilly outing Music From Regions Beyond. But an even cooler thing was the unexpected ways those Me Decade sounds were spit back this year, as in Kenna's unclassifiable new-wave hybrid Make Sure They See My Face, Scottish DIY-er Calvin Harris and the new millenium synth-pop of I Created Disco and fellow UK-er Jamie T's Clash-inspired hip-hop on Panic Prevention.

Even Nick Cave made an effort to reclaim part of his past, forming the new group Grinderman and making more blues-skronk noise than he had since his days fronting the Birthday Party. The subject of laments like "No Pussy Blues" aside, the old devil also sounded like he was having more fun than maybe ever — a pretty cool, and atypical, way for a pop musician to celebrate a 50th birthday.
— Dan LeRoy

All that Jazz

Blues and jazz roots run deep in St. Louis, and our town is fortunate to have an ample supply of talented musicians in both genres, as well as first-rate venues where listeners can tap into those roots on a regular basis.

BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups completed an ambitious expansion and renovation project this year, opening a second floor and adding an outdoor balcony that effectively doubled the room's capacity. The club also teamed up with video producers Front Row Productions to shoot performance footage of many local musicians for a prospective cable or public television series, which could mean wider attention for St. Louis talent if the plan comes to fruition in 2008

In addition to featuring local acts, BB's continued to book a fine selection of touring blues musicians, including recurring appearances by Watermelon Slim and the Workers, an Oklahoma band whose CD The Wheel Man was one of the underrated standout releases of the year. Other 2007 blues releases worth special attention included Old School, a strong comeback from Chicago vocalist Koko Taylor, and Irma Thomas' After The Rain, a heartfelt and haunting post-Katrina effort from New Orleans' queen of soul.

In other welcome news, Jazz St. Louis added several weeks of music during the summer to the Jazz at the Bistro season, making the series an eleven-months-a-year operation. To further its broader goal of promoting and preserving jazz in St. Louis, JSL also expanded its educational programs to help nurture future generations of jazz listeners and players. The Bistro's 2007 schedule included many top touring acts, highlighted by spring appearances from legendary bassist and former Miles Davis sideman Dave Holland's quintet and the sizzling all-star octet SF Jazz Collective, who mixed original works and re-imaginings of the music of Thelonious Monk with excellent results.

This past year also marked the revival of the Black Artists Group, with a contingent of musicians (led by bassist Zimbabwe Nkenya) performing a series of free shows at the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site's Rosebud Café. Here's hoping that this new edition of BAG will continue to thrive in 2008 and beyond.

On the festival front, the news was mixed, as both the Big Muddy Blues Festival and the St. Louis Jazz and Heritage Festival were forced to downsize due to a lack of funds. However, the Greater St. Louis Jazz Festival, headed up by UMSL music professor Jim Widner, continues to grow, with an entertaining, high-energy performance by Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band capping this year's event.

For many jazz fans, the most talked-about release of the year was the Miles Davis boxed set The Complete On The Corner Sessions, an expanded version of one of the trumpeter's most controversial albums. Also worth checking out: Metheny/Mehldau, which documents the recent collaboration between guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Brad Mehldau, and Sonny, Please from tenor sax giant Sonny Rollins. 
— Dean C. Minderman

Eclectic Avenue

Arcade Fire, Neon Bible (Merge). From the very first note — a divine howl from a massive cathedral pipe organ — this album is something special. What sets Neon Bible apart is the fact that a work of such staggering depth somehow manages to sound accessible. The subjects of the songs (faith and mortality, to name a couple) are vast; but when paired with richly textured orchestral compositions (which build to breathtaking crescendo), it's rock & roll in its most evolved form. Those who choose to critique the work for what its not — a revisiting of Funeral, the band's incomparably brilliant debut album— are missing what's right in front of them: eleven impeccably crafted, epic, elegant and profound songs. While 2007 will likely go down as the year that introduced the first wave of cheap imitations to the indie-rock aesthetic, Arcade Fire continued to operate on a higher plane of existence than its peers.

Of Montreal, Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer? (Polyvinyl). The fact that Hissing Fauna has hardly left my CD player since its release is a testament to the album's attention to detail. Each listen reveals something different. Inescapably catchy, synth-and-guitar-driven "disco sleaze" melodies draw you in on the first few spins; Destroyer's dissonant, profoundly dark and introspective lyrics then hook you on subsequent plays. But eventually, it's the minutiae that keeps you coming back for more — the way extroverted frontman Kevin Barnes draws out each syllable as he croons, "You're just some faggy girl, and I need a lover with soooouuuul power," or pondering what, exactly, it means to "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean."

Blue Scholars, Bayani (Mass Line/Rawkus). The Blue Scholars' song "Back Home," should go down as the political anthem of the decade. The first single from the Seattle hip-hop duo's second record not only serves as a shining example of MC Geologic's lyrical prowess and DJ Sabzi's soulful and rhythmic beats, but the vitriol it directs at the Iraq war is absolutely spot-on. "Fuck a coffin draped in red white and blue/Withdrawal past due," Geo rhymes in a tone that's more pensive than pissed off, "We disgusted with the fact we pay taxes to build tanks, still droppin' one twomp-and-a-half to fill tanks." The diverse pair (Geologic and Sabzi are of Filipino and Iranian descents, respectively) apply their righteous indignation to other topics such as immigration, the WTO riots and de facto segregation, but nothing rings as true as the refrain of "Bring 'em back home, I don't want to have to keep on singin' this song."

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, 100 Days, 100 Nights (Daptone Records). When I first heard this album, it felt like I'd been transported into a scene in Pulp Fiction. Not only would the songs melt perfectly into that film's soundtrack, but like all of Tarantino's work, Jones' music exchanges any sense of time or place for cool charisma. It's postmodernism at its peak: an amalgamation and reinvention of all the great funk, soul and R&B that preceded it (the influences of James Brown and Aretha Franklin are particularly pronounced). The Dap-Kings, Jones' backing band, also sat in for the production of Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, but while both vocalists are stylistic throwbacks, the 51- year-old Jones, who worked as a prison guard before getting her break, has the swagger and pipes make Winehouse look and sound like a British burnout moonlighting as a soul singer.

Devendra Banhart, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL/Beggars). Perhaps the bushy beard that Banhart sports is really just a mask that allows him to slip easily into the numerous identities he assumes on this album. The stylistic breadth of material covered on Smokey is astonishing: Banhart sings in beautifully accented Venezuelan Spanish over a delicately finger-picked guitar in "Cristobal," offers his takes on samba, doo-wop (in a delightfully tongue-in-cheek love ballad about a Rabbi's daughter in Jerusalem), indie rock, folk and — possibly most impressively, if not unexpectedly — psychedelic rock ("Seahorse"). Though such shape-shifting occasionally causes the album to lack focus, Smokey is Banhart at his innovative and idiosyncratic best.
— Keegan Hamilton

The Weight is a Gift

Is it finally time to tap-dance on the grave of Musical Irony? No, not parody, and certainly not satire — as long as there's social inequity and political wrong-headedness, there will always be need for that — but irony. You know: vintage shirt plus gym-teacher mustache minus properly fitting pants (oof) equals hipster gold. It's enough to make irony-weary music fans choose Scrabble over shows.

And while it's awesome to slap down QUIZ on a triple word score, we miss music. Real music. Good music. Thank heavens for 2007. The past twelve months have put a song in our heart, an extra 512 MB on our iPod, and a concert or fifteen on our calendar.

The year was nearly five-sixths over by the time Menomena came to town, and the Portland musicians' Billiken Club appearance highlighted their abundant talent and wicked wit. Most of the SLU students were dressed in costumes, which ordinarily would be all kinds of annoying (particularly since it was the day before Halloween), but the outfits seemed of a piece with Menomena's whip-smart whimsy. (Confidential to the guy who wore the "vampire giraffe" costume: I am totally stealing that idea next year.)

Menomena's 2007 release, Friend and Foe, is a worthy follow-up to its excellent debut. The band combines computerized loops, intricate math-rock signatures, and hella awesome keyboard and saxophone solos into music that is at once triumphant and very, very dark. Menomena's amazing live version of "Muscle 'N Flo" prompted one tipsy Billiken to shout, "You're special! ...In the good way!" Indeed.

The caliber of shows at the Billiken Club has been one of 2007's greatest delights. In the past four months alone, the venue checked off an impressive indie-rock wish list: There was Menomena, of course, but also Besnard Lakes, the Twilight Sad, White Rabbits and Mountain Goats. And the music released this year, in general? Damn, son. The best album of 2007 is the National's Boxer, and if you don't think so, you probably also hate puppies and fun. Okay, so maybe that's a bit harsh — but the Brooklyn quartet's fourth LP is seriously amazing.

Honest without being cloyingly confessional, serious without being mopey, Boxer distills all that is painful (and all that is beautiful) about being a young American. Matt Berninger's gorgeous baritone lends gravitas to songs about decaying friendships ("Green Gloves"), the dulling effects of middle-class striving ("Racing Like a Pro") and, yes, true love ("Slow Show"). The National's June concert at the Duck Room was both raucous and cathartic, with the capacity crowd requesting favorites and singing along, word for word. Bryan Devendorf further sealed his reputation as one of indie rock's most talented drummers, and Padme Newsome — an unofficial National member who kicks official ass — added texture and beauty with his impeccable viola-playing. Leave it to the National to go for the trifecta: best band, best album, best live show. Done, done and done — and without a trace of pretension or calculated irony. Real music made a resurgence in 2007, and only our Scrabble skills suffered.
— Brooke Foster

Revenge of the Nerds

LCD Soundsystem's self-titled 2005 release stands as the album that made me finally, truly believe in new electronic music. But Sound of Silver was a huge step up — and my ultimate album of 2007. It had everything I wanted: fun, super-fresh style, beauty and plenty of beats. "All My Friends" is elegant and touching, "Someone Great" is bloop-bloop perfection and the hand claps and joyous shouts of "a-woohoo!" in "Watch The Tapes" are majorly addictive.

Still, my favorite part of the music year was when an android stork dropped down from outer space and delivered us Radiohead's In Rainbows. The media hullabaloo surrounding the surprise release sucked me in whole (because I'm a dork and I love shit like that). And while I remain fascinated by the band's alien marketing techniques, the album had the chops to back up the hype. It's pretty, glitchy, bittersweet and epic — in short, everything you would expect from a Radiohead album. However, In Rainbows is instantly more accessible than Amnesiac, Kid A or even Hail to the Thief. Around the same time as the album's release, the band started leaking performances on its Web site, including live versions of album tracks and my new favorite cover ever: Radiohead playing New Order's "Ceremony."

My heart swelled with pride when the Arcade Fire released Neon Bible, and then both fans and critics welcomed the album's lush, bountiful orchestration. Arcade Fire fans have formed a near-cultish church surrounding the band, but their worship might be justified. "Intervention," "Ocean of Noise," "(Antichrist Television Blues)" and "My Body Is a Cage" are nothing short of magical and could easily be mistaken for the rapturous hymns of a new religion. Everyone was primed for a backlash against the indie darlings, but you can't argue with songs this beautiful.

As far as independent releases, at the beginning of the year I was gifted with an advanced copy of AA Bondy's recently released American Hearts, and it's been in heavy rotation ever since. The solo singer-songwriter put aside his former life as the lead singer of scorching glam-grungers Verbena in favor of a more earthy, exposed adventure. Bondy composes lonely tales of complicated redemption, teetering between the delicate confusion of Dylan and the hopeful pride of Springsteen. His soulful voice is soothing and softly Southern, making American Hearts a perfect Sunday-morning album.

I also happened upon tons of great local releases this year. The Humanoids' Are Born is my favorite; the songs are pure punk and the band straight-up shames most other locals with its energy and authenticity. Rats and People's The City of Passersby is dense and enchanting, and quite a few songs on the Bureau's We Make Plans In Secret deserve repeated spins. Finally, Riddle of Steel's 1985 wasn't released until the end of this year, but I can safely predict that it will rock me through 2008.
— Jaime Lees

Robot Rock

Someday soon, robots will dominate the world, enslave all humans and breed us for the sole purpose of working in factories to make more robots. (This is inevitable, so let's move on.) The members of Battles are not robots, but they're close — and therefore we probably should not trust them. But when the band's debut album Mirrored dropped in May, it was like the scene in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure where the protagonists are surrounded by people in robes air-guitaring to Wyld Stallyns; it felt like somebody had been to the future in a magic telephone booth and brought back an artifact.

Mirrored predicts a world where Gibson Les Pauls, the Apple iBook, real drums, sampled drums, ten-foot-high cymbals, keyboards, guitars, keyboards that sound like guitars and guitars that sound like keyboards live symbiotically. In a time when music is being enslaved by technology, Battles is making technology its bitch. The band is more than mere ear candy, though. On the album's defining single, "Atlas," the beat from Gary Glitter's "The Hey Song" lies under a bed of off-kilter guitar lines and elephantine bass loops. Soundmaker Tyondai Braxton's vocals, which are pitch-shifted to sound like a human morphing into a chipmunk and back, accent all of this music. It's incredible that a band like Battles can be this innovative — and equally incredible that, in the time we live in, music this strange can be so universal.
— Ryan Wasoba

The Heart of the Matter

The first release of 2007 that really caught my attention was Blonde Redhead's 23, an album on which the New York trio finally transcended the constant Sonic Youth comparisons that have haunted its career. Of course, I only came to this realization after I emerged from the trance-like state induced by the album's dark, wistful and woozy soundscapes. 23 hits its stride about halfway through with the slo-core but bombastically percussive "SW," on which ethereal vocals and a lovely George Martin-esque horn arrangement help build its many layers of hypnotic texture. The momentum continues with the driving rhythm and shoegaze swells found on "Spring and By Summer Fall," before the last few songs gradually wind down; "My Impure Hair" brings a calming sense of closure via church organ percussion, melancholy accordion and blissed-out space-echo effects.

Jimmy Eat World, another band with roots in the '90s, also made a record that proved its 21st-century relevance. On Chase this Light, Jim Adkins and crew created an album every bit as catchy as their seminal effort Bleed American. Super-glossy production drives the album — Light was produced by Butch Vig, after all — but that's not to say that these songs don't stand on their own. "Big Casino" was one of the most infectious singles of the year (and made a definitive statement about recognizing mortality and the dangers of romanticizing the past), while "Gotta Be Somebody's Blues" showed the band exploring its more melancholy side with the help of a truly haunting string arrangement (think Beck's Sea Change).

My favorite album of the year almost completely escaped my attention. Bat for Lashes' inventively choreographed and thoroughly creepy video for "What's a Girl to Do?" (yes, Donnie Darko continues to influence) was interesting, if not one of the best office distractions of the year. But for some reason I filed it under "gimmicky" and didn't check out the rest of Fur and Gold right away — even though when I finally did, I realized that it was a beautiful, moody and haunting effort. Natasha Khan's lyrics paint abstract pictures that are open to interpretation, although they can also be deeply personal; Gold's unconventional approaches to percussion, subtle acoustic guitar flourishes and cinematic string arrangements perfectly accentuate these emotions. The result is an album that's comparable to the likes of Björk, Kate Bush and Tori Amos — but one that also places Khan firmly in their company.

Every year brings a few artists who fly a little under the radar, but whose contributions still deserve recognition. Brooklyn's The Forms made an outstanding album with Steve Albini, one that proves post-rock can be not only powerful and anthemic, but also delicate and beautiful. Airiel's delightful noise-fest The Battle of Sealand was the year's best "new-gaze" record and was highlighted by a collaboration with Ulrich Schnauss on the shimmery and saccharine-sweet synthpop number "Sugar Crystals." Finally, MGMT's album Oracular Spectacular came loaded with pop-hooks and somehow manages to conjure Ziggy Stardust, disco fever and Mayan prophecy all at the same time.
— Shae Moseley