40. The Knife - Deep Cuts
Deep Cuts trades more on wit and irony than any 'The First Cut is the Deepest' deal, with songs about proto-pornos as in 'Handy Man'. The record is likeable because it engages the humorous side of European clubbish techno that seems to be taken so seriously on the face of things by English-speaking ravers. It takes that homoeroticism and pushes it firmly in your ear. But it has to be 'Heartbeats' that makes this very fun album somewhat painful and heartfelt also.
39. LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem
It's a complete accident that I like this band. It was Reading in 2005, the Sunday night, alone in the Radio 1 tent. I'd gone initially to see The Futureheads but the schedule had been delayed. This was the first time I heard 'Yeah' (Crass version), a semi religio-disco moment that completely re-wrote my perception of James Murphy and co. The throbbing melody that gobbles 'Yeah' down re-affirms much of my ill-intentions that were probably well-meant in the first place. Sometimes you should just be quiet and have a little dance.
38. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs
This record is whack. Perhaps listening to 'Kids on Holiday' in an airport is a good idea, because the sense of giddiness translates, even if you are on your way back home. Sung Tongs is the infantile goodness of AC, with the rare hints of trauma that seem to guide this band, as on 'Leaf House': 'This house is sad/because he's gone'. That is the song that got me into them, everything else before just seemed, well, peculiar.
37. Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
This is an underrated record. It's packed full of great melodies and the production is excellent. It's messier than You Forgot It in People, and it doesn't try to be anything other than what it really is - a melodic mess. But, again, any mess including Emily Haines and Feist will always manage to make the roughness pristine and lovely. '7/4 Shoreline' is one of the top songs in Canadian history, and, 'Swimmers'? Sheesh. 'Fire Eye'd Boy', 'Ibi Dreams of Pavement', 'Our Faces Split the Coast in Half'??? GET BORN!!!!1!1!!!1!!!
36. The Shins - Oh, Inverted World
Oh, Inverted World? It's a student's dream record, with songs about bus stops and bookshops. Yes, some of us are happy to get the bus and a little too happy to be in bookshops. Though, really it was Garden State that introduced me to The Shins. I did indeed wish that Natalie Portman had plopped headphones on my head, rather than Zach Braff's. Still, the first few listens to 'New Slang' offer a sensation that only this gullible and sweet-hearted kind of minor music can produce.
35. Alan Braxe & Friends - The Upper Cuts
Ok, so it's 2007 and I'm not embarrassed anymore, and no I don't want a fight. This is elated, euphoric French dance music that is completely welcoming and strangely indiscriminate. Though, you do have to stick with these songs to get their full spunk, like 'Most Wanted'. 'Intro' is Fred Falke at his best, slappin' de bass as only he can, in some studio in Marseille, probably. Let's not forget 'The Music Sounds Better with You', an infinitely playable track that seems to have soundtracked the late '90s as if by the soundbrush of God Herself.
34. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
Please let's not talk about Jay-Z or Twitter and all that Pitchfork news-barf about Ed Droste talking to some people who don't look like him or listen to the same songs. Veckatimest isn't a fashionable record but for 'Two Weeks' and Victoria Legrand gaining deserved notoriety in what is a stage of pre-Beach House breakthrough, before Teen Dream spaffs gently in the face of unknowing turbo-critics in January. What marks Grizzly Bear out is the slow thrust of fisticuffs as on Yellow House's 'On a Neck, on a Spit' and here with 'While You Wait For the Others'. It's also the New Weird America influences that sees the band wait for a song to hit, ala 'Dory' or 'Cheerleader'. Veckatimest is a very good record, but I'll admit, its charms aren't fully-fledged just yet. And that's a compliment.
33. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights
For lists that matter this year - i.e. not this one - Turn on the Bright Lights is a three-four gob throb with The Strokes Is This It. It's not been a good past few years for Interpol. Ok, Antics was good, but Our Love to Admire lit few flames, and the band have admitted as much. It seems that everything comes back to their debut full-length, a seminal work. It's a good mixture of reverb-guitar-pain and danceability as on 'Say Hello to the Angels'. It's the bass that undercuts the mastery, with 'The New' written sorely but sweetly on my memory if ever I listen to it. And 'Leif Erikson' tears my tits swiftly off with Paul Banks talking about time that our deceased Leif once had for Paul, always.
32. Great Lake Swimmers - Great Lake Swimmers
My fellow Great Lake Swimmers chum made me a mix which included a song from an unknown GLS record. I called him immediately to say thanks, Tony Dekker's voice is one that puts me firmly back in the wet Christmas of 2005. When us Brits could use Pandora to discover new music (you can't stop the constant revolution) 'Three Days at Sea (Three Lost Years)' always seemed to show up and punch me in the shoulder. I couldn't find the record in shops, it wasn't on the band's myspace, couldn't find it free anywhere it was only available to buy online. And so, after months of shoulder-pangs, I got hold of it. And, though it's not a circus ride of varying styles, it sticks to exactly what it's good at: washing reverb-swamped vocals (pre-Panda Bear), and faintly disturbing lyrics: 'The man with no skin/they would not let him in/nobody wants to see a beating heart/a lung, or a brain/or anything'. All-American goodness ala Washington Irving.
31. The Tough Alliance - A New Chance
Pop music, not pop-ular, feels energetic and exciting, new and unfounded. So, not the same retreading of old economic successes/artistic fuck-offs. To listen to 'A New Chance' is a rapturous experience, 'a new romance' indeed. There's an intensely political feel to songs like 'First Class Riot': 'Don't you diet/first class riot.' And the wittiness of this Swedish (best) duo is what makes the politics feel un-political and more unifying, more honest. There is no discrimination here, it's kind of the pacifist's uproar, using a Zizekian but non-alienating sense of humour, the type to dig cynics in the bits. 'Neo Violence' and 'Miami' are both growers, giving A New Chance a sense of effervesence over time. But it's the style of 'Something Special' that lives on: 'You were something special/something real.'
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