Sloth

You can always tell what a year was like by what didn’t make it on the list: Pelican, The Baroness, Von Spar, The Stereotypes, Band Of Horses, that live Daft Punk record, Boris & Merzbow collaboration, Mono, Electric Wizard and Cephalic Carnage all had fabulous records but not quite good enough to make the list, for whatever reason. And there’s a bunch more that don’t get officially released until next year like (Black Mountain , Earth) that would have been on there had they actually come out.

That’s one of the big problems I have with year-end lists, actually – it’s a lot easier to remember the stuff that came out near the end than to remember what I was grooving to eleven months ago.

Anyway, here’s Sloth’s Picks To Click For ‘07:

10. Bad Brains – Build A Nation. Thank Christ the Bad Brains have stopped trying to grow old gracefully. Giving the hardcore scene a much needed shot in the arm, the Brains (with producer Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys) harness some of that ol’ 1982 ROIR roar for the year’s second most surprising comeback. H.R.’s voice ain’t quite what it used to be, so Build A Nation relies pretty heavily on vocal overdubs, but Dr. Know is in fine shredding form and for once you can hear the bass in the punk songs and the reggae songs.

9. 65daysofstatic – The Destruction Of Small Ideas. Sometimes I am actually embarrassed by how easy it is to please me musically. 65daysofstatic play that anthemic strain of post-rock (check) with an interesting underlayer of weird IDM-like beats and noise (double-check) – and they got their name from an unfilmed John Carpenter project (triple-double-dog-check!). Gosh, what were the odds I’d like this? I haven’t got a clue what the singer is on about, but I’m reasonably sure it doesn’t matter.

8. Liars – Liars. My big Pitchfork pick of the year. I wasn’t terribly hip to the previous Liars stuff which sounded sorta proggy and shapeless, but this record fixes that: short songs that veer from seventies cock rock to Beck-style down tempo chillouts to Jesus & Mary Chain feedback drones to full on Sonic Youth circa Sister punk rawk. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded in an oil drum fifteen million feet below sea level, except druggier.

7. Trans Am – Sex Change. I love this fucking band. If I had the ability to drum like a cross between Neu! and Donna Summer’s touring drummer, I would start a Trans Am tribute band. While a lot of their earlier records can’t quite keep the energy level up all the way through, Sex Change is the glorious exception: a good solid hour of tongue-in-cheek disco-rock that sounds like what we thought the future would sound like in 1983.

6. High On Fire – Death Is This Communion. Probably the record I listened to the most this year. In my head, the title is always shouted like the way Matt Pike (lead HoFer) shouts it: “DEATH IS THIS COMMUN-EEION!” Inhabiting the sweet spot between stoner rock and doom metal, High On Fire inches ever closer to becoming the Motorhead of the new millennium. The drums alone make me want to cover my neck in tattoos. Best cover of the year, too.

5. Dinosaur Jr. – Beyond. Here’s why I love J. Mascis so much: the man is in his forties and he’s got a dozen albums to his name, but is still self-depreciating enough to write the lyrics: “C’mon, life! I’m almost ready!” Almost? What sounds on paper to be like a really bad idea – let’s regroup one of the most acrimonious underground 80s groups this side of Husker Du! – beats the odds to make one of the most downright enjoyable albums of the year. Lou Barlow and Murph pick up where Bug left off some twenty years ago*, but Mascis breathes fire all over this record like the slacker guitar god he is.

4. Battles – Mirrored. As experimental an album you’ll hear this year or any other, Battles welds machine and man together on an almost atomic level and then blurts out the bizarre, infectiously dorky results. It’s like listening to baby robots discover rhythm for the first time. It’s like what would happen if you stole Carl Stalling from the past and locked him in a room full of computers for twenty years. It’s like the soundtrack to the world’s oddest CGI movie. It’s the album Radiohead should have made.

3. LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver. I almost feel target marketed by LCD Soundsystem. He’s my age, more or less, and clearly listened to the same shit I did, except he’s a New Yorker so he’s filtered a lifetime’s worth of post-punk through the endless beat of the nightclubs. The music is funny without succumbing into novelty, and the lyrics mock himself for being the aging hipster that he is. “North American Scum” must have made Jarvis Cocker grind his teeth in jealousy.

2. Do Make Say Think – You, You’re A History In Rust. Venerable Canadian post-rockers have been veering a little too pastoral for my tastes lately, but this latest record restores some much needed musical balls to the proceedings. Perhaps the artistic proximity to the Broken Social Scene permeated their guitars. Whatever the reason, this record managed to remember the rock portion of the post-rock equation, without sacrificing the boring stuff like dynamics or musicianship.

1. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible. Like there’s a question. “Antichrist Television Blues” is the obvious centrepiece of this, their second record, which neatly sidesteps the fabled sophomore slump by turning the very personal music of Funeral around and shouting it at the world. The album is darker and denser, without the sharper corners, but where Funeral seemed to find music out of chaos, Neon Bible is the sound of a group of artists pursuing a singular, focused vision. They feel very much like companion pieces to me, in the way that Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac were – the yin and yang of the Arcade Fire’s soul. God only knows how they top this one.

* Ouch.