{"id":3409,"date":"2007-12-11T22:52:45","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T03:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/11\/best-of-2007\/"},"modified":"2007-12-11T22:52:45","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T03:52:45","slug":"best-of-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/11\/best-of-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"best of 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I said I&#8217;d <a href=\"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/01\/2007-contenders\/\">bend the rules a bit<\/a>, but here&#8217;s the ten best albums I heard this year, in alphabetical order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Aliens<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Astronomy For Dogs<\/em>: add a Lone Pigeon to a few remaining Betas, and the result is funkiness. This album has more earworms than is safe. They are even better live.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Animal Collective<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Strawberry Jam<\/em>: I pretty much have to be alone and sitting down to listen to this. <em>For Reverend Green<\/em> especially; it&#8217;s all involuntary limb movements, sinuses exploding with joy (this probably doesn&#8217;t happen to you, I hope), and ullulating <em>Oo oo weeuh yeh &#8230; ee yeh yeh<\/em> etc for me. Other Animals didn&#8217;t do so badly either this year: Panda Bear&#8217;s <em>Person Pitch<\/em> was joyful, and even the bafflingly backwards <em>Pullhair Rubeye<\/em> from Avey and Kr\u00c3\u00ada had something.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Colleen<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>The Golden Morning Breaks<\/em> (2005): very sparse but beautiful notes. <em>I&#8217;ll Read You a Story<\/em> is the sound that angels make.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>A Hawk And A Hacksaw And The Hun Hang\u00c3\u00a1r Ensemble<\/strong><\/em>: featuring magyar madness, crafty cimbalom, and the only piece of bagpipe music that won&#8217;t make you want to hack your ears off with a meat cleaver. It&#8217;s doubly nice that it features Zach Condon actually playing with his heroes, rather than just trying to sound like them.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Ideal Free Distribution<\/strong><\/em>: lush 60s rhythm and harmonies, with a ton of mellotron laid on top. Poppy enough that no-one I&#8217;ve played it to doesn&#8217;t like it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Dan Jones and The Squids<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Totally Human<\/em>: Dan has clearly listened to a lot of both Robyn Hitchcock and The Minutemen, and has come up with a noisy but thoughtful album, which we play all the time.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Old Man Luedecke<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Hinterland<\/em> (2006): merge sly alt.country lyrics with pretty clawhammer banjo, and you&#8217;ve got the Old Man. Bonus points for coupling the words &#8220;oracular bent&#8221; in a song, and getting away with it, too.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Ken Reaume<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Four Horses<\/em>: Ken quite modestly compares himself to Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. He&#8217;s easily the equal of both. Beautiful fingerpicking and whispered confessional lyrics.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Jesse Sykes &amp; The Sweet Hereafter<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Like, Love, Lust, &amp; The Open Halls of the Soul<\/em>: you&#8217;ll fall for Jesse&#8217;s world-weary lisp and the drawling psych guitar. I did (and unfortunately discovered her other two albums, <em>Reckless Burning<\/em> and Oh My <em>Girl<\/em>, are almost identical. Oh well; very good, but very samey).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Porter Wagoner<\/strong> \u00e2\u20ac\u201d <em>Wagonmaster<\/em>: if you&#8217;re gonna go, go out on a high note. That&#8217;s exactly what The Thin Man From West Plains did. It&#8217;s very straight country, but the decades of experience polish it brighter than rhinestones.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I said I&#8217;d bend the rules a bit, but here&#8217;s the ten best albums I heard this year, in alphabetical order: The Aliens \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Astronomy For Dogs: add a Lone Pigeon to a few remaining Betas, and the result is funkiness. This album has more earworms than is safe. They are even better live. Animal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[1016,1014,47],"class_list":["post-3409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-choons","tag-1016","tag-best-of","tag-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-SZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}