2007 in Re-View: The Year of Weird

Before I dive into my year-end lists, I want to comment on a few general trends I noticed in music in '07. Perhaps it was in part my disappointment with 2006, but '07 was one fantastic fucking year in music for me. And god was it a weird one! So many albums came out this year that felt somehow unprecedented, whether it was slight tweaks or outright overhauls of established formulas, utter irreverence for the notion of genre, or abrupt shifts in the sound of a certain artist. You know it's been a weird year when the new Menomena disc sounds downright tame! Battles made an album so mutant both in its means and its ends that it'll probably still sound futuristic 20 years from now. Shining treated genre as a boundary to smash and reconfigure, and are talented enough musicians that the results never sounded contrived. A Sunny Day in Glasgow (and to a lesser extent, A Place to Bury Strangers) grabbed some revered touchstones and reshaped them into something wholly new and original. Marnie Stern dared us to doubt that a bubbly blonde girl couldn't slay on the guitar. Dälek discovered subtlety and made their best album yet. El-P was weird by NOT being weird; fortunately the tradeoff was "fierce". PJ Harvey released a commercially-unfriendly album full of piano-driven torch songs. Even the perennially-weird released weird albums in 2007: Animal Collective became (to my ears) massively listenable, and Frog Eyes became just accessible enough to be enjoyable. And even though their whole albums failed to register with me, Supersilent and Kammerflimmer Kollektiev will have to share the crown for the two weirdest songs I heard in '07.

The other totally surprising trend in '07 was how many artsists whose previous work I'd loved released disappointing albums. Top of this list was the New Pornographers - if I was mean-spirited enough (like People magazine) to draft a "Worst of 2007" list, Challengers would be #1. Outside of sounding consistently contrived and disspirited, my friend David pointed out (and I agree) that Challengers is still identifiably a New Pornos album, with the horrid result that it's colored the way I listen to their previous (aboslutely cherished) work. UGH. Next up in the realm of disappointments was Björk's wretched Volta. We've been celebrating the woman's otherworldliness for years; but this album (and especially the bloated stage tour) suggests that she needs to come back to terra firma. (There's a quip in there about being, ahem, an Earth invader...) Liars set out to "just make an album", and boy did they succeed. Ted Leo continued his downward spiral into strident irrelevance; that new Clientele album is playing in an elevator somewhere near you; and Interpol finally lost the war against their own limitations. Friend Opportunity graced a lot of year-end lists, but I found it an enervated version of the Deerhoof that I love. The three exceptions to this trend were the fantastic Let's Stay Friends (an easy request, when Les Savy Fav bring the bluster like this); Learn to Sing Like a Star (I almost wrote that Kristin is incapable of making a bad album, but then recalled that her last solo and Throwing Muses albums both left me cold); and - to a lesser extent - Maths + English.

Another big surprise for me in '07 was how much fantastic drumming there was. Considering I didn't hear a single electronic album this year with mind-blowing beats, I have to conclude the analog guys used up all the beat karma. Long before Matt Beringer's melancholy baritone had penetrated into my pleasure centers, Bryan Devendorf's creative, insistent drumming was what kept me coming back to Boxer for repeat listens. "Mistaken For Strangers", "Brainy", "Squalor Victoria", "Guest Room" - all of them are driven by Devendorf. Christopher Weingarten's frenzied banging pushed the chaos factor even higher throughout Mapmaker, and absolutely steals the show on "Ghosts Will Burn." I still can't come up with a better way to describe Zach Hill's playing on Marnie Stern's In Advance of the Broken Arm than "batsoid"; the entire album sounds like a competition between the two of them to be more counter-intuitive. And then there's John Stanier. His might be the only instrumentation on Mirrored that's wholly non-digital, but watching him punish his body in the name of rhythm twice this year has me convinced he's the most robotic of the bunch. Which I mean as the highest of compliments: not "robotic" as in "static and uninspired", but "robotic" as in "totally fucking inhumanly awesome." Danny Seim from Menomena - already well-established as a consistently inventive skin-pounder - continued to do himself proud on Friend and Foe. As befitting the different context, Rob Ahlers sounded restrained on Learn to Sing Like a Star, but his presence gave that album some added heft. Greg Saunier discovered cowbells on the good songs from Friend Opportunity. HEALTH picked up the mantle dropped by that other L.A. single-word band and brought some serious rollicking percussion noise on their self-titled debut. And no discussion of beats in '07 would be complete without acknowledging the insane "Bird Flu." Apart from being poly-rhythmed to all hell, it's probably the only song in the history of humanity that uses a squawking chicken as a rhythmic element. Did I mention how weird last year was?