2007 music is finally finished!

It may be almost Valentine's Day, and I'm already queuing up a 2008 list, but God damn it, better late than never, right? Let's get this damn thing over with.

10. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity - I really like combining words, and I kinda think that this album should have been called Fripportunity, except that would have sounded like Robert Fripp was involved somehow. Deerhoof are one of my favorite current bands, and this one is probably the best sounding album of their career, if not simply the best. It's an album that showcases all of their best talents: the big balls rock ("The Perfect Me"), the off-kilter pop ("Matchbook Seeks Maniac"), the flat out bizarre ("Kidz Are So Small"), the Velvet Underground-like long-form noise experiments ("Look Away"). Deerhoof may record better albums, but they might not ever record one that better encapsulates what they're all about.

9. Menomena - Friend and Foe - It's a damn shame that every discussion about Menomena eventually devolves into "their album art is so crazy lolololol!" because it overshadows how great their music is. Friend and Foe may require use of the artwork as a decoder ring to find out track names, but I'm more impressed by the tunes. Not every band can get away with having three different songwriters and three different lead singers, but Menomena isn't just any band. The sound is something like if Spoon or The National went completely off the indie pop deep end, a kinetic compilation of every sound, mood, and spacey trip the genre has to offer. It's surprisingly deep and rich, and it rewards the repeated listenings that it takes to fully absorb it.

8. The Apples in Stereo - New Magnetic Wonder - Robert Schneider claimed in an interview last year that New Magnetic Wonder was heavily inspired by Brian Wilson's Smile. This shouldn't be too surprising, coming from a guy who records in a place called Pet Sounds Studio (also the place where Schneider recorded and produced every indie kid's favorite album). The sound of the album is more like Jeff Lynne than Brian Wilson, though, not that this is a bad thing either. Schneider's Apples are far more slick and polished than they were back in their Beatle-esque psychedelic heyday 10 years ago, and New Magnetic Wonder is one of the better-sounding albums I've heard in a while. It's also one of the catchier. I can't think of whether or not "Energy" was used in a commercial or if it just sounds like it was written as a jingle to sell Hewlett Packard computers (I mean that as a compliment, if at all possible). Robert Schneider, with has nasal voice, baldness, and dorky glasses, may look more like George Costanza than a rock star, but as long as he wants to keep making albums, I'll keep listening.

7. Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala - Every couple years it seems like one of my friends is telling me that I need to check out a very pretty-looking Scandinavian singer/songwriter, and I end up finding them to be fairly boring. I can dig Jose Gonzalez (yes, he's Swedish) every now and then, which is more than I can say for Sondre Lerche, but I figured I'd give this Jens Lekman dude a shot. I hit the play button. A quick timpani roll, and a soft bed of strings drift in, and Mr. Lekman softly croons, "There will be no kisses tonight," and I let out an audible groan, and start mentally tweaking my standard "pretty, but not really interesting" review, and then HOLY GODDAMNED SON OF A BITCH, there's a HUGE crescendo, and gigantic bombastic chorus, and suddenly my ears perk up. See, as it turns out, Jens Lekman isn't a boring Sondre Lerche type singer songwriter, he's a flamboyant pop crooner. Horns stab, strings swell, and melodies rise and fall with the confidence of a seasoned pop songwriter. The sounds and moods are scattered all over the pop spectrum, and the lyrics are as often funny and clever as they are melancholy and introspective. He's as likely to be singing over a backing track that sounds like early Scott Walker as he is one that sounds like Marvin Gaye with an electronic backbeat, or a Friends-era Beach Boys song. He may be leaving his girl because he doesn't love her enough in one song, and he may be pretending to be a lesbian's boyfriend to fool her father in another. In short, it's a varied, novel look at pop songwriting, and I like it, quite a lot.

6. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer - If I was going to pick somebody who I thought would make the album with more catchy pop hooks combined with more unnervingly personal lyrics than any album since Weezer's Pinkerton, I'd have been about as likely to say Kevin Barnes as I would have been to say Rivers Cuomo (ie., not likely at all), but here we are. I'll admit that I vastly underrated this before. After putting it down for a few months and picking it up again, for whatever reason, it just started hitting me like a ton of bricks. The songs were stuck so thoroughly in my head, the lyrics streaming absent-mindedly through my mouth at all times, that it was hard to think about the fact that I was singing lyrics about anti-depressant-induced writer's block, nervous breakdowns, separating from a loved one, rebounding, and the self-loathing that results from the whole thing. It's rare to find an album with lyrics that are as equally fascinating as the music (or vice versa), but Hissing Fauna is one.

5. M.I.A. - Kala - M.I.A. follows through on the potential of her debut to deliver Kala, which may be best described as a dance album that amalgamates every genre of music in the world, the craziest, most psychedelic album of its ilk since Paul's Boutique. M.I.A. is almost as liberal with her sampling and borrowing here as the Beastie Boys and Dust Brothers were there (at least they're all credited here), and the result is a colorful collage of the vaguely familiar and thoroughly alien.

4. Panda Bear - Person Pitch - I just happen to be listening to "Sister Ray" by the Velvet Underground as I write this. I point this out because the juxtaposition is funny to me, because apart from their mutual association with New York's experimental music scene (though decades apart), I don't think I could pick a more exact opposite of the Velvets than Panda Bear if I tried. As "Sister Ray" pounds me into submission and dares me to turn it off (or at least skip some of its 17 minutes of chaos), I think about Panda Bear's hypnotic pop bliss, and my mind is at ease. Noah Lennox's day job with the Animal Collective is pretty secure by this point, but Person Pitch shows that he has a fulfilling solo career to fall back on as well. (A few earlier thoughts are here.)

3. St. Vincent - Marry Me - St. Vincent is Annie Clark, and nobody would have heard of her or this album if she hadn't played guitar for the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens. The fact that she's got the most adorable big brown puppy dog eyes doesn't hurt either. But I'm glad she was able to get some recognition, because Marry Me is a damn good album. Imaginative songwriting and tasteful arrangements abound, and Clark's got the vaguely seductive yet vulnerable female vocal delivery style down, even if some of the lyrics are a little dumb.

2. Radiohead - In Rainbows - It's too easy at this point to take the brilliance of Radiohead for granted, especially when you've got the whole aspect of the download-only release to distract you from it, so for those of you who need the reminder, In Rainbows is as good as anything else they've done in this decade. The album is more cohesive than anything they've done since Kid A, the songwriting is more consistent than anything they've done since Ok Computer, they sound more like a democratic band than on anything they've done since The Bends, and it flat out rocks more than just about their whole catalog. Everybody in the world is sick to death of the lavish praise heaped on Radiohead by this point, but Christ, they deserve every word of it.

1. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam - When I was living with my roommates in Philadelphia (this would have been 2005 or 2006), three of us and a fourth friend all realized at one point that without knowledge of any of the other people feeling the same way, "The Purple Bottle" by the Animal Collective had worked its way into our own personal lists of favorite songs. This resulted (after a few beers) in a chorus of grown men emphatically pounding their fists on
a coffee table chanting "Get that- WOOOOOOO! Get that- WOOOOOOOO! Get that- WOOOOOOOOOO!" This was about the time that I realized that the appeal of the Animal Collective lies not with their mixing of strange song structures and sounds with great melodies, or some such thing (although that doesn't hurt), but with the fact that their music possesses a pure and simple joy that is exceedingly rare in any kind of music.

"The Purple Bottle" was on 2005's Feels, but the joy has only increased for Strawberry Jam. You could pick any song at random from the album and I could probably pick out a part that makes me want to drop whatever I'm doing and throw my hands in the air and shout. "Fireworks"? "IIIIIII'M ONLY ALLLLL I SEEEEEEE SOMETIIIIIIIIIIMES!" "Winter Wonder Land"? That rapid-fire chorus is brilliant. "Cuckoo Cuckoo" is essentially six minutes of pure bliss, alternating between the calm meditative bliss and the explosive triumphant bliss, all held together by a single repeating piano figure. The Panda Bear-helmed "Chores" opens with about the most gloriously insane minute and a half of music ever recorded.

It's rare to find a band that carries its own oddness with as little self-consciousness as the Animal Collective, but that's just who they are by now. These lists are always subject to change, of course, depending on the whim and mood of the creator, but if I had to list my favorite albums of the 00s so far, there's a good chance that the Animal Collective might be sitting at 1 and 2 on the list. I can't wait to hear what they do next.