In No Particular Order

Top tens.

This time of year, people love to take stock of things that have touched their lives or whatever over the previous twelve months and then arrange the results into digestible little chunks of data, usually numbered, bulleted or “in no particular order”.

I too like to engage in this activity, not that I really enjoy making top ten lists, but it really gives me something to do to take my mind off the New Year’s resolutions I didn’t keep last year and the ones I won’t keep in the coming year — which is pretty much all of them.

Ok. So here goes.

Top Ten Albums of 2007

Future of the Left - Curses; 2/3’s Mclusky, but 100%, uh, awesome.

Wire - Read & Burn 03; it’s Wire and it was released in 2007.

Baroness - The Red Album; further restoring my faith in metal.

Wu-Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams; best thing they’ve done since 36 Chambers, Raekwon and Ghostface be damned.

Black Lips - Good Bad, Not Evil; in a sea of boring, self-important indie-rock and watered-down Interpol clones, the Lips stick out like a sore thumb. Or a fat lip, even.

Ghostface Killah - The Big Doe Rehab; ok, so I don’t love this album, but it’s good. Not nearly as good as Fishscale or 8 Diagrams, but good.

Neil Young - Chrome Dreams II; Could have been a lot worse and “Ordinary People” really only feels like a brisk nine minutes if you don’t pay attention.

Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris; a lot of the appeal wore off after repeated listens, but a solid album nonetheless. Interesting for Josh’s reworking of post-punk guitar archetypes, if for nothing else.

King Khan and the Shrines - What Is !?; typecast as garage rock, but really a technicolour splash of power-pop, soul, r&b, punk and all that other good stuff. Plus, they’re sort of Canadian.

Pig Destroyer - Phantom Limb; I like to think of them as the White Stripes of metal, if Meg played blast beats and Jack was raised on a steady diet of Napalm Death.

Oh, and happy new year.