The great and frustrating thing about music is, no matter how much you hear you can never hear it all. Here’s 5 albums I found about by reading other peoples’ lists (most of which I found on Largehearted Boy’s master online list). 1. Andrew Bird-Armchair Apocrypha. How the hell did this album get by me? [...]

I can’t say more than the dozens of bloggers I’ve seen put this album in their top 10 or 20, except that more of them should have put it at number 1. Fun, choppy, funky, and bouncy, it’s an album that never stops giving. Here’s some stuff they released this year, including bonus cuts off [...]

In no particular order. These albums aren’t necessarily bad, but they should have been much better. 50 Cent’s “Curtis” isn’t here because, frankly, I didn’t have high expectations for it in the first place. 1. Common, “Finding Forever.” Lots of folks swear by Common, but to me he’s rarely been more exciting than a bath, [...]

It’s almost time to go back to business as usual here, reviewing indie rock and rap.  Tomorrow I’ll post the #1 album, we’ll have a few Xmas posts, and we’ll be doing our old thang.  I hope posting all these things that I’ve already posted throughout the year wasn’t a big waste of time for [...]

3. Brother Ali-Undisputed Truth (Plus bonus disc) (review) “Undisputed Truth” begins with the birth of a new MC (“I came in the door 1984 . . .”) and that first track tells of fights over lunch money and growing up hard. Every track after that is pure brilliance. In a year where Jay-Z returned to [...]

6. Band of Horses-Cease to Begin (Review) Also a candidate for best sophomore album of 2007 (tied with Amy Winehouse), BoH prove that the loss of an essential bandmember need not be a death knell but instead can be a way to grow. This album stays true to the indie rock sound and formula, but [...]

Another foray into the non-musical, my post on the best films (that I saw) in 2007. Bonus: My lists aren’t snooty! THE TOP 10 FILMS (THAT I SAW) OF 2007. 10. Transformers. Yeah. I frickin’ loved it. Deal with it. 9. American Gangster. Yes, it was too long. Yes, it skipped over some of the [...]

7. Voxtrot-Voxtrot. (review) Where rappers do mixtapes, indie bands do EP and web releases, and Ramesh Srivastava’s five-piece have been content to do just that since 2003. This year, we finally were treated to the full length album for which all those EP and web singles were the prelude. And the result, Voxtrot, was no [...]

8. Arcade Fire-Neon Bible. (Halftime award!) I picked this album when I was only halfway through the year, but you’re forgiven if you forgot that this March release actually came out in ’07. Unlike Funeral, which made a deep and lasting impression on the blogosphere, Neon Bible came and went with less than a month [...]

An excuse to post or repost some of my favorite covers of the year . . . 10. Guilt By Association (link). A wonderful collection of covers by indie bands. What sets this collection apart from all the other covers projects this year is a truly eclectic (but not eclectic for its own sake) selection [...]