1. Portraits - Self-Titled LP

Technically recorded years before 2007, Portraits’ eponymous debut was unveiled to the world this year. That unveiling took place in the same way that any good esotericism is made known – as much was concealed as was revealed. Portraits played 8 to 10 shows in 2007; an entire stage set was designed specifically for the LP’s one-off release party, which had a staggering attendance of 40; hushed praise for the band occasionally broke through the stony silence of Edmonton’s music media. There is something simultaneously tragic and magnificent about all of this, and I think that’s because there is a universality to Portraits’ music that is undeniable. This recording, made by two people with only the most modest aspirations of having it heard on a large scale, somehow manages to tap into the catharsis and exhiliration I felt when I first heard rock music as a child. Gorgeous and infectious, these are pop songs with a sense of maturity and texture beyond what should be possible for a debut. And yet again, its gesticulations towards the ineffable, towards a shared catharsis in art that might just be possible. “I don’t want to hear // I want to feel // So I can understand”. Nothing much more needs to be said than that.

2. Phosphorescent - Pride

Earthy atmosphere, eyes-closed-simple strumming that somehow creates opulent songs, impeccably convincing vocal delivery, simple lyrics that nonetheless manage to communicate depth, Lion-King-calibre army harmonies, Pride might very well be the one record in 2007 that made me want to stop scouring the sonic landscape for innovative and seductive new little emeralds of the musical future, and instead to set up a tent and play some acoustic guitar around the fire. Simply put, these are 8 of the best songs I heard this year. Not a moment is wasted either. For an album that values patience and introspection as much as this one does, it’s incredible that it never spills over into self-indulgence. Every instant instead distills itself into song, song that at its core is incredibly fragile but that somehow opens up immensely into the world through its dense walls of reverb (nothing would do here but of course, the thick natural reverb of a cave) and all-surrounding harmonies (undoubtedly performed by local primitives who took a liking to the songs and decided to enhance them impromptu). The last song and titular track, something like the bastard child of wolves crying in tandem, fertility cult worshippers in mantra, charismatics speaking in tongues, cattle slowly dieing on the plains after a long night of extraterrestrial mutilation, and the Beach Boys, is also the most chilling and beautiful thing I’ve heard this year.

3. Wintersleep - Welcome to the Night Sky

My kneejerk towards this record was that I didn’t care for it. So many acts whom I’ve enjoyed in the past put out mediocre records in 2007, and this seemed to me to fit quite neatly alongside those. Parts of it were even borderline embarassing – “Weighty Ghost” sounded to me like it actually came straight off a Counting Crows record (say, for instance Films About Ghosts?), while “Oblivion”’s repetitive one-word refrain just felt like lazy songwriting. The drum production was weird and they seemed to have foregone the peculiarly mournful organics that I loved them in the first place for. Where had the Wintersleep I so admired gone?  Fortunately for both myself and the band, I suppose, I learned that the album itself has a correctional effect with repeat listens. If one thing has not changed, it is vocalist Paul’s strange ability to project the ineffable in the simplest phrases. His thematic meanderings around childhood nightmares, corporeal being, Deleuze and Guattari, the spoils and travails of modern living, and his skill at communicating something like an absolutely molested innocence that is nevertheless still innocent speak to me in near-direct ways that I have a hard time articulating, but no problem at all appreciating. “The archaeologist found // some winged boys remains // stained by the fire and clouds”. Ironically, I still think the record has flaws (“Murderer”, the lyrics in “Search Party”), but they are not the flaws I initially suspected, not by a long shot. Accordingly, I shall consider the jury still out on my newer criticisms. This is a gorgeous collection of songs that already mean a great deal to me in that same unspeakable, holistic, therapeutic way that Wintersleep always has, even if the sound has shifted. “Our bodies are dead, why do you look so sad?”

4. Tulsa Drone - Songs for the Mean Season

Abysmal, hypnotic, masterful. This record is absolutely boundless in its bleakness – the circle might be seen as a useful visual stand-in for the infinite, but I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard it deployed aurally with such effect – with such devastatingly black effect. This is a loop-based recording, but not at all in the sense that it has been timestretched and beatmatched in Ableton Live. Here, loops are self-winding spirals of sound, carefully weaved out of each other, stacked and positioned together so deliberately that every breath feels and is premeditated.   Sitting back and watching what repetition itself can accomplish when these spirals coil together is what truly drives the aesthetic experience of Songs for the Mean Season. No individual part or player matters to this band, there is not a single notable riff – what counts here is cohesion. Spirals – and their coiling – bring that cohesion by which one can be auto-abducted towards the ineffable. By the time vocals penetrate the sonic landscape, the spirals of sound have already sent one into an impossible vacuum – this voice is unquestionably the voice of a ghost.  Johnny Cash’s ghost, perhaps, but a ghost no less.

5. Silverchair - Young Modern

Absolutely delicious. It is difficult to tell whether Young Modern is the masterwork of a pop genius, or whether it is its opposite: a kind of perverse parvus opus – the completely unrestrained brainspillings of a great creative mind on canvas. The distinction proves so obstinately indeterminable here because Young Modern is easily the most disjunctive and incohesive LP I have encountered, both in part and in whole. Songs here are either labyrithine and grotesquely complex attempts at expression, or exhibit the simplest possible pop structure. When the former obtains, songs shift absolutely unpredictably, changing keys repeatedly, radically altering mood at the drop of a hat, vocally contorting from female pop-diva sighs to strange emasculated Freddy Mercury take-offs. Some songs feel like genre exercises conducted on another planet, others as though they themselves perhaps merit genre descriptions. Most surprising of all is the payoff that occurs when one returns to this record – the crystalline pop craft that lurks underneath this morass of skullspew. And in a strange fashion, it is this morass which precisely draws one back to discover more and more of this records rewards – its complexity, its incoherence, its mystery are absurdly compelling. When I first attempted this record I lamented to friends that it might be one of the most difficult I’ve ever encountered. I’m not sure that that’s changed yet, and there are a few songs I still can’t bring myself to sit through. It’s sad that some people will find Young Modern too difficult to even listen to once because on it is emblazoned the name “Silverchair” (most trendy webzines and blogs didn’t even bother reviewing it). But then, I suppose that is their great loss.

6. Ghastly City Sleep - Self-Titled EP

This year I deliberately tried to get over my unhealthy prior fixation with shoegaze. It is a genre with a laudable history whose supposed modern ambassadors are doing little to nothing to move it forward, and which provided nothing but disappointments this year in terms of new outputs. It almost seems like “nu-gazers” or whatever we want to call these marching bands of the boring are sharing synth patches, guitar pedals, and vocalists. Every record is simply trying to get “the sound” and “the song” is completely overlooked. Ghastly City Sleep’s EP is not a shoegaze record – let’s be clear. But I think it was the only thing that I really, truly loved this year that I can call glacial, unearthly, and moving in the way that good shoegaze used to and still can move me. This is not least because it is based around the lilting exchanges of very talented, distinctive vocalists, but also because it is rooted in a production aesthetic that allows beauty to breathe without smothering everything in digital reverbs. You might even call the production crisp – and how counterintuitive is that?  Ghastly City Sleep’s work here has a radiating sense of linearity that guides the listener into and under its spell. Quickly one is transported beyond the pale, through crashing walls of static, spare drones that somehow manage to be at once comforting and ominous and the tired but determined hymnal mantric progressions of the dead. Although the EP is only four songs, the depth and complexity of the songwriting is easily enough for a lesser band’s LP. Take up the challenge: put this record on and go to sleep.

7. Miracle Fortress - Five Roses

I suppose in the wake of the release of Brian Wilson’s SMiLE a few years back, it appears the younger set (among which I count myself, for a while yet) have a renewed interest in the master and his creations. 2007 was a year with a lot of high-profile indie releases with Wilson’s sonic hallmarks and influence smeared all over them. This type of music really does not require literary criticism to appreciate lyrically (although I suppose one could write a monograph on the different permutations of “baby” that are deployed), but sounds and songs are everything. And on these two fronts, Miracle Fortress more than delivers: invitingly gentle soundscapes of scintillating pads with frollicking synths and psychedelic guitar underscoring. This record felt something like the soundtrack of summer, an underrated collection of pop gems that demanded to be played and replayed. Absolutely verdant and gorgeous pop music – so abundant you could almost suck the life-juices directly out of it. Five Roses may be some of the most straightforwardly benevolent music I’ve encountered, which makes me rest at ease a bit knowing it came out in 2007, several years after Stanley Kubrick’s death. It scares me to think what he would do with it. It’s THAT nice.

8. Brainstorm - 2007 Demo

I didn’t ever anticipate having a demo ascend into the ranks of records I lovingly selected for veneration in 2007, but then again, I never anticipated having my face melted off by three boys from Florida. It’s a demo but the production is perfect: I think that fire has finally been laid to tape, capturing every sonic subtlety. Hideously. Guitars sounds like ragged saws completely awash in a frenzied storm of cymbals. The screamed vocals, so often the originary honeypot of “heaviness” in aggressive music, here sound completely overwhelmed by the impenetrable wall of inferno that engulfs them – they sound more like cries for help. Musically, every hint of a melody here is really nothing but the wick that is lit for the next eruption. The violence feels unending. And by unending, I mean this shit is over in six minutes.

9. Kidcrash - Jokes

Kidcrash have laid down the gauntlet, and shown why yes, it is good for bands to change their sound. Jokes sounds like a dazzling meld of mathy Chicago indie from the early turn of the century, atmospheric mid-west post-rock sensibilities, the melodic european skram that has followed in the wake of Envy and even moments of dark-tinged screamy hardcore. In a genre that for some almost stakes its identity on the sloppiness of its musicians and low production values, Kidcrash are not afraid to play with precision-point musicianship and produce a record that sounds immense and clean while losing nothing of its raw force. Jokes moves the genre forward, and it may be the only record which can truly lay claim to that title in 2007. Actually, I would love to find out I’m wrong on that last point. But there you have it for now: a behemoth of beauty – Jokes.

10. Alcest - Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde

Neige writes and plays all the parts on this record. Neige used to be in black metal bands – well, he still sort of is, from what I understand (some people even call this a black metal album... hmm).  Neige is a weird recluse who only goes out at night and prefers not to have any friends. I like people like that. I especially like it when they are talented enough to communicate aesthetically with others in profound ways even when their social commissions are lacking. Neige presents us here with a record of ethereal beauty that channels a melodic sensibility not unakin to the more delicate moments of Envy, suis la lune or the oeuvre of Geoff Hawryluk. Make no mistake – this is a PRETTY record. When the first track breaks into a blastbeat towards the end, you will be forced to scratch your head and ask yourself whether your intuition that your grandmother would like this blastbeat is in fact correct. This is the one record I struggled most with deciding whether to include or not. The reason for that is that at several points the beauty and earnestness of this record threaten to undermine it completely and turn it into a parody of itself. The production and vocals could be generously called “dreamy”, or less generously be called “completely wimpy”. The danger with this kind of beautiful music is that it risks running over into the territory of sap, and I’m not certain that this record can at every second evade this criticism. I am certain, however, that when it is gorgeous, it is strikingly so. Check it out and decide for yourself.