5. Girls Aloud - Tangled Up
Song: “Can’t Speak French”
Girl power?
You know, it’s pure coincidence that the top five artists I listened to in 2007 were all female - four solo artists and one reality-tv supergroup. This is Girls Aloud’s fourth album, and remarkably, it’s their best yet. After faltering a bit with the only so-so Chemistry, Tangled Up is like a ridiculous case of overcompensation. As with previous albums, all production is by the incomparable Xenomania production house, and this album is as much their masterpiece as it is the Girls’. The pounding synths on “Call the Shots” and lounge-cum-indie rock shuffle of “Black Jacks” are exciting and fresh, and the sonic overdrive of “Sexy! No No No!” (which earns both of those exclamation points and then some) is classic Girls Aloud. But the best track here is “Can’t Speak French” and along with Chemistry’ s “Biology” it offers a perfect notion of what’s great about this group: Girls Aloud present themselves as the anti-Spice, monolithic, impersonal, a force of powerful womanhood stripped of cheesed-out gimmickry and stereotype. “Can’t Speak French” is about the ability of music - the most mathematic of the arts - to transcend the language barrier, and it does so with the sultriest, sexiest swagger of the year. Holy crap I love this record.
4. Marissa Nadler - Songs III: Bird on the Water
Song: “Dying Breed”
It’s hard for me to write competently about this album. I’ll add more later. Suffice it to say, terrific.
3. Nellie McKay - Obligatory Villagers
Song: “Testify”
In which our hero discovers her voice: for all their triumphs, joys, and pleasures, Nellie McKay’s Get Away from Me and Pretty Little Head, her twin double-album musical hydras, are so jam-packed with ideas, sounds, and explorations that they never quite settle down into a unified vision. Perhaps that’s their point. But with Obligatory Villagers, McKay steps out into something new, scary, and potentially career-ruining: maturity.
Which is not to say that she’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater: she still hops genres without care (the reggae-inflected “Identity Theft”), still belabors metaphors (”Zombie”), and still shows a remarkable ability to nimbly float between sounds, time signatures, keys, and genres (”Oversure”) She’s aggressively simple (the parodic “Mother of Pearl”) and entrancingly complex (”Testify,” as close to an all-encompassing Portrait of the Artist as McKay’s created yet). Obligatory Villagers is nine songs (and let’s be frank: “Livin’” is not a song) and less than 30 minutes, but it’s the most complete offering yet from the most continually promising young singer-songwriter in America.
2. Meg Baird - Dear Companion
Who? What? Meg Baird is a member of Espers and the Baird Sisters, a vibrant contributor to the essential and vital Philadelphia new-folk scene. And this record, which features nine covers and two originals, is the best thing to come out of that scene yet. It’s a decidedly minor affair - this record will never make the splash of a Milk Eyed Mender or a Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. But what it lacks in the showiness or the completeness of those landmarks, it more than makes up with a pureness of intent and a clarity of performance. Stripped to an incredible emotional and acoustic nakedness - Baird’s guitar and voice - it’s the least pretentious album on this list, and nearly the best.
But when it comes down to it, what makes this album so incredible for me is the sense of peace it gives me, the calm and the love it helps instill for me for those around me. This album makes me want to do better. It makes me want to be nicer to other human beings, to love people more. Already I feel it’s changed me for the better. This album is a minor miracle.
Song: “Guilty in Here”
I did not enjoy an album more this year than Miranda Lambert’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Miranda Lambert - the critics have been riding her junk all year long. And good for them! Good for them for latching onto something which points toward a bold new direction in one of the most traditional and stubborn of genres. Lambert records country music, and is the toast of Nashville. She shot to fame by winning fifth place on a reality TV show, and somehow she’s managed to endure where all that show’s first-place winners have failed. How does she do it?
3) In “Famous in a Small Town” she writes what seems like a nostalgic paean to small-town living. But there’s that one word which keeps standing out: “Everybody dies famous in a small town.” It’s a remarkably somber sentiment and one that puts the song’s tawdry tabloid vignettes into a darker context.
4) The title track finds Lambert beating the shit out of her ex’s new love. No moral justification is given or needed.
5) “Love Letters” is a perfectly placed traditional country ballad, Lambert laments a lover’s cheating ways, resolves to break up with him, and uses a surprisingly poignant religious metaphor to describe the hardening of her own heart.Anyway… you guys get the point. But here’s one more song, the best song on the album and the sample track included above:
9) “Guilty in Here” is a song about the crisis of being both smart and horny and unable to find anyone worthy of yourself - with allusions to Jagger and Machiavelli. Damn awesome.
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