The Top 10 Songs of 2007 Were Hoping For Some Romance

At long last, my choices for the 10 Best Songs of 2007. I’ve kept this list to one song per artist, and that made the top 10 especially hard, since about half of these songs came from albums with a number of Top 10-worthy songs on them. Also, any one of these songs might have ended up at #1 at various points during the year, and since compiling my initial list the songs in the top 10 have changed position a few times. But here’s my final list, the ten songs that I loved to itty-bitty pieces this year. I’ll probably regret the order of the top 10 the minute I hit the Publish button but that’s how it goes. As it is I already regret leaving a couple of things off the Top 101 altogether.

Some of the songs in the top 10 were mega-hits. Some of them are still pretty obscure to most people. At least four of them are over a year old (one’s actually from an album that came out two years ago), but try not to get too hung up on details. Just listen and enjoy.

(PS–I’ll be counting down the top 25 live on the radio tonight at midnight EST. 88.1 FM in Providence and here on the information superhighway. The show will be archived at the website, too, so you can listen to it any time after that as well.)

10. Bloc Party, Flux (5142 plays last week)

Bloc Party’s second album didn’t inspire quite the hoo-haa that Silent Alarm did–Hunting For Witches was okay and all, but it wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as the first time I heard Banquet. But then those clever boys surprised everybody and released their best song yet as a stand-alone single. (Well, now it’s on a new deluxe edition of the album, too. By the way, I wish everybody would just cut the shit and stop rereleasing their albums with bonus tracks the minute they drop off the charts. It’s desperate and irritating.)

I’ve always liked Bloc Party because of the way Kele Okereke sings like he really, really means it, and while that might sound annoyingly emo, it’s not because a) his voice is all sexy and deep and English, and b) the band’s usually punchy enough to prevent the songs from getting sappy. Flux adds a speed-addled club beat to epic guitars, which makes for a surprising late-night dance hit. (Also, click the song title above to check out the awesome video.)

9. Alicia Keys, No One (9965 plays last week–that’s the most of anybody on the countdown)

How do you make the year’s best smash R&B hit? Start with a beat that came from a Veteran’s Day parade, but replace the drums with farty synths. Add a piano line, and then top it all off with Robin S-inspired diva vocals that just scream “Chris Cox Megamix.” Then boom, everyone from your thuggy little cousin to your great-aunt loves it and it’s on every single radio station except (or maybe even including) the sports talk one.

(PS: This song reminds me a lot of a great but mostly-forgotten marching band R&B song from the mid-nineties, so I figured as a bonus I’d post that video, too.)

8. Nelly Furtado, Say It Right (9204 plays last week)

My favorite pop album of 2006, Nelly Furtado’s Loose has eight or nine awesome songs on it, so it wasn’t until this was released as a single late last year that I noticed how totally fucking amazing it is. The Pouty Frownmonster got to #1 with it for a week in February, but it stayed on the radio for half the year, until it was pushed off by her dumb song with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake. It’s my favorite kind of pop song, the ballad that’s totally not a ballad at all, the kind that acts sweet and pretty but really just wants you to get up and shake your ass. And, while it’s no Love Will Never Do (Without You), it’s definitely the best one since Cry Me A River, at least.

7. TV On The Radio, Wolf Like Me (3811 plays last week)

I admit that I was really slow to catch on to TV On The Radio, even after people said that Return to Cookie Mountain was the best album of last year. (In my defense, people also said really dumb stuff was the best thing of last year. Let’s see how much people still like the Arctic Monkeys and Gnarls Barkley in a couple of years.) Anyway, Wolf Like Me, which hit US airwaves this spring, is an irresistably stompy chant, and the breakdown two minutes in slows the song down just enough to make you positively giddy when it speeds up again.

6. The Tough Alliance, Koka Kola Veins (377 plays last week)

Although this song was originally released in 2005 (and then again at the end of 2006), TTA’s bratty pop didn’t cross my path (or anybody else’s in the US, for that matter) until fluokids posted about it in April. The duo of Henning Furst and Eric Berglund* have been called hooligans and gotten kicked off stage for swinging baseball bats around, but their songs are so frigging poppy that you’d never guess it. (Jens Lekman, who plays badminton with one of them, even sampled them on his new album.) Koka-Kola Veins is dance-pop made in a dirty basement, with sneering vocals that would be totally annoying if they didn’t come from a pair of ugly Swedish chavs that probably can’t get laid.

(*Not to be confused with Erik Berglund.)

5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Down Boy (less than 2300 plays last week)

2007 was a big year for EPs, which is awesome. Karen, Nick, and The Other One put out the amazing Is Is, a 20-minute blast of awesomeness spread out over the course of five songs. While it was a toss-up between Isis and this track for the countdown, Down Boy won just because I ended up listening to it a lot more. It’s also the striptease song of the year, and not just because of the title; the quiet-loud-quiet-loud structure is sultry, mildly dirty, and keeps you on your toes. Or off them, as it were.

4. Keren Ann, It’s All A Lie (310 plays last week)

Another toss-up: Keren Ann’s dreamy It’s All A Lie or her psychedelic Gainsbourg-y It Ain’t No Crime? Decisions, decisions. I’ve liked the French-Israeli singer’s stuff before, but never anywhere near as much as this year’s self-titled album. It’s All A Lie sounds like Low back when I really liked Low, and I can’t get enough of the way her voice quivers when she moans the titular ‘all.’

3. Bat For Lashes, What’s A Girl To Do? (2022 plays last week)

What could be sadder than a train to Trainwreck Town? Or more haunting than a waifish English girl reciting her woes over haunted-house organs and thumpy drums? Nothing, that’s what. Equal parts Black Box Recorder, Muse, and the Shangri-La’s, this song’s spoken verses and dramatic chorus make for the year’s most tragic breakup song. While Natasha Khan’s Fur and Gold album was good in an I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got sort of way, nothing else came close to the hypnotic What’s A Girl To Do. (It didn’t hurt that the song had the year’s best video, too.)

2. Amy Winehouse, You Know I’m No Good (9270 plays last week)

I got really nitpicky when trying to decide which of Amy’s five fabulous singles should be on the list. (Because, to clarify the one-song-per-artist rule, I probably could have put all five of them in the top 20, as well as two Keren Ann Songs, three Yeah Yeah Yeahs songs, and about seven songs from the #1 artist.) In the end I decided that Love Is A Losing Game is the weakest, Back to Black could be thirty seconds shorter, and Rehab’s been kind of tainted by her personal life, although she–well, actually, nevermind. I don’t want to start talking about what she’s been keeping in her beehive. So it was between this song and Tears Dry On Their Own and, in the end, it pretty much just came down to the fact that I’ve known this song longer and I’ve never been much of an Ain’t No Mountain High Enough fan. Mark Ronson’s production on You Know I’m No Good is dead on, the catchy bassline perfectly complimenting Winehouse’s tale of philandering and weird Roger Moore name-dropping.

1. MIA, Paper Planes (5593 plays last week–more than Fergie, thank God I don’t have to hate humanity now.)

Here it is, my song of the year, the amazing conclusion to Kala, my album of the year. I almost opted for World Town (thinking that, five years from now, a song with gunshots instead of a chorus might seem cheesy.) But, at the very last second, I changed my mind again.  This song is epic. There’s something almost strangely comforting about hearing it start, and it’s not just the familiarity of the Clash sample. The song deserves a whole essay, but I’ll save that for another time. I’ll just say that, although the gunshots are allegedly too much for American audiences, and although the chorus almost veers into Wreckx-N-Effect territory, the song is totally perfect. So is World Town, so is Bamboo Banga, so is $20. For that matter, so is Jimmy. But, you know, I had to pick one. And this song just has so much to say, so much so that she sings every verse twice in case you missed it the first time.  And while I feel–overdramatically, I know–that picking a favorite is like picking a favorite child and sending the other ones off to a death camp, I think it’s a totally appropriate song of the year. Because it can get the smartypantses to whip out their Spivak (or whoever), but can also get the douchebags dancing. And, maybe, get the grad students dancing and the club kids thinking, too.