The Year in Review Part 2: A Year of Listening Dangerously

I'm not the world's most up-to-date music listener. I love music, and listen to it quite constantly, and yet my listening habits are very much dictated by mood, and often mood has a lot to with familiarity. You have old favourites, like old friends. I love making new musical discoveries, but they are not always recent releases. I take a while to discover the music of a particular year, and usually the year's over by the time I have come to love the music it produced.

Towards the end of this year, I've had the fortune of inheriting my brother's old iPod, along with all the music that he had on it. So, wanting to actually know what the music of 2007 was like (I knew a few albums and songs, but not many) I searched through the albums from this year, and have come to love many of them very quickly. Only, I think it takes a bit longer to digest albums than it does to appreciate songs. Songs tend to be more immediate. Admittedly, you do listen to some of the albums of 2007 and, immediate as some of the songs are, you know that they are much stronger as albums. Stand-outs are few, but the overall impression is quite amazing.

Nevertheless, I feel that, to do justice to the music of 2007, I'm going to have to rate songs, not albums. I wanted to go with albums, but I'm just not sure that I know them well enough overall. Some albums - Low's "Drums and Guns", for example - I'm sure will grow on me with each listen, but right now are not so immediate on the whole. Other albums, like the new Jose Gonzales, have grabbed me with the handful of tracks I know well, but I have yet to hear them in their entirety. I'm sure Jose's effort would be in any list of top albums if I knew it all, but it's not really fair to put it in my list just yet.

So, enough of the preamble. Here, in some sort of an order, starting at number 10, is my list of the top 10 songs of 2007.

10. Amplifier Machine - Poor People In Church
9. Radiohead - All I Need
8. Low - Always Fade
7. The Field - Over the Ice
6. Jose Gonzales - Heartbeats
5. The Chariot - And Shot Each Other
4. As Cities Burn - Contact
3. Apparat - Not a Number
2. Jesu - Conqueror
1. Blonde Redhead - 23

And here, albeit a day late, ends the year for Ideas From the North.