ALBUMS (descending points)
1. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
2. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
3. Daft Punk - Alive 2007
4. Lil' Wayne - Da Drought 3
5. Justice - Cross
6. v/a - Cosmo Galactic Prism
7. White Rabbits - Fort Nightly
8. The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
9. Burial - Untrue
10. Voxtrot - Voxtrot

TRACKS
1. Justice - D.A.N.C.E.
2. Those Dancing Days - Those Dancing Days
3. Frankie Valli - Beggin' (Pilooski re-edit)
4. LCD Soundsystem - Get Innocuous!
5. Moths - Games
6. LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
7. Hot Chip - My Piano
8. Lil Wayne - We Takin' Over (Drought 3 remix)
9. Caribou - Niobe
10. Spoon - The Underdog

REISSUES
1. Pylon - Gyrate
2. Culture - Two Sevens Clash

ARTISTS
1. T-Pain
2. Daft Punk
3. Danja
4. Justice
5. Lil Wayne

COMMENTS
NOTES ON ALBUMS

1-2: Given the efficacy with which I was able to titrate both Sound of Silver and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga down to "All My Friends" and "The Underdog", respectively, it seems like the big story of 2007 should have to do with the year the disposability of the album format finally reared its ugly head. It certainly seems consistent with the rest of the year's big musical events, all of which seemed to be inherently tied to singles - Soulja Boy's chart dominance; "Gimme More" doing exponentially, er, more for Britney Spears' comeback than her actual, immaculately-prepared comeback album; radio programmers bending over backwards to milk Timbaland's album of shitty collaborations dry; Jay-Z famously refusing to break American Gangster down to its component pieces for iTunes...the list goes on and on. The fly in the ointment, however, is the fact that both Sound of Silver and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga stand up as heroically consistent albums, both in terms of artistic approach and overall quality; the fact that I'm filing away songs as undeniably top-shelf as "Us Vs. Them" or "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb" or like three or four other songs from each should in no way be seen as a denigration; they just happen to be neighbors with tracks which represent some of both bands' most immediate, rewarding, compelling songcraft, and given the quality of the bands in question, that's really saying something. I have full faith that the measured, nuanced attention each band lavished on each record will hold up over time; at the moment, however, I still can't get past each record's most outstanding component part, even in spite of the months and months I've spent gorging on them. I suppose this is a pretty good problem to have.

3. LCD Soundsystem and Spoon may have recorded my "favorite" albums of the year, but when it comes to the "best" record of 2007, there really can't be any debate: it's Daft Punk, and it's not really even close. Anyone who'd raise any objections to praising a straightforward recording of a live show this vociferously clearly hasn't had the pyramid dropped on them; Daft Punk simply get more mileage out of their live show than anyone since Kiss, and Alive 2007 does a good enough job of capturing that to tower over damn near anything else put out this year. Sure, by necessity it's not perfect (you really do need to see the aforementioned pyramid going bonkers to get the full headrush - and I say this as someone who's seen their show dead sober TWICE), but Alive 2007 isn't some simple stopgap - frankly, I'd call it the only Daft Punk album anyone would ever need if we weren't talking about Daft Fucking Punk here. This is a record which will be pored over for decades as armchair musicologists attempt to dissect just how it did what it did to all the people lucky enough to get to see it live - or maybe just to see how it turned Human After All into something amazing.

4. Part of me feels like anyone who would have denied end-of-year dap to Speakerboxxx/The Love Below on account of its undeniable bloat ought to be forbidden from voting for Da Drought 3 simply to uphold the virtues of consistency - in fact, Lil' Wayne's mixtape masterpiece may well showcase even more filler than Outkast's double-album extravaganza. What's there, though, is unimpeachable - from making Beyonce's "Upgrade U" his own (seriously, until I recently reacquired cable, I'd forgotten what she sounded like on it) to declaring "Damn right I kiss my daddy" within a handful of bars of "Feed me, feed me, feed me - no homo!", Da Drought 3 represents everything good and bad about Weezy's entire artistic approach in one more-or-less convenient document. Whether it actually justifies his claims for the title of best rapper alive is, of course, a matter best left for more knowledgeable cultural commenters; all I know is that none of the other candidates for the title made half as compellingly listenable a case as Lil Wayne did here. God only knows how much moreso it'd be if Wayne hired an editor.

5. I'll be interested to see how Idolator's vote-tabulating system manages to aggregate the votes for Justice's debut album; somehow I can only see a future which counts votes for "†", "Cross", "The Cross Album", "Self-Titled", "Option-T", and god only knows what else as separate, denying Justice their rightful place among 2007's luminaries. And, really, that's exactly where they belong - 2007 saw a ton of lauded debut LPs from dance artists (Boys Noize, Simian Mobile Disco, Digitalism, Gui Boratto, etc.), but for sheer fun, none of them hold a candle to Justice's debut, an album which rocks just as hard as it didn when it leaked. Even the echo chamber of blog-house remixers (seriously - "bedroom producers chopping up 'D.A.N.C.E.'":2007::"shitty indie bands covering 'Crazy' on acoustic guitars":2006) haven't been able to dull its thunder - † is still being strip-mined for singles with outrageously productive results. And of course, it's significant that the most effective remix of one of their tracks - Soulwax' epic turn on "Phantom Part II" - eschews radicalization nearly altogether, merely extending the beat and adding a monstrous (yet oddly consistent) climactic breakdown. It's almost enough to leave you with the impression that † doesn't really need to be fucked with to render it utterly compelling - not that † itself didn't do a good enough job of making that clear on its own, of course.

6. Prins Thomas actually came to Los Angeles towards the end of the summer, and after having immersed myself in Cosmo Galactic Prism I will capital-n Never forgive myself for knowingly staying home. Of course, it's hard to imagine Thomas - or anyone, really - being capable of curating a liveset which flows with the preturnatural grace of his double mix CDs; Cosmo Galactic Prism moves as smoothly as those legendary 2 Many DJs mixes moved...uh, un-smoothly?, and the overall effect feels exactly as revelatory. Like, revelatory to make my unthinkable absence even more painful.

7. It was a banner year for American indie-rock, which is a nice way of saying it was a pretty shitty year for me.

NOTES ON ARTISTS

1. In which a rappa ternt sanga ternt inexhaustible chart presence. Seriously, I may not care too much for most of T-Pain's output last year, but Mr. T's commercial omnipresence alone says more about the cache of his work than I could ever manage; he was just all over everything, from Khaled to R. Kelly to Kanye to probably even this post. Luckily for listeners, some of those songs were also pretty good, too.

2. It should speak volumes about Daft Punk's death-grip on 2007 that they're garnering these kind of accolades despite doing nothing other than tour (and releasing an accompanying album), apparently leaving the actual production of new tracks to their spiritual successors over at Ed Banger and Institubes and Boys Noize and so on. Then again, why parse the names of everyone who followed in their footsteps when you could just vote for the dudes sitting at the top of the pyramid?

3. With the notable exception of Chris Benoit, nobody did a better job of turning their name into a verb meaning "to fuck up your reputation beyond repair" than Britney Spears - and yet Danja's turn behind the knobs for "Gimme More" proved so irresistable that pop consumers almost couldn't help but make it the second-biggest hit of her career. THAT is a fucking star turn, friends - and it wasn't even the best track he put together last year.