ALBUMS (descending points)
1. No Age - Weirdo Rippers
2. Parts and Labor - Mapmaker
3. Gowns - Red State
4. Nina Nastasia and Jim White - You Follow Me
5. Phosphorescent - Pride
6. Two Cow Garage - III
7. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
8. Witchcraft - The Alchemist
9. Six Parts Seven - Casually Smashed to Pieces
10. Times New Viking - The Paisley Reich

TRACKS
1. Grinderman - No Pussy Blues
2. Electrelane - To the East
3. Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma
4. Wilco - The Thanks I Get
5. Gowns - White Like Heaven
6. Jay Reatard - I Know a Place
7. The Very Knees - Pour Poor Moi
8. The Dreadful Yawns - Don't Know What I've Been On
9. Times New Viking - Teenage Lust
10. Fucked Up - Year of the Pig

ARTISTS
1. Jay Reatard
2. No Age
3. Parts and Labor
4. The Very Knees

COMMENTS
Clevelanders love to complain. It's too cold and it snows too much in the Winter. It's too hot and it rains every weekend during the summer. Everyone drives too slow, or they drive too fast. Gas is too expensive. What are we going to do about it? Carpool? Bike? Walk? No, we'll complain. Our sports teams lose a lot. Sometimes they win, but we cast aside minor successes like the Cavaliers making the NBA finals, or the Indians making the American League Championship Series. Even the Browns are winning games this year, and they may make the playoffs, but we'd rather complain about past failures like The Drive, The Fumble, or The Shot. Our triumphs don't get such catchy nicknames. If you're a Clevelander and you don't complain, you're looked at like you're an outsider. Wipe that cheery expression off your face, don't you have anything to complain about? Weren't you stuck in traffic this morning? Didn't the girl at the coffee shop leave too much room for cream?

It's taken me more than 30 years, but slowly, I'm learning not too complain so much. I may gripe about 480 East in the morning and 480 West in the evening, and the price of gas as my car's helplessly jammed in the morning and the evening, but at least I've learned to accept the weather. So, when someone asks me how was music in 2007, my answer is simple, "I can't complain." Sure, I could complain. There certainly were many things I could moan about. People aren't buying music and they certainly don't give it much value these days. There was Oink-gate and all of the insufferable bitching when the best (illegal) source of (free) music was forced off line? Radio's awful and Mtv's worse. There was too much Blog hype, too much pitchfork hype, and there were those pesky Black Kids, the band with one kinda catchy song who inexplicably became a hit at CMJ. The major labels continue to sue content providers and grandmas, and Universal's Doug Morris gave that head scratching interview where he talked about technologists and The Shmoo. There's more dinner indie, middling indie, and heavy handed, overproduced, over-emoting indie than ever before. What is indie anyway? Is it college rock? Alternative rock? What happened to the alterna-teens? Do they listen to this thing called indie, too? As if all this wasn't enough, there was a certain indie artist, let's call him Sufjan Stevens, who proclaimed rock is dead before he debuted his pop opera about the Brooklyn Bridge. That's our alternative? I think I'll listen to my mother's Josh Groban Christmas album instead.

Then there's this concept called fragmentation where a rapidly declining industry is parsed into smaller pieces as the audience becomes more narrow in its tastes. It ensures fewer people are hearing the same music, and fewer people are experiencing the same shows. It also causes critics to opine that perhaps indie is too white, or perhaps indie is too privileged. It got so bad that New York Times columnist, David Brooks teamed with classic rocker, Little Steven, to complain that the white kids and the privileged white kids aren't making music for older white men, and maybe it's because they're not familiar with the music of the older white men. Make it stop! We do not need another Foghat! Repeat after me: No more Foghat!!!

Oh right, I wasn't going to complain, and why would I when there was so much music from 2007 worthy of my praise? No Age's potent combination of lo-fi punk and ambient drone took punk rock out of the shopping malls and back to where it belongs: the smelly, DIY venues on the wrong side of town. They didn't have to fight the good fight alone, as they had an ally in Memphis' Jay Reatard, who embraced the simplicity and power of "1, 2, 3, 4'" and "Let's Go," with 15 minute shows, a mop top, and a white flying V. They also had Brooklyn's Parts and Labor, a band whose punk leanings didn't rely on the sounds of our past, but instead utilized an unwieldy, and potentially hazardous, array of switches, boxes, guitars, keyboards, and wires to produce a wild, glitchy, noisy, frantic, and ultimately, melodic vision of the future. Lastly, there's the new crop of lo-fi coming out of Columbus, Ohio, with Times New Viking, Psychedelic Horseshit, and The Dolby Fuckers who are eliminating over produced pro tools pap, one rickety, hissy, in the red record at a time. Together, these artists not only helped me forget about all of the dreaded middling indie clogging the internet's tubes, and all of the disappointments of 07 (Wilco, New Pornographers, and Arcade Fire, to name but a few), but also gave me hope for the future. We have six Jay Reatard singles to anticipate for next year. Yes, six. Besides, thanks to our good friend fragmentation, with a helping hand from the blogs, youtube, mp3 technology, and an indirect assist from the top level taste makers, who are becoming more irrelevant with each passing day, it's possible to go an entire year without hearing the artists that make you twitch. Go ahead Sufjan. Write an opera about some dog park in Manhattan, the baggage handlers at JFK, or the poor soul who hands out towels and mints in nightclub restrooms. I won't complain. I won't bitch. I'll never hear it.