Despite a pervasive rockcrit feeling to the contrary, jokes and grooves are more than enough on which to build a great record, even a great career. But we all know that an album like Sound of Silver doesn't escape its subculture, doesn't win the approval of this many rock critics of varying allegiances, without mixing in stuff like pain and fear and heartache and miscellaneous intangibles—usually at its own peril, especially when the artist is so adept at beats and laughs.

To be perfectly honest, nothing on Sound of Silver works the hips or brings as many smiles as the singles LCD Soundsystem released between 2002 and 2004, the records that helped cement the DFA's production rep and launched a thousand dance-rock trend pieces. But what's catapulted James Murphy out of the realm semi-popular acclaim, even if just among critics (not an insignifigant audience, especially online), is not his mixing desk facility with both punk and disco, his ability to juice the sonics of one with the other until it seems like they'd never work as well apart. Predictably, it's the intimation of emotional depth. However wild their rhythms, the sentiment of records like "Beat Connection" and "Yeah" essentially boiled down to gripes about the perennial straight-boy resistance to dancing. And gripes, unlike jokes, can be wearying over the long haul of an album, no matter how badass the low-end or hilarious the grousing.

Listening to Sound of Silver, something important happened to Murphy's songwriting process in the two years since his snooze of a debut album, LCD Soundsystem, a record that was more than satisfied with an indistinct ennui laid over competent genre pastiche. Maybe it was opening this one-man-band up to input from the live disco unit Murphy isn't wrong to call the touring circuit's baddest motherfuckers—hopefully drummer Pat Mahoney got a fat holiday bonus—or maybe he just got sick of standing in the shadow of his record collection. But whatever quotation there is on Sound of Silver is much slyer than ever before—now only hints of Eno, shades of Byrne, intimations of Mark E. Smith—and the grooves move with the best of classic dance music, from sleek mid-'80s boogie to modern German techno, without outright cribbing. Musically, Murphy has most definitely come into his own without fully abandoning his keen ear for sonic reference. And in turn, maybe this growing assurance in his own musical voice made him think it was time to knock a few bricks out of the carefully constructed wall of lyrical meta-snark and slip in some real talk about his own needs and fears. Hell, maybe even a few gripes that went beyond scene politicking.

But overly earnest he is not, especially when compared with the embarrassing gusto of his tourmates the Arcade Fire, who sound like a smile, let alone a smirk, would crack their suffocating self-seriousness in two. Unlike the year's other crit-approved "important" albums, Sound of Silver not only moves with an increasingly rare less-is-more restraint for a rock band in these indie-prog times, it can be playful as hell. The vocals on "Get Innocuous" and "Sound of Silver" prove Murphy's not above mixing up art-rock and pure camp, even as the fierceness and loveliness (respectively) of the backing tracks elevates them beyond gags, while the quick keyboard jag, "Watch the Tapes," and the whole of "North American Scum" smuggle that old snark into bug-eyed farce.

Even the poll's No. 2 Track, "All My Friends," has to be rock's most restrained tugging of the heartstrings in recent memory, an "epic" that eschews melodrama in favor of motorik, delivered in Murphy's now trademark monotone, which only hits a quaver of regret at its most wracked. And if "All My Friends" and "Someone Great," the touchy-feely center of Sound Of Silver, have allowed Murphy to broaden that thematic range enough to draw in all those emo-loving rock critics, they only work so well because they're surrounded by moments of self-satire, silliness, and serious ass-moving. Even taken alone they find Murphy thumbing his nose at his peers' more overwrought gestures; it's the intimation of massive regret that "Someone Great" offers up without ever nailing down the precise nature of its pain that makes the song so powerful, so ready to be filled in, read into, used up by each listener. That might be a strike against him for those who see emotional minimalism as indie rock's great sin, but in the context of stadium pomp and circumstance that's increasingly come to define the quasi-mainstream face of the genre over the last few years, it's fine by me.

And with his defense mechanisms to avoid showing his emotional hand in public and his compositions that slowly develop over radio unfriendly durations, Murphy's definitely still making art-rock, which may be why his lyrically obscure lament for his drinking buddies lost out to the romantic universality of "Umbrella" in the end. But I found Sound Of Silver had as much of that good ol' fashioned pop use value as any other record this year, getting me through two bouts of heartbreak, one death, and the usual interpersonal ups and downs of a 12 month period. Those first five paragraphs are more or less a fancy way of saying that Sound of Silver, you know, moved me, deeply, both physically and emotionally. And obviously a lot of other people were moved as well. It was probably the year's most blogged-about album—especially because all those people writing about Blackout and In Rainbows weren't really writing about something as inconsequential as the album—and if that helped prove it was 2007's consensus record (non-"Radiohead-model" division) before the year was halfway over, it also proved there are really only so many ways to say you're thrilled to find your own base needs and fears mirrored in a record that also challenges your music-nerd lobe and stimulates your bump-and-grind lizard brain.

Finally, if you're reading these results and grumbling at another aging white male appearing atop another best-of list, more post-collegiate egghead comfort food for the creative underclass, I will admit that M.I.A. produced an equally bold mash-up of progressive sonics and sentiment this year, maybe moreso since hers was a purposefully confrontational, aggressively psychedelic look at a planet-spanning culture of resistance-through-bricolage. And since I won't presume to speak for anyone else who helped get LCD into the No. 1 spot, I'll just say that personally I never wanted to play Kala as much as Sound Of Silver. Plus at least it wasn't Radiohead. And since the top spot can belong to only one, it's hard to argue Murphy didn't earn his place as much as No. 2 finisher M.I.A. would have if the numbers had turned out a little differently, both of them trying to squeeze everything—innovation, backbeat, wit, intimacy, aggression—into an album that unashamedly sought out a mass audience without pandering for a moment. Given the state of the industry and the lack of potential for that kind of audience, even among professional pop panderers, this kind of ambition isn't just rare, it's a crazy, an unexpected bounty thrown in the face of every musician content to shrug their way through the collapse.

Jess Harvell is Idolator's senior editor.