1. The Arcade Fire - Neon BibleOne solid characteristic of your favorite album of the year is that you can’t really listen to it anymore; you’ve completely played it out. Still, I cannot underestimate the marvel it has brought me over the course of 2007: from it’s slowly leaked first tracks in January, the stunning Blogotheque vidcast, and the gorgeous Norah Jones and Calexico covers of smoldering stand-out track “Ocean of Noise”. Though, as the David Byrne said, in his best-of-2007 list, the lyrics are ‘all wrong,’ the first listen to “My Body is a Cage” was the most singularly visceral rock experience I’ve had all year (here’s the fan-video that the Boss himself dug).
If the Fire’s great first album, “Funeral,” was a celebration of life in the face of death, this Springsteentastic album – unafraid of grand gestures, doomy chants, and church organs – is a wild elegy for life in the face of the rapture. Mercifully, its apocalyptic atmosphere is lifted by just enough wisps of hope and an overall feeling of strength in numbers, a warm collectivity we also find at my #2.
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