10 albums from 2007 (#1)

1. Akron / Family, Love Is Real

The latest entry in the attempt to write the great American psychedelic folk roadtrip album, and one of the most successful I've ever heard. This album is the triumphant album of experimental folk-rock that acts like Califone, Wilco, and the Flaming Lips have been almost-making for a decade now (and that Camper Van Beethoven were almost-making 20 years ago), but it also breaks from that framework periodically, expanding into ecstatic mind-expanding jams -- jams that locate the choice middle ground between the sloppy, shambalic, "No Neck Blues Band" type and the more polished, technically-efficient, "Phish" type, and consequently are more effective than either. Mystical in orientation, singular in vision: at its best, it's like a backwoods Americana version of the Boredom's Vision Creation New Sun. Essential.

Listen: Akron / Family, "Ed Is A Portal"

10 albums from 2007 (#4)

4. White Lichens, self-titled

A great pregnant thundercloud of a record. Each of the five drones collected here brood and surge and bristle, although spend enough time navigating their fields of electrical menace and you'll find nothing but mystic peacefulness at their center. A perfect soundtrack for some kind of as-yet-unrealized Tesla biopic. This disc represents a collaboration between Lichens (aka astral child Rob Lowe) and the heavy guitar duo White/Light: excellent acts in their own right, although neither has ever sounded better (and—full disclosure—I say this as one of the people who released the White/Light debut album a few years back).

Listen: White Lichens, "Belial"

10 albums from 2007 (#9)

9. The Bird Names, Wooden Lake / Sexual Diner

Flat-out the oddest album I heard all year, which is saying something given the amount of odd music I listen to. Twinkly little bits of clockwork exotica, cartoon-falsetto sing-alongs, ramshackle pop structures, a Shimmy-Disc-esque drug haze pervading the lo-fi production: imagine the Residents importing some rubber-limbed anthropomorphic animals from an old-timey Max Fleischer short, and some self-replicating machine elves from one of Terence McKenna's DMT trips, and you're in the neighborhood. Refreshingly strange.

Listen: The Bird Names, "New Mexico"