The Top 50 Albums of 2007

21 Nine Inch Nails
Year Zero (Interscope)
The secret of Trent Reznor's return to form and then some isn't its sci-fi plot or digital appurtenances. It's how skillfully and radically it connects extremes of tune and noise. By naming the enemy — there are some out there who aren't convinced "Capital G" is George Bush, but that's OK, he can be God too — Year Zero compels Reznor to reach out into the real world and thus transcend the part of his nihilism that's a tragedy of body chemistry. The rest of his nihilism is a tragedy of social forces from which he provides cathartic if temporary relief.

22 Paul McCartney
Memory Almost Full (Hear Music)
McCartney's first album for the EMI of coffee shops is at once briskly modern and obsessively retrospective. "Only Mama Knows" has the punch and drive of a Kings of Leon torpedo. It also sounds like a son of "Jet." With McCartney's mandolin up front, the jaunty, minimalist "Dance Tonight" sounds like a Chemical Brothers rhythm track — with Bill Monroe on top. But the long view in these songs is also in the way the mid-sixties McCartney marvels at the mid-Sixties Beatle in the mirror in "That Was Me" and the natural, poignant cracks in his sunset-years voice in "You Tell Me."