The Top 50 Albums of 2007

23 1990s
Cookies (Rough Trade)
The View got the hype; Babyshambles got the tabloid ink. But it was 1990s — a power-jangle trio from Scotland with family-tree connections to Franz Ferdinand — that made the great, rowdy Brit-pop album of the year. 1990s know the right people: Cookies was produced by ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler; Edwyn Collins, once of arch-pop Scots Orange Juice, provided vintage studio gear. But the coltish jump and pub-choir vocal harmonies of "You Made Me Like It" and "Cult Status" were all 1990s.

24 Robert Plant and Alison Krauss
Raising Sand (Rounder)
Led Zeppelin's golden god made two sets of headlines this year: with his old band's reunion and this collaboration with bluegrass princess Alison Krauss. They harmonize with natural worry and warmth against a midnight-Mississippi chill in songs by Tom Waits, the post-Byrds Gene Clark and country singer Mel Tillis. And Townes Van Zandt's abject jewel "Nothing" is Zeppelin's "Kashmir" reset in Death Valley, with distorted guitars and Krauss' sustained, funereal bowing hanging over Plant's riveting, moanlike final judgment.