The Top 50 Albums of 2007

39 Dr. Dog
We All Belong (Park the Van)
Five Philly dudes drawing on cheap-sounding keyboards, mock-choral accompaniments and a seemingly endless supply of great melodies. There were big doses of whimsy (the hippie-esque, singsong "Way the Lazy Do") and agitation (the desperate, brokenhearted "Die Die Die") in their pop kaleidoscope. One minute it sounded like Elton John fronting the Band, the next it made clear how much Bowie had ripped off from the Beatles.

40 Amy Winehouse
Back to Black (Universal)
The Motown mimicry is astute — Mark Ronson, who produced half of this album, knows his Holland-Dozier-Holland. But Amy Winehouse, the British tabloid train wreck of the year, writes and sings of the addictions in these songs (men, the worst kind of good times, the cold comfort of tears on a pillow) with a brassy, intensely personal sorrow that is true blues, not nouveau soul. The sex and loss are brutal and explicit in the title song, an effect made more haunting by Ronson's echoes of the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go." But when Winehouse crows, "I told you I was trouble," in "You Know I'm No Good," it's hard now not to wish that she was just acting.