The Top 50 Albums of 2007

41 Of Montreal
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)
Kevin Barnes has Lindsay Buckingham's knack for melodic overkill and ingeniously fussy hooks, and singing about divorce with all his over-the-top weirdness on display, he's put his Tusk and his Rumours on the same album. "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" may be the funniest sex song anybody came up with all year, with space-glam synths, mega-twee harmonies and the plea, "I've got a tigress back at home." And every single song is funny, which matters a lot when you're singing about love pains.

42 Wilco
Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch)
"I'm more hopeful than I used to be," singer-guitarist Jeff Tweedy said last spring of his songwriting for Wilco's sixth studio album. "It's just easier to hear now — there's less static." Sky Blue Sky comes with weirdness, like the freakout-guitar bursts in the middle of the iridescent-California glow of "You Are My Face." But Wilco's recent ascension to avant-rock celebrity belied Tweedy's deeper roots in the bared-nerve contemplation of folk and country music. In the elegant whirl of "Either Way" and the hopeful waltz "What Light," the scarring, confrontational distortion of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004's A Ghost Is Born has been replaced by a psychedelic grace and communal warmth both in the music — guitarist Nels Cline brings the Stephen Stills, Jerry Garcia and John Cipollina — and Tweedy's lyric optimism. America's next Sonic Youth have now become our new Grateful Dead.