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The Top 50 Albums of 2007

M.I.A. went global, Bruce returned to E Street, Lil Wayne and Devendra got smoky, while everyone else from Spoon to Chris Brown kept the party going

ROBERT CHRISTGAU, DAVID FRICKE, CHRISTIAN HOARD, ROB SHEFFIELD

Posted Dec 27, 2007 9:13 AM

1 M.I.A.
Kala (Interscope)
M.I.A.'s second album was an international block party with a sonic imagination nobody else could match all year. The Sri Lankan-born U.K. rapper's inspirations run all over the globe, with a Day-Glo sensibility rooted in the Native Tongues hip-hop of the Jungle Brothers and De La Soul, but with the political rage of Public Enemy. She dips into Sri Lankan temple music, Bollywood disco, the Pixies, New Order, the Clash, Wreckx-N-Effects — sometimes she even sounds like the old U2 record where they let the Edge rap. Kala explores worldwide war zones, talking about third-world democracy and "putting people on the map that never seen a map." Yet M.I.A. remains a criminal-minded art freak with a true rock & roller's love of flash and sensation and irresponsible shit-talking. And are those Pink Floyd's cash registers she samples? Cool.

2 Bruce Springsteen
Magic (Columbia)
Magic comes on like the album Springsteen's been building up to for the past five years, since he revitalized his sound on 2002's The Rising. These songs are Springsteen at his toughest and most focused, going for the grimly detailed style of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska. He's sung about some of these characters before; the Vietnam vet of "Born in the U.S.A." gets a bonfire funeral in "Gypsy Biker," and the New Jersey Turnpike loner of "State Trooper" seems to show up in "Radio Nowhere," still asking his car radio the question: "Is there anybody alive out there?" The big themes are marriage and America as well as the constant repair they both demand.

3 Jay-Z
American Gangster (Roc-A-Fella)
Jay-Z hasn't sounded so fired up since The Blueprint, and like that classic, American Gangster is tripped out on a Seventies-funk fantasia. The Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield samples provide a bittersweet soundtrack to the old-school hustler fatalism of the lyrics. Jigga's dense wordplay may follow the Denzel Washington movie, but that doesn't get in the way of his original concept, which is himself and how bad he is ("Ya boy is off the wall, these other niggas is Tito"). The music makes him larger than life — the nutty organ solo in "Success," the Miami beatbox in "Party Life" and, above all, the unstoppable horn riff in "Roc Boys."

4 Arcade Fire
Neon Bible (Merge)
An ocean of sound, shaped into songs about religion run wild, weather gone haywire, privacy under siege and other coming bad times. The majestic sweep and sense of purpose recall U2 or Springsteen, neither of whom ever achieved the Cure-like intimacy that comes so naturally to these indie community builders, a seven-piece band that makes joyous noise out of fear and foreboding.

5 Kanye West
Graduation (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam)
Graduation wasn't as revelatory as Yeezy's first two records, which redefined hip-hop's borders. This one was merely the year's most high-impact work, full of Daft Punk samples, Jay-Z samples, flashy disco, a Lil Wayne cameo, hooks galore and catchy rhymes that mixed self-examination and high-life swagger. By now, complaints about Kanye's arrogance seem totally passé Not only is his braggadocio justified, it seems his ego leads him to work as hard as any pop musician out there, and fruits of that effort are both his and ours to enjoy.

6 Radiohead
In Rainbows (inrainbows.com)
The steal of 2007 — a lot of folks spent more for a gallon of gas than they were willing to pay for downloading this album — was already one of the highlights of 2006, when Radiohead debuted much of In Rainbows in concert, including the gnarled-riff riot "Bodysnatchers," the circular tension of "Nude" and "Videotape," with Thom Yorke's haunted voice and piano tangled in stumbling percussion and emotional rewind. Radiohead haven't sounded this aggressive and infuriated — so rock & roll — since OK Computer, an achievement that will be worth the usual retail price when In Rainbows comes out on CD in January.

7 LCD Soundsystem
Sound of Silver (Capitol/DFA)
This is the kind of album where your favorite song changes week to week. Is it the punk-funk political goof "North American Scum"? Or is it "Someone Great," which mourns a dead relationship with a startlingly sincere electropop tribute to the Human League? How about "All My Friends," where piano, guitars and synths build into a hotblooded epic on the scale of David Bowie's "Heroes"? All over SoS, rhythms turn into hooks and hooks turn into beats, until there is no difference between the two. LCD's James Murphy has always been a studio whiz, but even his biggest fans never dreamed he'd make a masterpiece like this.

8 Rilo Kiley
Under the Blacklight (Warner Bros.)
The big, bright pop-rock record these ex-indie-rockers always had in them, Under the Blacklight found Jenny Lewis cooing seductively and belting out manicured choruses amid meaty, danceable beats and stylistic flourishes like Latin bounce and horn sections. The music was as inviting as you'd expect from a band dubbed the new Fleetwood Mac, but there was darkness in Lewis' lyrics — this is an album with four songs about dangerous sex (the one about prostitution doubles as a selling-out parable). The whole package suggested talented young people out to reach a bigger audience without leaving their brains behind. In that, they succeeded.

9 Against Me!
New Wave (Sire)
On this major-label debut, these Florida punks truly capitalize on the righteous anger they have long been known for, turning out tight, gloriously propulsive raveups that aren't afraid to be a little catchy. Though Tom Gabel's wordy, throat-shredding bellow suggests emo-punk bloodletting, his songs are simply better than almost anything you'd hear on Warped Tour. And while longtime fans thought the band's major-label deal reeked of corporate compromise, Gabel delivers a load of agitprop that is anything but tepid — including the meta-anthemic protest anthem "White People for Peace" and "Stop!" a barnburner about getting off your ass and making a difference that cribs from Dolly Parton's "Jolene."

10 Spoon
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)
Spoon are an indie-rock band only in the most literal sense. They record for an independent label and know what it's like to be kicked around and thrown away by a major. But the dirty-twang, pop-hook pow of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is gloriously commercial. Singer-guitarist Britt Daniel has more than a little '67-Beatles maniac in him, peppering his songs here with koto, flamenco guitar and mariachi brass. In fact, for a Texas band, Spoon sound a lot like the very British, mid-Eighties XTC — with the right amount of gravel in their paisley.

11 John Fogerty
Revival (Fantasy)
The Creedence man has never lost his most sustaining strength, which is the warmth and grit of his voice. He might be the most universally beloved living American rocker of the Sixties, simply because something in that voice speaks to us of endurance, compassion, digging in for the long haul. You can hear that all over Revival, especially in "Creedence Song," where he sings about making peace with his cantankerous past. "You can't go wrong/If you play a little bit of that Creedence song" — can't argue with that. And when he snarls about the government, he reminds you he's still the guy who wrote "Fortunate Son" and "Don't Look Now."

12 Bright Eyes
Cassadaga (Saddle Creek)
Twenty-seven-year-old Conor Oberst has been honing his craft since thirteen, and this was the record we'd all been waiting for him to make: a magnum opus with songs about love, self-medication and alienation, plus loads of mandolin, fiddle and rambling Americana, Cassadaga was both sprawling and largely bullshit-free. From the apocalyse-heralding hoedown "Four Winds" to "Cleanse Song," a painfully gorgeous meditation on a friend's addiction, Oberst's loose, memorable tunes and lyrics about crises both personal and global are consistently engaging — the work of a Major Artist digging deep and trusting his instincts.

13 Lily Allen
Alright Still (Capitol)
A showbiz kid singing pop ditties with cheerful Jamaican and New Orleans underpinnings in a talky, tuneful, disarmingly normal-sounding voice, Lily Allen is no formal original. Her low-gloss production could even be called trad. Yet there's never been anyone like her. By now we've seen plenty of girls who stick up for themselves with some cheek. But they're generally either wildly defiant like Courtney or too ready to compromise like Missy. Allen knows female pride has become a round-the-way attitude — a simple fact of life. Every one of these eleven memorable songs has the same sense of inevitability.

14 Gogol Bordello
Super Taranta! (Side One Dummy)
Ukrainian-born Eugene Hutz tours as if the world was America and his immigrant band was the JB's. Gogol Bordello's second straight masterwork proves again that you needn't rock the classics to celebrate your sacred European heritage. Their intercontinental funk claims Gypsy roots, with violin and accordion swallowing guitar. Like Arcade Fire, their fiercely articulated music turns the mess of the world into rage and joy. Unlike Arcade Fire, they're out to steal your girlfriend. Or boyfriend.

15 Common
Finding Forever (Geffen)
The high point is "The People," an epistemological investigation of hustling that connects balling to the everyday struggle of being black in America. But with Kanye producing most tracks and guest shots from D'Angelo and Lily Allen, this blast of sunshine and soul has plenty more highs.

16 Les Savy Fav
Let's Stay Friends (Frenchkiss)
After a decade of wowing the circuit with singer Tim Harrington's uncool theatrics and everybody's art-garage barrage, this Providence, Rhode Island-spawned, Brooklyn-based quartet suspended operations in 2005. But LSF didn't break up, and as if they planned it that way, their first true album in six years is their very first where true tunes undergird angular noise. "Has your skin grown thick from bands that make you sick?" the opener inquires, then goes on, "Well, this is where it stops." And by the time they declare themselves "hills all filled with gas and gold," they've proved they were just getting started.

17 The White Stripes
Icky Thump (Warner Bros)
A return to the firewall fuzz of 2003's Elephant, Icky Thump is simply Delta-garage wallop made from the fewest, finest ingredients: the tube-amp guitar squeal and frantic falsetto vocal in "I'm Slowly Turning Into You"; Meg White's John Bonham-size drumming, sounding like a jail door slam, in the busted-immigrant song "Icky Thump." And if you think Jack White has no sense of fun to go with his power-chord Skip James, go to the cover of Patti Page's Fifties hit "Conquest" for a fat slap of Mexican Zeppelin.

18 Lucinda Williams
West (Lost Highway)
West is an album perfect for communing with yourself at three in the morning — the sound of one of rock's great songwriters getting her demons out, and still challenging her fans. Producer Hal Willner brings in jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and violinist Jenny Scheinman, who add a contemplative darkness to Williams' roots sound, and the music flows like the Dead in a country mood, particularly the pained psychedelic longing of "Unsuffer Me." Williams' cracked voice brings to mind her hero, Bob Dylan, fighting for air on Time Out of Mind. "Fancy Funeral" — about planning her mom's service and ending up thinking the money would have been better spent on groceries — might have been the year's saddest, simplest song. Except Williams tops it with "Are You Alright?" in which she hopes an ex-lover is making out OK.

19 Devendra Banhart
Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon (XL)
This freak-folk-scene daddy is not as bombed on vintage Laurel Canyon cool as he looks. Devendra Banhart cultivates this nirvana party aura with deliberate loving, soaking his songs in Brazilian tropicalia, the contact high of David Crosby's 1970 album If I Could Only Remember My Name and the casual communion of Dylan and the Band on The Basement Tapes. "Sea Horse" runs wonderfully long, from bedroom-folk om to Crazy Horse-guitar rumble, and a part of "Tonada Yanomaminista" sounds like the Doors at sea. Stoned corn like "Shabop Shalom" makes Smokey longer that it should be, but most of this excess is a guaranteed buzz.

20 Melissa Etheridge
The Awakening (Island)
Etheridge has always had passion to burn. But there is a special urgency to the classy folk pop of her first studio album since she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. Etheridge is the fighting picture of health and hope as she hits and holds the high note in "California." There is intense reflection too in the quiet lessons of "All There Is" and the guilt of "An Unexpected Rain." In the latter, when Etheridge sings, "I've come so far in my Kansas dancing shoes," you hear every mile. On the rest of the album, you hear the thanks — and the determination to keep going.

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."

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.

25 Linkin Park
Minutes to Midnight (Warner Bros.)
Now in their early thirties, Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda are still angry young men, only now they're as riled up about world affairs as personal turmoil — "The Little Things Give You Away" and "Hands Held High" are as vociferous as any anti-Bush screed 2007 produced. They've broadened their sound a little, too, adding cooler keyboard textures, but with co-producer Rick Rubin in tow, their metallic crunch is as brutal and efficient as ever, and the tunes still feel as cathartic as a good punch to your bedroom wall.

26 Miranda Lambert
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Columbia)
Tough-talking, straight-shooting, self-examining Lambert made the best album to emerge from Nashville since years started with "19." The fast ones surprise because usually Nashville rocks so macho. The slow ones surprise because Nashville rockers rarely know the difference between sodden and serious. Lambert is serious. She's also funnier than a crutch upside your head.

27 Lil Wayne
Da Drought 3 (Young Money Entertainment)
There's only one rapper alive who'd try to get away with talking shit like "I get my Emmett Till on/In a New Edition I get my Johnny Gill on." And you know Lil Wayne won't let go of the rhyme until he's also gotten his ice grill, tip drill and Buffalo Bill on. Weezy was the undisputed king of hip-hop this year, running his crazy mouth on one underground mix tape after another. Da Drought 3 was easily the best, two jam-packed discs of Weezy cruising to Anita Baker and smoking weed by the acre.

28 The Apples in Stereo
New Magnetic Wonder (Yep Roc/Simian)
There's always been something twee about Elephant 6 founder Robert Schneider's de facto Beatles tribute band — as the name indicates, their aesthetic has been very much late Beatles, with alt guitars mixed in. Here, prominent organ sounds, including a few Mellotron interludes, gesture endearingly toward an early-Seventies schlock that subsumes the music's high-end and spiky bits. Schneider's voice has deepened a little too. Hypercatchy songs about encountering the eternal and getting your head together, not necessarily in that order.

29 Mary J. Blige
Growing Pains (Geffen)
Having turned R&B pledger and pleader for 2005's The Breakthrough, the once and future Queen of Ghetto Soul re-repositions herself for a fickle marketplace by re-refurbishing street-tested moves. Kicking off with a defining track in which she and Busta Rhymes urge dark-skinned homegirls not to fret about the size of their chests and derrieres, she's a big sister to believe in. Sure, it's calculated. But praise the Lord that she arrived at this answer, rest assured that it's always been her natural mode, and be hereby informed that the songwriting is her finest in years.

30 Youssou N'Dour
Rokku Mi Rokka (Nonesuch)
The Senegalese mbalax master's third album for Nonesuch sticks to the method that has served him well since he parted from crossover-conscious Sony a decade ago. A mite polite, a mite curatorial, the label merely insists that he conceive each album acutely and provide full translations and transliterations in return. On Rokku Mi Rokka, N'Dour bows to the Malian music just north, long a hotter commodity in the world-music market. Given his voice, his melodies and his deft balance of Western guitar-bass-traps-horns-synth and African percussion-marimba-xalam, this supremely dedicated artist is just about guaranteed to satisfy completely and excite enough.

31 Because of the Times
Kings of Leon (RCA)
Sometimes a band can be too tight. Compared with the rigid, chunky fury of their previous records, the Followills' third album opens with a shock: groove. "Knocked Up" is extended, rolling funk noir with the guitars snarling behind the pulse, and the new-daddy worry and wonder in Caleb's bark is like a chorus of wolves. Kings of Leon were a dynamic band from jump street. But the fuzzy goth of "On Call" and the depth of attack in "McFearless" — U2-style reverb, stuttering soprano-distortion guitar — show them exploring the dynamics within garage-quartet basics with pop-sonics flair.

32 Maroon 5
It Won't Be Soon Before Long (Geffen)
Songs About Jane made Adam Levine a certified pop star, putting his soulful croon all over the radio and helping him get dates with a slew of Hollywood hotties. On this even-better followup, his mates came up with music to match his self-assuredness. The sound was both tougher and sweeter — no simple thing. "Makes Me Wonder" was a dance-pop kiss-off that seemed cribbed from some boy-band hit, but there and throughout, the candy-coated shell concealed a yearning for sex, affection, romance — whatever's handy — that was more wild than dark. These are vivid tunes that young girls can love and grown-ups can respect.

33 Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ray Price
Last of the Breed (Lost Highway)
The antique glow of this collaboration — which opens with the three singers swapping lines at a vintage Bob Wills gait in "My Life's Been a Pleasure" — is etched with the grizzly candor of old country-music soldiers who know the road behind them is longer than the stretch ahead. The harmonies are weathered, sometimes wandering, and there is an old-photo-album lyricism to the Floyd Tillman, Cindy Walker and Lefty Frizzell songs on these two CDs. But Nelson, Haggard and Price revisit them with confidence and an affection for the truths and memories they still hold. This is country music with none of the modern trimmings — no Kiss-style power chords or SUV-cowboy flash. But it is big and rich in every other way.

34 Chris Brown
Exclusive (Jive)
The day Chris Brown was born, the Number One song was Madonna's "Like a Prayer," and that's the level of hyperemotional pop he reaches for on Exclusive. He begins with a shout-out to the old-school D.C. go-go scene in "Throw'd," and then he settles into his T-Pain-assisted tenderoni jam "Kiss Kiss," a fantastic blast of teen steam. The "Irreplaceable" sound-alike "With You" is a ballad that coasts on acoustic guitar and Brown's heart-on-sleeve vocals — this sophomore album is where an R&B prince hitherto known best for his dancing stakes his claim as a singer. He's the only pop star out there right now who can both hang with T-Pain and show up on Sesame Street, and he's going to be around for a while.

35 Feist
The Reminder (Cherry Tree)
The most eagerly awaited folk-pop album of the year, in the weird-Canadian-girl division, The Reminder is like a summer of discovery at art camp, and it does a whole lot more than live up to the promise Leslie Feist showed on Let It Die. She broke on through with "1234," written for her by New Buffalo's Sally Seltmann, which got her into coffee shops and upscale shoe stores everywhere. Feist reaches out with gorgeously lovelorn ballads, including "The Park" and "My Moon My Man." "I'll be the one who'll break my heart," she sings over wild-card acoustic strumming on "I Feel It All": "I'll be the one to hold the gun." The girls cheered and the boys swooned. And then on "Sealion," she turns an old Nina Simone song into a modern-day ring shout with hand claps, cheap electronics and crescendoing guitars.

36 Alicia Keys
As I Am (J. Records)
Keys' ever-deepening vocal power is the first thing you notice on As I Am. When she's on, she makes all the other girls on the radio sound like they're yakking away on The Hills. As I Am, her third album and the third she's named after herself, is predictably introspective and mellow. It sounds like she's spent quality time lately with Aretha's Spirit in the Dark and decided to make her own version. "Wreckless Love" floats on soul clouds, "Teenage Love Affair" gives new meaning to "feeling you," and "Go Ahead" is a killer. But for most of the album, Keys is happy to get over on her voice, and that's exactly what makes As I Am such a physical pleasure.

37 Down
Over the Under (Down)
Ex-Pantera singer Phil Anselmo now has a full-time job in this former side project, and it's about time. His backwoods-devil growling in "Never Try" and "Beneath the Tides" attest to his victories over hard drugs and the viciously public breakup of Pantera. But Anselmo's avenging Southern soul comes fortified with double-guitar dynamite — the harmony riffing and hellhounds' debate of Kirk Windstein and Corrosion of Conformity's Pepper Keenan — that sounds like it crept out of a Louisiana swamp.

38 Imperial Teen
The Hair the T.V. the Baby & the Band (Merge)
Polymorphous indie pleasure-seekers trade noise for sweetness, and stick with guitar parts that merge both rhythm and melody and sexuality and vulnerability. Singing about the point in your life when you trade late-night drinking for early mornings at the gym has never sounded so cool.

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.

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.

43 Smashing Pumpkins
Zeitgeist (Warner Bros.)
Billy Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, the only original members in this resurrection, make an art-pop roar worthy of the Pumpkins crown. Corgan piles on guitar overdubs with philharmonic zeal and Siamese Dream-era smarts on searing songs about the suffocating chaos of life and politics in America.

44 Peter Bjorn & John
Writer's Block (Wichita)
Like many good indie boys, these three Swedes sound a little beaten down by romance. But on their third album, they translate their love-zonked melancholy into warm, Sixties-derived folk pop that feels instantly familiar and improves on repeated listens. The little frills — modest keyboard atmospherics, meticulous harmonies, even the whistled hook on "Young Folks" — all seem perfectly placed, but the real appeal is the slew of clear, simple melodies that stick around in your head like a bad houseguest.

45 Foo Fighters
Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace (RCA)
This album opens with the best blast of power-rock Foos since 1997's The Colour and the Shape — the bam, shred and wolf-boy chorale of "The Pretender" — then wanders all over, like a multiband anthology written and played by the same four guys. But in most of their incarnations here, the Foo Fighters deliver winners, including the sugar-bomb glam of "Long Road to Ruin" and the soft-loud drama of "Let It Die," which updates with thrills and craft the sound that Dave Grohl once made with a band called Nirvana.

46 Fall Out Boy
Infinity on High (Island)
Infinity is emo as prime entertainment: Giant pop-rock songs with confectionery choruses and some new tricks — the lead single rides a grinding dance beat that evokes Trent Reznor rocking a prom. Pete Wentz and Co. are easy to poke fun at. But given that no one else of their ilk made a pop record this likable in 2007, they're also hard to duplicate.

47 Band of Horses
Cease to Begin (Sub pop)
In indieland, 2007 was a year when skinny ties and wiggy haircuts gave way to the time-honored beard and flannel. As befits beard-and-flannel guys, Band of Horses promise heartfelt songs, but unlike so many of their peers, they have the craft to deliver. This music is simultaneously downcast and sky-cresting, the guitars tangling with sad melodies as if it really matters. And in songs like "Is There a Ghost" and "Cigarettes, Wedding Bands," it does.

48 Mavis Staples
We'll Never Turn Back (anti —)
Half a century after the Staple Singers scored a hit with the gospel promise "Uncloudy Day," equal rights is still a relative concept in America. Here, Mavis Staples measures how far we've come and have yet to go in these hymns and blues, many of them traditional civil-rights anthems like "We Shall Not Be Moved." The dirt-road feel of Ry Cooder's production and the argumentative stab of his Pops Staples-style guitar suit the purpose in Mavis' voice and the emancipation spirit she brings from the records she made with her family years ago, at the height of the fight.

49 Dropkick Murphys
The Meanest of Times (Born & Bred)
The only band ever to lose a lead singer to the Boston Fire Department has honored that working-class spirit as it expanded its Celt-punk lineup to seven and kept writing songs that not only describe cycles of struggle and escape in their white-ethnic Boston suburb of Quincy, but sound like them — the nearest America's ever gotten to its own oi band. Al Barr and Ken Casey compete shout for growl on blowouts like "Famous for Nothing," and "The State of Massachusetts" is as furious a tribute to single motherdom as any hip-hopper has ever spat.

50 Britney Spears
Blackout (Jive)
Emerging from her SUV wreck of a life, "It's Britney, bitch" or her digital facsimile consorts with a smaller-than-usual cohort of producers on an album sure to be remembered as a monument of deranged techno-pop amorality. The heroes here are Timbaland-apprentice Danja (debut single "Gimme More"), Swedish popmeisters Bloodshy and Avant (prime cut "Piece of Me") and the phalanx of lyricists who provided the first "confessional" lyrics Justin's ex ever needed.

Click here to check out the rest of Rolling Stone's 2007 Yearbook, including the best in music, movies, television and photos from '07.