Cue the frog rain....

It's 60 degrees in January and I am a little scared. But then I remembered that I am not bored enough with life to be irrational and decided to come up with my top 20 albums of 2007 instead. My goal is to do one album a day in reverse order, review what the music is like and why I like it. I will try to do a good job, but I am not vocabularily inclined in auditory expression, so you may have to bear with me, and hopefully I won't be finding new ways to repeat "I like this album because it sounds good" over and over again. This also gives me 20 days to edit the order of the list, which I am sure I will do 50000 times. 20 posts in 20 (week)days in a row is an unheard of frequency for me, so hopefully it can be accomplished. Cross your rabbits feet and rub your fingers.

I will also try to introduce each album with some kind of tidbits about what I find interesting that is going on here in the good ol' PoVegas community and end each post with a links to song/video samples (if there are any) and amazon.com buy page for those who want to buy instantly. You lazy f-words.

ALBUMS JUST OUTSIDE THE CUT: today I worked on the list, but most of today was spent working around the # 20 and selecting which albums were going to be left off the list. I started out with about 30 albums in mind and then removed 8 because I found out they weren't released in 2007 like I thought they were. Ooops! But that still left me with 2 that I had to leave out.

Number 22: Tegan and Sarah "The Con" I really enjoy their sound, their attitude and a number of thier songs, especially the signature track. I explored more of their work and found them very talented and their use of harmony is great and their lyrics are very very good. They use the soft electro beats very well while showcasing their great vocal work. They should be more popular than they are, and thats probably why I left them off. They are almost pop music, but not quite. Their highs didn't leave me high enough. I could be biased because I got this album early in the summer and they fell off the back burner to my latest music, but each time I listiened to it, I got less and less excited to hear it. So my gut left them off. Sorry guys.

Number 21: Animal Collective "Strawberry Jam" This is a highly regarded album by the indie music scene, most put it in the top 5 of the year. I am just starting to see why, but I have only had this album for a few weeks. Most albums like this take a few weeks to absorb, but I have to do this now. Sorry Animal Collective. This album is PACKED full of sounds and unusual rythems. Thats probably why it is so amazing to so many and maybe the reason for the title. To me it sounds over done and the lyrics are usual haphazzard indie lyrics that you have to know more about the members and band to fully understand why they write the words they do. I am a very open-minded person, raised on simple pop and rock and try hard to listien for the highly regarded beauty, and I think maybe by this summer I will understand it, but for now #21 is the best I can do.

NUMBER 20: Rogue Wave "Asleep at Heaven's Gate": It's hard to live up to past success. Ask Rogue Wave, the Cali-indie rock machine. Still mostly unknown, thier sound is very unique and carries a certain fan base, which tripled recently after the release of 2005's Descended like Vultures Album. DLV was fantastic album start to finish, taking the unique melodies of their first album and adding more intensity to a perfect balance of new perfectly smooth music. I highly suggest picking that one up as it would be one of my top 4 2005 albums. Now with more attention, Rogue Wave had to please the fans of the past and of the present which is nearly impossible . Zach Rogue, lead singer and the bands creative force, almost pulled it off. He has a great and unique voice and he layers it uniquely which creates what I think to be a very west coast sound. He sounds blonde to me, fair and soft in delivery, but is actually afro-y brown. Maybe a son of art garfunkle? HaHa This album falls off towards the end, but the first half is a fantastic direction for this band. He probably wanted to give the audience even more sound and moved out of the comfort zone with bigger and more aggressive instruments and studio work that may have been the downfall for the second half since the songs show a lack of consistency start to finish. But the first half shows promise that it wasn't a complete waste for what I feel are some of the bands best songs in its 3 full-length album history. I must say though, a good sign is that I like the last half more and more each time I listien to it, especially the last 3 songs "Fantasies" "Phonytown" and "Cheaper than therapy" which is more of a throw back to Descended..My favorite song is "Harmonium" a powerhouse of a song mixing a melody of Zach's voice in what may be the climax of the Rogue Wave sound thus far. I could not find any full length samples of it for free though, boo hoo.

Song Samples: Lake Michigan youtube video, MySpace Page

Amazon Page with song samples of each song at the bottom.