White Rabbits / Fort Nightly
Say Hey

We saw White Rabbits play an early-evening show this summer and I couldn't believe I wasn't seeing a band that had been at the top of their game for a decade. Not only is their songwriting strong, but their tight musicianship and ability to play as a group belie their beginnings just a few years ago at the University of Missouri. For once, this is a Pitchfork-hyped band that I really want to see succeed, and I never thought I'd say that about an act that seems to derive from the impulse to write indie rock sea shanties.

From the beginning, the band uses the bass end of the piano and a set of sing-along choruses to draw you in. Having multiple vocalists and multiple drummers allows the opening double-shot of "Kid on My Shoulders" and "The Plot" to get things off to a raging start. With the melody being driven by two guitars and a piano, it's a thicker sound than you would expect, almost Spector-like at times. The next few tracks introduce a rhythmic swagger to the album, leading up to the pounding drums that open "I Used to Complain Now I Don't." Everything is brought to a head on the tropical, bouncy closer, "Tourist Trap," which sounds transitional as much as anything else. They've got more to say, clearly; their Daytrotter session features two unreleased originals and a cover, and their current live set has more new material in it. As good as they sound and as green as they are, I expect this is a band we'll be paying a lot of attention to over the next few years.

Watch "I Used to Complain Now I Don't," live in Madison, WI

Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer / Schematics
Le Pamplemousse/FlightPlan

About a year and a half ago, we saw Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer play at the short-lived Journey Music, a venue that had more than a little in common with an unfinished sunken living room. It was probably my most anticipated show of last year, and they didn't disappoint; on the way home I found myself wondering why there weren't more bands doing what they do. Their formula isn't so complex after all: Synths + energy + sugar = Zolof. But they remain largely uncontested, and a level above all the other bands that take a similar approach.

With Schematics, they add another ten shiny pop gems to their arsenal. It's a more grown-up sound, with less of the urgency that drove their last full-length, Jalopy Go Far, but the band's command of melody and young obsession remains all over songs such as "Death or Radio" and "I'm a Rock and Roll Mess." And though the record passes quickly -- its 10 songs take just about 27 minutes -- it accompanies the terrific split covers EP the band released with Reel Big Fish earlier in the year.

A band like this is like a hot young running back -- they start with lots of energy and power, but you can't count on their longevity. But Zolof is about five years into their career, have taken something of a turn on this record, and are still running. Here's hoping they keep it up, and maybe pick up some decent imitators along the way.

Watch "The Way It Goes," live in Milwaukee, WI

1997 / ...A Better View of the Rising Moon
Victory

Chicago is coming up as the epicenter of a new kind of organic-sounding quasi-emo. The Hush Sound is the band I first noticed in this mini-trend, but perhaps the best example is 1997, whose debut is a combination of hard-charging acoustics, big drums and boy/girl vocals that manifests in anthem after anthem. Maybe the best comparison I can come up with for the bigness of the first half of the album is the Juliana Theory's Emotion Is Dead, but it's not a close one.

What I think I like best about this record is its excellence as a road trip soundtrack, and a meta one, at that. "In Your Car" and "Tennessee Song" both deal with travel in one way or another and are great to sing along with, as are "Garden of Evil," "Droppin' Dimes," "Hey Darlin'" and more. I just hope that in 2008 they take the "car ride up to Madison" that's mentioned in "Tennessee Song." It's only two and a half hours!

Watch "In Your Car," live in Chicago, IL

The Apples in Stereo / New Magnetic Wonder
Simian/Yep Roc/Elephant 6

For quite a while, I expected this would be my #1 record of the year. It's the most consistent and assured record the Apples in Stereo have ever made, and opens with a progression of terrific indie pop songs that's always great to hear early in the year. My only regret about it is that by the time we saw them in February, Hilarie Sidney had left the band, and so we didn't get to hear the terrific "Sunndal Song" or "Sunday Sounds."

We did get all the other great cuts, though -- "Skyway" (which I always feel the need to play when I cross over the Chicago Skyway), "Can You Feel It?," "Same Old Drag" and probably the best of the bunch, "7 Stars." Looking back on it after a year or so of listening, there's really an epic quality to the whole thing, with or without the album's many short interstitials. It sounds much more like a cohesive album than I ever would've expected this band to make, and I bet the follow-up takes them even further down this road.

Watch "Play Tough," live in Madison, WI

The Box Social / Get Going
Bright Ideas/No Karma

As I'm friends with the band members and was in the studio for the most of the recording and mixing of this album, it's a tough one to make an objective judgment about. Still, to the extent that I can, I think they really hit the sweet spot of the Nirvana/Tom Petty axis that they operate on.

That they meld approaches to rock so smoothly is, I think, a big part of their live charm. "Comin' Around" and "kcmo" both feature dropped bass and shimmery guitar lines that could've been pulled straight out of 15-year-old time capsules unearthed from behind Butch Vig's Smart Studios. The opening pair, "Ginger Ale" and "Easy Does It," are far enough into the sound of modern pop-punk for the band to fit well into their 2007 Warped Tour appearances. "A New Low" owes a clear debt to their fellow Milwaukeean Steve Miller, while "Galoshes" and "Happy Little Mistake" pull more from the 80's tradition of Petty/Mellencamp Americana. The set has a midwestern vibrancy to it, and that identifiability probably has a lot to do with the local following they've developed. They've got new material on the way, and new tours coming up this spring and summer, so check them out if they come to your town.

Watch "kcmo," live in Madison, WI

Motion City Soundtrack / Even If It Kills Me
Epitaph

Each of Motion City Soundtrack's first two LPs were my favorite records of the years they came out, so saying I was excited for Even If It Kills Me really doesn't do it justice. As you can probably guess from its #6 ranking, I was a little disappointed by it, but even a disappointing offering from this band still comes with a lot of good material. The sound here is much more subdued than their early stuff, which works well for the most part in shifting them toward a kind of modernized power-pop.

Probably the best example of this is "It Had to Be You," which sounds like it could've been co-written by mid-90s vintage Matthew Sweet. But compared to their first two albums, a lot of it falls into the trap that power-pop often does: It becomes staid. There are a couple songs -- "The Conversation" and "Antonia" -- that try way too hard to be really mature and important, and they both interrupt the flow that the songs around them establish. I really love the desperate energy of "Point of Extinction," for instance, and "Antonia" kind of kills it just before the album wraps up. But I find myself wondering if the flow has become less salient for me in the Smart Playlist Age, because I still like this record a lot despite its flaws. And if my least favorite record of yours is my #6 album of the year, you must be doing something right.

Watch "Point of Extinction," live in Leeds, UK

The Bird and the Bee / The Bird and the Bee
Blue Note

A couple years ago I went to see Nada Surf at the Annex, and the first opening act was a singer named Inara George. At the time, I wrote that her beautiful voice was ill-served by her boring material. Then I didn't hear anything about her for a while. Meanwhile, I encountered this chilled-out "jazz" two-piece called the Bird and the Bee with the release of their first single last year. It was a nice, bouncy piece with a fun b-side, and both of those tunes ("Again & Again" and "Fucking Boyfriend") appear on this debut full-length.

Well, come to find out the smooth, breathy vocals in the group come from none other than Inara George -- she got some good songs! They range from hard to light, and there are even a couple of downtempo ballads in there; as a package, they give George and collaborator Greg Kurstin a lot of room to show off. As a bit of icing on the cake, they've already released a solid follow-up EP (Please Clap Your Hands) and have another coming in a month or so. We saw them about a week ago and it couldn't have been a better show.

Watch "Fucking Boyfriend," live in New York

Baby Teeth / The Simp
Lujo

The world of peer-to-peer file-sharing took a pretty decent hit last October when a gigantic private BitTorrent site called OiNK's Pink Palace was taken offline at the behest of organizations representing major international record companies. The idea, at least publicly, was that they'd taken a big step in keeping people from downloading their releases for free, but frankly, they haven't. Major label releases can be found in hundreds of other places, both public and private, and the death of OiNK (and of Demonoid, another major site taken down recently) does next to nothing to change that. No, the impact of OiNK going down is felt most strongly by bands down the food chain, like Chicago's Baby Teeth.

I first encountered this band and this album at OiNK, attracted by the description despite no previous familiarity. I was quickly enthralled. The Simp is like the best album Elton John never made, but somehow cuter and snarkier than even his early stuff. There's a ton of variety in here, from New Order-style synth-pop to 70's AOR gold to straight-ahead, modern, Chicago indie rock. On top of that, they do a great job of translating it into a live show with a lot of energy and personality -- a show that they brought to Madison twice this year, unlike many of their fellow Chicagoans (*cough* 1997 *cough* Office). And if the album somehow isn't enough to sate you, singer and songwriter Abraham Levitan is currently maintaining a year-long songwriting blog called 52 Teeth, where he's posting a new demo every Monday. He's about halfway done with his year, but all the old ones are still available for download and well worth it.

Watch "Intolerable," live in Madison, WI

Minipop / A New Hope
Take Root

I've acknowledged many times before my weakness for breathy sopranos, and Minipop's Tricia Kanne hits me right where it hurts. It's very hard to not hear Eisley when listening to them, but it's also hard to hold that against them. Their sound is a bit more spry, and they use the style well, creating the kind of dream-pop atmosphere that recalls both the less drab parts of shoegaze and some of the 80's British indie pop scene.

Their sound is much more ethereal than other bands with the same kind of vocals -- their whooshy synth lines were enough to prompt me to tag them as "Dream Pop" on my iPod. When I saw them in a small San Francisco club last spring, I was surprised they could pull it off live without everything sounded muddled, but it was really terrific. They've gotten some overseas notice for "Like I Do," and there are several other beautiful, lilting pop tunes on this album that are worth checking out. With any luck they should be making waves outside the Bay Area pretty soon.

Watch "A New Hope," live in San Francisco, CA

Locksley / Don't Make Me Wait
Feature

Somehow, Locksley is from Madison. They pulled up stakes and moved to Brooklyn a couple years ago, escaping the midwest without attracting my notice. This year, they played several shows in Madison and got some decent buzz for them. My interest piqued, I checked out their debut LP and was amazed that their Kinks/Beatles hybird style had managed to stay under the radar for so long. I can only guess that they left town just about as soon as they formed, because this sound would've played spectacularly well in the local scene. Many of their quicker blasts recall not just those 60s icons, but power-pop masters like Cheap Trick as well, the title track in particular. They've been touring like crazy and getting pretty good TV exposure, and the record is certainly strong enough to support them for a while -- it's the kind of release that sounds like it could be the vanguard of a real power-pop genre revival.

Watch "All Over Again," live in Madison, WI

Pale Young Gentlemen / Pale Young Gentlemen
self-released

When the buzz on Pale Young Gentlemen first started, I purposefully resisted. Something about it felt like a really deliberate attempt to create some kind of small-scale, local blogstorm and perhaps catch the attention of the tastemakers of the Intertubes. The fact that they kept getting compared to blog bands I don't like, such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, didn't help. But then we saw them open for White Rabbits at what turned out to be a surprisingly packed house, and I found myself won over.

The two bands made a great pair, as they both use piano to great effect in creating an atmosphere. In the case of Pale Young Gentlemen, that atmosphere is something out of the 1920s, or eastern Europe, or both, with a dash of Vaudeville thrown into their stage presence. The album contains a lot of that live feeling, and the piano sound on tracks such as "Fraulein" and "Clap Your Hands" has the kind of thick reverb that came alive at their well-attended set in the UW's Music Hall. Their local following is large and real, and hopefully this record is just the beginning of great things to come.

Watch "A Shadow on the Wall," live in Madison, WI

Piebald / Accidental Gentlemen
SideOneDummy

When you make a record like this, and you're at the level of rock success that Piebald is at, it's time to retire. I mean that in the best way possible -- here's a band making yet another solid album, doing a version of "alternative" rock as well as anybody else, and getting nowhere for their trouble. Piebald has been around, in some form or another, since 1994, and it's totally understandable that they've just got to call in quits at some point. Having their members now split between Boston and Los Angeles probably helped move that point forward, I'd guess.

But still, it's a really sad loss. This is the second year in a row that I've mourned the break-up of a favorite band in this list (in 2006 it was Rainer Maria), and we seem to be in a period of sustained risk for the bands I came to love in the early 2000's. The excellent songs on Accidental Gentlemen -- "Opener," "Oh, the Congestion," "A Friend of Mine" -- represent an approach to rock that is probably endangered by now, and I'm hopeful its comeback is sooner rather than later.

Watch "Getting Mugged and Loving It," live in Denver, CO

Foo Fighters / Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
RCA

On the other hand, when you make a record like this at the level of the Foo Fighters, you just keep on rolling. After what sounded to me like a serious misstep and kind of an identity crisis in 2005's In Your Honor, the band seems to have refocused and turned out an extremely consistent rock record that's always good but rarely great. The first five songs, for example, could've been released on their own as a kind of statement EP for where the band is headed, in much the way Alice in Chains' Jar of Flies diverged from Dirt.

The record gets a little weaker after that, but not by much (the instrumental "Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners" is largely responsible for the downturn). But the strength of early songs "Long Road to Ruin" and "Come Alive" returns near the end in "But, Honestly," and it says something about the place of this band in the late history of rock. This is a careerist album, through and through, and it's reminiscent in that way of recent Pearl Jam releases. Whatever else happens, you can expect these guys to hold down the fort with a new batch of strong rock anthems every two or three years.

Watch "Erase/Replace," live in Brighton, UK

Dolores O'Riordan / Are You Listening?
Sanctuary

Having last been on a record I liked more than a decade ago, naturally this would be the year for Dolores O'Riordan to release a terrific solo debut. My favorite Cranberries record is probably their third, To the Faithful Departed, and this album is more like that than any of their others. She shoots for a lot of big statements here, and mostly connects. But while much of the harder-edged Cranberries material always seemed to be on the verge of devastation, this album sounds both more mature and more assured. Nothing here is going to set the world on fire, but songs like "In the Garden" and "Ordinary Day" go a long way toward resurrecting a form of the 90s college rock sound that the Cranberries helped to popularize. Her new label, Sanctuary, has built a name for itself by bringing out new material from artists that may have been forgotten (such as Billy Idol, Anthrax, Morrissey, etc.) and that seems like just the kind of place that O'Riordan can continue making her kind of music.

Watch "Loser," live in São Paulo, Brasil

Idlewild / Make Another World
Sanctuary

I have to be honest and say that I can be somewhat unforgiving even with bands I like a lot. Idlewild's 2002 release, The Remote Part, is one of my favorite anthemic rock records of the past decade. Their follow-up, Warnings/Promises, was a boring dadrock mess, combining the worst elements of late-model R.E.M. and the Dashboard Confessional line of emo warbling. It was such a stunning shift in quality that I was entirely prepared for their next record to be abysmal. My pessimism was unjustified, however, as Make Another World turned out to be a pretty decent slice of modern Brit-pop.

Some of the big punches of The Remote Part are back, most notably on "If It Takes You Home," and "No Emotion" brings a kind of modern danceability that the band has never really had before. They've certainly found their feet again and I think have perhaps solidly nailed down their own identity for the first time.

Watch "If It Takes You Home," live in Birmingham, UK