2007: The year in albums.

For the most part, my favorite singles from 2007 weren’t lifted from my favorite albums. I’m not sure why that frequently seems to be the case, but I suspect it means that I demand something more from a full-length record than I do a three-minute song. If a great song is an escape, then a great album is an experience. This year, these ten records delivered that.

10 | UNDERWORLD Oblivion With Bells
MySpace | Hype Machine

More than any other album on this list, Oblivion With Bells is a sequential collection. Its first single, “Crocodile,” made so much more sense to me when it was paired with “Beautiful Burnout” — on its own, even at six-and-a-half minutes, the track felt incomplete. The same could be said for much of Oblivion: Each song works hard to create an environment where minimal techno and new-wave electro peacefully coexists with Wax Trax grit and Eno ambiance. In an era where casual MP3 collecting has disturbingly corroded the album as a concept, listening to Underworld still requires an investment.

09 | RUFUS WAINWRIGHT Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall
MySpace | Hype Machine

Release The Stars was a good album, of course. But it lacked a few of the qualities that make Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall even better: This album — and, really, the entire concept of recreating a legendary concert by an American icon — was as risky and ballsy and insanely ambitious as an artist might ever get in his career. Had Rufus Wainwright fallen flat on his face, we would have given him a standing ovation for simply trying. Instead, we were confronted by a successful and endearingly idiosyncratic homage that somehow never ran the risk of becoming parody — in addition to the humbling realization that nobody else could have pulled this off.

08 | THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS We Are The Night
MySpace | Hype Machine

Their inclusion in the mid-’90s “electronica explosion” probably undermined their actual position in underground club culture, but the Chemical Brothers’ roots in U.K. house has never been more evident than on We Are The Night. “Do It Again” is as floor-friendly as anything you’ve heard from Get Physical this year, and “The Salmon Dance” — featuring a vocal by The Pharcyde’s Fatlip — is easily the first remarkable hip-house track in well over a decade. But “The Pills Won’t Help You Now,” a psych-pop collaboration with Midlake, better illustrates how the Chemical Brothers have weathered the ever-changing dance climate for nearly fifteen years — as track-makers that are equally as gifted songwriters.

07 | SIOBHÁN DONAGHY Ghosts
MySpace | Hype Machine

I probably said everything I needed to say about Siobhán Donaghy’s Ghosts last time — short of knighting her, anyway. I’m just a sucker for a good underdog story, and this record really did that for me: Even when Donaghy sings with a defeated demeanor, it feels like she just kicked your ass.

06 | MARIA TAYLOR Lynn Teeter Flower
MySpace | Hype Machine

I can’t totally put my finger on it, but Lynn Teeter Flower felt like more of a moment than simply another Maria Taylor album. Her solo debut, 11:11, was a mostly solid, but occasionally stifling collection of songs that sounded less like a singular vision than it did a really good mixtape. But this year, Maria Taylor reeled it all in with dose of decidedly Midwestern soul that keeps Flower from devolving into a potentially Prozac–wispy twee. When Taylor finally does use this record to resort to a whisper, it’s not that she’s afraid to make a point; it’s that she demands your attention.

05 | RYAN ADAMS Easy Tiger
MySpace | Hype Machine

Ryan Adams only released two records in 2007. (It was a slow year, apparently.) Easy Tiger was the one that everyone was tripping over themselves to praise, using the angle of his newfound sobriety to justify the perception that this was his most “focused” album since Heartbreaker. I can’t say for sure that there’s a connection — dude did somehow manage to write the epic Cold Roses on speedballs — but I can certainly endorse the sentiment. When Adams claims, as he does on the album closer, that he finally taught himself how to grow old, you might wince from the premature assessment of a 33-year-old. But a self-evaulation this earnest can’t be too far off.

04 | BLOC PARTY A Weekend In The City
MySpace | Hype Machine

In January, the U.K. Guardian predicted that A Weekend In The City would become “a zeitgeist-defining record in 2007.” By December, the paper had all but forgotten about it, neglecting to mention the record in their year-end Top 20 Albums list. The Guardian wasn’t alone in its backtracking: Weekend scored a #44 position (!) with Stereogum, a #20 spot with the NME, and failed to make the Pitchfork Top 50 altogether. So what happened? I can only deduce that you are all fucking crazy.

03 | ELLIOTT SMITH New Moon
MySpace | Hype Machine

If anyone has the potential to be as posthumously prolific as Tupac Shakur, it’s probably Elliott Smith. But New Moon, a 24-song collection of unreleased material from the Kill Rock Stars era, is hardly a compilation of scraps. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how Elliott could have discarded any of it — much less all of it. Even more discouraging to aspiring songwriters everywhere, this is only a fraction of what’s out there.

02 | ATHLETE Beyond The Neighbourhood
MySpace | Hype Machine

Perhaps tired of being compared to Coldplay, Athlete left the piano ballads off their third album and replaced them with an exponentially more favorable mix of big British guitar rock and subtle ambient electronica. The commercial audience they picked up on their last album sure lost interest fast, but in terms of The Big Picture, Athlete’s 2007 mission statement hung on a foolproof conviction — that “Computer Love” is, in fact, a better song than “Talk.” Are you really prepared to fight with that?

01 | FEIST The Reminder
MySpace | Hype Machine

When I first heard The Reminder, I wanted to lock myself up in a Parisian apartment with an acoustic guitar and a cadre of hand-clapping friends. If Leslie Feist smoked clove cigarettes and listened to Edith Piaf there, then that’s what I’d do, too. If she sat on her balcony with a pot of coffee and basket of baguettes, then I’d find her bakery and carb-load — just like her. Feist’s massive success this year couldn’t obscure the fact that — for at least as long as it took before that iPod commercial hit the airwaves — The Reminder did what all classic records should do: It didn’t make me want to meet Feist as much as it made me want to be her.