At the beginning of 2007, if you had asked me what upcoming albums I was most looking forward to, I probably would have said the new Arcade Fire, !!!, and Bright Eyes. If you had instead told me that I would be spending most of my time listening to LCD Soundsystem, Of Montreal, and Modest Mouse, I would have laughed at you. Laughed and thought poorly of your lineage. Because that would just be stupid.

LCD Soundsystem had some good singles, but their first album was at least 70% filler and entirely too long. I was neutral on Modest Mouse, and through the way my brain works I'd always get them confused with Mouse on Mars. And Of Montreal...they were so precocious that I always figured there were just shy of being a novelty act and were frankly kind of irritating.

And yet, despite you also would have been correct. So what the hell happened? Sound of Silver is awesome all the way through, with the possible exception of that piano tinkle on "All My Friends"¹. I bought We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank on a whim after liking the nautical video for "Dashboard", and was pleasantly surprised by how much fun and varied the album is. And Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is just great and eminently listenable, without the aspects that annoyed me in previous Of Montreal songs. I've been pretty much rotating between all three albums in my car for the past few months.

By comparison, Neon Bible, Myth Takes, and Cassadega all have good tracks on them (especially Neon Bible, which has some of my favorite songs of the year), but I just don't find myself wanting to listen to the albums as wholes. If a song comes on when I'm listening to a shuffled mix, I'll bop along, but I just skip over the cds when trying to find something new to listen to. The !!! and Bright Eyes discs both have problems with too many of the songs sounding the same, and I guess Bright Eyes and Arcade Fire just doesn't make for great driving music.

So yeah, about halfway through the year I'd say my top three discs are Sound of Silver, We Were Dead, and Hissing Fauna. The new Bloc Party Weekend in the City and Rosebuds Night of the Furies albums almost made that list, and I suspect that Voxtrot will too after I've owned it for a few more weeks.

Coming up in the next few month are new albums from Interpol, Editors, New Pornographers, and Okkervil River. Will I fall in love with them, or instead go for something completely unpredicted? The pre-release tracks I've heard from Editors² and Okkervil³ are great and have me very excited, and the New Pornographers⁴ one is growing on me. (I've yet to hear any of the new Interpol because of my aversion to streaming music and because I'm still holding a grudge at them for playing Pittsburgh but not DC.)