As her lovely tune-banjo, choir, strings, finger snaps-progresses, everybody prances and skips in an intricate, goofy-yet-endearing hipster Busby Berkeley number with Feist as its beating heart. Leslie Feist, a member of the loose-knit Canadian music mafia that includes Broken Social Scene and the New Pornographers, prances about with a rainbow of friends in what may or may not be an empty American Apparel warehouse. The video (and iPod commercial) of 2007, and one of its better songs, too. To our ears, this list represents what sounded sweetest in 2007.ฤก, 2, 3, 4: Feist. Hopefully you'll find something here that you missed, and be glad you did. But then you don't need us to tell you that Rihanna's "Umbrella" was a pretty good pop song. So are these the best sounds of the year? Certainly you won't find too many chart-toppers here.
And then there's the fact that music is painfully subjective-you'd have better luck compiling a less-divisive best-ice-cream-flavors list. Even for those of us whose job it is to stay on top of the latest releases, it invariably proves overwhelming. Before we get started, a caveat: no one here at NEWSWEEK has heard all of the music released over the past 365 days, so any best-of list is going to be, by necessity, incompletely informed.