Top 10 Everything of 2007

#7. Mirrored
by Battles

This mostly instrumental album is more fascinating than lovable — but it's pretty damned fascinating. For one thing, it sounds a lot like... fractals. Ex-Helmet drummer John Stainer kicks Atlas off with a pattern that expands and loops around itself in ways that feel logical, but not natural, while the wordless "vocals" (at least they sound human) hum and whistle and bleep until they gradually congeal into a killer riff. Tonto swings a bit more straightforwardly but still sounds as if it's being beamed from space. If a few years from now it's discovered that Mirrored was a program written by an MIT student that allowed computers to express themselves, I wouldn't be at all surprised.