Results tagged “Monster Magnet”

This isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other — sometimes in obvious ways, often not — and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.

My goal is simple: to give readers some ideas for new listening, or perhaps to spur you to go back to an artist you’d dismissed. There are a lot more familiar names in this year’s mix than last year’s, and that’s because of the accelerating fragmentation of the music market; it seems increasingly difficult for anything to capture the public’s imagination for more than a few seconds.

So here are 18 songs that I felt deserve more love than our short cultural attention span typically allows.

Dismiss Monster Magnet at your peril. It’s certainly not difficult, but it’s unwise. The band might be all that rock and roll has left. The five-piece New Jersey outfit has taken the Black Sabbath/Led Zeppelin torch that Soundgarden carried in the early 1990s and stripped the 1970s-style heavy metal of its grungier self-loathing and self-importance of the past decade. By re-claiming heavy music from rap metal and what passes for “alternative” these days, Monster Magnet might just be the savior of good ol’ rock and roll.