Mark Kozelek (previously of Red House Painters) has the kind of melancholic voice you mostly have to be in the mood to properly appreciate, but every once in a while he throws out utter gems, like Never Ending Math Equation, that regardless of your mood, will have yourself soaring. In case you’re wondering, it’s from an album made up, curiously, of Modest Mouse covers, all given that unique Kozelek treatment.

I don’t really know how it could be any better.

The Rut’s ‘This cartoon just blue its brains out’. There are many other great cartoons in the archives, so I’d definitely recommend having a dig through.

Spike Press is another independent designer of awesome music prints — I pretty much want to buy them all, including those for bands I’ve never heard of. The only annoyance is that the site doesn’t seem to allow you to add multiple posters to your basket.

One of the few things I wasn’t keen on when Leopard came along last year, was the dropping of the very slightly curved top-left and -right corners of the menu bar, and I kind of hoped they’d make an — at least optional — reappearance, along with the non-translucent menu-bar which was restored in 10.5.2. They didn’t of course, so I was pleased when I stumbled across Many Trick’s Displaperture. Although it provides options for crazy amounts of curvature in all four corners of your display, all I can see anyone really wanting is the smallest available amount of curvaceousness on those top corners, so that’s what I’d recommend.

The app doesn’t seem to modify any system files, and you’ll be back to the default as soon as you kill the application, which runs in the background.

Now that I’ve had my wish for a couple of days, I’ve shunned the curviness in favour of the default straight-edged menu bar — it was a nice experiment, but I’ve decided Leopard probably suits its sharper look, so I’m finally ready to let go. Still, I’ll never forget you, oh lovely rounded corners.

I had fully intended to write up a post on my favourite music from 2007 at the beginning of the year, but for one reason or another the, admittedly fairly minimal, hassle of putting together a nice downloadable album and what-not was meant I didn’t. I came across Muxtape the other day, and instantly knew I could knock up what I wanted to do in a few minutes flat. So, fashionably late, I present taster tracks from my favourite albums of 2007.

Arcade Fire – Neon Bible

Keep The Car Running

Undoubtedly my favourite “single” of the year, it’s a pretty much perfect three-and-a-half minute sonic blast from an equally brilliant album of big sounds. Tracks like Intervention with the church organ backdrop sound huge, but never out of control.

If there was a better driving song released last year, I’d like to hear it. And despite what you might read, it’s as good as anything off their debut Funeral.

Stars – In Our Bedroom After The War

Take Me To the Riot

I loved Stars’ 2005 album, Set Yourself On Fire, and was very much looking forward to hearing what they would follow it with. Despite a few instant gems like Midnight Coward, I was a bit underwhelmed at first but, months later, I’ve found myself listening to it more and more and it’s definitely an album that slowly reveals its secrets, and it now seems a natural progression from Set Yourself On Fire. All in all, it’s such a distinct, polished sound that it well deserves its place here.

Wintersleep – Welcome To The Night Sky

Archaeologists

What do you know — yet more great Canadian music.

It’s pretty refreshing for an album to run at just 40 minutes over 10 tracks too — no filler and no skippers, especially when the last track is an eight-plus minute semi-instrumental epic, and one of the best closing tracks I’ve heard in a long time.

From their previous two albums – both self-titled – I really enjoyed The Jaws Of Life, which I only recently realised uses a similar kind of technique to Archaeologists for building the track up to a point where you think it’s ending, only for it to carry on building after almost coming to a stop. These guys are surely destined for greatness.

Jesse Malin – Glitter In The Gutter

Black Haired Girl

The Fine Art of Self-Destruction was a brilliant debut album from a few years back, but the follow-up – The Heat – was a bit of a disappointment by comparison, so I was really pleased that Glitter In The Gutter took off pretty much where the former left off, albeit with a more direct rootsy rock approach. With Bruce Springsteen guesting on one of the tracks, it even had the potential to get out to a bigger audience.

Great as Jesse’s albums are, he’s a hero live. I saw him play to a couple of hundred people some time last year and it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. He’s also has a great stage-presence, and clearly enjoys telling stories, which makes for great entertainment.

I could have picked pretty much any track to feature here, but the drums and bass combination which drives Black Haired Girl makes it a great introduction if you’ve not heard the album before.

New Pornographers – Challengers

Failsafe

I was sold Challengers on the Shinsy My Rights Versus Yours, which is indeed a great track, but Failsafe is another minor classic. Combining vocals from Neko Case and a guitar riff that pulses in and out throughout the track, they carve out a very unique sound.

The Shins – Wincing The Night Away

Phantom Limb

Ah, those Shins. They sounded amazing, and didn’t look too bad either, in Natalie Portman’s headphones in Garden State, but despite their being no New Slang here, it’s still their best, and most consistent, album to date, which by definition should put it in anyone’s best albums of 2007 list.

The Twang – Love It When I Feel Like This

2 Lovers

I saw The Twang support James last year and, to be frank, they kind of irritated me with their cockney-wideboy on-stage shenanigans. For some reason I got a copy of their album and realised their were more than a few good tracks on it. 2 Lovers is just one, so here it is. Alrite geeza?

Athlete – Beyond The Neighbourhood

Hurricane

I was torn for the 10th spot between a handful of other albums, but in the end iTunes play counts don’t lie, and Beyond The Neighbourhood was one of my most played albums of the year, so here it must feature. I think that about says it all for this album – it’s in no way world changing, but I enjoy listening to it greatly nontheless, and it’s probably my favourite Athlete album now. I also love the moody instrumental In Between 2 States which kicks the album off.

The National – Boxer

Apartment Story

Speaking of opening tracks, Boxer features possibly the best opening track since man discovered sliced bread. The way it builds from a simple piano line to an ensemble of guitars and then horns will make the hair on your neck stand up on end with every spin. Listen to the lyrics and it’ll whisk you to your own escapist Fake Empire.

I’m featuring Apartment Story here because it’s my second favourite track on the album, but I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere unlike Fake Empire. With lyrics like “Tired and wired we ruin too easy / sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave / but I’ll be with you behind the couch when they come / on a different day just like this one” it follows the same melancholic need for escapism.

Boxer isn’t quite on a par with their previous album, Alligator – which I’d recommend in a heartbeat, but it’s up there.

Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago

Lump Sum

Bon Iver was a late discovery at the end of the year, thanks to stumbling across a couple of samples floating around online, but something about the hauntingly beautiful sound of tracks like Skinny Love, Blindsided and Re: Stacks had me hooked from the outset. The story goes that the album was made in a three month long spell of winter isolation deep in the Wisconsin woods, fueled by self-felled firewood and a deer he (Justin Vernon) hunted and fed upon for the rest of his hibernation. I don’t know how much of this story is embellished, but it makes for a fine tale all the same, and I love the idea that an album, or anything creative, can be created out of a period of isolation like this.

For Emma, Forever Ago is another album which takes a little work to get under the surface of, but it’s well worth putting in that effort.

Muxtape

Just a quick parting word on Muxtape itself: I absolutely love it. With it’s big iPhone style interface, it’s simplicity itself but, because of that, it’s fast, keyboard navigable (arrow keys to skip forward/backward, enter to pause/resume) and doesn’t get in the way of the music in any way.

Hopefully record companies will see it for what it is, particularly as there’s no way to download the music, and realise that it’s a perfect way to promote artists in these digital times.

Even better, combine it with Fluid and the Coverflow plugin on OS X, as described in this screencast, and you’ve got a stellar way to browse and discover new Muxtapes. It’ll be even better if contacts and genres are added to the service.

All in all, I’m pretty sure the next mux won’t be too far around the corner.

Honourable Mentions

Finally, here’s a few other albums I considered including which are also well worth checking out:

• Andrew Bird — Armchair Apocrypha
• Iron & Wine — The Shepard’s Dog
• Rilo Kiley — Under The Blacklight
• Ryan Adams — Easy Tiger
• Turin Brakes — Dark On Fire
• The Manic Street Preachers — Send Away The Tigers
• Bruce Springsteen — Magic
• Twighlight Sad — Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

And here’s the link to the Muxtape again in case you missed it earlier.

Do you like rock music? Good. So do I. And so do British Sea Power, judging by their new album Do You Like Rock Music?, from which this, ahem, quarter’s Track of the Week is taken. It’s pretty much perfect 3 minute-single fodder — a chuggy guitar riff, pounding drums, and great vocals, none of which let up until that three minute mark.

It’s probably my favourite album of the year so far too. Play loud.

Today we launched the Recycling Group Finder — a fun little project we put together recently to make finding your nearest Freecycle and other recycling groups, wherever you are in the world.

Will, who takes full credit for the idea, has blogged about some of the reasoning behind doing so, so head over to his site for more on that.

You might also like to sign-up to get notified of something else related that’s in the pipe-line.

Probably my favourite little application in a quite a while is Pukka. It does relatively little, but makes what it does do – posting to del.icio.us – an absolute cinch. del.icio.us itself has a simple but well thought out web-based interface which I really like, but, even with the bookmarklet, it can still be slow waiting for web pages to load when you just want to file something away and get on with things.

Pukka allows you to post a link either by dragging a URL to it or by using its bookmarklet, which works in a similar way to the regular bookmarklet, pre-filling the URL and Title fields automatically for you. Pukka caches your existing tags regularly and provides the handy type-ahead suggestions you’d expect. It handles duplicate URLs well too, helping you keep your account nice and tidy.

I’d recommend you take a quick dive into the settings and set it to hide itself after submitting a post, regardless of how long this takes. It will then notify you via Growl once it’s been successfully added, if you wish.

Even though it keeps things simple, Pukka still has an extra couple of tricks up its sleeve. Right clicking on the dock icon allows you to navigate your bookmarks via tag and, more recently, it’s also started caching a local copy of your bookmarks for searching in Spotlight. This is still a bit hit-and-miss unfortunately it seems but Justin, the developer, pushes out updates regularly so this is bound to get even better.

I highly recommend the fantastic video too. 100% brilliant.