The Jonas Brothers - "Still In Love With You"

Unlike America's angrier teenage girls, I find it impossible to hate on these curly-headed, social-networking-feud instigators, especially since underneath the bazillion dollar digi-production (see if you can spot the organ bobbing on the waves of compressed guitar) all their non-ballads are just old-fashioned bubble-punk with the sneer swtiched off. (Jess)

Jonas Brothers - "Still In Love With You" [YouTube]
Jonas Brothers [MySpace]

Paramore - "Misery Business"

The best pop-punk track of the year: three cheers for sweet revenge, big "whoooas" that dared you to not sing along with them, and a spitfire frontwoman who took to her Livejournal to disclaim the use of the Lord's name in the song's sing-along-'til-the-rapture chorus. (Maura)

Paramore - "Misery Business" [YouTube]
Paramore [MySpace]

Gui Boratto - "Beautiful Life"

Cheesy, life-affirming trance hidden away in the sleeve of a minimal techno 12-inch, with the bonus of stupidly heart-melting New Order bass twang and the biggest staggered climaxes of the year. (Jess)

Gui Boratto - "Beautiful Life" [YouTube]
Gui Boratto [MySpace]

Robyn - "This One's For You (Remix)"

The year's one truly new(ish) song from the reinvented Swedish kook was the dark underbelly of "Irreplaceable," three minutes and change of post-dumping freakouts over a breezy acoustic guitar stolen from Ne-Yo's arsenal. (Maura)

Robyn [MySpace]

Double Dagger - "Luxury Condos For The Poor

Moving from Double Dagger's native Baltimore back to my own native Philly only underscored the sad universality of this lugubrious post-hardcore lament over city governments refusing to rectify institutional poverty in favor of pandering to developers building "waterfront gravesights, 30 stories high." "If you've lived here your whole life, it's time to get out," but to where? (Jess)

Double Dagger - "Luxury Condos For The Poor (Live At Whartscape)" [Look closely for my big bald head somewhere in the background.]
Double Dagger [MySpace]

My Teenage Stride - "To Live And Die In The Airport Lounge"

Fresh Orange Juice served up in a Brooklyn cafe, with a side order of world-traveler ennui. Plus the video has zombies. Zombies! (Maura)

My Teenage Stride - "To Live And Die In The Airport Lounge" [MySpace]
My Teenage Stride [MySpace]

Shackleton - "Blood On My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos Apocalypso Now Mix)"

A crackling deep house rhythm track and the low-end of dubstep wring their hands somewhere between England and Berlin for the spirits of the 21st-century's political bystanders, a track only about right for gloomy bus rides out of the more blighted parts of your neighborhood. (Jess)

Skull Disco [Official Site]

Blood Red Shoes - "It's Getting Boring By The Sea"

Bitching about a dead-end town, transformed into something constructive by guitars that sound like they've been pulverized. (Maura)

Blood Red Shoes - "It's Getting Boring By The Sea" [YouTube]
Blood Red Shoes [MySpace]

Dirty Projectors - "Rise Above"

Davey Longstreth's musical revamp of Black Flag's Damaged was warmer but no less forbidding (and impressive) in places than any of the year's neo-proggery, but the words of hardcore's most supposedly nihilistic (the element of Longstreth's experiment so often glossed over by reviewers) provided an unexpected humanizing element when stripped and repurposed, a cracked, life-affirming jolt in a bleak year. (Jess)

Dirty Projectors - "Rise Above" [YouTube]
Dirty Projectors [MySpace]

Britney Spears - "Heaven On Earth"

Is the year's most photographed woman even singing on this track? Does it even matter? It's a grand, swooping song that's made for the last dance of the night, an ode to Mr. Right Now that dresses up her tawdry hooking-up-with-paps expoits enough to make them seem almost purposeful. (Maura)

Britney Spears - "Heaven On Earth" [YouTube]
Britney Spears [MySpace]

Idolator's 2007 Top 40 List Of Awesomeness

Wouldn't we all like to find a doctor who could protect us from zombies and the CIA within those long, eye-glazing "health service provider" directories handed out by HR departments across the land? In this clip for My Teenage Stride's "To Live And Die In The Airport Lounge"—one of their standout songs, it's a bit of C86-recalling cheer that'll have you singing along with its boisterous chorus by the second go-round—the bandmembers all have odd problems (the aforementioned zombies, an "opacity disorder," a weird thing where slices of pizza get turned into pieces of meat) that get miraculously fixed by a doctor who takes the notion of "general practitioner" to a new level. I'm going to guess that his office is somewhere in the bowels of Brooklyn, just because. Maybe it's right by the McSweeney's store?

My Teenage Stride - To Live and Die in the Airport Lounge [YouTube]
My Teenage Stride [MySpace]

Jedediah Smith is the Brooklyn-based songwriter behind the band My Teenage Stride, and listening to the band's third full-length, Ears Like Golden Bats, you have to wonder just how much time he's spent obsessing over the Trouser Press; Ears wears its influences like one-inch pins bearing the logos of Orange Juice and the Go-Betweens. We've been especially charmed by the haunting "Reversal" (think of what would happen if the Chills' "Pink Frost" were turned upside down) and the manic, pogo-worthy "Chock's Rally":

My Teenage Stride - Reversal [MP3, link expired]
My Teenage Stride - Chock's Rally [MP3, link expired]
My Teenage Stride [MySpace]