It occurred to me around the time all the Canadian university frosh week concerts were being announced that Stars is the new Tea Party, Metric is the new Moist, and Feist is the new Sarah McLachlan. Welcome to bizarro 1997, kids, where your CanCon heroes of old have been replaced with Folgers crystals. Let’s see if anyone notices.

I don’t mean to make those comparisons literally; it’s more an observation that the Canadian music industry has latched on to the new set of indie rock heroes the same way it latched onto the alt-rock heroes of the late 90s, thus completing a cycle that began a couple of years ago when bands like the Strokes, Interpol and Bloc Party first became popular. As a genre identifier, indie rock has never had much meaning; it represented an ethos more than any particular sound, which was why you could include the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Don Caballero and Mates of State under the same extremely large umbrella. But that ethos of independence has moved on, now divorced from many of the bands that used to carry its banner high. This is not a sellout lamentation, but rather a recognition that things change. Eventually your idols, the ones you saw in that dingy little club in Kingston back when they were new and hip and no one knew who they were, they become the next big thing, sell tons of albums, break up, move on, and then reform as Credence Clearwater Revisited and play dingy little clubs in Kingston again. Such is the way of nature. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

All that said, 2007 was a surprisingly good year for music in my neck of the woods. I honestly can’t think of many albums that I disliked this year; only one album from 2007 was even close to taking the Daybreaker prize (so named for Beth Orton’s rather unfortunate third album, which should’ve been taken out back along with Ryan Adams and shot twice in the head). The first four months of the year, so often a barren and bleak period for album releases, was chock full of intriguing and exciting records. And if my recent re-examination of 2006 is any indication, there’ll be a bunch of other amazing albums that I’ve missed completely.

But maybe the reason why 2007 didn’t sound so bad has less to do with the amount of really good music and more to do with the number of old favourites releasing decent albums. Ten years ago I’d just discovered Sleater-Kinney and Versus and Stereolab and Sonic Youth and a whole bunch of other bands that eventually came to be my bread and butter. A couple of years later it became so obvious to me that the previous musical universe I lived in—one dominated by the likes of the Tea Party and other alt-rock radio staples—wasn’t actually a universe at all, but rather a very small box containing a few meagre scraps and a whole lot of advertising. I feel a little bit like I’m stuck in the box again, and though I’m content to stay a while, I know that just buying up the new album from my favourite bands every couple of years is a path that leads to disaster—that is to say, growing old.

So if Stars is the new Tea Party, where’s the new Sleater-Kinney? Hopefully I’ll find out in 2008.

Review 2007 is next.