last.fm is a statistics nerd’s wet dream. The ways in which it lets you slice and dice your listening history are fantastic, and my only wish is that there were even more charts and graphs for me to stare at, staring at reams of data to divine some greater truth about Rainer Maria versus Versus. (If you’re like me, then you’ll find unofficial last.fm data-slicing sites like the fantastic Lastgraph a real treat.) One of the things you can do is sort the last year of your listening history by album. last.fm will give you a list of albums sorted by number of track plays; once you divide by the number of album tracks, you have a rough figure of how many times you’ve listened to the album over the past year. This year’s winner for me isn’t a 2007 release, but one from last year. Closing the unofficial “make up for stuff I missed from 2006″ series is the little band that could from Montreal, Land of Talk.

Applause Cheer Boo Hiss simply refuses to die. It’s been released several times in Canada alone, and several more times for international markets. The latest release, more than a year after the mini-album’s initial street date, is a UK version with new tracks that have previously only popped up live. Land of Talk, too, is band that refuses to die despite numerous setbacks. Entering the year on a wave of good American press, the band lost their original drummer to tour fatigue not long after SXSW. Then the band finds itself opening for several higher-profile bands, a spell of good luck that leads into an opening gig with the Decemberists in Europe—only to discover on the first day of the tour that the Decemberists cancelled the tour. Colin Meloy and company told everyone involved except their opening act (classy), leaving the band stranded in Britain with non-refundable plane tickets and time to kill. Then, upon their return to North American shores, Land of Talk close out the year by having their equipment stolen in the States.

All this explains why interviews with frontwoman Elizabeth Powell occasionally dip into the melancholy. Whether it’s not feeling Canadian enough, not feeling particularly appreciated in Montreal, or just generally being down and out in Britain, you always get this sense that not enough people are giving this band their richly deserved due, and that at any given moment, Land of Talk is held together with twine and Scotch tape. Maybe the Decemberists just make a habit of abandoning all their opening acts in Britain, I don’t know.

Not that everything has gone wrong for the band, not by a long shot. Applause Cheer Boo Hiss came out in March in the States, and in September in the UK; they got a new drummer who’s more suited to the rigours of non-stop touring; and the long-awaited second album is in the works for next spring. If it’s true what they say about what doesn’t kill you making you stronger, then Land of Talk should have a scorching second release on their hands. I can’t wait.