So, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2007 list is up, and our Top 100 Tracks hit yesterday. We are taking a break for the rest of December and we'll be back in full force on January 2nd. Forkcast updates during this time will be few. In the meantime, read about albums, listen to some great tracks, watch videos, take Pitchfork's first-ever readers poll, and check out what some of our favorite artists liked this year.

You know what just about everyone seemed to dig in 07? M.I.A.'s Kala. Yesterday the video for "Paper Planes" arrived with some controversy. MTV, like Letterman's show before it, had a problem with the percussive gunshots on the chorus, prompting a lengthy screed on M.I.A.'s MySpace blog ("STOP THE PAPER PLANES VIDEO SABOTAGE!!!!!!!!!"). Here's the video, as she intended. In addition, M.I.A.'s label, XL, has posted the first in a promised series of short videos documenting her current UK tour. The clip has the usual mix of candid and performance footage, with bits featuring tour-mates including Rye Rye and Afrikan Boy. Also: gunshots! Have a safe and happy holiday.

M.I.A.: "Paper Planes"

Pitchfork is on holiday break for the rest of the month, but be sure to check out our year-end lists (Top 100 Tracks of 2007 is up today, albums list to follow tomorrow). Forkcast updates during this time will be few, but a new Christmas song by Sufjan Stevens is online, so what the heck. Last week we pointed you toward "Christmas Eve Nite" by Danielson, posted on the Sounds Familyre label's blog as part of a project offering a free Christmas song each day for 13 days. Today, they've posted a ramshackle version of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" by Sufjan, recorded over Thanksgiving weekend this year.

MP3:> Sufjan Stevens: "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"

Another pleasant surprise from Sweden. When the Tough Alliance single "First Class Riot" turned up in a snowboard commercial the other day, we half-joked about the ad getting listed as the next item in the, ahem, varied catalogue of the label run by the electropop duo, Sincerely Yours. Nope, instead was the suggestion that Stockholm should put a horse's head under the chimney of every art gallery in its limits and flood the streets with cocaine-- "as a Christmas present to humanity." After that, though, the label posted a new single from one of its best and most interesting performers, the Honeydrips.

The project of Gothenburg, Sweden's Mikael Carlsson, formerly of Dorotea, the Honeydrips previously released an online single called "Åh, Karolin". It was a Swedish-language chanson based on Pierre Bachelet's music for 1974 softcore erotic film Emmanuelle. I'm not immediately sure what reference the newly posted "Hej Då Karolin" might be making, but it's another one sung in an unfamiliar tongue, with Carlsson's fey vocal crackling from the lo-fi recording amid Field Mice-like acoustic guitar and sampled orchestration. One thing's for sure: "Just another lovesong... not," the label's website says. The Honeydrips' Here Comes the Future came out earlier this year and includes TTA Guest List fave "Fall From a Height", previously posted here as a remix by fellow Gothenburger the Field.

MP3:> The Honeydrips: "Hej Då Karolin"
[Here Comes the Future is out now on Sincerely Yours]

This track by Chicago's Cave starts off like a nice little dance-and-shout jam, well-deep bass and mid-range guitar chasing one another's tails in criss-cross figures. The drums follow the lead, pushing a motorik regimen with élan but little fanfare. The guitar eventually finds its high end, clipping away like dub on heavy uppers. Synthesizers and chant-in-a-closet vocals peel off of the riff's back. Xylophone steals the synthesizer's thunder around the four-minute mark, although you're now just dancing with a different kind of smile.

But the bottom finally falls out, the shit finally hits the fan, and the rubber finally peels from the proverbial road and warps the pick-ups on the guitar that shape-shifts the song for its next three minutes. The rhythm doesn't care about the guitar, and the guitarist certainly doesn't give a fuck about the rhythm. Imagine Thurston Moore and J. Mascis trading 8s through big amplifiers in an alley behind a German disco around 1973. The synthesizer protests, and the rhythm eventually scratches its itch by tightening its gaps. But when the guitar sears itself into ashes with a minute left, leaving the track mostly where it started, you'll only have one thought: "Bro, more guitar."

"Hello. My name is Geneviève and I am a French-speaking person from Québec in Canada." So begins the bio on the K Records page for the woman who makes music as Woelv. I will refrain from commenting on the wolf-iness of the project's name, but there's no doubt that this track, from her K Records album Tout Seul dans la Forêt en Plein Jour, Avez-Vous Peur?, is a haunting miniature of home-recorded death-folk. The music consists only of a bass that seems to be moving quietly down a dim highway on padded feet. The voice swings from a barely-audible whisper to disturbing shrieks that wind around layers of harmony. The lyrics are in French, a language I don't speak, but I imagine them to be heavy and bleak. It's a wonderfully moody track, and it sounds better after dark.

[from Tout Seul dans la Forêt en Plein Jour, Avez-Vous Peur?; out now on K]

The room has been filling up with White Williams' Smoke more and more often around here, and some live recordings have come along lately to make the songs sound new again. Was it only Monday when the Cleveland dance-pop dude's Daytrotter session went up, including a previously unreleased instrumental track? "Williams' oh so exhaustively documented tour with energetic East Coast art-partiers Dan Deacon and Girl Talk is finally over," we wrote, but the man born Joe Williams and his band must still have live music energy left to burn. The album cover suggests using a hookah.

Blunted T. Rex boogie is still in the air on this rendition of Smoke's "In the Club", recorded live in the studio for PRI's show "Fair Game". Toward the end, Williams sings Marc Bolan-like catchy nonsense about dancing with his "spider love"-- "We'll spit the venom"-- as keyboards plink, guitar goes off on a glammy good-time solo, and glassy echoes cloud up the performance further. The full show is streaming over at "Fair Game", plus an interview with host Faith Salie.

MP3:> White Williams: "In the Club" (Live on "Fair Game")
[original track from Smoke; out now on Tigerbeat 6]

There's a touch of Ishtar to the latest video by ThunderAnt, the team of Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, as they collaborate telephonically, trying to write "the perfect song." Look for a special cameo.

Video:> ThunderAnt: "The Perfect Song"

During CMJ a couple of months ago, Los Angeles duo No Age were the toast of New York's Bowery Ballroom, as Pitchfork's Zach Baron told you. With classic SST punk and the art world both in mind, guitarist Randy Randall and singing drummer Dean Spunt banged out this year's great Weirdo Rippers, a compilation of vinyl-only EPs that put noisy thrash and ambient textures side by side and often on top of one another. The dudes also made a CMJ stop at the city's Other Music, which has launched a film series of in-store performances from this year's annual event.

No Age sound anything but atmospheric here, bashing the drums and chunking away at chords on a new song, "Sleeper Hold", from their upcoming record on Sub Pop. Then they slow down and create more distance on a rendition of "Neck Escaper", which we posted here in February. Randall and Spunt also take some time to talk with an interviewer from the store, saying: "What you're doing is just being part of someone's community and culture, and I think, beyond commerce, there's ideas. You know what I mean? Not that we're against making money, in any shape or form, but it's just at the same time, it's like, I'm way more about sharing ideas." Their ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

[Weirdo Rippers is out now on Fat Cat]

On former Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan's recently released Hourglass, "Deeper and Deeper" is where the gloves come off (if not the ProTools). Gahan embraces the part of psycho predator, growling like he's gotta have it and taking a much-appreciated risk by hamming it up in the role so thoroughly. DFA dance maven the Juan Maclean-- whose previous band Six Finger Satellite made a welcome, nightmarish return of their own earlier this year-- uses Gahan's studio-scrubbed snarls as a starting point to thrust himself into a menacing techno epic. The original's OK, but the remix works best when Maclean gets beyond his source material almost entirely.

The first few minutes of the nearly eight-minute track stick a couple of verses from Gahan over a clicking, echoey synth drone, heavy beat, and occasional bongos or tablas. The line that emerges the most here is "I want your love", and this ambiguous declaration-- compared with the overly spelled-out freakiness of "you know I like it when you put up a fight"-- gives it more and deeper resonance. Then about halfway through, pretty much everything but a Star Trek-alarm synth and some electronic percussion cuts out. From there, Maclean goes harder than before, synths squiggling beautifully overhead, deeper and deeper into whatever's going on in his head. And when he's done, baby, he's done.

Stream:> Dave Gahan: "Deeper and Deeper (Juan Maclean Club Mix)"
[original track from Hourglass; out now on Mute]

Various Production are gone from XL, but the English dubsteppers are no less shadowy and mysterious for the change. "Risen", from Various' forthcoming full-length collaboration with Gerry Mitchell as well as a Christmas package including a t-shirt and USB bracelet, does a similar "dubstep plus folk" as Jess Harvell described in last year's The World Is Gone, and as you'd expect, it's a lot more Halloween than ho-ho-ho. Organic drums and creaking squeeze-box keyboards of some kind loop over and over again in waltz-time, eventually joined by backing vocals that could be the oh-we-ohs of the Wicked Witch of the West's foot soldiers. Rather than sighing female vocals on top, though, we get Mitchell's avuncular burr, describing "fever vengeances", blood, damp gardens, and "lice scuttling around" in his hair. If lice were included in the Various t-shirt package, they'd have to tell us, right? Another reason to stay off the "naughty" list.

The precocious scamps of Cardiff, Wales septet Los Campesinos! have done animated videos. And they've done a really good live-action video where they argue about the relative merits of punk and twee-pop's most beloved icons. Recorded in Los Angeles, the video for "Death to Los Campesinos!"-- originally from their early, blog-circulated demo and now re-recorded as the first single from forthcoming full-length debut Hold On Now, Youngster...-- starts out looking like the video where Los Campesinos! decide: "Hey, we can play in a proper studio now. Let's make one where we're singing with headphones on like we're in some real 'We Are the World' shit."

But then balloons, confetti, feathers, kittens, rainbows, and stuffed animals start shooting out of the speakers, and soon Los Campesinos! are overwhelmed by the power of their own punk-charged indie-pop. As for the song itself, it's another reason to put exclamation points on your calendar next to... whatever day next year this album comes out. With all the frenetic energy, shouted hooks, glockenspiels, and bright, scrawling guitars of 2007's excellent Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP, the song also shows that all this touring and critical acclaim hasn't yet dulled their self-deprecating sense of humor, with lyrics about war economies, father Führers, artificial intelligence, robots, and leopards changing their spots. "I invented you, and I will destroy you," Aleksandra and Gareth Campesinos! sing to each other. They kind of did-- dig the Ramones-like noms de punk, the literal sign of their self-invention-- and let's hope they don't.

[from Hold On Now, Youngster...; due 04/01/08 from Arts & Crafts]