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2007's best albums

Mika: Perfect pop star

Feist: Finally sold a few copies

Bruce Springsteen: This year's Magic was one of his best

Jamie T: Witty pop

Paul Connolly takes a look at this year's best albums in pop, indie, rock and urban.

POP

There were two great debuts by new talents in 2007 - Made Of Bricks by Kate Nash, who received the usual flak from poncy critics who felt that she looked too posh to have a London accent, and Mika's Life In Cartoon Motion, which attracted the kind of vitriol usually reserved for fundamentalist terrorist paedophiles. Mika is the perfect pop star - sexually ambiguous, playful and capable of getting right up the snouts of music snobs.

Otherwise both Sugababes with Change and Girls Aloud with Tangled Up consolidated their positions as the pre-eminent girl groups of our time, while Britney Spears shocked everyone by releasing the really fine Blackout.

Whether or not she actually wrote any of it was irrelevant. As for Newton Faulkner's risible Hand Built By Robots, if someone will lend me the hose and brush, I'll do the rest.

INDIE

Pete Doherty's Babyshambles stumbled somewhere near to coherence on Shotter's Nation but more adventurous music was offered by the excellent Cribs on Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever.

Arctic Monkeys released their second very good album in as many years, Favourite Worst Nightmare. Klaxons, somewhat surprisingly, snaffled the Mercury Music Prize with the patchy but exciting Myths Of The Near Future.

North America produced the best in this category, however. Feist's The Reminder was my album of the year and finally sold a few copies as a result of the iPod advert.

ROCK

If you haven't laid your hands on a copy of Bruce Springsteen's Magic yet, then do so immediately. The album may have received a bafflingly mixed reception from critics but, take my word for it, it's one of his best - noisy, tuneful and thoughtful.

One band who may have listened to a couple of albums by Springsteen, right, while they were growing up are The Hold Steady, whose Boys And Girls In America was an exciting, wordy take on beefy rock.

Radiohead's In Rainbows provided the biggest talking point of the year in music when they released it online in a fashion similar to that of an honesty bar - you paid what you thought it was worth. Turns out it was worth a tenner of anyone's money, as it was their most accessible and lyrically honest album since OK Computer.

URBAN

It was number one for what seemed like the entire miserable summer but that wasn't the most remarkable thing about Umbrella by Rihanna, off Good Girl Gone Bad. That a song so oddly syncopated and with such an ungainly yet catchy chorus could capture so many people for so long was deeply strange.

In a good way, mind. Untrue, the second album by Burial was even stranger - fidgety and full of desiccated but beautiful soul.

Panic Prevention by Jamie T was filled with witty pop, while The Evolution Of Robin Thicke showed the grown-ups' Justin Timberlake could channel Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye through a skinny white man's body.

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