Who released the best album in the last year?

The Strokes, the motherfucking Strokes! Okay, maybe not. But last August I found Room on Fire online and I, well, I pilfered it. I stuck it to those New Yorkers, who play their guitars with caviar stained fingers, singing vocals while getting blow jobs from runway models, beating out the high hat while watching French films(and not elegant, easily beautiful French films like Amelie, but weird, sexually deviant films filled with cigarettes and penis dangling like The Dreamers).

I stuck it to 'em, and listened. And listened. I turned my room into a bastion of fire, listening Under Control so often I started telling my girlfriend I didn't want to give it to her her way. I had it going on repeat in my puny Winamp player every day for a month; I could have criss crossed a country, if say, that country was England, or travelled the burroughs of New York, listening to Albert and Nikolai and Julian and Fab and that other dude.

And then I started to think. Is this the greatest fucking album ever released? I'm listening to it like it is, every dishrag on the newstand tells me it is, bloggers throughout the interweb are saying it is, so yeah, obvs it is the best jawn evs. But it wasn't.

I tried to keep listening, to the catchy guitars and wonderful beats, to the spit out lyrics tossed out of a cab rollin' down the Tunnel. But alas, once that balloon is popped you can't inflate it back. The Strokes saved nothing. And I in turn didn't save them.

Fast forward ten months. Room on Fire breathes like a lung full of Marlboros, when all you've had that day is air, sweet, fresh, unkilling Midwest air, and god did you miss that nicotine.