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I resisted MySpace like I resisted the World Wide Web, seat belts, unleaded gas, Barry Goldwater… but I digress. Since familiarizing myself with MySpace’s vast musical wilderness, I’ve become addicted to the surprises it reveals. Sometimes you discover a new outhouse, sometimes it’s like discovering new continents in wooden ships. The winnowing process never stops, but you can discern certain patterns. Lately, bands with really weird names but interesting music have been popping onto radar.

Tokyo Pudding (Tokyo): Remember Bill Murray’s appearance on the inane, utterly stupid Tokyo talk show in Lost in Translation? That was my first thought when I saw the Devo-ish photo of the two guys behind Tokyo Pudding. “Tokyo 007,” from their album Tokyo Soundscapes, did nothing but reinforce that impression. TP takes a joyous flirtation with absurdity into the stratosphere with the cynical MySpace description blurb: “all you need to know about Japan.” They describe their music as “Japanese office worker's grief and expectation with Eurobeat,” with a tragic kernel of cultural decay at the heart of every tune as they parody a variety of pop styles. (song: "Tokyo 007")

Texas Sluts (Bordeaux, France): Lord knows what the Bush administration could make out of the band name alone. I smell international incident. They look like a punk band, but Robert Cray comes to mind as they blast through originals like “Rainin’ in Bordeaux” and “I Believe to My Soul.” Honest rock is easier to find in Europe than honest blues, but these bar vets are trying to do it right. (song: “Doggone Man”)

One side note to my “official” list of favorite 2007 albums: A lot of my favorite “new” music from this past year didn’t even come out in 2007. Originally, at least. The music biz may have been slow in coming around to the whole digital-revolution thing, but it has realized that people will pay exorbitant amounts for “deluxe editions” of albums they already own, or best-ofs by people they may not, and has keyed onto this fact with a vengeance. So here’s a few albums and compilations that sounded even better the second (or third, or fourth…) time around.

U2, The Joshua Tree (20th Anniversary Edition): Besides a slick remastering job that renders Edge’s guitar even more clarion than before, any opportunity to revisit the thundering “Bullet the Blue Sky” and crystalline “In God’s Country,” and even underrated harmonica jam “Red Hill Mining Town,” is welcome indeed. The extra disc of B-sides and outtakes isn’t exactly essential, but it does contain the excellent “Spanish Eyes,” the original “Sweetest Thing” and the studio version of Rattle and Hum standout “Silver and Gold,” while a third disc is a workmanlike concert DVD filmed at Paris’ Hippodrome at the height of Joshua Tree mania. Tres bon.

Led Zeppelin, Mothership: Maybe not the definitive Led Zep anthology – No “Lemon Song”? No “Dancing Days”? – but what are you gonna do, cry about it? With segues like “Heartbreaker” into “Immigrant Song” and “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” into “Kashmir,” please don’t. The super deluxe edition tacks on a DVD for all you unlucky sods who didn’t get to see the big London reunion show, i.e. everyone but the 20,000 souls whose karma meter is on “empty” right now.

2008 is but a week away, but it's already sounding brutal. Next year we can expect new releases from the Mars Volta, a Flight of the Conchords studio record, and a Rick Rubin-helmed Metallica disc. Plus a new Eagles of Death Metal record that I will no doubt be hectoring readers about until December.

This is the first thing to get stoked about. A new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record, Dig, Lazarus, Dig! Hot on the heels of 2007’s dirty-old-man Grinderman project comes a whole new set of grimy Southern Gothic dirges from Mr. Cave. The new single is streaming on the web now. Ouija boards are going to be 2008's iPhones, I predict. Or at least I can hope.

The slump that's afflicting the music industry has apparently bypassed the holiday genre, since nearly forty new or reissued yuletide releases arrived at our door this year. We were happy to receive some of the discs reviewed below. The rest should have been returned to sender.

A slew of CDs come courtesy of notable names, with some cashing in on relatively recent popularity and others representing artists hoping against hope for some sales this Christmas. Falling into the former category is KT Tunstall, whose new EP, Have Yourself a Very KT Christmas (EMI) benefits from credible versions of strong songs such as the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," a duet with Ed Harcourt. Relient K's Let It Snow Baby...Let It Reindeer (Capitol) is more erratic, with the contemporary Christian pop-punkers vacillating between decent revamps of traditionals and often goopy/whiny originals. Extra credit, though, for the ludicrous rocker "Santa Claus Is Thumbing to Town," in which Rudolph pukes boughs of holly. Talk about your red-light specials.

As previously threatened, I have devised my list of the best albums of 2007. It wasn't easy. I had to ignore some sales calls at work to make this. Sorry, Weld Tooling out of Tulsa, Daddy has to make his list. Ah, day jobs. Can't live with them, can't buy shit on eBay you don't even need without them.

1. Justice, t: This thing made me get into dance music again with a vengeance. After years of longing for a record that combined elements of metal, Italian horror-film scores and copious amounts of bass, we got what we wanted. And it's French. They pronounce it "JUST-EECE." I pronounce this record and me, man and obsession.

Ah yes, doo wop. Perhaps no other genre is so closely identified with a specific era in time than the one that relied on majestic vocal harmonies to alternately offer pleading paeans to love and nonsensical shimmy-shimmy ko-ko-bops, all delivered by immaculately dressed (and mostly black) singers in uniform silk suits in the mid to late 1950s.

But as any PBS pledge-drive viewer will tell you, love for the music of groups like the Flamingos, Platters, Five Satins, Crests, Drifters, Spaniels and a host of acts with bird names (Cardinals, Ravens, Orioles, Falcons, Crows) is still healthy, even if its fans aren’t quite as medically sound.

Legendary New York DJ and current Sirius satellite radio host “Cousin Brucie” Morrow and co-author Maloof have produced a gorgeous coffee-table book here. And while a bit light in word count, it still manages to pack in a lot of detail about doo wop’s origins, development and performers. It’s alternately a nostalgic look back into the archives for veteran listeners, as well as kind of a CliffsNotes starting block for the curious.

There’s something magical about the Geto Boys' “Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangsta.” The same could be said about A Christmas Story. Here’s what happens when you put that chocolate in that peanut butter. – John Nova Lomax

Remember terrestrial radio? Cool terrestrial radio? That doesn’t play Fergie and Fall Out Boy all day? It still exists; you just have to seek it out.

On Monday, Christmas Eve to all you non-Festivus revelers, Drenched in Blog will be sitting in from noon till 3 p.m. with Mr. Brad, the news director on the Gulf Coast Rocker, KACC 89.7 FM. We will be talking about all things awesome, including this past year in music, plus playing some of our favorite tracks from this year's best albums. I don't quite know yet how French dance-rock will jive with his Clutch and Back Door Slam, but it will be fun. We may even make an off-color joke…or seven. Tune in to hear what I sound like, so you can put a voice to all my sarcastic self-referential nonsense. I hear I sound like a tired Phillip Seymour Hoffman. – Craig Hlavaty

Okay, so actually it's just our favorite shows from the past few months, and no doubt we missed a few, but read it and bitch. -- Keith Plocek

Some songs start off bad and get pretty good. Others start well and fizzle.

This apparently unreleased version of “O Holy Night” we found on the Web starts badly, and ascends farther and farther into ever more inglorious strata of crapulosity.

Yes, I fell on my knees, but not because I was hearing angels’ voices.

Not safe for work, or home, or the car, or any other environment. (And yes, supposedly this guy sent this to somebody thinking he was actually a good singer.) – John Nova Lomax

So let me get this straight. This week, I found out I'm a wanted fugitive in La Grange. My Rogaine foam isn't working, and I found a few gray hairs in my beard. And I still have no idea what to get my special lady friend for Christmas.

Now, I wake from slumber to find that Mrs. Drenched in Blog, Lily Allen, is pregnant. Not with a new album, but with a baby. Inside her body. That apparently one of the Chemical Brothers put in there. All the British press is aflutter today over the "good" news.

We would just like to make one thing clear upfront: To the best of our knowledge, Rap-A-Lot Records owner J. Prince is neither a murderer nor a member of a Chicago gang called The Gangster Disciples.

Now then: J. Prince has filed suit against Apple, Black Entertainment Television and parent company Viacom for defamation by calling him a murderer on an episode of BET’s popular series “American Gangster,” which was made available on iTunes. The suit was filed last Friday in federal court in Houston.

Congratulations to Houston’s own Brian and Michele Long and their two daughters, who today were announced as the winners of Home Depot’s 2007 Holiday Gift Card Contest. Contestants were asked to shoot a homemade video explaining why they deserved a $25,000 gift card and upload it to YouTube. The Longs chose to entreat the Atlanta-based home-repair megamerchant in the form of a rap, and Brian Drops lyrical bombs like “Hammers and nails and all types of wood, Home Depot gets your home looking really, really good” and “We need new insulation for the cooling and the heating, our electric bill is really taking a beating,” and tosses off hilarious asides like “Sounds like somebody’s all up in our attic.” Sounds like Scarface, Chamillionaire and Bun B have some company.

Lunch time customers at Zydeco Louisiana Diner got a treat today – Houston guitar great Little Joe Washington performed an impromptu acoustic set of Christmas tunes. ("Rudolph had a really, really, really shiny nose"). No word on if he'll be making a repeat appearance – Washington’s schedule is erratic, to say the least – so the two dozen or so people who saw him today can count themselves lucky. – Olivia Flores Alvarez

These are my favorite videos of the past year. This was the first year when we all stopped waiting on people like MTV and Fuse to give us what we wanted; now we all just YouTube everything. We don't have to sit through Tila Tequila sifting through porno industry rejects and listen to a bunch of valley girls eating in dark restaurants talking about boys in trucker hats with STD's. It's a brave new world, my friends.

1. Kanye West, "Can't Tell Me Nothing"
Zach Galifianakis with a Band-Aid on his beard, down on the farm. What else do you need? People riding on tractors? Done!