The nearly men/women

For completeness' sake, the next ten down in our Albums Of The Year list:

31 El Perro Del Mar - El Perro Del Mar
Sarah Assbring's poignant voice and minimal Brill Building stylings were variable but completely enchanting at their height
32 Tilly & The Wall - Bottoms Of Barrels
Album two of their UK year was more irked and less immediate through slight diminshing returns, but the joi de vivre remains intact
33 Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
An absolute mess of a record, ideas spilling out over the sides, but the dreampop diamonds shone out a long way
34 Metric - Live It Out
Emily Haines was one of the most charismatic frontpeople of the year and her band produced buzzing hard edged smarts
35 Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad Of The Broken Seas
Chalk and cheese whisky-soaked country-noir melancholy, Campbell airy, Lanegan dark, equal parts sinister and beguiling
36 The Minus 5 - The Minus 5 (The Gun Album)
Peter Buck's other band made their own big noise with bookish, deadpan Revolver-meets-Big Star country folk-pop
37 Tapes 'N Tapes - The Loon
Doesn't quite sustain its promise over the album, but at top notch its jerky, pared down anthems promise big things ahead
38 Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am That's What I'm Not
Found guilty by sales and appropriation, but ignore that and take in the lead-lined amateur sociology and youthful vitality
39 A Hawk And A Hacksaw - The Way The Wind Blows
Beirut grabbed more plaudits but for our money Jeremy Barnes' invocation of warped eastern European klezmer was the better deal
40 Archie Bronson Outfit - Derdang Derdang
Lo-fi runaway train blues inflected garage rock, almost one sustained groove of loping rhythms and killer guitar sounds

And these were disqualified from probable top 30 placings on technicalities:

Anathallo - Floating World
Never got a full UK release even after we chatted to one of them but some import copies are floating about of this eight-piece's expansive, intense, experimental without ever losing the thread indie-Sufjan-prog work.
iLiKETRAiNS - Progress Reform
The band reckon it's an EP rather than a mini-album, so we'll take their word for it. Their historically inclined atmospheric post-rock bodes remarkably well for 2007's debut LP proper
Johnny Boy - Johnny Boy
So how come after one little-airplayed top 50 single they got dropped by a major and can't even get a UK label? An extraordinary rollercoaster of synthy girlpop gone very sour