ILM'S TOP 77 ALBUMS of 2010 (NOW COUNTING DOWN THE TOP TEN)

Just like the tracks results, I'll be posting a top 77 list. It starts with 17 today and then 20 per day over the following three days.

Hype! Hype!

woot! I fear my infinite AntiFR cred is about to take a small knock though :(

YAY

If my #1 doesn't make it, a pox on all yr houses tho.

looking forward to this. thanks, dr. fever.

(after no-one else voted for my #1 single by the same band, i'm guessing y'all gonna be pox'ed)

It's ON.

Like the singles I will attempt to listen to every one of these. Also lol at me thinking I'll do that. What I mean is i'll maybe try to first 3 or 4 and the winner [unless its kanye, and then more pox]

77 albums is a lot of listening time...

yeah but as of next week i'll be only working part time again

people should mention what they think the best trax on the albums are, and that way we could see what the fuss was about w/o investing lots of time & $$$.

i.e., albums = long singles

pumped for this one, as i actually voted

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_ePwDySjVdyo/TTv0XmXqfII/AAAAAAAAAUc/atk7H-3vhA8/harveymilk.jpg

77. HARVEY MILK — A Small Turn of Human Kindness (240 points, 8 votes, 1 first place vote)
P&J: 220th
Pitchfork: DNP

Yeah, I'm going to try to listen to at least one song off each - no way I'm listening to the entirety of them all.

xpost interesting 77! Never been that moved by HM but they've definitely got some stuff worth listening to in their back catalogue.

ooooh. i liked the one w/ the jacket on the cover, will check it out. nice cover too.

Lovely picture of a ditch that.

yes. i voted for harvey milk, even though it's not as good as their last one (life ... the best game in town). it's one of those albums where the whole thing flows together and has repeated themes so it's hard to pick one track to recommend.

oh im not going to listen to everyone in full, esp. if i cannot stand what you all vote for

I bet that was whineys #1. Yay for Harvey Milk

8 votes and 1 #1 vote is pretty good going for 77th place.

seandalai was nice enough to provide me with spotify links for albums they carry, so I'll be posting those for people who can use them.

yeah, sounds like a lot more concentrated voting in this compared to the tracks.

P&J: 220th
Pitchfork: DNP

Fuck P&J and Fuck Pitchfork.

never knowingly heard this band. What're they like? What song should I check out?

I used to like it in polls like this when notable comments from album threads were put up, although I know it's a bit much to ask :-)

I think it might have been a runner-up album on the Pitchfork list?

smashing album cover btw.

yeah fuck a mostly indie website for not covering a relatively obscure metal band! xpost

selected youtubes - URLs not embeds! - from the albums' fans/voters would prob be appreciated

i have no idea what's going to place in this poll, let alone place. well, am hopeful for 11 of my ballot, anyway.

gonna have to drop out for 45 mins in a bit to interview one of the artists that i assume will be on this!

tell erykah i <3 her and bag lady is my jam lex

I keep confusing Harvey Milk and Titus Andronicus and Abe Vigoda

it's not erykah :(

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ePwDySjVdyo/TTv2cj9wL0I/AAAAAAAAAV8/dQmJiutbH88/quadron.jpg

76. QUADRON — Quadron (240 points, 12 votes)
P&J: 433rd
Pitchfork: DNP
Spotify: listen

I keep confusing Harvey Milk and Titus Andronicus and Abe Vigoda

― vienn?tta (Stevie D(eux)), Monday, January 31, 2011 10:13 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

harvey milk has been around longer than titus andronicus and abe vigoda put together btw

oh. i'm sure i remember you mentioning interviewing her last week. oh well, just tell whoever it is that bag lady is awesome and they'll never write anything that good unless they pull their finger out

this is going to be painful for me, isn't it

i haven't heard much of this year's harvey milk but they're a spectacular band, so i approve!

quadron album is great, particularly "slippin'", "day", "pressure" if you need tracks to check out folks

that quadron record was on Andy K's end of year list, right? that probably functions as a great endorsement for some folks (myself included)

hate the album cover though :(

I couldn't get into that Quadron album at all.

I have the Quadron album. It's good. I have no idea about her/them.

I don't like the album cover though - so many albums with that kind of thing now. Really reminds me of Zoomer by Schneider TM or that recent one by Phil Selway from Radiohead.

xposts

Fever, can you pull some descriptive quotes from ILX about these albums?

again it's hard to pull a "standout track" from the harvey milk album but here's a sample track that's fairly representative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta0RdajnegU&feature=related

is this the happy xx?

It felt like a kind of weird Scandipop attempt at doing Sade to me.

yeahhhh quadron! i CANED this over the summer - perfect for easing those hangovers in weather too hot to breathe. an album that kind of hangs in the heat and just shimmers slightly.

buster keaton
pressure

No, but other people can. xps to lj

that quadron record was on Andy K's end of year list, right?

it was andy k mentioning them offhand in the sideways r&b thread that turned me on to them

i love that you'd never actually guess they were scandinavian if you didn't know

no that's right, i guess i just feel it doesn't matter if the other stuff you wished had been nominated was on a list or not. there'd inevitably be some megathread were everyone lists the glaring omissions, so you'd still get that banter one way or another.

agree with emil.y here. one nom per person would radically alter the outcome, and plenty of important stuff would be left off for one reason or another. it's a stunt, as was suggested upthread. not a way to rationally determine what ILX collectively thinks of a year's releases, but a way to create an "interesting" process/result. completely open-ended nominations would get messy quickly, and some would abuse the privilege. like the system as it is.

I'm disappointed that ilxor chose to vote for stuff he thought would place rather than vote for his fave 25 albums. In all lists people should not vote for what they think will place otherwise all lists will look the same!

― Algerian Goalkeeper, Thursday, February 3, 2011 4:50 PM (3 hours ago)

i agree. i seem to remember arguing with ilxor about it last year tho.

― lextasy refix (lex pretend), Thursday, February 3, 2011 4:52 PM (3 hours ago)

yeah i totally regret doing this now. super lame. i'll be different next year!

ilxor prob has a ton of stuff he's trying to cram into a ballot and prob rank against each other too, if ur thinking abt what could make it it at least focuses the mind, i imagine

― zvookster, Thursday, February 3, 2011 5:26 PM (3 hours ago)

yeah this is a big part of it. like, would i rather bump something in the top 25 up a spot or two? or would i rather something obscure be #234 instead of 243 or whatever? thinking about the results rolling out, i'd rather make an impact! trouble is, though, it makes my ballot look super hivemind-y when i post it :(

anyway, as to alterations-- i'd propose a P&J style ballot.

- keep albums/tracks ballots at 25 each
- you get 250 points
- unweighted/unspecified ballot = 10 points per vote
- or, you can give yr votes any # of points you wish, within limits:
- max. 30 pts per vote
- min. 5 pts per vote

i don't really like the distribute yr points as you please thing -- everyone has a #1 and a #2 and so on, why should be people get to (or have to) decide they REALLY REALLY like their #1 way more than their #2 or whatever?

I hate the P&J style.

I'm in favor of whatever will make things the most difficult for the people running the poll.

lol

the only suggestion so far that isn't a piece of shit is shipley's -- maybe next year you'd get strictly 15 albums AND 15 singles noms, but idk i don't mind giving ppl the option

haaa rudi

there's nothing wrong with the poll as it's done now.

^^^

That's what I really think as well.

OTM, poll is fine the way it is, 77 is a perfect number as well.

it went really well this year so it doesnt really need changed. and blueski could do a second poll with his idea to see how it goes and that way there's two polls and we can enjoy the fun again?

I like having lots of noms - lots of mine were things from other people EOYs that looked interesting which I wanted the option to vote for if I got into them (half of them turned out to be a bit shit btw).

AG - stop right there!

indeed blueski could do a poll, right now, of all the albums that got a #1 vote this year.

also thought the poll went really well this year so no changes necessary.

Enough fucking polls guys.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

iawtc ^

Demdike Stare was in my last 30 and I cut it, if I'd known it'd miss out by 8 points while many of my other votes missed the 77 by some way maybe I'd have bumped it. Ho hum. But in general personally I don't see any point trying to second-guess what will and what won't make it, cz there are things in the top 20 which I'd decided were goners once we reached #40 and things at like #110 which I thought would make it.

My fave album of last year. Technically it barely scraped in, its rest of world release is officially this month.

Well this will make it eligible next year, so you've got 11 months to hype it up here on ILM!
(I shd check it, liked other things by Home Video but haven't heard that one.)

I think the poll worked fine as run, but will offer this one other alternative: if you use Needle to tabulate it, as I do with the Pazz and Jop, you can do without nominations entirely, and just rely on Needle to facilitate the data cleanup. For 700 voters x 20 votes, this cleanup took me a few hours, much of which could be eliminated with a better input form that helped people not flip album/artist.

Polling without nominations would be different, obviously, and I'm not lobbying for or against it, just pointing out that it isn't necessary for rendering the process managable.

Yeah, even w/o Needle I expect some basic string edit distance computations would handle a lot - but even then there are "cleaning" issues like whether a release is permissible (e.g. actually came out last year), whether two releases should be combined like we did with Yelawolf or whether two albums with very similar names are actually distinct. Having a public nominations thread means informed people can weigh in (I would have had no idea about Yelawolf).

otm re: cleaning issues - many many people seem not to pay attention to the YEAR BEING POLLED at all.

also i think a nominations thread (plus gap between then and the voting) is more inclusive - allows people who may not have been paying attention during the year to have a bit of a catch-up.

only 1 more poll needs to be done between now and next jan tbh and that is the last decade (the oooooos).

didn't we just do a 06-10 less than a year ago though? maybe get a bit of distance from that first

err '05-'09 i mean

I really really want to do an alternate '00-'04 poll, where none of the albums/songs that placed in the 2004 poll are eligible. I might start making moves to do that after there's some breathing room from this one.

I might poll the 50 best biscuits.

I mean re-running a list for a period ILM has already covered is a bit Q magazine.

bourbon ftw

Only poll I'm really keen to see is a pre-1960 (1950?)tracks poll, though I suspect that may be a niche opinion.

More or less happy with the current voting set up, though would prefer a weighted/unweighted ballot as an option next year.

would love a jazz poll tbh. I doubt glenn would be interested in helping me with that tho. If he agrees to set needle up though I'd totally be up for it

I really really want to do an alternate '00-'04 poll, where none of the albums/songs that placed in the 2004 poll are eligible.

i suggest looking at the albums/songs that placed in the 101-200 range --pretty good list of alternates to the top 100

my 2012 resolution is to vote next year

I'd like to see that Electronic albums/tracks poll happen. Seemed to peter out back in Oct.

iirc that one broke down over infighting about what was and wasn't eligible genre-wise, i think the poll creator had a mnml/idm/ambient-type poll in mind and a bunch of people were nominating synthpop and new wave type ilm-love stuff and getting mad when they were shot down

i unveiled the results, you may have missed it because it was in this thread

YOU TOTALLY MISSED THE ILX HEAVY ROCK/METAL ALBUM POLL COUNTDOWN, SUCKA (CLICK FOR A RECAP)

haha

I really really want to do an alternate '00-'04 poll, where none of the albums/songs that placed in the 2004 poll are eligible.

i suggest looking at the albums/songs that placed in the 101-200 range --pretty good list of alternates to the top 100

― Damn this thread seems so....different without ilxor (ilxor), Friday, February 4, 2011 12:40 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, lot of good stuff there but not remotely all of the good records that missed the top 100 that people would probably vote for now.

I've never understood the point of doing nominations in the first place. What's wrong with having everyone just send in a list with their top 25 albums and singles? With 15 noms/person x 100-odd people making nominations, most people's favourites end up on the nominations list anyway.

More importantly: it cuts down on the time needed to run the poll because you can cut out the ~ 3 wk nomination period and publish the poll results in January.

i thought the point was in large part to standardize the name, spelling, format of each nominated item.

I guess nominations are good for ironing out the "which year did this come out" difficulties and they remind people of stuff, but otherwise, yeah.

If it's a 70's or 80's or "all-time genre" poll, I can understand wanting to remind people of stuff, but not for a year-end poll for a year that just ended. Standardizing the formats is obviously a huge help to the people running the poll and doing the coding, which I know nothing about so I won't comment on how big of a headache it might be to not have that in place.

w/r/t the delay - i think that's a positive. albums are still released well into december - some of them placed this year! which wouldn't nec be the case if the poll was done a few weeks earlier. and doing it in the dog days of january never exactly hurts enthusiasm.

nominations are useful for me for reminding me of albums I wanted to check out but ended up forgetting about, and also for albums I did listen to and love but might forget to put on my list

^ yeah, this. nominations thread assists the process in a number of ways, not just in the standardization of ballots. i personally appreciate the memory-jogging and heads-upping, along with the extra time it provides for (re)evaluation before ballots are officially cast.

Veil Veil Vanish - Change in the Neon Light
Engineers - In Praise of More
the Prids - Chronosynclastic

i like these ones trayce! in fact the prids was in my top 5 on my ballot iirc

in the shoegazing poll, half of my ballot at least was made up of stuff I checked out from the nominations thread, stuff I never would've heard of w/o it (Skywave, Joy Formidables, you are the coolest)--of course this meant my ballot favored heavily on stuff that got nominated in the thread's first two days, but still, it was v useful...

also, some dude I like your idea of doing another '00-'04 poll but let's not do an alternate one, let's just an updated nu-ILX one. I don't want to deal with any constrictions on what you can &/or can't vote, esp. since we aren't doing a whole decade poll for the forseeable future...

Having done an 00-04 poll and an 05-09 poll already, the next time we even touch the first decade of this century should either be an all-in thing or a genre poll of some kind. That said, I'm not advocating anyone start anything of the sort in the near future.