Year-End Critics' Polls 2012

There was a bit of both, the Perempay & Dee/Crazy Cousins end was pretty glossy but "high end sound design" is probably overstating it a bit. A lot of it was pretty rudimentary in its production values though although maybe not to grime levels.

otm its classy high-end sound design was part of the appeal!

sure but on the super clean & sculpted tip, opposite end of the spectrum from anything dubby/blurry/post-burial etc, right?

For what its worth, Dylan and Womack both have a fair shot of making my Top 10.

friday, 16:15, can i be bothered

nah it's all yours finney

This year's best old-timers: Cohen, Cale, Womack, Cooder, Byrne and Dr John.

the thing that gets me about the old-timer lists is that they don't even acknowledge young fresh'n'new artists in the same genres! like i'd love to see the mirel wagner album get some EOY love but i haven't seen it crop up anywhere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciBpDFjzl6I

xpost I will cheerfully shout for ZZ Top in the best old-timers category. But they are not respected and deep old timers, so no one gives a shit.

xp You're missing the point - Uncut don't want young fresh'n'new. They want legends who are (a) still alive and (b) not disgracing themselves.

Death to Young Fogeys

nb dorian i think you'll REALLY like that mirel wagner song/album

No Scott Walker in the Uncut list, do they hate his record or is this more of a timing thing?

Timing I reckon.

xp I'll certainly check out Mirel Wagner Lex. Thanks for the link.

Imho none of Byrne's melodies on the new one rival Talking Heads in their prime.

I just ordered THIS: http://shop-hellsheadbangers.com/item.asp?PID=26326 thanks to Scott posting a video on Youtube. It better be good!

Vincent steals the show on Love This Giant. Byrne's lyrics have had a tendency to come off a little trite and facile in recent years, and that puts me off a bit. I think it's a good album - solid 3.5 stars - and it helps I got given it on my birthday, so I made a point of acquainting myself with it properly. Some of the horn work is exceptional.

I started a Mirel Wagner thread early in the year when I heard No Death, but it kind of petered out quickly. She'll certainly be on my ilm ballot.

"Some of the horn work is exceptional."

You are Allan Jones and I claim my five pounds.

lex i adore that mirel wagner album, but for some reason i thought it came out last year?

It came out last year in Scandinavia/Europe, but this year in US/UK iirc.

Yeah the Mirel Wagner is great. Goth as hell though and weirdly brittle sounding so I don't feel the urge to listen to it very often, but when I'm in the mood it's amazing.

That Uncut top ten is quite the old man list, 80% if you count Grizzly Bear and Jack White as honorary geezers.

Ha! Thought the exact same thing re: Jack White when I read the list. That said, it's another one that might make my top 10. I, too, had a pretty geezer friendly year, it seems.

oh the smallpeople recordhas Black Ice on it, that was one of my favs of last year....rest of album seems pretty understated, nothing partic jumping out but nice enough

i'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that all these ancient dudes, as much as i like them, are making more important music than people of my generation. maybe this year is just a fluke in that regard but it looks a bit like laziness on the part of the writers to shoe-in so many classic names. i want year-end lists to point me towards cool new artists i missed, not remind me that bob dylan is awesome for the 900th time

wow mirel wagner! neverheardofher!

is the whole album that good?

everything on the album sounds like that, in the best way (and it's a pretty short album too)

Yeah, it's a pretty uniform album soundwise, but some songs are better than others.

Why, every year, do people bother complaining that a magazine unashamedly aimed at middle aged white men picks albums of the year aimed at middle aged white men? It's like saying Good Housekeeping's best Christmas presents guide doesn't have enough bukkake DVDs.

the lists from the narrow specialist mags are easily one of the most interesting things about these threads too

xp lex' complaint was that they magazine unashamedly aimed at middle ages white men missed out on an album by a new artist middle aged white men would love because they are preoccupied with releases by old artists though

Also, Uncut used to cover a slightly more adventurous range of music. Martha Redbone is a new name for me. It sounds decent, certainly on par with the other folky singer-songwriter geezer type of albums being overrated. However, and this may not be fair, but it would sound more appropriate to me softly playing in the background of a cafe, yuppie coctail party or corporate event than on my stereo.

That Go-Kart Mozart album is quite an ordeal at 17 songs. It's just jarring for me to hear Lawrence's voice over the quirky, too-precious electro-pop after being a fan of Felt for so long. The Norman list got me excited about Gnod, BEAK>, Death And Vanilla and Cold Pumas, but none really stood out to me.

When I get home I'm gonna check out The Helio Sequence - Negotiations. Comparisons to Eno, Talk Talk, Roedelius and Manuel Göttsching have me interested.

xpost Was more directed at ciderpress than Lex.

My guess would also be that declining print sales and the continued recession forces titles like Uncut to retreat even further into the safety of the core demographic. There aren't any new sales to be found, so it's more about keeping old readers.

That said, if Uncut's list was the result of an unmanaged vote, with no editorial postproduction, then it's spectacularly elderly. I know plenty of their writers personally like much more outlying stuff than that list suggests.

Declaration of interest: I was involved in the Guardian's list. There was a suggestion this year that it be managed, but thankfully we decided on an unmanaged vote in the end.

If The Helio Sequence still sound like they used to, you're going to be disappointed. xp

jarring for me to hear Lawrence's voice over the quirky, too-precious electro-pop

Where have you been for the last... 15 years? That's what he's been doing for ages. I like the new album, not sure yet if it'll make my top 25, but it's pretty charming in that Lawrence-y way.

Don't want to put you pn the spot here, but in what direction would a managed Guardian list be likely to go? How do you think it would have been different?

I did hear one other Go-Kart Mozart album and couldn't get into it either. I didn't say I was surprised. Maybe I hoped he'd changed his sound again. It just sounds wrong.

I will agree with you that good Felt is easily his best. They did a few dodgy things but when they were up there, man, so far above both Denim and Go-Kart Mozart.

xpost I don't know - I haven't been running it, just been a voter and seen everyone's individual lists and been sorting some of the content and production. As it is, the list ticks quite a lot of different boxes, so it might have been more a question of placings than a load of completely different albums. I think it's a pretty reasonable list, actually - by no means all to my taste. One thing I know from years of being involved with it, though, is that it doesn't take a big change to the voting base to make big changes to the outcome of the poll. This year there are a couple more R&B/dance favouring writers than there were two or three years ago. But had a three or four of the more "rockist" occasional writers been asked to contribute (to be fair, they may have been asked and not voted. I don't know) then I'm pretty sure some of Lex's favourites would have been a whole lot lower down.

Years ago, when I edited FourFourTwo, we did a poll of managers on who the best manager of all time was. We had a very good response - half the managers in England and Scotland voted – but it still only needed one third place vote to get to 20th place.

i don't know if this is true for the early days of uk funky, given how much it drew on house music with impeccable sound design!

― #YOLO ONO (lex pretend), Friday, November 30, 2012 7:58 AM Bookmark

The point isn't that it didn't have good sound design, but that it didn't seem overly focused on it as a pursuit in itself.

Thanks ithappens! I'm generally in favour of comments box outrage from dunderheads so I think the poll is panning out v nicely at the moment.

not that anyone wants to jump back to that stupid indie/pop argument from a few days back BUT i was looking back at ilm's top 77 tracks of 2010 and we had arcade fire, ariel pink and robyn all in the top 10. ARIEL PINK BEAT THE-DREAM (with a great song, but still)

how are you classifying robyn there?

So two out of ten tracks were indie? Exactly what does that prove? (And Robyn may be 'pop that indie types like' but she isn't indie in any way, she's quite clearly a pop artist.)

well she's pop in sound, that's about it

also "somebody that i used to know" was no. 39 on the list last year and all the comments after it got posted are "huh?" and "i heard it's big in australia"

Robyn in 2010-2012 is mainstream enough, especially considering that a lot of the people voting her prob don't live in America

J0rdan, what's yr point with 'Somebody That I Used to Know'? It didn't hit the charts until this year, so it's not surprising people didn't know it then. (I'm assuming you're not invoking the pop/indie debate here, b/c it's definitely not the latter... it's more like Phil Collins or something.)

no yeah i just thought the gotye thing was funny

yeah after it blew up i was like "ah come to think of it i had heard that song mentioned a lot the last few months"