Year-End Critics' Polls 2012

Is "sound design" in dance what we rockists call "arrangements"?

RYM list looks pretty okay to me.

Done a lot of catch-up listening this weekend:

Alabama Shakes - Retro blues-rock int he style of the BellRays. Could stray to the wrong side of pastiche (the singer has one of those voices) if it wasn't so well executed.

Chairlift - Yeah, I've been listening to bits of it all year but never all the way through. Some of the vocal melodies on here are just wonderful; maybe yet another take on the eighties, this time reminiscent (i.e. pinched) from the Mac or the Pretenders or even some early-90s Beats International/Soul II Soul type thing, but somehow never boring. It always heartens me when a band who released a just-okay debut come back with a first-class follow-up.

Swans - So yeah, I finally discovered and fell in love with this album a couple of weeks back but listening to the acoustic demoes gives a whole new insight into this album.

Fuckin' MAGNET's:
http://www.magnetmagazine.com/category/best-of-2012/

Best Of 2012: World Music
MAGNET’s j. poet picks the best world-music releases of the year.

1 TriBeCaStan New Deli (Evergreen)
2 Balkan Beat Box Give (National Geographic)
3 Taraf De Haïdouks & Kocani Orkestar Band Of Gypsies 2 (Crammed Discs)
4 Chicha Libre Canibalismo (Barbés/Crammed Discs)
5 Samite Trust (Musicians For World Harmony)
6 The Spy From Cairo Arabadub (Wonderwheel)
7 Wahid Road Poem (BMP Blouzo)
8 New York Gypsy All Stars Romantech (Traditional Crossroads)
9 Bang Data La Sopa (rOckOliTo)
10 Zdob Si Zdub Basta Mafia! (Asphalt Tango)

Best Of 2012: Noise
MAGNET’s Raymond Cummings picks the best noise releases of the year.

1 Penny Royale This Town (Sleepy Hollows Editions)
2 Grasshopper The Day America Forgot (SicSic)
3 Mike Shiflet Merciless (Type)
4 Pauline Oliveros Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 (Important)
5 Natural Snow Buildings Night Coercion Into The Company Of Witches (Ba Da Bing)
6 Pacific 231 Scuffle (Nostalgie De La Boue)
7 Various Artists Compilation For A Cat (no label)
8 Neptune msg rcvd (Northern Spy)
9 Marta Zapparoli Codex (Zeromoon)
10 Lightning Bolt Oblivion Hunters (Load)

Best Of 2012: Hip Hop
MAGNET’s Elliott Sharp picks the best hip-hop releases of the year.

1 Kendrick Lamar Good Kid, m.A.A.d City (Interscope/Aftermath/Top Dawg)
2 E-40 The Block Brochure: Welcome To The Soil 1, 2 & 3 (Heavy On The Grind)
3 Future Pluto (Epic/A1/Free Bandz)
4 Ab-Soul Control System (Top Dawg)
5 Killer Mike R.A.P. Music (William Street)
6 IamSu! Kilt (Dat Piff DL)
7 Action Bronson Blue Chips (Fool’s Gold)
8 Aesop Rock Skelethon (Rhymesayers)
9 Main Attrakionz Bossalinis & Fooliyones (Young One)
10 Big K.R.I.T. Live From The Underground (Island Def Jam/Cinematic)

Alex Ross's best classical albums in the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/11/ten-notable-classical-music-recordings-of-2012.html

Wire albums list news:

Hyperdub ‏@Hyperdub
Laurel Halo #1, Dean and Inga #17, Cooly G # 41, DVA # 49 in the best albums of the year in @thewiremagazine - thankyou!

Anyone seen the full list?

A little surprised to see Basta Mafia in the Magnet top ten, it's far from Zdob Si Zdub's best work. It's pretty good though.

lmao laurel halo #1

poor senile old dorks scammed two years in a row

lololololol

dean & inga copeland is nearly as bad

listening to this Purity Ring album for the first time. not really sure if i'm slowly starting to like it or if my critical faculties are working overtime and preventing me from quite yielding. also listened to the Goat album earlier and can say that i dig it.

these lists always strike me as weird. just seems a bit arbitrary to me to get fanatical about ordering things before the dust has truly settled. if there's logic and a rigourous protocol to the numbering, then it's kind of lost on me. i can get behind the one (Decibel?) that had Converge at number one though.

Lol, that noise list would be diff if I made it now!

Not by too much, but still

I like the queasy sub-aquatic feel of the Laurel Halo record. It's very collage-like and there aren't lots of obvious hooks, but the textures and the layering and whole weird way it's lit work really well for me.

End of year lists are having a slight but noticeable effect on the UK album charts: Goat #27, Grimes #35
http://www.officialcharts.com/record-store-albums-chart/

Raymond: great to see Natural Snow Buildings on yr list!

didn't know there was a new Neptune record, cool

that's p cool about the Goat album racing up the charts. I think Tame Impala are also seeing that effect.

Tame Impala is actually on its way down though!

Django Django otoh is a new entry @ 22

...and that's been out for months and months right?

ah okay, obv didn't pay enough attention. I guess that Tame Impala record hasn't been out so long so might be dropping after its first promo push.

I despise Alex Ross, but here are his notable classical releases of 2012

Feldman is the only release worthy of note for historical reasons.

FACTmag begins...

http://www.factmag.com/2012/12/03/the-50-best-albums-of-2012/

hope u liek clicking

Dummy have started their top 10 albums too, but it looks like they're being really slowcore about it and doing them one at a time. Good news for all you Dean & Inga fans:

http://dummymag.com/features/2012/12/03/10-dean-blunt-and-inga-copeland-black-is-beautiful/

haha so far my takeaway from the FACT list is "huh, I should be reading FACT"

note to self: never pay attention to FACT ever again

― OH NOES, Friday, 16 December 2011 17:46 (11 months ago)

Not listened to the Purity Ring album before. Kinda like Crystal Castles without the shouty noise?

xp haha

I am apparently the exact opposite person of who I was in 2011

I tend to think of Purity Ring as some weird intersection between CREEP and a flesh-eating fairy princess

Vice:

50. Someone who's just been signed.

49. Someone who's already been dropped.

48. Rapper who has done things that would make Chris Brown cut off his dick in shame, but because they're not to anyone famous, they still count towards his grizzled street cred with Pitchfork readers who are too scared and confused by WSHH to get their news from source.

47. Whatever Thom Yorke has blessed this year.

46. "Never heard of it."

45. "I've heard of it, but not actually gotten around to hearing it yet."

44. "Worst thing I've ever heard."

43. Kendrick Lamar.

42. Band who mistakenly believed they'd be given a big post-Olympics popularity boost by their very public decision to tell Danny Boyle and his Opening Ceremony to go fuck themselves.

41. Artist whose raw public confession of homosexuality wasn't quite as good as Frank Ocean's because he had the misfortune not to work in a genre that hates gays.

40. Peaking Lights

39. Woman compared to Kate Bush because of key overlaps: 1) being a woman, 2) singing, 3) giving the impression that she has difficulty coping with life.

38. Woman praised in copy for "striking a blow for modern femininity", a blow that so far consists of making mediocre indie-pop about past boyfriends.

37. Mac DeMarco

36. Album that everyone suddenly seems to be talking about like they've been into it for ages, despite the fact that you've never heard anyone other than the Quietus say a damned word about it, and never will again after 31 December.

35 – 31. Five acts who have all slept with someone who has slept with Swim Deep.

30. People voting for Django Django who meant to vote for Alt-J.

29. People voting for Alt-J who meant to vote for Django Django.

28. Act who changed name and moved to Montreal to make deep house two years after changing name and moving to Brooklyn to make witch garage two years after moving to Portland to make Apple advert indie.

27. Band who had the good fortune to be alphabetised in everyone's iTunes immediately after Grimes, leading to crucial "left it running" plays.

26. The much-feted return of a "living legend" who, despite enjoying a good feting, has mainly spent the past few months praying that no one finds out what happened in his Top Of The Pops dressing room in March 1973.

25. A "shadowy" post-dubstep producer, who spends his days cold-calling pensioners on behalf of EDF Energy.

24. Artist whom music journalists have decided to love because their former career as a journalist means that there's still hope for everyone's thwarted and stalled creative ambitions, #GodGetMeOutOfThisWakingNightmare.

23. Something on Not Not Fun that was recorded in a pristine, state of the art studio – in which the band were playing next door in the bogs for that authentic lo-fi sound.

22. Someone who might have been in Odd Future, but trying to deny it now.

21. Canadians making Canadian Music.

20. Toy

19. A bunch of super-smart, snot-nosed, wet behind the balls students whose lyrics seem to infer that they have had sexual intercourse, whereas one listen to the way they sing them confirms that they surely haven't.

18. Album that writer breathlessly describes as having "deconstructed pop", but which simply reflects the fact that said writer doesn't listen to much pop nowadays and is astonished at genre-blending that anyone with a working knowledge of Radio 1 will have long since taken as standard.

17. Beach House

16. Someone who once shared a cab with Kevin Parker.

15. Band who have released an "amusingly arch" record that they'd be mortified to hear described as such, because in fact they were being deadly serious and are just incredibly pretentious.

14. Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen

13. Fiona Apple or Cat Power

12. Dirty Projectors or David Byrne

11. "Sun-dappled dream-popper" who in truth only ever dreams about killing animals with a spade.

10. The xx or Chromatics

9. Album whose appraisal involved the editor having to do a ctrl+F to make damn sure she'd rooted out every last appearance of the word "shimmering".

8. Space reserved for old black legend being rebooted for modern coffee tables by Richard Russell.

7 – 2. The six highest-ranking albums of the year on Pitchfork that lazy hacks swotted up on to obscure the fact that they basically spent 2012 listening to nothing but real music, i.e. Muse and The Vaccines.

1. Album Of The Year: Mumfords (Q), Kendrick Lamar Spector (NME), Sven Vath (Mixmag), Andy Stott (Resident Advisor), Neil Young (Uncut), Neil Young (Mojo), Neil Young (Classic Rock), Neil Young (Home & Garden), people humming transcendentally over distorted tape loops of concrete being laid (The Wire).

LOL!

lol @ explicit reference to lil reese

implicit

people humming transcendentally over distorted tape loops of concrete being laid (The Wire)

Would listen

Sounds more promising than Laurel Halo anyway

purity ring record is my favorite discovery from list-time so far, it's right in my wheelhouse

Guardian also doing a top 10 slowroll: #10 is Bobby Womack

People don't like Laurel Halo any more all of a surgeon? I never even got the chance to hear it.

people humming transcendentally over distorted tape loops of concrete being laid (The Wire)

Would listen

― ILM Communication (seandalai), Monday, December 3, 2012 4:00 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

Actually, I'm kind of tempted to try to make that record.

Laurel Halo is not bad imo, just kind of ok and I haven't felt like listening to it in months.

Wow, does Magnet cover all that stuff now? I'd check it out again if they've expanded coverage from their alt/indie niche.

^ my question too. my guess is they don't *actually* cover that stuff regularly, but make end-of-year lists. hope im wrong

^^^
We're getting there

Weingarten, Inc.'s list is out:

http://www.spin.com/articles/best-albums-2012

1. Frank Ocean
2. Kendrick Lamar
3. Japandroids

someone else will have to type the rest out ... kudos to SPIN for making it so I can flip back to #1 immediately rather than having to go thru 50 clicks!

Big difficulty in covering rap/noise in print mags that pride themselves on timeliness and require huge lead times: dearth of early promos. Indie rock: really ace at getting stuff into people's hands super early

yowza, that nsfw at #12 was a shocker (Deth Gripz). hadn't seen the actual cover till now...

Was going to moan about Spin's top three, but then... DJ RASHAD at 4!

the khia album is so much better than the kendrick album as far as 2012 hip-hop goes

the khia album is so much better than the kendrick album as far as 2012 hip-hop goes

― #YOLO ONO (lex pretend), Monday, December 3, 2012 10:43 AM (25 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LOL

*leans forward, puts chin on fist*