2010 Magazine's Albums Of The Year Thread For Posting Lists and Discussion

Oh yeah that boomkat and friends best of 2010 is awesome. All this stuff around the Raime post satanic techno industrial thing looks extremely interesting!

If someone were up for the task, they could make a master list of all these lists with the consensus ones filtered out. We'd just need to agree on what qualifies as consensus -- appearing on more than two other lists?

the Wall Street Journal weighs in on year-end lists in general (naming Stereogum's the best, among other random/silly awards)

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/22/best-of-the-best-of-music-lists-for-2010

this feature is awesome, btw

http://flavorwire.com/134970/stereotyping-you-by-your-favorite-album-of-2010

"I much prefer a list which is formally constrained and, as a result, is more inventive, unusual or informative."

DD!

double ditto

i made a youtube playlist of the top 50 rap songz

Lots of goodness, then E-40's "He's a Gangsta," which makes me want to never look at a computer again.

the video is a bit much -- cant believe they cut messy's verse from it smh

some great jacka lines on that -- dunno why but theres something weirdly evocative about describing your pistol as 'dripping' bullets

I hear what you're all saying about the usefulness of genre/specialty lists. However, I'd find it more interesting to know, say, what are the top 40 albums from the listmakers at Decibel, Terrorizer, etc. that weren't within their publications' parameters. Some of them must listen to some hip-hop, r&b, pop, indie, electronica, etc. Is there a particular Latin American album that struck the fancy of people at Rock-A-Rolla? Does anyone at The Wire like any metal anymore?

My specialties/obsessions rotate over the years. Lately I guess the Rodney Dangerfield's of my list are the neo-prog/hard/stoner/psych rock that gets no respect elsewhere. Maybe some post-punk/shoegaze influenced stuff, and other random quirky pop.

Mainly, most peoples' lists are too short ;) You just can't fit all the interesting stuff in just a top 10-50. I seriously have over 300 albums from this year on my continuous playlist. Bubbling under my top 100 are albums from around the globe and tons of stuff not on many lists.

Chico Mann - Analog Drift (Wax Poetics)
The Radio Dept. - Clinging To A Scheme (Labrador)
Tamikrest - Adagh (Glitterhouse)
Alasdair Roberts & Friends Too Long in This Condition (Drag City)
Black Angels - Phosphene Dream (Blue Horizon)
Calle 13 - Entre los que Quieran (Sony U.S. Latin)
Choc Quib Town - Oro (Nacional Records)
Afrocubism (World Circuit)
N.E.R.D. - Nothing (Star Trak)
Thee Oh Sees - Warm Slime (In the Red)
Khaira Arby - Timbuktu Tarab (Clermont Music)
Black Tusk - Taste The Sin (Relapse)
Yakuza - Of Seismic Consequence (Profound Lore)
Disappears - Lux (Kranky)
Oceansize - Self Preserved While The Bodies Float Up (Superball)
Faust - Faust Is Last (Klangbad)
Owen Pallett - Heartland (Domino)
Steve Wynn & The Miracle 3 - Northern Aggression (Yep Roc)
Grandfather - Why I'd Try (Grandfather)
Gnaw Their Tongues - Arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante (Crucial Blast)
Willie Nelson - Country Music (Rounder)
Cathedral - The Guessing Game (Nuclear Blast)
Ellen Allien - Dust (BPitch Control)
Black Sun - Twilight Of The Gods (Future Noise)
Monster Magnet - Mastermind (Napalm)
Zoroaster - Matador (E1)
Voice Of The Seven Thunders (Tchantinler)
Black Cobra - Chronomega (Southern Lord)
Kemialliset Ystävät - Ullakkopalo (Fonal)
Von Spar - Foreigner (Italic)
Sigh - Scenes From Hell (The End)
Seu Jorge and Almaz (Now-Again/Stones Throw)
Luisa Maita - Lero Lero (Cumbancha)
Night Horse - Perdition Hymns (Tee Pee)
SardoniS (Meteor City)
Brutus (Transubstans)
Plants And Animals - La La Land (Secret City)
Earthride - Something Wicked (Southern Lord)
Danzig - Deth Red Sabboath (Evilive
Celeste - Morte(s) Nee(s) (Denovali)
Khoma - A Final Storm (Selective Notes)
Karma To Burn - Appalachian Incantation (Napalm)
Free Energy - Stuck On Nothing (Astralwerks)
Endless Boogie - Full House Head (No Quarter)
Orphaned Land - The Never Ending Way Of ORwarriOR (Century Media)
The Secret - Solve Et Coagula (Southern Lord)
Solace - A.D (Smallstone)
Priestess - Prior To The Fire (Teepee)
King Sunny Ade - Babá mo Túndé (Mesa Blue/IndigeDisc)
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars - Rise & Shine (Cumbancha)

However, I'd find it more interesting to know, say, what are the top 40 albums from the listmakers at Decibel, Terrorizer, etc. that weren't within their publications' parameters. Some of them must listen to some hip-hop, r&b, pop, indie, electronica, etc. Is there a particular Latin American album that struck the fancy of people at Rock-A-Rolla? Does anyone at The Wire like any metal anymore?

excerpting this to emphasize it. i totally agree with this. you can get an idea of this, to a limited extent, by reviewing the individual lists of a publication's writers. p4k used to release it's writers' individual lists, but i'm not sure they're doing that this year.

i totally dont agree, because ppl all end up being like "hey love that big boi

"

phew glad i closed that quote

xpost How can you find time to listen properly to more than 300 albums in a year for a continuous playlist? You're saying that you can listen, in effect, to a new album every day and listen to it closely appreciatively? Do you have time to listen to music for pleasure alone? Not snarking, genuinely wondering. No way I could manage that ...

i totally dont agree, because ppl all end up being like "hey love that big boi"

true in some cases, i'm sure, but hardly all. individual writer lists on, say, the dusted site rarely include the titles that dot the upper-end of most publications staff lists.

closed that quote for you, btw.

"I much prefer a list which is formally constrained and, as a result, is more inventive, unusual or informative."

I have only ranked albums with titles containing fewer than 20 syllables and no articles.

xpost How can you find time to listen properly to more than 300 albums in a year for a continuous playlist?

yeah, that fastnbulbous post kind of blew my mind a little, too. but let's say you're culling your rotating 300 from like five or six hundred albums in total that you heard during the year. if you listened to music for three to five hours a day, every day, you'd have plenty of time to separate the wheat from the chaff and to become familiar with your real favorites. i lack that kind of dedication, myself, plus i don't get free records, so there's a cost/time factor involved (shopping, downloading, etc).

yeah but dont yall have like social lives & jobs? do u exercise ever?

"looks like takeout again -- im only at 270 albums and the year is almost over!"

you think you're just shaping your abs, but you could also be getting your narcocorrido picks in order

yeah but dont yall have like social lives & jobs?

45 minute commute 2 ways = 1.5 hrs per day = 7.5 hrs listening time in car per week

do u exercise ever?

you'd be surprised -- running 50-60 miles per week and listening to 8-10 hrs of music go quite well together

let's say you're culling your rotating 300 from like five or six hundred albums in total that you heard during the year

that's the mind-blowing thing! if you have a continuous playlist of 300 - and spend time listening to albums not in that - how many times can you even listen to each? twice, three times?

i mean that's at least 15 hrs listening per week. and i probably heard about 100 newly released albums this year. soooo... what's that, like, 2 new albums per week for ~50 weeks? might listen to each one 2-3 times to digest the first time around. which takes maybe 4-5 hours of that 15. and that's not even counting 3-5 hours of shuffled ipod tunes in the office, per day.

xp to self

Glad someone pointed out to deej that you can listen to music while you work out. Also, I listen to music at work, at least about 60% of the time when not on the phone or in meetings. An hour on the train each way also affords lots of listening time. Surprised so many people on I LOVE MUSIC are blown away by people that obsessively listen to stuff.

I've got about 212 albums from this year that I started as the basis for my list-making.

part of the problem is that i still do a lot of my listening on vinyl. i certainly buy more vinyl than CDs/downloads. this inclines me to listen to many of my favorites only during the evening hours, where they have to compete with meals, friends & family, errands, TV & movies, parties, etc. plus i just don't often listen to music while i'm commuting or working. dunno why. certainly not enough so that i'd be able to listen to one or two new albums every day, on average. i mean, what about older stuff? at least two thirds of what i do listen to is over a year old...

i made a youtube playlist of the top 50 rap songz

Lots of goodness, then E-40's "He's a Gangsta," which makes me want to never look at a computer again.

― Pete Scholtes, Thursday, December 23, 2010 10:59 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

"He's a Gangsta" is a great song!

I have my entire collection backed up to 3TB of external drives at work, and listen at low levels for most of the day, and occasionally put on good sealed headphones when I'm doing something that I want to block out the chatter around me. I listen on my commute, but ironically never listen to music when I run 4-8 miles every day. It's just a habit from when I was a serious runner in college and a racing team in my 20s. I'm slower now, but did manage to get 6th/3,000 at the Santa Hustle 5K earlier this month, heh. There's safety reasons running in the dark with traffic, and not a bad idea to be alone with yr thoughts at least part of the day!

I put on music at home all the time unless watching tv/movies, and spend usually at least :45 to 4 hours with deep listening in the office with my AKG headphones, while writing/corresponding, working on site.

Glad someone pointed out to deej that you can listen to music while you work out.

^__________^

"He's a Gangsta" is a great song!

― rihanna rennavated my dick (rennavate), Thursday, 23 December 2010 20:15 (18 minutes ago) Permalink

pretty violent vid tho for sure. buttt yukmouth had a wayyy worse one this yr

Glad someone pointed out to deej that you can listen to music while you work out. Also, I listen to music at work, at least about 60% of the time when not on the phone or in meetings. An hour on the train each way also affords lots of listening time. Surprised so many people on I LOVE MUSIC are blown away by people that obsessively listen to stuff.

I've got about 212 albums from this year that I started as the basis for my list-making.

― one pretty obvious guy in the obvious (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, December 23, 2010 1:55 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i obsessively listen to music but i cant at work & the other thing is sometimes i dont want to listen to new records? or sometimes i want to hear things a bunch of times? 300 BEST albums sounds crazy as shit to me still. i think i only hear maybe 200 total records in a year max

(and less than a quarter of those are heard more than once i imagine)

Yeah, it's really hard for me to imagine liking that many albums from a current year. (I'm not sure there are any previous years for which I could say I like that many records, though it might be possible for some years in the late 60s or 70s.) I might hear 300 albums some years, but probably closer to 200 at most.

Oh yeah, deej, I'm with you on 300 BEST part, I didn't notice that originally. My 212 is the total new albums I heard this year, at least half of that was eliminated right away when I started thinking about my lists.

i guess to be fair i listen to lots of singles/youtubes

I was going to say earlier, I don't think I could ever keep up with your level of mixtape/youtube intake.

I think there's something to be said about watching a YouTube and going, "Yeah, that's cool," and never feeling the impulse to play it again, which is probably the effect most songs we listen to have.

I listen to four or five whole new albums a week, in addition to singles, reissues, plus albums that don't make it beyond track three. So that's 250-300 a year, but no way do more than a couple of dozen of those really register with me, because I don't find time to listen to most more than once or twice. Got kids, so don't play out loud at home much; listen on way to and from work, have headphones on for an hour or two at work, but I need to know what's going on around me - and hear the phone. Makes picking the ten best quite easy though - it really doesn't require much thought.

But also "listening at low levels throughout the day" - are you really taking in much of that stuff? The stuff I listen to at work often barely registers cos my mind's on the job, not the music.

I've listened to music while multitasking most of my life. Attention varies at work of course, but it's enough that when something grabs me, I make a note of it for more focused listening later on. I have several playlists, of course. There's 2010 for albums I like from the year that obviously didn't start at 300, but ended up that at the end. So some albums I've heard dozens of times, others, just a handful. There's New for all the new stuff I'm absorbing. And of course all my other older music I still enjoy.

BTW, low volume for me might be different than for others. It's still loud enough to hear the music fine, on sort of decent Harmon Kardon speakers, and enough that my colleague ten feet away can also hear well enough to recognize stuff he knows. Fortunately he likes much of what I like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJDef09QTOg

ok this video is 100x worse than the e-40

the song, 1000x worse

Is that Tha Bizness sound opening the track? Ugh of all the producer signatures, I might possibly hate that one the most.

hardly the most objectionable thing in this lol

verges a bit too much on torture porn imo

No, you're right, it's just the first thing you hear on the song, thus the first thing I had an opinion. And yeah, I shut this off after like 45 secs.

man you guys are sensitive

i dunno whiney just not into rap fantasies about home invasion involving rape

so you're gonna throw all your Geto Boys CDs out?

ive never seen a geto boys video where they actually act this sort of thing out, no