ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2012

Xps, I was the Amanda Mair no. 1 voter.

Wonderful album.

TS: Being surprised by the John Talabot vs actually having an informed opinion on John Talabot when he turns up visavis his position on the list.

(I have chosen neither because I'm still making my way down the Spotify list. Boy, those Dirty Projectors, huh? They really.. they.. man, fuck the Dirty Projectors!)

congrats to the poll-runners

pffft to all the greyscalenaysayers

many thanks to the ppl who posted fave track youtube links, I listened to all of these. Goat sounds fantastic.

i fell asleep seeing spiritualized on the ladies and gentlemen tour, went w/my weed dealer big mistake

my housemate fell asleep in the Let It Come Down tour, "it was just so soothing!" she was v gratified at the Ladies & Gents full album show in the Opera House nine years later that multiple people in rows around us were snoozed out solidly when the lights came up

i'd invite most of these artists to a dinner party, even the ones whose music i wouldn't allow in the house

i <3 dinner parties

...what do you serve?

also wkiw DJP's dinner parties.

I fell asleep standing up during Boris's set at portishead's atp. In my/their defense it was the 3rd day and I'd had like an hour's sleep all weekend.

I also know a guy who fell asleep at godspeed's reunion gig, lol

made a what.cd collage (everything except gunplay for some reason)

https://what.cd/collages.php?id=16998

http://i.imgur.com/fczJ4ef.png
http://i.imgur.com/Tc1edhm.png
http://i.imgur.com/ZARTj2f.png

I fell asleep during My Bloody Valentine at Primavera. No earplugs either. Comfy seats though

I know i'm late, but no Session Victim? cmon people that was the house album of the year.

interestingly, i'll have a hard time coming round to both the Laurel Halo and Cooly G albums for the exact same reason: the vocals in each just seem to suck the life out of the intriguing developments and trajectories of the songs.

my secret house/disco album love of 2012 was roberto rodriguez' dawn which some may find a little too trad but i thought was crazy melodic and the lushesht starriest beachiest thing i heard all year.

as far as bobbins go i would take untold's change in a dynamic environment over say voices from the lake (which i love). haven't been able to get into the andy stott record yet, it sounds sort of unnecessary to me somehow, i will probably change my mind though.

john daly's sunburst was my deep house LP of choice that no one else cared about, but i can see why people would find it boring if you aren't a total sucker for his sound like i am. kind of agree about the andy stott, i really liked it on my first listen and then it never really drew me in a again after that.

Thanks Johnny!

Thank seandalai. I just made pictures. He crunched the data. <3

nice results. i am not much of an album listener -- i actually have never filled out the albums section of a ballot before, but this year i put farrah abraham as my sole vote because that one really blew me away when i first heard it (and probably even more as i kept listening to it).

but actually a lot of the albums i listened to this year did place so i guess i will tediously list my thoughts on the ones i know :)

66. KATY B Danger EP umm this was good i guess and it did brighten my day to get something of its quality for free but uhhh not exactly "memorable" or "something i would expect to see on one of these"
41. THE XX Coexist hugely disappointing and i'm not sure what else i could possibly say about it (which is basically its biggest problem)
39. NICKI MINAJ Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded this is an *interesting* album to me as a commercial phenomenon but overall it was too uneven for me to honestly say i liked it. "stupid hoe" is fucking amazing and i did come around to some of the tracks that i didn't like initially but i still can't get quite behind this one
37. ANGEL HAZE Reservation really strong -- kind of a breath of fresh air when i first heard it actually. she navigates many styles quite deftly, but also in an appealingly subtle and cohesive way. some really powerful songs here and she's also a pretty endlessly interesting person.
19. FIONA APPLE The Idler Wheelzzzz so fucking boring, can't sit up and tell myself to pay attn long enough to convince myself to pretend that i even remotely enjoy this. "every single night" is a great single though and "hot knife" is good (maybe partly b/c it follows a marathon of snoozers)
17. CARLY RAE JEPSEN Kiss good album, but hard for me to actually consume in one piece.
09. FRANK OCEAN Channel Orange i wanted to like this but i just couldn't. i just... got bored a lot. inaccessible? i don't know. my tastes aren't sophisticated and i need cheap thrills apparently (and i will admit that some momentary thrills do register in the first two singles). his previous album is much better to my ears, but even then he didn't have a very compelling persona
08. JESSIE WARE Devotion good album. was actually pretty put off by her when i first heard "running", but it's a good song and many of the others are even better. one day while i was swimming in the summer "110%" hit me like a ton of bricks and i haven't looked back since. the run toward the end is pretty fantastic but some of the tracks are legitimately mediocre/perplexing ("no to love"........)
06. TAYLOR SWIFT Red i am not very passionate about this album either way. it is "a good album"
05. GRIMES Visions idk. grimes seems cool and sometimes i really love amorphous dreamy/atmospheric albums but this really didn't do it for me. i couldn't bring myself to revisit it at all, basically, other than "oblivion" which was focused enough to come through to me in a big way
04. DAWN RICHARD Armor On this is a really impressive album, i actually think i much prefer it to her new one (which hasn't kept me that interested honestly). the cohesion and the relentless yet subtle rhythmic drive throughout the album are pretty amazing. the melodies took some time to catch on, and i would say overall that is not her strength, but they came and it was a gratifying album
03. JOHN TALABOT ƒin good album, certainly much better as a full experience than any of its individual tracks.
02. KENDRICK LAMAR Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City love this one. i read a number of ppl saying it's annoying how you have to buy into the story/context to really enjoy it or whatever, but i don't feel that way at all. i typically don't listen closely enough to albums to ever really tell what they're ~about~ or whatever, and this is certainly the case for me here, but enough interesting and occasionally arresting things/ideas happen throughout this one that i can experience it like a 12-year-old listening to some poem he doesn't really ~get~ and still get really affected
01. MIGUEL Kaleidoscope Dream i do enjoy this one a bit but overall i am clearly not as enthusiastic about miguel as most are atm. ("sure thing" is still my favorite song from him.) "use me" and "do you" are fucking great though. i've always really enjoyed "adorn" and i like it even more now that it's dominating radio (and still evading being tiresome) but it's not the life-changing thing for me that it evidently is for others.

and the one i voted for...
15. FARRAH ABRAHAM My Teenage Dream Ended simply a stunning album. i didn't listen to it for a long time b/c i didn't find "finally getting up from rock bottom" that interesting initially. some time later i heard "the sunshine state" and was pretty shocked at all the sounds (and to some extent the ridiculousness, which at the time did have some lulzy appeal to me). i was even more shocked to find when i listened to the album that it was actually some really powerful and pure catharsis. somehow the really fragmented and occasionally incomprehensible vocals drew me to listen to it as more of a story than most albums i hear. like idk, ppl are probably going to laugh at me for overanalyzing but i find it tremendously moving when i hear her surrender "i can only put so much into a song" at the end of the first track as the machinery collapses around her and settles into the dreamy, hazy flashback of "after prom" WHICH ITSELF is a super creepy, intriguing combination of her naive optimism and the harrowing sense that something terrifying and shameful -- his infidelity? her pregnancy? -- lurks in the shadows. a number of those early tracks continue in the sort of flashback-ish manner, but to me they always sounded like they're colored by her present sense of regret/denial that came from knowing he was no longer with her -- particularly "with out this ring...", which sounds at first like a recollection of her regret at having rejected his early marriage proposal, then soon reveals itself as much more as this mere recollection becomes her first cathartic expression of the isolation she feels

+ of course the album is really interesting in a cultural way, too -- the way it was attached to a book (which i purchased b/c of the album but couldn't finish), its reception over the months (from the earlier lolzy and uniformly negative gossip blog posts to the time the professional reviews starting coming out and people started editing amusingly arty music videos to her music. it's just hard to imagine that something like this could ever happen again, and it's shocking that it even happened once.

some people don't particularly like the suggestion that it has a partly camp appeal to it, but i'll honestly say that sometimes i still enjoy it in that way. i do grin when i hear "the sunshine state" and i have danced around in my bedroom to "after prom" (and played it at my new year's eve party) and in the car at night i would often mock-earnestly sing along to the "I MISS you / shoulda coulda woulda / i miss that FEELING / yes it's true" in "with out this ring". i do let out a few laughs at it sometimes. it's pretty amazing to me that one album can make me so happy and so sad and get me thinking about so much when on the surface it appears to be so limited in its expression. so yeah, that is basically why i voted for it despite not being "an album person"

ok anyway i'll stop with the incoherent rants now lol. these polls as usual have been so amazing, thank you j0rdan and johnny fever and seandalai for putting it together :)

I'm disappointed at where Fiona finished - she was one of like two album votes of mine that placed - but gli maybe shouldn't be surprised. The curse of being a favorite for too long, etc.

The curse of being a favorite for too long, etc.

Don't feel too bad for her. Springsteen only got a single vote iirc.

Seriously? Damn

banging post from teledyldonix. (not incoherent at all!)

i'd invite most of these artists to a dinner party, even the ones whose music i wouldn't allow in the house

i <3 dinner parties

...what do you serve?

― ( ͡° ͜ʖ͡°) (sic), Friday, February 1, 2013 12:34 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

last dinner party chez moi: saltimbocca alla romana with spanakopita and roasted vegetables, followed by langres cheese.

you know the followup question right

housemate's boyfriend made items 1 and 3, guests brought 2, i bought 4 :)

boyfriends who love to cook are wonderful things.

Missed the last few albums rolling out, but that Top3 is well deserved.

Thank you so much seandalai and Johnny Fever - really enjoyed this countdown!

nooooooooooooooooo my #1 came #78 ;_;
time to make myself a #78 black and white graphic and fake posts talking about how awful it is

xps i was the other amanda mair voter, placed #4 on my ballot

absolutely love that TRST record, haha dang animal collective

what is trst?

kinda in the same category as cold cave? so the darkwave or coldwave category
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQs3h6SRdIA

whoops sorry wasn't meant to embed there

that... gave me something of the feeling of having a body flu

that's probably to do with the cover too

i typically don't listen closely enough to albums to ever really tell what they're ~about~ or whatever, and this is certainly the case for me here, but enough interesting and occasionally arresting things/ideas happen throughout this one that i can experience it like a 12-year-old listening to some poem he doesn't really ~get~ and still get really affected

I agree with this I think - I'm not sure the extent I would have paid attention to the story had I not actually read a synopsis of it after listening. But so much attention has gone into the production and atmosphere of the record, I genuinely think I would enjoy in a purely instrumental version of this, although obviously it wouldn't be an album-of-the-year contender.

I genuinely think I would enjoy in a purely instrumental version of this, although obviously it wouldn't be an album-of-the-year contender.

why obv?

Because there's not enough interest or development in the music alone to make it a great album rather than an enjoyable one.

i read a number of ppl saying it's annoying how you have to buy into the story/context to really enjoy it or whatever

This is so depressing. God forbid there should be storytelling in hip hop. Even if you don't follow the whole arc, how can you hear The Art of Peer Pressure and not get the message?

tbh i seem to have read more ppl say the opposite, that its enjoyable w/o reading the story

reading = paying attention to

ah ok, not heard the record just was curious why it was so obv

you really don't have to buy into the overall story, and the coherent/short film aspect was mad overrated, but it does enhance the album; more importantly, the storytelling on individual tracks (the best ones, anyway), is strong enough that they hold up individually as well as part of a whole

It's not about the ins and outs of the narrative (which I couldn't explain off the top of my head tbh) but the fundamental moral conflict. You get that first time and then pick up little details from individual tracks each time you return to it. Good concept albums don't get too tied up in the narrative anyway - you need tracks that can stand alone.

Missed the final results. Such a worthy winner and a great list overall.

Huge thanks to seandalai and Johnny Fever for putting this all together.

Tim F the manuel tur album is on spotify! It just hits all my pleasure centres.

I am really enjoying this! So lush and un-austere...

The surprising omissions:

Flying Lotus - Until the Quiet Comes
Trust - TRST
Light Asylum - Light Asylum
DIIV - Oshin

No, I didn't vote for any of them, but I thought all would speak to parts of the ILM massive.

The Flying Lotus album is really good

this is so sad but the flying lotus album not being on spotify means i only listened to it once

Trust did speak to parts of the ILM massive; it came in at #78!

DIIV - Oshin

this album is super awesome

i get the sense a lot of more rock oriented ppl don't vote in this poll, at least i didn't

this is so sad but the flying lotus album not being on spotify means i only listened to it once

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, February 1, 2013 11:53 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this probably had an impact on its standing. I didn't hear it until a few weeks ago because I got if for Christmas.

I still haven't heard the Flying Lotus for the same reason.

Before Spotify, we found ways. Some of us even left the house.

I guess I'm not that desperate to hear it either, otherwise I'd find a way round the inconvenience. There are other albums I'm more motivated to hear but if it had been on Spotify I would have checked it out.