it's the most wonderful time of the year
by which i mean time for year-end lists. woo-hoo! what satisfies a giant music dork quite like ranking things? you get all the excitement of sitting, being quiet and writing things down. yes, top tens have it all.
top ten albums of 2005:
1. why? – elephant eyelash
2. broken social scene – s/t
3. feist – let it die
4. m.i.a. – arular
5. spoon – gimme fiction
6. new pornographers – twin cinema
7. halloween, alaska – too tall to hide
8. the mars volta – frances the mute
9. death cab for cutie – plans
10. the hold steady – separation sunday
i can't really tell if this is final. i don't think that top 5 is gonna change much, but i'm hemming and hawing over the bottom 5. i also loved the wolf parade disc, and fourtet and board of canada both made great discs this year. i'm working on a local top ten as well, which i'll put up in a little while.
i've also been thinking about songs that have particularly stood out. in this age of playlists and itune, it seems to me that songs are rising in importance vs. albums and there have definitely been great songs on not completely fantastic albums, like "perfect speed" from 13&god's album.
i dunno. hip-hop? anybody? sims's disc is gonna be on my top ten for local albums, i know. part of the problem with this is remembering what the hell came out this year. so i implore you: post some top tens of albums, songs, haircuts, bars, shows or whatever else you feel like.
Labels:
Year-End Lists
3 comments:
point taken. of course, that was the european release. the u.s. release was april 26, 2005. that's what i've decided to go by, since i started listening to it then. i assure you, i'm not trying to cheat.
ah the pitfalls of importing. i remember getting coldplay's first disc back in like 2000 and being sure they were going to be huge, but it took like six months for it to come out domestically and by that point i'd already listened to it endlessly, so i really didn't need to hear 'yellow' one more time. and yet i did. and then a million times after that.
and yes, that why? record was immediately my pick for number one this year. it always seems like the number one record is never in doubt because there's always one that really sticks out as an artistic achievement. 2002: wilco's yankee hotel foxtrot; 2003: the mars volta's de-loused in the comatorium; 2004: madvillain's madvillainy; 2005: why?'s elephant eyelash. that's about as far back as i remember keeping track of this sort of thing, and i stand by all those picks for no. 1.
yeah, i really like that fog also, but i haven't really had time to dig into it, so it's somewhere around like 13 for me. did you go to the why? and fog show at the cedar? incredible. and broder and wolf doing "21st c. pop song" was completely unbelievable. i can't believe they pulled off that back and forth vocal part. i need to listen to fog more. starting ... now.
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