Also up at P4K is their Top 100 tracks of the year. To my surprise I 'only' have 51 (after grabbing a couple from Guvera last night. Yes, including "Call Me Maybe". I actually really enjoy that song.). Currently listening to my iTunes mix of those 51.
@Craig - I snagged that awhile back from Guv. It's catchy as hell.
I'm probably either "People who have at least one album in their top-10-of-2012 list that they havent actually heard" or from the comments "Nostalgic for the 80s, yet you never really lived it to realize how awful it was."
Yes, good list, NankerP. It's a nice surprise to see Zachary Richard. When I lived in the '80s in Houston, which is sort of a suburb of Lafayette, he used to come to town a lot. I loved the Archie Roach, although I've never heard of him.
Edit much later: I thought, though, that the Tedeschi Trucks track, with its amazing intro and blistering ending solo by Trucks, could have been greatly improved by editing out the organist's endless, aimless noodling. Jimi and SRV would have been ecstatic over the playing of Derek Trucks.
Well, for Christmas I received Taylor Deupree's 'Faint' - the box set, no less, bless my family's cotton socks! - and on first listen it will indeed vault into my top 20. And for the first time today I feel sufficiently rested after an overly intense few months to be able to contemplate radical ideas like Doing Things. So I might start working on constructing my list soon.
Various folk above were collating their top few, I think to contribute to a pool list. Who has theirs ready? Who is going to collate them? On what timeline?
Here's Les Inrockuptibles' Top 100. Top 10: Alt-J, Tame Impala, Liars, Frank Ocean, Django Django, Hot Chip, Lana Del Rey, Lescop, Alabama Shakes, and XX.
Thanks @denver. Archie Roach is a bit of a legend in Australia. I should also say it was an unforgivable oversight not to include Ray Wylie Hubbard's Grifter's Hymnal in my list. There's always at least one I forget!
Sasha Frere-Jones put his best songs into a Spotify playlist and his best albums, oddly, in a Google doc. Links to both are here. I'm listening to the playlist now and it has some good things I've never heard of. It has more rap than I would include--I soon skipped by a track by a Kendrick Lamar. But I guess that's a critic's prerogative. My not liking it is probably just a reflection of my being a grouchy old codger.
Edit: I listened through a song called Reagan by a guy named Killer Mike and followed the lyrics with TuneWiki. I might disagree with some of his points but it was really impressive.
Gosh, it's been so long since I've worked on a draft MiG piece, I'm dismayed to learn that I have fogotten how to get an album cover pic. I managed to do it the same as is done here with BBCode, but I used to do it another way where I actually saw the picture in the visual mode and I could click on it and reduce the size.
I hope to finish up my draft contribution to the 'Best of 2012' collaborative piece in a day or two, but if I can't figure out how to change the size of my images, somebody will have to clean it up for me.
Only this week have I gotten around to purchasing many of the albums I would expect to end up on my own Top 20. I'll have to put together a list in March when everyone has already forgotten about 2012.
Looking over the Metacritic list, which is the direct opposite of lists like Craig's that reflect an individual, thinking person's critical judgment, I nevertheless came across something beautiful, Life Is People by Bill Fay.
I was also pleased that in their list of albums with fewer reviews, Ten Freedom Summers came in first, with an astonishing Metascore of 99. By comparison, the top release on their main list, of course Channel Orange, had a 92.
Looking over the Metacritic list, which is the direct opposite of lists like Craig's that reflect an individual, thinking person's critical judgment, I nevertheless came across something beautiful, Life Is People by Bill Fay.
This seems implicitly disparaging of meta-lists vs. individual ones, but I think that underestimate the usefulness of the former (and overestimates the usefulness of the latter) to a random (or "average") reader of such lists. Since all critical judgments are subjective, a high meta-score has a better chance of matching the random reader's tastes (being of the same species and all) than an individual score does. In any case, as a criticism-reader, I find sites like metacritic and rottentomatoes to serve very important functions that couldn't be replaced by any individual review site.
Of course, lists from reviewers known to have similar tastes/approaches to the reader will be most useful.
Yes, I can see how it sort of implies that, but what I had in my mind at the the time was more an appreciation of Craig's list than it was a disparagement of Metacritic's. I will continue to explore the things I don't know, which is quite a lot, in both.
- With album, single, live album, V/A, box set, Act of the Year, New Artist of the Year, Overlooked Staff Picks, Lifetime Achievement Recognition and worst album sections.
Comments
Craig
I'm probably either "People who have at least one album in their top-10-of-2012 list that they havent actually heard" or from the comments "Nostalgic for the 80s, yet you never really lived it to realize how awful it was."
Edit much later: I thought, though, that the Tedeschi Trucks track, with its amazing intro and blistering ending solo by Trucks, could have been greatly improved by editing out the organist's endless, aimless noodling. Jimi and SRV would have been ecstatic over the playing of Derek Trucks.
Various folk above were collating their top few, I think to contribute to a pool list. Who has theirs ready? Who is going to collate them? On what timeline?
Edit: I listened through a song called Reagan by a guy named Killer Mike and followed the lyrics with TuneWiki. I might disagree with some of his points but it was really impressive.
New Year's greetings from Denmark.
I hope to finish up my draft contribution to the 'Best of 2012' collaborative piece in a day or two, but if I can't figure out how to change the size of my images, somebody will have to clean it up for me.
- Reminded me about that Gultskra Artikler is on my check out list.
Craig
Craig
I was also pleased that in their list of albums with fewer reviews, Ten Freedom Summers came in first, with an astonishing Metascore of 99. By comparison, the top release on their main list, of course Channel Orange, had a 92.
Of course, lists from reviewers known to have similar tastes/approaches to the reader will be most useful.
- With album, single, live album, V/A, box set, Act of the Year, New Artist of the Year, Overlooked Staff Picks, Lifetime Achievement Recognition and worst album sections.
Link.
Craig