Hello,
In the spirit of Journalistic Douchebaggery, I’m providing my top 10 albums, EPs, and songs of the year! I have included streaming audio for everything I was able to find a source for.
Normally, I think that end-of-year lists are kind of a bad idea – everybody’s choices are pretty similar, and most of them are front-loaded to the last two months of the year anyways because our memories are pretty short when it comes to this stuff. But given how easy lala.com makes it to just stream stuff out, I figure it’s an easy way to recommend some stuff I really liked.
There were a few things I heard very recently that probably would have made the list if I had heard them a few months ago, like Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone and Animal Collective’s Fall Be Kind EP, but I don’t want my impulsive nature to corrupt the purely analytical experience of making an arbitrary list of some stuff I liked.
I am going to hide all the streaming audio below the fold: please click through to hear full samples of like 20-some albums and tracks and stuff.
Albums
Viva Voce – Rose City – it is a miscarriage of justice that I cannot find a streaming source for this wonderful album.
EPs
Tapes – Hissing Theatricals – click to listen.
Soom T- Dirty Money – click to listen.
Burial & Four Tet – Moth / Wolf Cub:
Gatekeeper – Optimus Maximus
Gatekeeper “Optimus Maximus” from Fright on Vimeo.
Tracks
Viva Voce – The Slow Fade – again, it’s horrible that this isn’t available for streaming anywhere I can find. This song is great.
Honorable mention – Warp20 box set – this was an absolutely ridiculously lavish package. 5 CDs, 5 10″ records, and a full-color book depicting the entire packaging/graphic design history of the label (most of which was crafted with care by the unparalleled Designers Republic). Two of the CDs were handpicked “best-of” comps. One of those was voted on by fans, whose messages actually appear in the packaging. Two of the CDs are a wide variety of artists covering songs off of the Warp catalogue. The fifth CD is an extremely ADD mix, which manages at one point to put Anti-Pop Consortium’s “Ghostlawns” smack on top of Squarepusher’s “My Red Hot Car” and turn the whole thing into this R&B/2-step hybrid. Craig David is rolling in his grave. Two of the 10″s are just locked groove loops, which means that finally you can just get so high and listen to the vocal hook on LFO’s “Freak” literally forever.