Magazine/website/record store BEST OF 2011 end-of-year list pile-up

If I were trying to construct a list that would have people take me more seriously btw, I wouldn't be repping for Obake and Cornershop I'd be repping for Beyonce and DJ Quik... it would be a lot easier for me to do this but I think the former are awesome and the latter merely good. But again that's only based on reading ILM not what other sites have to say.

john maus was amazing long before the press decided to get on board, i think at least one or two other ilxors also had 'love is real' on their 2007 ballots.

i am deeply, sincerely concerned for ppl on this board who have lost perspective to the extent that a korn/skrillex collaboration is eoty material

I thought that was just a running joke.

I mean, you have to work on that assumption, otherwise you're looking at some serious Mayan end tymes shit going on right here. Or maybe there's more to this Insane Clown Posse remixed by Bently Rhythm Ace shit that I'm initially hearing.

kmt at music journalists devoting attention to korn/skrillex either for the lulz (smh) or out of popularity-chasing desperation

good tactic for an irrelevant band like korn to gain some column inchezzz though

of all the criticisms I level at acts, "irrelevant" definitely makes me feel warmest inside

you loathe the John Maus album, Doran? that's slightly disheartening (considering that the Quietus half-year list is how I first heard of it)

okay, here comes the big one....

Total Guitar (UK) EOY 2011

01 Mastodon : The hunter
02 Foo Fighters : Wasting light
03 Japanese Voyeurs : Yok
04 Anna Calvi : Anna Calvi
05 Joe Bonamassa : Dust bowl
06 Rise Against : Endgame
07 Machine Head : Under the locust
08 Megadeth : Thirteen
09 Steve Cradock : Peace city west
10 Skindred : Urban black
11 Twin Atlantic : Free
12 Noel Gallaghers' High Flying Birds
13 Turbowolf : Turbowolf
14 Anthrax : Workshop music
15 Black Country Communion : II
16 Denis Coffey : Denis Coffey
17 Opeth : Heritage
18 Miles Kane : Colour of the trap
19 Funeral for a friend : Welcomme home Armagedon !
20 Tessercact : One
21 The Joy Formidable : The big roar
22 Sylesis : Edge of the earth
23 Vintage Trouble : The bomb shelter sessions
24 Trivium : In waves
25 Duane Eddy : Road trip
26 Alkaline trip : Damnesia
27 Death letter Circus : This is the warning
28 Dream Theater : A dramatic turns of events
29 Fleet Foxes : Helplessness blues
30 Johnathan Wilson : Gentle spirit
31 PJ Harvey : Let England shake
32 Social Distorsion : Hard Times & nursery rhymes
33 Elbow : Build a rocket boys !
34 Frankie & the Heartstrings : Tender
35 Evile : Five serpent's kiss
36 Pete Yorn : Pete Yorn
37 Rival Sons : Pressure & Tone
38 Russian Circles : Empros
39 White Denim : D
40 Amplifier : The octopus
41 Derek Sherinian : Oceana
42 The Answer : Revival
43 Gentlemans Pistols : At her majesty's pleasure
44 Letlive : Fake history
45 Mr Big : What if ...
46 Arch Enemy : Khaos Legions
47 Tedeshi Trucks Band : Revelator
48 The Dangerous Summer : War paint
49 We Are The Ocean : Go now and live
50 Philip Sayce : Ruby Electric

45 Mr Big : What if ...

lol we opened for these guys in August

totally disgusting that total guitar mag has only guitar music in their list

no publication can be bothered to rig or fix the results, or craft a list that "espouses" a "hivemind" or "worldview". and nor should they

yes they should. i mean maybe a generalist publication or daily paper can sorta get away with not having anything to say abt music except 'these X number of albums got made this year. we like them' but if yr publication isnt putting any thought into what yr eoy list says than maybe you dont need to make one

it is so depressing to me that anyone genuinely believs rigid, dogmatic bullshit like that

kind of like repping for an album is a political statement, as though what you're repping for are "values" or a "wider" "aesthetic" rather than the music - it doesn't acknowledge how consuming music is a messy and illogical affair, how stuff that moves you can come from any place or any aesthetic at any time, and that roping off an aesthetic is basically a mug's game

the music we talk abt on ilm/in these eoy lists is indivisible from the social/cultural/experiential context that envelops it. the 'values' (good word imo) that an album or song embody matter just as much as how a song sounds, really. pubs trying to front like all that matters are the formal qualities of ~~the music~~ are lying to themselves & their readers

anyway it doesnt make sense to me to divorce albums from context/taste and present them kinda sui generis or w/e

Henrietta: It kind of doesn't matter what I think about it personally (and I probably shouldn't have said anything on here) but the thing is, Luke, who I co-run the site with and Rory, our third member of staff, both love it. Personally I can see that there's an interesting story there and a decent debate to be had and I'm more than happy to have them on the site.

Loathe is perhaps too strong a word but I wanted to pick the most extreme example I could think of. I feel the same way about Gang Gang Dance and Ariel Pink and a few other American bands from the last couple of years but for the most part, we're all extremely happy about our top 50.

This poster ^^ above me is talking out of his/her hat. Having a list that reflects your tastes doesn't mean you don't have anything to say about music. I look at it as the one chance in the year that we get to talk about music in a much less involved way.

bullshit! that's entirely about pre-judging music based on a rigid "value system" that you're not prepared to admit is malleable or can be altered. that path is route one to eliminating all outliers and stuff that doesn't "fit" into your "value system"

xp obv

i mean that is basically how rock crit has functioned for years and years - privileging certain value systems over others - and it has not led to anywhere good.

also, it's like...it boxes you in as a critic as well. "oh no this album doesn't represent my ~values~ i can't vote for it." fuck off!

i mean lists of things are p fun to make i guess so w/e but i dont really see what possible value you two think your eoy lists have if they dont engage w/anything deeper

lol @ lex of all ppl fetting mad abt rigid value systems tho

and i mean the challenge isnt to discard albums you like from yr list because they dont fit but to engage w/ them so that you ~get~ why they fit w/ the system your already operating w/in

EOY lists don't "engage" with anything. they're lists. i "engage" with deeper things when i write words, hopefully. a list is just a list is just a list. in that great metaphor of a few weeks back, EOY lists are the glitter pens and unicorn stickers of music writing.

actually the EOY list is an opportunity to just throw my listening open and go "shorn of all the rhetoric i type over the year here's what i've actually been feeling and rinsing most"

and it's str8-up dishonest for an actual publication to game its results to fit some bullshit value system

Yeah, we spend all of the year writing about this shit. If you're only interested in what you can glean from the EOY lists and not the debate that's been taking place all year leading up to them, well, that's kind of your problem.

i dont think thats de facto true, that eoy lists just have to be lists, and some lists do a better job than others. but overall yr right of course

idk the mag i write for you do a ballot but theres some manipulation i think, which im fine w/ if it makes the list more thoughtful

seriously...y'all know how every EOY list is made? it really is as simple as just balloting writers. no publication can be bothered to rig or fix the results, or craft a list that "espouses" a "hivemind" or "worldview".

― lex pretend, Saturday, December 3, 2011 3:25 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink

this is so cute^^

it strikes me that that's more about reinforcing the ~brand~ than pretending to engage with the deeper issues behind the music, otherwise why not engage with those issues explicitly? if you're gonna do that, be honest and write about why you've manipulated certain albums into your list, and certain albums out of it.

or y'know just do what every other publication does and don't game it because that's dumb.

would you really prefer say the ilm list to be manipulated to be more hivemindy? i really hope not

i remember a few years back accusations that the NME swapped the #1 and #2 around

XP: To be fair, we don't ballot our writers because we know just doing the tQ list between the three of us will be closer to what the site's about (whatever that is). So maybe I should just stfu.

Having talked to a lot of people about this over the years, I get the feeling that ballot fixing used to be a lot more widespread than it is now. But the reasons would be less high minded than the ones outlined above and more to do with second guessing what the readers wanted.

well isn't that why p4k (i assume this is the site our friend is talking about) "manipulates" its EOY list? to preserve its "brand" for its readership...

lex sorry but your eoy lists definitely espouse a worldview and brand

1) not consciously 2) i would be interested to know more about a worldview and brand that encompasses laura marling, meek mill and cher lloyd

I think there's a third way here. Taking this site as a prime example, our EoY is entirely democratic and I think that with as large and variegated a bunch of contributors that we have here, that there is any way that our list can be said to deliberately represent anything. And yet I absolutely believe that ILX's EoY lists reflect a very specific--almost idiosyncratic--set of 'values' that are constantly being scrutinized and often being modified from year to year.

I feel like Lamp's problem mostly is that the superficial inclusion of its token indie choices/blogsoul sit incongruously with what is usually a discernible deeper purpose within FACT, ...? But I've spent a lot of this thread misreading Lamp so

btw Doran: no problem. I just get the feeling that the John Maus record is going to be the trendy indie record that will be even more trendy to slag off. There's one or two of these every year; there's a few ppl in Outloud who really loved that record, and I finally gave in a few weeks ago and now it's one of my favorites...

think that would be redundant, i doubt anyone who's read your posts on ilm the past few years is really unclear on what that worldview is. there are people whose tastes seem genuinely less aesthetically cohesive, or more incidental, but i wouldn't say their lists are better for it. i imagine one of the many reason tim f's eoy track lists are so widely adored here is the way songs culled from so many disparate places form such a unique & appealing vision of pop

(xp to lex)

Henrietta: I should go back and try it again I guess. A lot of people who I admire and trust like it, so I see it as a failing on my part in some ways. To not 'get' it. Like Skrillex, Cheap Trick and Derek Bailey.

how does everyone know who people are? i thought i was arguing with deej not lamp

i guess everyone was listening to Peaking Lights all year and loving it, but i'm just now listening over the course of the last two days and this is shit is so rad. "Birds of Paradise dub version" might be my favorite song so far, but every song has merit. the distorted drums buried in the bg of "Summertime" are funky as hell if you concentrate on them.

yeah great album

lex you do realize that not every publication is general interest and lots of them have a slant towards specific genres or demographics? like TOTAL GUITAR magazine probably tells their writers "give us your top ten guitar albums of the year" the same way my paper in baltimore just had me tell them my top ten baltimore albums. that's not 'dishonest' or 'manipulative.'

obviously that becomes a little more complicated with something like pitchfork or the wire that kind of positions itself as being 'open-minded about the best music of any genre' or whatever but i think people reading their lists understand implicitly that there is a lot of conscious and unconscious branding going on

of course i get that, in explicit cases. but i would be interested to see a list of albums that would be considered unsuitable for the p4k or wire brands, and explicit reasoning why.

i imagine it's much milder and more ambiguous than that -- individual voters strategizing, editors looking at stuff with similar numbers of votes toward the bottom of the list and making judgment calls about what makes the cut and what doesn't.

I think the appeal of Pitiless Censors, musically, is the combination of echoey minor key vocals (which kind of remind me of some of the melodic content of late 60s garage rock and psychy with the specific synth arrangements

I feel like its the ascetic counterpart to the more libertine 1999

(xp to Doran)

I feel like Lamp's problem mostly is that the superficial inclusion of its token indie choices/blogsoul sit incongruously with what is usually a discernible deeper purpose within FACT, ...? But I've spent a lot of this thread misreading Lamp so

haha i just agree w/ you since your take always ends up more coherent :/

i guess my 'problem' with dorian and lex's take on the eoy list process is:

- we are all operating with an (unstated?) set of values that informs how we respond to music
- pop music is essentially experiential in nature
- for almost any publication their big eoy list will be one of the most viewed/widely talked abt pieces they run
- its intensely disingenuous to pretend this piece doesnt communicate something abt that underlying set of values, regardless of intent
- taking that into account why not knowingly craft a list that makes explicit these values and 'says something' abt what music is like in 2011 from yr pov
- to me 'branding' isnt really negative it helps the reader understand the context w/in which the music is generally being heard/understood