Traditionally late November through December is a bit of a graveyard for new releases. In part its because festival season has come to a close and the number of acts foolhardy enough to brave early winter weather to go out on tour are fewer and fewer. As a result store stocking strategies turn to gift giving choices. Topping up the Taylor Swifts, for instance. It used to be time when the machinery of American Idol would drop albums by the prominent contest participants or winners, because everyone’s uncle or grandmother had seen and heard those artists, and little Sarah, who said she was really into music would surely love a Clay Aiken CD. As they understood it… that was music.
The paucity of releases also creates a six week window to pour back over the year and figure out what the best releases might have been. Everyone and their dog’s lawyer likes to put together a top 10 list. Or top 50, or whatever. I’m no different, of course. If nothing else they are fun to look back on years later and see how right or wrong you were, or how much your taste has changed. For instance, consulting the now almost totally defunct Backstreet Records blogspot page, the oldest year end list I could find was from 2004, and this was the top 20.
01 American Music Club - Love Songs for Patriots (merge)
02 Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans (sounds familyre)
03 The Good Life - Album of the Year (saddle creek)
04 Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days (sub pop)
05 Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Like Bad News (epic/sony)
06 Elliott Smith - From a Basement on the Hill (anti/epitaph)
07 The Arcade Fire - Funeral (merge)
08 Pinback - Summer in Abbadon (touch and go)
09 Interpol - Antics (matador)
10 Rogue Wave - Out of the Shadow (sub pop)
11 Electrelane - The Power Out (too pure)
12 The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows (record collection)
13 The Pink Mountaintops - S/T (scratch)
14 Joan of Arc - Joan of Arc, Dick Cheney, Mark Twain (polyvinyl)
15 Molasses - Trouble at Jinx Hotel (fancy/alien8)
16 Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles (5 rue christine)
17 The Black Keys - Rubber Factory (fat possum)
18 Nick Cave - Lyre of Orpheus/Abattoir Blues (anti/epitaph)
19 Wilco - A Ghost is Born (nonesuch)
20 Hayden - Elk-Lake Serenade (hardwood)
I stand by most of this, although I don’t think I’ve listened to Rogue Wave very much since, and that was certainly the last year I cared about The Black Keys. Otherwise I just yesterday mentioned Electrelane in context of a new-ish Spanish indie pop band I’d bumped into called Malenas who have a 2023 album that shares their sound to a degree.
Twenty years ago there were far fewer lists. Consensus between outlets as varied (or clearly not as varied) as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NPR, Mojo et. al. was not uncommon. These days there is a array of magazines, real world and online, whose focus becomes either wildly far ranging or microscopic in detail. I welcome them all. Taking a look at the strange fourth world rabbit holes that All Songs Considered might explore or the wildly obscure bedroom Finnish metal bands that The Quietus unearths is evidence that “the music scene,” for all its financial collapsing, is vibrant and impossibly large despite our best efforts to squeeze its output into simple Best Ofs. Still we try.
My efforts boil down to the things that reach my ears via new release stocking for the record store, or programming the Surgery Radio podcast. It’s a fairly wide net, but still only covers a small amount of territory. I’ve abandoned ranking the lists for a good while now, mainly because judging something like the new Sufjan Stevens against an ambient record by Blank Gloss seems disingenuous. Instead it’s a simply alphabetized top 50 or 100. A fool’s errand, some would say… but the end of the year is a time for fools.
I’ve been taking care of the Indie Rock/Pop/Whatever side of things over on the Indie Dependence podcast. In a series of daily shows since early last week I’ve been showcasing some of the “rough list” of contenders for this year’s favourites. If nothing else it’s provided an opportunity to show my work as I pour over my notes and other emerging lists to see what I loved and what I may have loved had I not missed it first time around. It’s kind of pointless busy work, yes, but the fun kind. So I do it.
Stay tuned here and over at the podcast. The full comprehensive list will likely drop right around the New Year’s countdown. And we haven’t even started talking about movies of the year! Wow!