Introduction To This Year's Top 10 Albums

The process of creating the album list causes me to go through the previous years posts.  It turns out that I seem to have settled on buying about 25 albums every year.  As I mentioned in my playlist post, I have switched my streaming from Rdio to Apple Music.  Furthermore, I became very frustrated with the changes at EMusic and I ended my subscription there.

It was difficult to create the top ten list this year.  I found myself liking a number of albums that I could have put in the list at 7 through ten. These albums ended up in two groups.

Group One - Artists that I follow, whose albums were very good, but, not as good as previous albums.  Essentially, if I hadn't heard of these artists before, I probably would have put them on the list, but, based on previous work, I have much higher expectations for them.

Artist - Album
Florence + The Machine - How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
Guy Garvey - Courting The Squall
Frank Turner - Positive Songs For Negative People
Laura Marling - Short Movie
Steve Martin/Edie Brickell - So Familiar
The Unthanks - Mount the Air
The Vaccines - English Air
Lucero - All A Man Should Do

Group Two - These are artists that would fall under interesting, but not interesting enough.

Artist - Album
Father John Misty - I Love You Honeybear
Houndsmouth - Little Neon Light
James Bay - Chaos & The Calm
Laura Welsh - Soft Control
Mark Ronson - Uptown Special
Pops Staples - Don't Lose This

Finally, I wanted to recognize two albums that I think are very good but didn't resonate with me for some reason.

Joanna Newsom - Divers - This is a dense, complicated, unique work. I picked it up in late November and I found it really interesting.  I also thought I would need to listen to it  eight or ten times to appreciate it and understand it.  I don't have that kind of time right now.  I will know more in six months.

Sleater Kinney - No Cities To Love - I had a lot of time to sit around in January, so I gave this a listen late one night.  It's really well made and super unique.  It is also true to their previous work, but, still new.  Finally, it is not nearly as shrill as their earlier work, which has always been a problem for me.  But, at the end of the day, it just doesn't resonate with me.  I'm sure it's me not them.