early cuts from top 100 v. 3
i’ve slowly begun working on the third revision of my personal top 100 albums list. as planned, this year i am making the transition to a one album per artist limit… which has automatically disqualified twenty excellent albums from last year’s list (see below). this has been a hard step for me to take, but i think one that was ultimately necessary to maintain the integrity of the list.
there are definitely benefits to allowing multiple albums per artist… a second favorite album pick can in some cases tell more about a person’s tastes than what may be the more obvious top choice, particularly from an artist like bowie or dylan (low and john wesley harding respectively). and the selection of artists that make the list twice (or three times in volume 1 of my list) is certainly telling.
but there are of course drawbacks as well… i’ve always been a bit unsure of the ordering of the second album… it seems almost impossible for me to consider it on it’s own, completely uninfluenced by the first album’s placement. and then the changes in preference…. it surely would be interesting to watch say good morning spider make its way up the list year over year and eventually displace it’s a wonderful life… that situation could happen because there’s stability in that musical relationship.
but my relationships with artists are just as often characterized by instability… preferences changing wildly month to month, year to year. for example, i chose destroyer’s city of daughters as my 2nd favorite for volume 1 , streethawk: a seduction for volume 2 and, had i continued to allow it, i probably would have picked thief for volume 3. new albums, at new positions, each year. multiply that variability by several artists and you’ve got a fairly unstable system. the #1 destroyer pick, destroyer’s rubies, has remained constant though… moving up a few spots year to year. that works for me.
and while i hate to see many of these albums go… cutting 20 duplicates has opened up a lot of room for the over 40 albums on my top 100 candidates list… some of which have been waiting to make the cut since volume 1.
- silver jews – american water
- brian eno – taking tiger mountain (by strategy)
- pixies – surfer rosa
- pavement – slanted & enchanted
- captain beefheart – safe as milk
- the halo benders – don’t tell me now
- sparklehorse – good morning spider
- mp3: sparklehorse – pig
- the beatles – the white album
- the flaming lips – yoshimi battles the pink robots
- radiohead – kid a
- frank black – frank black
- destroyer – streethawk: a seduction
- joanna newsom – ys
- beck – odelay
- david bowie – low
- smog – a river ain’t too much to love
- mp3: smog – palimpsest
- bob dylan – john wesley harding
- fiona apple – extraordinary machine
- wilco – yankee hotel foxtrot
- built to spill – keep it like a secret
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[...] year and now just 1 this year, which is where it will stay. as a result, upwards of 20 albums were disqualified from the list this year… so obviously there have been an equal number of new artists [...]