ILM's Top 77 Albums of 2012

goat is def too heavy for me
aw that's kinda sweet -- i think goat is kinda lite but it's good to know that there are delicate souls out there who aren't crispy old chicken legs like me.

being totally earnest, i really like how these polls are like a conference of all of the different ilm factions 1x a year. it's charming. some sniping but nothing harsh, see you next year!

One thing i'd like to draw people's attention to re Carly Rae Jepsen:

On "This Kiss", in the second half of the first verse when Carly sings "And's she's a real sweet girl..." and this little ticking hi-hat comes in which just lifts the stadium-pop beat to a new level, that's one of my favourite obv-but-perfect little details in a pop tune forever (the gold standard for this will always and forever be the bongo loop added to the final victory lap choruses of Kylie's "Love At First Sight").

I love blondes but my favourite dance full-length this year turned out to be manuel tur's swans reflecting elephants, which apparently only I like. Fans of austerity should check it out imo

two things:

1) johnny fever, great job doing this poll!

2) i usually try to avoid meta-thread whining, and i won't mention this again, but man i fucking hate when everyone predicts the top five and the top ten way ahead of time. i guess it's fun for people who are intensely poll watching and are deeply interested in the tracking and predicting the ilx hivemind (i mean that seriously, it's an interesting thing to think about albeit not my thing), but for the rest of us, you just ruin the results. for example, i for one did not listen to any john talabot this year, and i know nothing about him really. it would have been so awesome to see him pop up at #3, such a surprise, and i'm sure i would have been very excited to go home and listen to his music immediately. instead, when his album was revealed it was like "oh there's the guy that i've seen on literally dozens of predicted ilx 2012 album poll top tens for the last week." i am sure there is -50,000 sympathy for this view, and it's not like i'd like to see all discussion of prospective top placers squashed, but man it totally draaaaaaaaains the fun out of it when you're repeatedly exposed to the top ten over and over before you ever get there.

bonus 3) j0rdan's trax poll was awesome too!. you both did rolled them out within a work week, using the same exact countdown schedule. sheesh, you guys are pros.

i done did don't know how to type so well good

why is it more fun to listen to john talabot today vs a week ago?

welp know what my first post to coint & plick's gonna be

hahaha

i don't think you'd be able to predict the top 5 in this year's coint & plick!

i kinda agree with you on the predictions Z S, i would never be able to guess everything myself if other people didn't all dump speculative lists into the thread starting around #20, and surprises are fun. i don't really like the idea of policing that though, it is what it is.

xpost yeah i know i'm alienating myself by criticizing something that 90% of the posters on this thread probably contributed to. and also there's no way to possibly stop it, so whatever.

*shouts at clouds*

it would have been so awesome to see him pop up at #3, such a surprise,

this is kind of stretching the concept of surprise...

no way, i would have been surprised for sure!

i would have been like "who the fuck is john talabot, #3, holy smokes, wow!"

but you could have said that three days ago when people were predicting him! ruining the surprise of being exposed to something you've never heard of before... by being exposed to it

i understand your point, z s. and i plead guilty. but at least my predictions were completely off the mark...

I love blondes but my favourite dance full-length this year turned out to be manuel tur's swans reflecting elephants, which apparently only I like. Fans of austerity should check it out imo

― castle grayscale (wins), Thursday, 31 January 2013 10:34 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wanted to hear this! Then forgot that it existed before actually tracking it down. I loved "Will Be Mine" a few years back.

The Amanda Mair album must have been pretty popular with the three people who heard it - a first place vote, my #2 and one other vote to have it place at 122 in a 700-odd listing. I hope more people would hear it and love it.

Very pleased with the results, a good mix of stuff I loved and stuff I will no doubt end up loving, thanks everybody.

yeah, but (god i can't believe i'm elaborating on my stupid opinion) it's the countdown that makes it fun and interesting! if all of the fun came from seeing a list of top albums, then we wouldn't do a poll or a countdown, we'd just bust out our top tens and move on with our lives.

then again, most would probably say that speculating on who will make the top 20 (or whatever) is part of what makes the countdown fun and interesting. so whatever, i get it.

sorry i brought it up.

sorry, xposts

i agree with you dude. but it is pretty funny when people make really obviously wrong predictions.

haha, well like i said way upthread, i think we all stand behind johnny fever's decision to post the batch of failed some dude predictions immediately before the Frank Ocean

man i fucking hate when everyone predicts the top five and the top ten way ahead of time
i've gotten used to it, and i just quickly scroll past whenever i notice anyone doing this. it bugs me and i've complained about it, but there's ways to avoid it.

would be nice if people who wanted to do that started a unique thread for it

ZS you could just skim the thread and zero in on each result

this Goat album rules

it's a shame kaputt wasn't eligible this year, i feel like its influence and charm carried over well into 2012 and likely into '13 as well. i will write in a vote for it next year.

yeah, but (god i can't believe i'm elaborating on my stupid opinion) it's the countdown that makes it fun and interesting! if all of the fun came from seeing a list of top albums, then we wouldn't do a poll or a countdown, we'd just bust out our top tens and move on with our lives.

i guess i had just assumed that you needed to have formed some type of expectation to be surprised about something... like, by your logic you could slowly scroll down a list of albums you are guaranteed to never have heard before and get the same effect. frank ocean being outside the top 5 was a surprise to me, but that's only because i had expected it to be #1, an expectation formed by reading ilm... tbf i did find this roll-out more boring than usual, so maybe that's why. it was really fun last year when gr80 and plaxico and Lamp were all posting throughout the results, documenting their horror at a lot of stuff. this year it seemed like most posts were run of the mill boundary policing

it was also a good year for ilm-type music, though

Preeeeeetty solid top 10 in my little universe, even if the order is a bit jumbled according to my personal preference. I liked Kendrick and the Chromatics albums even if both were a bit long and could have been improved with some editing - neither quite made my top 25. GOAT album is the only one I haven't heard, and I've been meaning to do so for a while.

saw jessie ware the other night in melbourne and i know people were talking about her quiet stuff being the highlights but seeing her live really reinforced what a belting, huge voice she has - if anything i would love to see her ramp up the bombast for future releases and perhaps even do something more uptempo.

don't get the farrah abraham thing. i suppose it is meant to be an "emotionally affecting" piece but i can barely make out any words amidst the vocodery garble. As far as warbling seal vox albums go i'll take future thanks. otherwise to me it just sounds like crystal castles which, of course, were nowhere near the top 77

frank was my number 1 and personally i feel like the songwriting is a huge part of what makes that album great, i'm going to need more expansive commentary on the subject to make me believe otherwise.

My favourite moment on Smalhans is on the final track when he reprises the main theme from I Feel Space and you realise he's doing a victory lap and how much fun it must have been to make this album.

This is the best.

Tim F the manuel tur album is on spotify! It just hits all my pleasure centres.

Voices From the Lake has been my best discovery from all this. What a great album

The Amanda Mair album must have been pretty popular with the three people who heard it - a first place vote, my #2 and one other vote to have it place at 122 in a 700-odd listing. I hope more people would hear it and love it.

when i made a top 50 late last year i had it at #49 or something. Lovely little thing, but it's no Lykke Li or whatever. Particularly liked the song where she was asking for a minute / hour / decade of one's precious time. She's extremely young so I think we'll be hearing a lot more from her.

farrah abrams is best appreciated as legit "outsider art" imo

Okay, here's the full 77 album covers, in color:

http://imgur.com/a/HGHgu

Is there a spotify list for top albums?

yes: http://open.spotify.com/user/callalldestroyer/playlist/51xGGGTA0yUpkkCRoHPqhg

I loved "Will Be Mine" a few years back.

arto mwambé remix of this is an all-time house track.

the last track on this Goat album is fucking awesome. i don't want it to ever end

Xps, I was the Amanda Mair no. 1 voter.

Wonderful album.

TS: Being surprised by the John Talabot vs actually having an informed opinion on John Talabot when he turns up visavis his position on the list.

(I have chosen neither because I'm still making my way down the Spotify list. Boy, those Dirty Projectors, huh? They really.. they.. man, fuck the Dirty Projectors!)

congrats to the poll-runners

pffft to all the greyscalenaysayers

many thanks to the ppl who posted fave track youtube links, I listened to all of these. Goat sounds fantastic.

i fell asleep seeing spiritualized on the ladies and gentlemen tour, went w/my weed dealer big mistake

my housemate fell asleep in the Let It Come Down tour, "it was just so soothing!" she was v gratified at the Ladies & Gents full album show in the Opera House nine years later that multiple people in rows around us were snoozed out solidly when the lights came up

i'd invite most of these artists to a dinner party, even the ones whose music i wouldn't allow in the house

i <3 dinner parties

...what do you serve?

also wkiw DJP's dinner parties.

I fell asleep standing up during Boris's set at portishead's atp. In my/their defense it was the 3rd day and I'd had like an hour's sleep all weekend.

I also know a guy who fell asleep at godspeed's reunion gig, lol

made a what.cd collage (everything except gunplay for some reason)

https://what.cd/collages.php?id=16998

http://i.imgur.com/fczJ4ef.png
http://i.imgur.com/Tc1edhm.png
http://i.imgur.com/ZARTj2f.png

I fell asleep during My Bloody Valentine at Primavera. No earplugs either. Comfy seats though

I know i'm late, but no Session Victim? cmon people that was the house album of the year.

interestingly, i'll have a hard time coming round to both the Laurel Halo and Cooly G albums for the exact same reason: the vocals in each just seem to suck the life out of the intriguing developments and trajectories of the songs.

my secret house/disco album love of 2012 was roberto rodriguez' dawn which some may find a little too trad but i thought was crazy melodic and the lushesht starriest beachiest thing i heard all year.

as far as bobbins go i would take untold's change in a dynamic environment over say voices from the lake (which i love). haven't been able to get into the andy stott record yet, it sounds sort of unnecessary to me somehow, i will probably change my mind though.

john daly's sunburst was my deep house LP of choice that no one else cared about, but i can see why people would find it boring if you aren't a total sucker for his sound like i am. kind of agree about the andy stott, i really liked it on my first listen and then it never really drew me in a again after that.

Thanks Johnny!