a grammar

you will be buried in lists

The New York Magazine year-end culture issue is out, with a list (in no super-meaningful order) of ten of my favorite records from the year (I am not great at the TEN BEST, IN ORDER OF OBJECTIVE BESTNESS part), and a short piece about pop music’s mostly glorious (for now) return to seeming really classically “pop” again, maybe. (That idea is partly a suggestion I’d be curious to hear other people talk about.)

Maybe it’s just that I’ve spent the past year doing the vast majority of my music-listening in the same place — at the desk in the back room with the view of the grayish alley scene — but a lot of the ten albums I wound up listing feel of-a-piece to me: If there’s a theme, it’s that several seem chilly and shadowy and color-drained.

So how about, in the interest of “fun,” I will now list, alphabetically, twenty-five albums I enjoyed and considered putting on a list this year, and you can use the above as a hint to try and pick out which ten are on the actual list?

Marsha Ambrosius’s Late Nights & Early Mornings
Austra’s Feel It Break
Beyonce’s 4
James Blake’s James Blake
Das Racist’s Relax
Death Grips’s Ex Military
Destroyer’s Kaputt
DJ Quik’s The Book of David
Eleanor Friedberger’s Last Summer
Gang Gang Dance’s Eye Contact
Iceage’s New Brigade
Nicolas Jaar’s Space Is Only Noise
Katy B’s On a Mission
King Krule’s King Krule EP
Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80
Liturgy’s Aesthetica
Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra
PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake
Prurient’s Bermuda Drain
Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up
Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
Tune-Yards’ whokill
The Vaccines’ What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?
Wye Oak’s Civilian
Yelle’s Safari Disco Club

If I can find time, I might write a bit here about some of the items that aren’t on the main list, or that I don’t see appearing on other lists, or that just have some quality I really want to tell people about.