Jimmy E's Music List Mania

2009 has been a good year (for me) for music. This year I have got into, in a big way, Converge, Thrice, Mastodon and Lily Allen, the latter 2 artists releasing arguably their greatest work to date. For example, if Jane Doe and Vheissu/the Alchemy Index had been released in 2009, they would be my albums of the year. As it is, Axe to Fall makes the cut (no pun intended), as does Beggars, but neither are the forementioned masterpieces. Disappointments of the year include Dream Theater - Black Clouds and Silver Linings, which I forced myself to listen to a few more times, but I still think I wasted the £60 the darn special edition cost me. Porcupine Tree's The Incident, on the other hand, was worth the cash for the beautiful packaging and artwork alone, it's just a shame someone doesn't check Steven Wilson's quality control. There are, as ever, some jawdropping moments, but there is an awful lot of filler, and the chorus of Draw the Line is cringingly horribl...

Hello, and welcome to the second instalment of this potentially ill-advised annual tradition that is my top 10 of the year list.  Not wishing to dive right in, let's pad it out a bit, first with some disappointments and then with some records that didn't quite make the cut. Disappointments of the year Stone Sour - Audio Secrecy.  I gather this is a grower, but I couldn't find much to like and couldn't be bothered to wade through all the soppy ballads. Coheed and Cambria - Year of the Black Rainbow.  Nothing jumped out, no matter how many times I listened to it. The Melvins - The Bride Screamed Murder.  This band is amazing, have at least 10 great albums to their name, including the last one, but this one was too experimental at times, even for me, and a bit rubbish. Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip - The Logic of Chance. I just can't excited about this duo like many people can. Angles was a decent record but at best only about half of ...

My iTunes says I bought/acquired 72 2011 albums this year, although 5 of them are the same Battles album (featuring Tom, Dick and Harry) and I'm not sure Count Basie recorded One More Time in 2011.  Had I not embarked on a mission to purchase the "100 jazz albums that shook the world" list in its entirety (alas not even halfway) I might have done better - who knows, I might have even picked up the new Coldplay.  Nah, probably not, but still, out of that limited pool, here are the great, the good, and the distinctly average. Great EPs I believe I only bothered with this last year because I wanted to give shout-outs to the James Cleaver Quintet and Glassjaw.  As it happens Glassjaw gave away the Coloring Book EP at their show earlier in the year, and it's not bad at all.  Still groovy but less heavy than the Our Colour Green series of Singles, it could be an interesting new direction, but is a brand new LP too much to ask for?  Another to ment...

Hello and welcome to my year-end "best of" list for, would you believe it, the fourth year in a row.  This time I've gone all up-market and created a blogger/blogspot thing in an attempt to widen my audience from the 500 or so facebook friends who couldn't care less about what I have to say about anything to the circa 7 billion people on the planet with internet access who couldn't care less about what I have to say about anything.  Except the music editor of the Guardian who will read this and whisk me away to a life of musical journalism and all the free CDs I can shake my neglected saxophone at.  Yeah, right. From a seemingly successful attempt to perform some iTunes wizardry it looks like I have acquired some 60 albums released in 2012 (and made some good progress against Jazzwise's "100 jazz records that shook the world" list, of course).  Although this is fewer than 2011, I nevertheless conclude there remains a point to doing this.  You lucky...