Jimmy E's Music List Mania

Gentle men and women, lend me your eyes for this fifth annual instalment of my end of year favourite records list.   I am quietly hopeful that my audience might even number more than ten folks this time around.   How’s that for passive expansion? Despite the glut of these lists around the internet and the big words used, let’s be honest for a moment.   They’re not even remotely objective, arguably not really proper journalism and as comforting as they are, lists are an extraordinarily lazy way of forming and writing an article.   Neither they nor the music they mention are going to cure cancer or strife in Syria anytime soon, not even the new Daft Punk record on the 67th listen.  Still with me?  Great, clearly you care about music not sorting out the world's problems as much as I do (maybe it can, but I'll save that for another time), so let's plow on together regardless. My shame Not that it really matters, but I do like to point out that I ...

*A note before I begin.  By "double album" I am referring to the original media format on which the album was released (and let's ignore greatest hits and live albums, because that's just cheating).* "There's a good single album's worth of material in there somewhere."  Just because it's a cliche readily thrown out by practically every reviewer of every double album ever made, doesn't mean it's not true.  Why would artists open themselves up to that inevitability?  Backing up, why make a double anyway? - too many ideas for a single disc? A way to make twice as much money if released separately?  Aesthetic and / or artistic reasons that us mere mortals aren't meant to understand?  Whatever the reason, the double-album has been around for a long time; it doesn't seem to be genre specific and nor does it seem to be going away anytime soon.  Quite the opposite in fact. I have for a long time believed that Bob Dylan's Bonde on Blo...