Jimmy E's Music List Mania

I don’t know whether lockdown and continuous working from home is the cause of me devouring as much new music as I did, but for whatever reason I have listened to more than I ever have. Circa 200 albums, comprising more than 190 hours and 2,535 tracks (some of these are reissues or live albums). Here’s a link to a Spotify playlist of these, which excludes The Microphones’ Microphones in 2020 and Sumac’s May You be Held, available on bandcamp instead. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0NqqIOdZ45eYVlJvprpmNE?si=lXNIrCvjTB2a3V-sv5Lfcw If Spotify Wrapped is to be believed, some stats (only for the first 11 months of the year, mildly annoyingly) are: 454 new artists “discovered” and 1,172 in total. My top 2 genres are rock and jazz. (Then electronica, alternative metal, and post-rock. No surprises here). My top 5 songs include 3 from Piano Become the Teeth’s 2018 record Wait for Love, 1 from last year’s Cult of Luna album, and Iron Maiden’s Infinite Dreams (from 1988’s Seventh Son of a ...

See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction. If you read my “Best of 2000” entry, you’ll see that as I move backward in time I am starting to run out of a good stock of records from these years that I have memories and opinions and any sort of knowledge or interest in. Now while I have a much larger pool of 1999 releases than I did for 2000, it will only be a couple more years before I run out of experience. I probably have an album that I love from every year after a certain point (it might be fun, for me at least/most, to test this theory) and I could perhaps do top ten jazz albums of the year for some time period like 1955-1965 but we’ll see about those. A good and knowledgeable friend of mine once suggested in the pub that the late 90s was a bit of a nothing time for music. What with the New York City cool bands like The Strokes and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem and Interpol (see Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 book “Meet me in the Bathroom” for the lowdown on these) still a y...

See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction. I’m not stumped, exactly, for this year, but as it happens I can quite easily keep the list of faves down to a mere ten. My longlist is only 31 records! Now, this is as usual a very personal thing – there are some HUGE albums from this year that weren’t my thing, which I mention in another bulleted list of nuggets here: 2000 was the year of…Linkin Park – Hybrid Theory. With thanks yet again to Wikipedia, this record “sold 27 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling debut album since Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction (1987) and the best-selling rock album of the 21st century. At the 44th Grammy Awards, it won Best Hard Rock Performance for "Crawling".” Wowsers. I was 15 and a raging Korn fan at the time, and so LP was just too smooth and lame and tame for me. Where Jonathan Davis would have a good ol’ swear, Chester Bennington (RIP) would say something like “you tried to take the best of me. Go away”. PG-...