We present to you our favorite albums of 2011. Some of these we knew were going to be grand slams in the beginning. None of them have any measure of mediocrity. They are barely in any order, because we think lists are kind of dumb anyways. There are 58 albums on this list. The top eight are our “Best of the Best” and the rest are the “Rest of the Best”. We love all of these records. It's hard to see trends in our groupings other than ones that are indicative of our personal tastes – 2011 was not a “Year of the [Insert trope]”. If anything, this was a year when we saw through genre. It would be hard to classify most of this music into a definitive group, where it could reside with other similar records. There is no clearly defined genre for Liturgy's “transcendental death metal” or Oneohtrix Point Never's classical audio collage or Pictureplane's DIY trance. Future Islands say, on their Twitter bio, that they are “too noisy for new wave, too pussy for punk,” and it's true. Nothing fits in a box anymore.
This is an excellent development.
