eMusic's best albums of 2011

I like eMusic as a source for downloading mp3s.  I like to pay for digital downloads because I'm old-fashioned that way, but I don't like to pay extra at iTunes for a format that isn't used outside of the Apple biosphere.  I often find the eMusic site clunky, but I suppose you get what you pay for.  I do like it that they post charts and a year-end best of list.  Here's a link to their top 100 albums of 2011.  If you just go to the eMusic website without the help of this link, good luck trying to find it - I don't think you will.

One of the annoying things about eMusic is that if you just want to download a couple of tracks from a record you've never heard, it's hard to figure out which tracks might be the ones you'd want. You can read the reviews, but usually it's just a critic tossing out whichever tracks were the easiest for them to describe on first listen. If you take a peek at the record on iTunes, you can sort by popularity and then go back to eMusic to download the most popular or 3 most popular or whatever. It's a cumbersome and slightly time-consuming process, but it's less time consuming than weeding through it all on your iPod or computer after having downloaded to much garbage.

Then again, maybe you'd like that info, but you don't like the process.  Here's the eMusic list with the iTunes top track (as of Jan15 2012).

The eMusic top 20 in descending order (with iTunes top track in parentheses) are:

20. We Are Augustines (Chapel Song)
19. Zola Jesus (Skin)
18. Tom Waits (Bad as Me)
17. Liturgy (Generation)
16. Drake (The Motto)
15. Fleet Foxes (Helplessness Blues)
14. Dum Dum Girls (Coming Down)
13. John Maus (Hey Moon)
12. Nicolas Jaar (Space is Only Noise if You Can See)
11. Youth Lagoon (Cannons)
10. Craig Taborn (The Broad Day King)
9. Cut Copy (Need You Now)
8. EMA (California)
7. Bon Iver (Holocene)
6. Beyonce (Love On Top)
5. Yuck (Get Away)
4. James Blake (The Wilhelm Scream)
3. The War on Drugs (Baby Missiles)
2. M83 (Midnight City)
1. P.J. Harvey (On Battleship Hill)

Don't be fooled by Beyonce at #6 or P.J. Harvey and Tom Waits at #1 and #18.  This is mostly a great list for discovering new artists.  Also, P.J. Harvey ended up at or near the top of a lot of year-end lists, so maybe I need to give P.J. Harvey a new fresh listen.  Or maybe you just want to check out Yuck.  It's up to you.

2011 Year-end Best-of Lists

I feel like the best-of lists are showing up early this year.  I prefer to read them while relaxing after having finished all my Christmas shopping for others while contemplating a post-Christmas record shopping outing on my own.  No such luck this year.  I could only skim the NY Times in a fatigued and harried state before rushing off to a Chuck E Cheese birthday party this morning, but there was at least one new discovery for me.

Like most of blue-state America, I'm pretty oblivious to current country music.  I sit comfortably distant from red states listening to alt-country, but the chasm between commercial-radio country and alt-country is still something I find astounding.  There's virtually no cross-over in either direction.  I think the Pistol Annies could be an exception.  Miranda Lambert is a huge country star, and if she's ever shown up on any NY Times year-end lists, I've certainly missed it.  Her side project, however, showed up on a couple of lists this year, including Ben Ratliff's.

I was intrigued by the write-up and figured it wouldn't be too hard to find a video, and it wasn't.  I hope things slow down enough during the holidays that I can explore the rest of the list and many others as well.  I was very happy with this first discovery.