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As 2011 slams the brakes on, editors the breadth of the land put their feet up on their desks and serve you some reconstituted yesterdays—the top-10-20-30-50-100 countdowns of stuff that happened over the past 12 months. But as you grind your way through one end-of-year music supplement banging on about Metronomy and TV on the Radio after another, your eyes go oblong and there’s a sense of intense, giddying deja vu. Haven’t we seen it all before? In every other magazine/paper/webzine/cereal box? Like, every year? Forever?
Slice through the crap—this is The Only Top 50 Albums of the Year Countdown You’ll Ever Need. HERE’S THE BIG LIST (2011 edit).
50 – 43. Stuff you’ve never heard.
42 – 41. Stuff you never want to hear.
40. Band managed by ex-music journalist now furiously milking his old contacts for snippets of friendly press.
35 – 39. Albums bearing the traditional inscription “feat. Nicki Minaj.”
34. Band on a perennially “plucky” indie label that has so far managed to avoid anyone noticing the massive cash injections it regularly receives from Universal Records.
33. Million-seller grudgingly voted for because no one wants to be seen as unduly snobby by holding its success against it.
32. Band that released their record using an innovative web distribution model, three years after anyone last gave a shit about anyone using an “innovative web distribution model.”
31. Horrible chop’d, screw’d, fuck’d album inspired by 90s RnB, made by basically just twiddling filter knobs over a lot of 90s RnB till it sounds unrecognizable.
30. Metronomy.
29. Act who all the staff are into, forgetting that their readership are a good decade younger and have therefore never been alive through a period when this band last produced good records, so really couldn’t give a crap about this latest supposed “return to form.”
28. Album made by hip-hop artist while in jail.
27. Obscure folk album raised almost indiscriminately from a stack of similar such one-man witterings and dubbed “This year’s Bon Iver.”
26. Bon Iver.
