I like You & Me, by the Walkmen, but seeing it on so many year-end lists made me a little suspicious. After all, it seems almost designed to appeal to anyone listening to it in November or December. It’s not only a wintry album, warm and soft and a little bit logy, like you’ve just eaten a big turkey dinner—but there are even explicit references to the holiday season in there, including a whole song about New Year’s. Since year-end lists get made in precisely this period, and the album does sound uniquely good on a snowy day, it made me wonder if the idea of best albums lists really being “best winter albums” lists was a widespread problem.
One way to find out would be to see what the lists would be like if they were made around, say, the fourth of July. There’s probably a better way to do this, but my first thought was just to check Metacritic and see what the top albums were around the middle of the year. This seems fair; their top-rated albums for 2008 look pretty much like everyone else’s.
And so, here are their top-rated albums from January 1 to July 4 of 2008. At first it might seem a little off, but once you scratch the reissues and the oddballs (Protest the Hero?), you’ll see a lot of albums that ended up on year-end lists, too: Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Hercules and Love Affair, and Portishead are all in the top ten, which could make up half of a fairly representative year-end list’s top 10, too. But maybe these are just wintry albums in disguise, I thought; maybe they came out in the early part of the year. Nope: one January, but then it’s nothing but April and June. We can quibble over mood, but there’s no apparent bias in the release date.
The answer to the question then, would seem to be no. Music critics may suffer from certain downbeat tendencies, but year-end lists have no particular lean toward November and December.
Best Albums of 2008 [Metacritic]
Excellent post.
Isn’t there already a bias towards gloomy, wintry albums built into the rock critic ethos? And why only token,where any, best singles/songs lists?
The geekier of us generally make a half-year list in early July to avoid overlooking the beginning of the year. I always find that list interesting–this year, Portishead went from that list to me year-end list. The Breeders, however, did not.
Anybody do the reverse? Just curious, as Portishead seems to be suffering a bit of year-end backlash (my favorite protest was that ‘it’s just too damn depressing’)
that’s a funny theory, because i noticed that my personal year end list was mostly summer records and that’s not like me.
But don’t Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes also “sound better” when you go back to listen to them in November and December, and as such benefit upon consideration at the end of the year?
@MonsieurValentine: yeah, that’s a good point. But the Metacritic list had them rated very highly at the middle of the year there, so maybe they got bumped up a few notches because of the winteryness, but they would’ve (should’ve?) been there somewhere regardless.
What’s interesting about this theory is how music release dates and acclaim compare with the film business. It’s widely known that Oscar bait comes out in the last quarter of the year, on the assumption that Academy attention spans are short, and that a fourth-quarter release signals “prestige” to the business (i.e., if you hold a movie from May to October, you’re signaling that you think you’ve got an awards magnet).
But this doesn’t hold up in music, for two reasons:
A skewed awards calendar. The Grammys operate on an October-September calendar, and most critics’ album lists have to be compiled before Thanksgiving due to publication deadlines. So you can’t hold an “awards bait” album too late in the year (although “Grammy bait” albums by aging legends like Springsteen are often dropped the last weekend of September to get as close to the end of the Grammy year as possible).
A lack of measurable sales improvement. The point of Oscar buzz is to get people to feel obligated to see your movie. Theoretically, year-end album lists do the same for CDs (I’m keeping an eye on TV on the Radio’s sales to see if they get a bump from their near-unanimous lead in most of the polls), but it’s usually less concentrated than the bump for movies and, frankly, less lucrative.