Drowned in Sound's albums of the year 2017 - commentary and conjecture

Oh, and uneasy because she’s in the Illuminati, obv.

Those first four Elbow records are such a soundtrack to my twenties that I don’t think I’m capable of rationally assessing/ranking any of them.

Have totted up all of our staff votes and the winner is…

1 Like

Which EP?

Kamasi Washington, it’s longer than quite a few albums on the list, but is nominally an EP. But it’s a bit of a meaningless distinction in this case; it’s 45 minutes of separate songs intentionally composed to form a single work so for all intents and purposes may as well be an album.

1 Like

The Arca album is absolutely superb.

2 Likes

Fair enough. A poll is a poll and it’s scored fairly. Who’s top scored the most.

I’ve always preferred looking at individuals’ top three or five depending whether they’re voting for album of the month or year rather than the end results of the poll. For me it’s more interesting to see individuals’ listening tastes and habits.

I may well be wrong and have no statistical proof but the end results of poll might boost bigger bands with albums that inevitably get reviewed from multiple publications with a lot of exposure. If loads of people have these albums as their fourth or fifth best album it’ll win even though those individuals don’t think it’s the best of the year.

Anyway, you can’t please everybody. I usually find an album or two placed towards the bottom that I haven’t heard of that tends to be a revelation to me and so overall no complaints from me.

1 Like

Oh well, from nearly no.1 to oblivion for Kelly Lee Owens on the new poll :smiley:

Yep, I for one prefer the Evil Dictator’s list … and thus welcome our Overlord’s rule …

(Although admittedly, he did get the no. 1 and 2 albums mixed up, the fool). :smiley: Listened to that KLO album again last night - first time for a while. Still fresh. It’s just not got old at all. Wonderful album, gaining well-deserved recognition.

3 Likes

SORRY!

Just checked it out after meaning to for ages, yep it’s very good indeed

Thanks for recommending this album. Prompted to go listen by your post and haven’t stopped over the last couple of days. Brilliant.

1 Like

@sean can you please tell me: is it E. M. A. or Em(m)a?

Asked this in thread a few months ago but I think everyone was assuming I was making a joke …

1 Like

For E. M. A. For E. V. A.

Just had a listen to the Wolf Alice album on Spotify. Not sure if my PC is playing up but it seemed really quiet and mushy production coming straight off listening to my MP3s of this year’s Cloud Nothings album. That said, it wasn’t nearly as dull as I’d sort of assumed. Quite a nice album overall. “It wouldn’t be my number 1” isn’t a meaningful phrase to me nowadays because I tend to have a bunch of albums I love from genres and moods too different to compare but it certainly wouldn’t be likely to make a dent on my 10 favourite albums of the year.

C’mon, team, I thought we patched out the issues with Theo’s ranking algorithms? Please don’t tell me all the ratings are rounding to whole numbers again…

2 Likes

You’re not helping things!

Top 10 all women or women-fronted bands. Pretty sweet.

1 Like

“Hi, this is E.M.A.”

2 Likes

Legend