Anyone who is even a little bit serious about their music listening habits puts together a top whatever list around this time of the year. I have been doing this every year since graduating college and passing it around to friends and family. This year I decided to take vacation between the Christmas and New Year holidays and I have used some of that extra time to put together this article rather than a simple ten line list.

Disclaimer: The album names in my list are links to each album’s digital download page at Amazon. This is primarily part of my ploy to get filthy rich via associate referral purchase kickbacks. It also gives you a way listen to all of these records from within your browser (perhaps while you read this article?!). Most of them weigh in at $5.00 per DRM-free album, which is really great for your record collection, but not so great for my get rich quick scheme.

Having said that, you can hop straight to my list or continue reading the minutiae of my album selection process.

Empirical Evidence and Subjective Taste

As an engineer, an album lover, and an ex-college radio disc jockey, I approach my list creation process in a specific manner.

Warning: software and music nerd content ahead! You can skip ahead to the list if either makes you itch.

The most interesting approach to creating my list is probably using the custom software that I have written to analyze my album listening habits year by year. When I was in college and using iTunes, it let me rate individual tracks on a ★★★★★ scale. I developed a bit of track rating OCD, and throughout my years with iTunes I have come to revere my library’s XML meta-data file. Today it is around 56MB of XML data describing more than 2700 albums.

A feature that I have always found lacking in iTunes is the sense of an album as a listening unit. When I was in college, the burgeoning portable media player market was changing popular culture’s listening habits to become even more track-oriented rather than album-oriented. To this day, I remain an album lover despite the increasingly amazing listening technology that I slip into my pocket each morning. I collect and actively listen to vinyl. Similarly, I collect and consume digital media in album-sized chunks. An album is the unit of creative work that I believe good artists strive to produce. In my opinion, part of respectfully enjoying an artist’s work is listening to an album in its entirety. Shuffle be damned. /rant

Saddened by iTunes’ lack of album ratings and album listening statistics, I wrote an application to analyze my iTunes XML meta-data file and report my listening habits in an album-centric manner. The output of this application is a list of albums by year which can be interactively sorted by the following criteria.

• Overall Album Rating = aggregate track rating / number of tracks
• Real Time Spent Listening To Album in hours:minutes:seconds
• Album Play Count = aggregate track play count / number of tracks

I use these different views into my listening habits for the year to form an empirical list of albums that I clearly liked either because I rated them highly or spent a lot of my time listening to them. In my head I weigh these aspects differently from year to year depending on how many albums were released that I listened to, and how much time I had spent listening to music.

After forming my initial list of around twenty or so albums in this manner I begin to rank and prune based on subjective and experiential listening criteria like:

• What season of year was the album released?
• What was the weather like when I first listened to it?
• Where was I when I first listened to it?
• What was I doing?
• What kind of mood was I in?
• How could it affect my current mood?
• Did I see the artist perform this album live?

… and so forth. I will try to describe these factors as I describe each album in my final list.

Kris’s Top Ten Albums of 2011

10. David Comes To Life

Fucked Up

A hardcore punk rock opera. Say that a few times to yourself. Then take 78 minutes and give it a listen because it’s amazing. In a year when I feel like most records that I liked were on the shorter end of the spectrum (less than 40 minutes long), David Comes To Life brought it for nearly twice as long. Extra kudos for writing and performing a rock opera that just doesn’t suck.

9. Tell Me

Jessica Lea Mayfield

I’ve liked Jessica Lea Mayfield since her previous full length, With Blasphemy So Heartfelt. I saw her perform at Johnny Brenda’s during that tour and I was absolutely blown away with her performance. Tell Me is another great record from a young woman (she’s 22 now) with a big voice set against a backdrop of loose guitars and some difficult subject matter. I really love the mood of this album.

8. Moody, Standard And Poor

Obits

Rick Froberg would have to play the pots and pans for me to question whether or not I dig what he’s producing. Moody, Standand, and Poor is twelve three-ish minute long tracks of excellent quality rock ‘n’ roll that stirs an, “I’m an American, and I like rock ‘n’ roll, damnit!” attitude within me. Which is a great attitude to have, I believe. I was lucky enough to share a beer with Rick and John Reis at the old Khyber after a Night Marchers show years ago and I can say that they were both really cool rock gods.

7. Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Bon Iver

Everyone loved this album, right? I did too. It is a great example of an album as a work of art and not just a collection of tracks. I rarely begin listening to this record if I know that I don’t have time to finish it in a single sitting. At just under forty minutes that’s not hard to do, which is perhaps another reason I like it.

6. Zonoscope

Cut Copy

I liked In Ghost Colours but I didn’t think it was a really great album as a whole. Zonoscope is a great album. The collection of longer (4 - 6 minute) tracks culminating in the 15 minute outro works really well. As a fan of ambient and experimental/electronic noise the last track is a particular treat for me and I got a lot of good work done while listening to this record during the past year.

5. Arabia Mountain

Black Lips

This album is a lot of fun. If you haven’t seen the Black Lips play live some of this album’s energy might be lost on you. They really are fantastic on stage. Arabia Mountain brings the familiar southern lo-fi punk sound of the band together with an accessible sense of melody that will be pleasantly bouncing around in your head after the first listen.

4. Tao Of The Dead

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Just like David Comes To Life is a rock opera that doesn’t suck, Tao Of The Dead is a concept record that doesn’t suck. The last few albums from Trail of Dead have been advancing Conrad’s delivery of steampunk artwork and lyrical style, which is either something you dig or do not dig. I happen to dig it and I think that this record expresses the genre in a compelling and entertaining manner. It also gets bonus points for being another big record in a year full of shorter records. Sixteen movements in D and F, and a solid prog rock revival in line with Yes and Genesis records of the past.

3. Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

M83

For me, this is one of those records released in Autumn that will end up feeling more like a record released the following Spring when I look back at it. It’s a long and upbeat album and doesn’t seem to fit the shorter, colder days of Winter. Despite that feeling, it has very quickly ran up my “time spent listening to” and “album rating” lists. I loved Saturdays = Youth and was lucky enough to see M83 perform that album in an intimate setting. I’m looking forward to seeing them visit the sold out Union Transfer in May, 2012 and fill that large space with this equally large album.

2. Knife Man

Andrew Jackson Jihad

For years Andrew Jackson Jihad, This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb, and Ghost Mice have defined folk punk for me. This album is a bit of a departure from their previous works in that there is a good amount of electrified instrumentation and more of a studio production feel to it. It’s closer to The Body, The Blood, The Machine than Can’t Maintain and it totally works. With track titles like Zombie by the Cranberries by Andrew Jackson Jihad and lyrics like, “I hate whiny fucking songs like this, but I can’t afford a therapist… sorry guys, here’s a solo… [queue guitar solo]” it’s hard to not enjoy this album, even if you have never heard of folk punk.

1. Helplessness Blues

Fleet Foxes

I didn’t enjoy Fleet Foxes self-titled first LP, though it seemed everyone else did. To be honest, I still don’t really love it all that much. When I first played Helplessness Blues my opinion of the band immediately changed. The pervasive feeling of a rich, rural environment instantly appealed to my mind’s eye and I can conjure vivid pictures of spaces and situations which Robin Pecknold describes. The swelling strings and vocal harmonies sweep me away. This is the kind of record that I will put on, sit down, relax and simply enjoy. I also had the pleasure of seeing them perform at the Tower Theatre from an excellent seat and it was an awesome experience. It can be difficult to recreate such an elaborate mood at a live venue but they pulled it off spectacularly thus cementing Helplessness Blues as my favorite record of 2011.