Top 100 Albums of 2011 | 2011 Breakdown: Top 13 Genre Lists | Shows | Movies, Television, Books, Comics, Music Coverage

It's hard to pigeonhole a year when it's not quite over. For some it belonged to Lady Gaga, at least until Adele stormed the charts with the biggest selling album (5 million in the U.S.) since Usher's Confessions in 2004. For others it was a banner year for underground rap and hip-hop in the form of self-released "mixtapes." Or for polished, commercial R&B, soul and dance pop, or country, or gauzy, arty indie pop, or a group of folky Americana albums that seem to be our era's version of 70s soft rock. Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to It's Own Past, showed his favorite albums to be obscure experimental electronic music. His choices don't disprove his thesis, that while there are small, incremental innovations in music, there's been nothing big and striking enough to revolutionize the music world in a couple decades. My response was that it isn't necessarily important. When you back up and view the history of music for the past millennium, cultures didn't flame out because their music failed to become unpredictably unrecognizeable every few years. That was a very unique condition spurred by the fast-moving markets of late-20th century capitalism and a flurry of technological innovations. Some people expected that since we went from learning to fly to traveling to the moon in just a few decades, that by now we should be intergalactic space travelers. I know, it's so disappointing that we're not penned up in floating cans of space colonies.

To me, the exciting development of 2011 was the fact that various means of accessing more music than ever without being forced to break the law have begun to pick up steam. For many, this came in the form of Spotify finally becoming available in the U.S. after we enviously watched it develop in Europe the past few years. For those like me who still like to own their music and listen to it on nice headphones or speakers, Bandcamp is a revelation. Albums are available in any format, most importantly lossless codecs, and bands name their price, generally between free and $15. Most of my listening time was focused on the stoner/psych/doom genres. I tracked recommended albums with my Blogger.com dashboard, some of which you see reposted on my Facebook page or the portal on the home page. The result was exposure to so much more great music than I ever anticipated. I had actually intended to reign in the range of music I spend my time on in 2011 and focus on what I truly enjoy the most. I did just that, but there I found so much more music to enjoy! I found 300 albums I really liked, and had I had the time to spend, I probably would have found a couple hundred more. No doubt I'll continue to discover more 2011 albums via blogs throughout 2012.

While you'll still find a lot of popular favorites towards the lower end of my 400+ albums in the master list, my focus on stoner/doom/psych, metal, post-punk, avant pop, post-rock, neo-prog and just a smattering of electronica, soul, hip-hop, indie rock and music from Africa and Brazil will probably appeal to a narrower group of people. But those who share some of these preferences should be very happy. Continue...