Albums of the Year 2011
- Low C’mon
- Abigail Washburn City of Refuge
- King Creosote & Jon Hopkins Diamond Mine
- Eleanor Friedberger Last Summer
- The War on Drugs Slave Ambient
- St. Vincent Strange Mercy
- Kurt Vile Smoke Ring For my Halo
- The Decemberists The King is Dead
- Gillian Welch The Harrow and Harvest
- Le Butcherettes Sin Sin Sin
- The Cowboy Junkies Demons
- Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat Everything’s Getting Older
- The Mountain Goats All Eternals Deck
- Elbow Build a Rocket Boys!
- Bill Callahan Apocalypse
- PJ Harvey Let England Shake
- Driftless Pony Club Buckminster
- Josh T Pearson Last of the Country Gentlemen
- EMA Past Life Martyred Saints
- The Antlers Burst Apart
- R.E.M.. Collapse Into Now
C’mon is the Duluth band’s best since “Things We Lost In The Fire”, the album I listened to most in 2012 and a thoroughly deserving record the year. I feel like I should note that the Low album was at number two until I realised that the only reason I had the Abigail Washburn record on top (as good as it is) was due to her relative obscurity.
One other point – the list was going to be a top 20 until I decided that as a loyal R.E.M. fan for twenty years their final release really should be on here somewhere, even if there is only one track on Collapse Into Now that I really like.
You can find 18 of the these on this Spotify playlist unfortunately the Gillian Welch, Mountain Goats and Bill Callahan records aren’t available.