The Guardian have been doing their annual rundown of the Albums of The Year (Their #1 was Frank Ocean‘s Channel Orange, if anyone reading this blog actually cares). As usual, it’s assembled from votes by individual writers. I have always thought that such aggregated lists complied by a committee are a complete waste of space. Regardless of the mechanism used to tally up votes, they end up favouring the lowest common denominator, which at the moment seems to be faux-edgy indie-rock and commercial R&B at the expense of the more diverse and interesting.
Far more interesting and illuminating is the individual critics top tens, which is a good guide to which of their critics are worth taking seriously, and which ones are not.
When comparing with my own end-of-year list, there are two in common with Dom Lawson’s list, Gojira‘s “L’Enfant Sauvage” and Marillion‘s “Sounds That Can’t Be Made“. None of my other albums of the year appear on the lists of a single Guardian writer. I recognise some of my choices are independent releases by artists without large PR budgets that might not be on the radars of those whose exposure to new music is limited to major-label freebies. But the absence of a record like Anathema‘s “Weather Systems” does make one question the depth and breadth of The Guardian’s writers’ musical horizons.
What’s very telling is just how much Dom Lawson’s albums of the year are completely out of line with the rest of The Guardian’s. A few days earlier a couple of Guardian writers were making rather arch remarks on Twitter about Guardian commenters complaining about the lack of Swans and Scott Walker on the official Guardian list. Then Dom Lawson goes and puts those two at the very top of his list.
This does give me the impression that Dom’s taste in music is more widely shared by the readership than some of their other writers seem to realise. What The Guardian really needs is far more writers like Dom Lawson, not specifically metal fans, but people with a deep knowledge and love of different non-mainstream genres. They can pension off some of the surplus superannuated NME types to make room for them.
FYI, Swans’ “The Seer” is indeed a phenomenal record.
So say a lot of people, with the exception of all but one of The Guardian’s writers, it seems.
Give the Grauniad credit for at least hiring the guy. It suggests they acknowledge that they have weak spots in their coverage. They just need a bit more persuading that they need a few more similarly independent writers.
These”add the points up” end of year charts are a bit meaningless – if the number of votes determined quality then the charts would be better. But at least they get people talking about the year’s releases.
On an interesting tangent to this The Enid made No 9 in the readers AotY list. The bits I found ironic were the comments.
The first was somebody saying that open polls were bad because they allowed bands’ fans to vote. The implication was they’d rather be dicated to by press gatekeepers.
The second was James Walsh doing the ‘I listened to it so you don’t have to’ then deriding it as “heroicaly naff prog”. As usual this reminded me of your comments from a while ago about mainstream criticism being broken.
There seems to be a blindness to the ideas that a) people who read the Guardian actually like prog already & find it’s music coverage cringeworthy b) if more people listened to prog they might find they liked it and most importantly c) that prog does not equal naff
The thing is, any band with with a dedicated fanbase could have encourage their fans to vote, it’s just nobody other than The Enid managed to motivate their fans in sufficient numbers to affect the results.
And yes, James Walsh was being heroically snotty. How dare a bunch of uncool prog fans gatecrash his cosy little party?