2012年 Jan 1日 Sunday, 9:08

2011 has come and gone and it was a good year for music though certainly not as good as 2010 but that comes as no surprise. 2010 was an amazing year for music with a number of great releases buy just as many great artists.

Artists:
Last year I said that I would be investigating the previous work of my second place artist The National and that's exactly what I did. The National has become the soundtrack to my life (or at least the unhappy parts) and as such has blown away everybody else by seven hundred scrobbles. They dominated almost my entire twelve month track listings and took up prominent spots on the album chart. Everything they have released has struck a chord with me in all the right ways which is why in the space of just over two years they have gone from obscurity to my number four artist. Trailing the national is Radiohead who released The King of Limbs in the early months. Following them are Gorillaz who picked up a number of scrobbles when I bought a copy of The Fall a few months ago. That said Gorillaz are a lot like The National in the sense that all of their albums are fantastic and when I hear one song I am often driven to listen to more. For the first year since I joined last.fm Nine Inch Nails is not in my top three; in fact they are sitting down on the number seven spot this year. Last years top artist Skinny Puppy have fallen all the way to seventeen with only one hundred and forty scrobbles. To be honest though it's hard for anybody else to get any scrobbles when I was constantly listening to The National.

Albums:
As mentioned above The National chewed up my charts this year taking the number one, two, four, eight, nine, and ten spot on my album charts. Top place goes to their 2005 release, Alligator. Following that is the preceding album Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. In a surprise upset James Darren's 1999 release of This One's From The Heart stole the third place spot on new years eve. I know James Darren better as Vic Fontaine, a character he played in the series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This One's From The Heart is a compilation of the material he sang for the show and it's been a pleasantly different addition to my music collection.

Tracks:
Looking over my track charts for 2011 shows almost nothing but The National for the first thirty tracks or so. The song All the Wine grabbed the top spot, not because it's their best song but because it appears both on my top 2011 album Alligator as well as an EP they released the prior year titled Cherry Tree which was my number four album. Following that are two tracks that I am very fond, namely About Today and Daughters of the Soho Riots. About Today has accompanied some of the worst moments of 2011 for me while Daughters of the Soho Riots is likely my favorite track from Alligator. Interesting to note is that Hey Rosetta! was the only artist that could poke holes in the blanket of The National anywhere near to top spots. Two songs by Canadian group Hey Rosetta!, Bandages and Red Song, both of which are featured on the fantastic three track release Red Songs. An alternate version of Bandages also appears as the final track on their 2011 release Seeds.

There we go, another year in music. Honorable mention goes to German group Unheilig who would have taken up more of my charts had I gotten their fantastic release Grosse Freiheit earlier than October 2011. I imagine my listening to The National will settle down in 2012 which will allow for new (or old) artists to have a shot at the top spots when I sit down to do this again in twelve months time.

Some albums released in 2011 that didn't make it into my top spots but still deserve some praise would include Matthew Good's release Lights of Endangered Species, The Gangs Are Gone by Black Rust, and Noon by Locust Toybox.

Thanks for reading and happy new year.