I loaned Yellow Ostrich's The Mistress to my buddy. It's tied for #2.

H. Canoli! I didn’t really think so, but 2011 was a pretty awesome year for music. Anyhow. Obviously the best record was Too Funky… by Jumpsuit, because duh! After seemingly a Brazilian years of recording and mixing and mastering and being in Estonia and having an unreliable postal service, I finally got a copy. And it’s great.

Tied for #2 is Yellow Ostrich The Mistress and Dead Rider The Raw Dents, both of which were thanks to Curator of the Year, Grant Sutton. I think he had something to do with that first record as well.

Tied for #4 are Neon Indian Era Extrana, St. Vincent Strange Mercy, and Girls F, S, HG. I don’t feel like adding a tilde right now.

Tied for #7: Hooraymond True Loves, Decemberists The King Is Dead, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart Belong, and TVoTR Nine Types of Light. The rest aren’t really ranked, but CANT, Bill Callahan, Stephen Malkmus/Jicks, Bridge & Tunnel, REM, Iron & Wine, and The War on Drugs all put out great records this year, too.

Old records that stubbornly held on to their time on the turntable include The Books last record, Sufjan Steven’s Age of Adz, all the guided By Voices records I finally bought this year, The Misfits, Twin Shadow, and Head of Skulls. I finally got to see Head of Skulls this year, and I figure their You Became Your Mind will continue to stay in the auxiliary “in the hole” stack of records. I finally bought the self-titled Wilco record, so maybe I’ll get around to buying their new one sometime this year. Looking forward to listening to the Boys Next Door record my buddy gave to me, and finding time to listen to Sun City Girls’ Dante’s Disneyland Inferno in it’s entirely ten or twelve more times.