Well, it’s that time of year again and… how to put this. Whilst it would of course be completely fatuous of me to try to draw any wider conclusions about the state of music in 2012 based on my own small, idiosyncratic and probably fairly conservative sampling of it, the fact is that I’ve listened to a lot of music this year that has sucked.

More disappointing follow-up albums than usual. More ‘sorry-guys-this-is-just-not-happening’. more ‘don’t-get-it’. More ‘OK, FUCK THIS’. More reminders that music is hard.

We shouldn’t dwell on the negative though. Enthusiasm for these things always ebbs and flows, and is wholly subjective. I thought my own Buddy Bradley Phase (wherein aging hipsters adopt an attitude of jaded machismo and start habitually berating new music for not being as good as Alice Cooper and ZZ Top) had quietly come and gone a few years back, but turns out that was just a taster. Looks like we have much more fun in that vein yet to come.

All that said though, there HAVE still been a big pile of new records this year that have made me happy. Very few heart-pounding, life-changing discoveries, but that’s ok. I can probably do without them for a while. Just a lot of stuff that’s been really SOLID, y’know? Utilitarian music, that’s what I’m about at the moment. Stuff that does what it does in the way that I want it to do it, and gets me from A to B.

And as such, I’ve put together a TOP 25 of it, all album-ish length things released during 2012 (or in some cases the tail end of 2011) that I heartily recommend, topped off with a final five that I will love til my dying day and actually physically fight for and blah blah blah. So I guess life’s not so bad after all. Noise made by people marches on, and if I find myself just mooching about in a piss-soaked alleyway as the parade passes by, that’s my own business. I’ll jump back on board when I’m good and ready.

Before we begin though, here’s a super-quick run-down of numbers #26 to #30, of which one is flawed but not a total write-off, two are thoroughly decent but I can’t think of anything particularly pertinent to say about them, and the remaining two are dense and interesting records that I only recently picked up and haven’t quite got my head ‘round yet, so they might well increase in my affection as time goes on.

Labels: best of 2012, series intros