I do this every year - Spend too much time thinking what albums qualify to make it to in my list of favorites for the year, but when it comes down to actually penning down reasons why, I quickly scribble down in one sitting everything, typically leaving out numerous details that I regret later on, leaving me to quietly re-edit what I had originally written, hoping that readers hadn't checked out my list just quite yet. Well, I'm doing it again, aren't I. Here, then, is a list of my favorite ten albums of the year, with the stipulation that they had to have been released this year. Of course, that leaves a lot leftover, so that gets a list in itself.
What constitutes being placed into this prestigious (not really) list? Albums that challenge me. The common theme to most of the music on this list consists of the fact that they were not immediately pleasing to the ear. As a result, most of them stretched my ear, so to speak, and required an effort from my part to realize what it was they were trying to point out. Here is last year's list, just for comparison: