Best Albums of 2011

I've been making these lists for a few years now. It's a really good way to see how my taste has changed, for better or worse. With the advent of Spotify, music is so easy to find and is so readily available for digesting that filtering the year's music down to a few selections is increasingly difficult. What's even more difficult is figuring out what "good music" is when everything in the "independent" music world is starting to sound the same. Before this turns into a full-on rant, here are my choices, for one reason or another:


Full-length-

1. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues
2. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
3. Radiohead - The King of Limbs
4. Antlers - Burst Apart
5. White Denim - D
6. Wilco - The Whole Love
7. My Brightest Diamond - All Things Will Unwind
8. Nerves Junior - As Bright As Your Night Light
9. Atlas Sound - Parallax
10. Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil
11. The Dodos - No Color
12. Dirty Projectors + Bjork - Mount Wittenberg Orca
13. Thrice - Major/Minor (because it's their last for "an indefinite period of time")
14. Tune-yards - w h o k i l l
15. yMusic - Beautiful Mechanical
16. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming


EPs-

1. Alabama Shakes - (s/t)
2. Conveyor - Sun Ray

Honorable Mentions:

-Feist - Metals
-Son Lux - We Are Rising
-Mute Math - Odd Soul
-Wye Oak - Civilian
-Destroyer - Kaputt