As with the last two years, I'm commencing the countdown of my favourite albums of the year in mid-September. This is because I listen to a lot of new music these days, much more than I used to, and have heard more than enough records that I really like to start now at a hundred.
This is a slightly strange endeavour in that there are a few albums I'm fairly sure will end up on the countdown that I haven't heard yet because they haven't been released. I can't imagine the Alvvays and Weyes Blood albums, for example, which are coming out in the next couple of months, won't turn up somewhere here. So I'll be making hard and painful decisions in the coming weeks, (hey I'm a Record Shop geek, these things are painful to us!) and adjusting things and some records that are in my rundown now, probably aren't going to make it.
It's a list that by no means aims to be comprehensive. These are records that are my favourites, and I'm not by any means suggesting they are the 'best' of 2022 in anyone's eyes but my own. How many people have heard Memory's Fool, the quite astonishing record by Fortunato Durutti Marinetti apart from me after all?
So there's no Kendrick. I didn't feel like listening to him. There is no Sharon Van Etten. It didn't do much for me the couple of times I tried. There are plenty that you might expect and that will be on plenty of other's lists. This isn't The Quietus. I listen to enough records for it to be reasonably eclectic. There's some Hip Hop, one genuinely avant gard record. Albums in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and French.Oh and one in a mixture of Cornish and Welsh.
But it's largely Indie as in independent, and melodic as my taste essentially is. Every one of of these I'd say is worth listening to, and worthy of individual consideration or I wouldn't have included them here, as I've had to leave out plenty that I really like. Wonderfully the countdown, will lead us to Christmas Day.
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