The Best Albums of 2011

I’m naming 12 albums to my best-of list because there are 12 months in a year, and so it feels like a less arbitrary number than 10, even if it is also less round. Plus, where good music is concerned, more is always more. If you put Wilco at the top of your ballot, you forgo any chance of seeming fashionable (especially if you put them ahead of Frank Ocean and Tune-Yards), but if you’re going to engage in any activity as subjective as ranking the albums released in a given year, listing them in rough order of how much solace you’ve taken in them is the only honest rubric. If you haven’t heard any of these records, I feel qualified in saying that there is one sort of solace or another to be found in each of them.

 1. Wilco: The Whole Love
 2. Frank Ocean: Nostalgia, Ultra
 3. Saigon: The Greatest Story Never Told
 4. Tune-Yards: Who Kill
 5. Joe Henry: Reverie
 6. Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes
 7. Das Racist: Relax
 8. TV On The Radio: Nine Types of Light
 9. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up
10. Tom Waits: Bad As Me
11. Jay-Z & Kanye West: Watch the Throne
12. Hayes Carll: Kmag Yoyo (& Other American Stories)

Happy New Year, everybody.