The new issue of Uncut should be out any day now, featuring our thoroughly extensive Best Of 2009 coverage: the Top 50 albums of the year, best reissues, best comps/boxsets, films, DVDs, books and so on.
Fairly predictably, I suppose, I’ve been watching the unravelling Best New Bands Of 2009 business with some bafflement. Not that my taste was ever going to chime completely with this sort of thing, of course (in my ballot for the BBC poll, I did actually include Florence & The Machine, alongside Telepathe and Crystal Antlers, for what it’s worth).
With blogging, of course, you publish and be damned, then, once damned, you publish again. So it is with the Top 75 I unleashed on an unsuspecting world on Tuesday, only to soon realise that it was, basically, a bit of a cock-up.
Thanks to everyone who’s submitted their lists in response to the Best Records Of 2008 brainstorm from last week. Some excellent albums rising to the surface, and it’s especially nice to see love for No Age, Fleet Foxes and Elbow, three records which narrowly missed my original cut.
It occurred to me this morning, in an anal sort of way, that we should probably talk about the best records of 2008's first six months. To that end, I've just been through my blog archive and come up with my ten favourites of the year up 'til the end of June.
Publishing imperatives being what they are, most of us have virtually forgotten about all the hair-wringing and number-crunching that went into compiling those Best Of 2007 lists. But before we completely write off the last 12 months, here's one last poll that's pretty interesting.