This might have been the "deepest" year I remember doing for this yet. Quite a few all-time faves. I'm sure not a little of that has to do with the fact that I was 15. Seems an especially good year for Canadian music. Really enjoyed revisiting all my top 10 and a handful more that I'd never spent much if any time with this week.
1. Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days (10 pts.). I only discovered Iron & Wine in the summer before I started university, in 2007, after stumbling across some performances on YouTube. He quickly became my favourite artist and still is. This album spent every day in my Discman until a few months later when his magnum opus, The Shepherd's Dog, came out.
2. Ken Reaume - Hope In Another Place. A local favourite who really introduced me to the whole folk thing. An incredible guitarist and songwriter, who I only heard of because he was opening for City & Colour at a show I didn't even end up going to. He had a few mp3s for free on his site which I checked out, and then spent the next few years hunting desperately for a copy of his debut CD, which I eventually did find and is now one of my most treasured albums. Never found a copy of this, his second album, but I was lucky enough to see and meet him a few times in the following years.
3. Feist - Let It Die. I've been a big Feist fan for quite a while, but this album never really clicked for me until VMP did it last summer (crazy, I know). I'm still used to the Canadian cover art and tracklisting so it's always weird when "Tout doucement" starts up instead of "L'amour ne dure pas toujours." She is a Canadian treasure.
4. Arcade Fire - Funeral. This was the first vinyl record I ever bought, in 2005. My dad hooked up his old Pioneer table to his computer and we ripped it into Audacity so I could listen to it. It's not my favourite Arcade Fire album, but there's no denying it's a classic. "Rebellion (Lies)" and "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)" were all over that year.
5. Sufjan Stevens - Seven Swans. I'm rarely in the mood for this anymore but one summer I listened to it constantly.
6. Mastodon - Leviathan. I remember seeing "March of the Fire Ants" on Much Loud, a half-hour metal show on Much Music, all the time on Friday nights when I'd tune in, eventually leading me to delve into what became my favourite metal band. "Hearts Alive" is such a fuckin' tune.
7. Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing in the Hands. This and the next album were two of my main intros to "freak folk", which I've been drawn to ever since.
8. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender. I must have been in the minority because I was never turned off by her voice on this album. I came to it after Ys, so the more focused, short "pop" songs were a nice change.
9. Death From Above 1979 - You're a Woman, I'm a Machine. This album is so incredibly fun. I'd never even considered a drum-and-bass band before I'd heard them, they just blew my mind with what they could do with just the two of them.
10. MF Doom - Mm..Food (1 pt.). A much more recent discovery for me, as I'm typically not too into hip-hop, but when it is, it's gotta be fun.
HMs:
11. Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
12. k-os - Joyful Rebellion
13. Destroyer - Your Blues
14. Alexisonfire - Watch Out!. This probably would have been #1 if you asked me in 2004. I spent much of that autumn and winter trying to come up with a song like "Accidents."
15. The Hold Steady - Almost Killed Me
16. mewithoutYou - Catch For us the Foxes
17. A.C. Newman - The Slow Wonder
18. Elliott Smith - From a Basement on the Hill
19. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Miss Machine
20. Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News
21. Dustin O'Halloran - Piano Solos
22. Drive-By Truckers - The Dirty South
