I am an adventurer.

About My Lists
I make annual lists of albums and the scores I give them. I make a couple kinds of lists.

Best Of
One of them is the Best Of [Year] format, which is meant to be a complete, thought-out ranking of the albums relative to one another.

Releases Rated
The second kind is the [Year] Releases Rated, which just orders them by the score I give them, as I go. It's not meant to be a strict best-of ranking for that year at all. Unlike a Best-Of List, which is mainly meant to note the top 50 or 100 albums of the year, this list takes in everything and puts it on the map. Also unlike a top-whatever list, the albums aren't really entered in relation to each other. Rankings are by isolated listens of the each album, without comparing whether it is particularly better or worse than other albums. Percentage ratings on a 1-100 scale. Initial impressions and repeated listens make scores and list order very fluid.

Here's a general guide for interpreting scores on a Releases Rated list:

96-100 - Immortally Good.
90-95 - Album-of-the-year contender.
80-89 - Unusually good, and/or (less often) highly artistically meritorious
75-79 - A really good album
70-74 - Passing grade. I'd listen to this again.
65-69 - Shaky, sub-par, or boring, but still OK
60-64 - Sounds belabored or has serious flaws.
50-59 - Failing grade. Not worth your time considering the options.
16-49 - Objectively crappy but some careless fans will like it anyway.
00-15 - Seriously, you could hurt yourself trying to like it.
NR - I haven't listened to/rated this yet

Aggregation
The newest method I have for my lists is the [Year] Releases Rated by Track Score Aggregation. I call this my iTunes Star method. Instead of forming an impression of an album as a whole, I rate each track by how much I enjoy it or am impressed by it. The rating is in iTunes, by their five-star system, so it's a little limited. A lot of the songs really fall between 70 and 85, and where in that gap seems important sometimes even though they all end up being four stars.

Still, in general, adding these individual song scores, dividing by the number of tracks, and multiplying by 20 (in order to convert from a 5-base score to a percentage) seems to produce an album rating in the right ballpark, with perhaps more accuracy than a less systematic impression of the album.

The Decade List
The big mama of my lists is the Best Of The Aughties ('00s) list.

Thought I'd try to collect some of the best albums from this decade. With music, even hindsight isn't 20/20. But I think looking over the decade in which the music industry finally came out of the cocoon and began to flutter its way to freedom, and seeing which things really stuck, is a fun project.

These Are Albums, Not Musicians or Songs or Videos
Of course, I come back to my purist album-orientedness for this. I don't care how many great hits you had, how popular you were, how famous your moment in the spotlight was, or how many copies you sold. If your album wasn't that good, it didn't make the list, or at least it's somewhere toward the bottom. You can see I didn't even list them in order of the scores I gave the albums.

I Don't Give a Flip Whether You Agree, but You Might
I weighed this list by an admittedly subjective mixture of merits, mostly along the lines of

• artistic integrity,
• durability (meaning I can throw this in the stack of thousands of other albums and somehow it keeps rising to the top, for years),
• reliability (meaning I can recommend this to a lot of people and expect they'll probably like it),
• cultural or music scene importance,
• critical acclaim, and
• indulgence in my own tastes and preferences

For instance, I think Brian Wilson's Smile, Sufjan Stevens' Illinois, and Joanna Newsom's Ys are three of the most artistically meritorious and and best albums of the decade, but I'm never going to be able to listen to them repeatedly for ten years in my car the way I do with the tight, simplified pop tunes of The Shins, Spoon, or even the critically pooh-poohed Caesars. Speaking of critical acclaim, I know that Spoon's minimalism is perhaps more critically praiseworthy than The Shins, but the Shins shaped my decade whereas Spoon just made several years of it sound a lot cooler. The Caesars won't make anyone's list but mine, but few albums have played over more miles in my car than Paper Tigers has over the last decade, so it has to make the list.

Cred is Cred.
Okay, okay, yeah, yeah. I say I don't particularly care what people think about this list, but then I quote people to back up my opinions. So why shouldn't I see the importance of critical polling? That's why, where applicable, I listed what other critics said, especially if they agreed. It lends a little legitimacy to my list, I guess, since I am still an amateur. For example, I was surprised to find that Acclaimedmusic.net agreed with me, despite the fact that a lot of the critics cited by Metacritic.com didn't, concerning Funeral being the best album of the decade. In another instance: I tend to like the opinions I hear from Tiny Mix Tapes, and check out what they said about the Brian Wilson album! That is definitely worth quoting, because if it hadn't been for statements like that, I know I may have never bothered with that very impressive album. In the end, that's the best use of music criticism: recommending good music. So here's the list.