#^d 2015-02-02 #^h Music Week

Music: Current count 24455 [24422] rated (+33), 503 [497] unrated (+6).

The year-in-progress file for 2014 is now frozen, as of January 31. As of the same date, I've stopped adding things to the Best Jazz and Best Non-Jazz files. I'll continue to the 2014 file until December 31, 2015, with the late additions in green. (I've added four such records so far.)

I've also stopped updating the Music Tracking 2014 file -- I actually stopped several weeks ago. It's job was to remind me of what's out there, and in that regard it's been supplanted by the 2014 EOY Aggregate. I'm not quite done with this file. Most of what I've done in the last week has been to add to the "comments" field. I've added all of Robert Christgau's grades (to date). I've added many ratings from Album of the Year (top 500) and Metacritic. I've found very few new lists to add in, but I did add a selection of P&J ballots, and I violated my neutrality principle there: I added in every ballot that included a vote for Nicki Minaj's The Pinkprint. That nearly doubled Minaj's votes (18 to 37) and bumped her from 221 to 113. Her voters were almost all names I had never heard of (more than half female), and I was curious what else they might like (not that Azealia Banks, now in 25th, came as a big surprise). Also helped move D'Angelo up to 22nd. Also Run the Jewels 2 finally opened up some breathing room over War on Drugs at the top of the list.

One thing I still expect to do is to add my own A-list into the count. I'll add Christgau's Dean's List if/when it appears. If you have a list I don't have already (check here) let me know. But for all practical purposes the list is about done. I don't know whether it's been useful for anyone else, but I've found a lot of surprising new records through it.

I figured my new jazz mail would continue to decline in the new year, but it picked up this week, including two new records from Intakt in Switzerland. (They haven't serviced me in 4-5 years, but their records are on Rhapsody, so I wrote up nine of them last year, including A- for Tom Rainey: Obbligato and Michael Griener: Squakk: Willisau & Berlin, plus four high HM for Harry Sokal, Aki Takase [twice], and Trio 3.) Also got an advance of the new Free Nelson Mandoomjazz -- first CD to come my way from that publicist since last year's record, which I was virtually the only one to have noticed.

One fairly pointless exercise I did was to pick up all the Metacritic.com scores for every 2014 release they rated and add them into the comment section of the EOY Aggregate File. That came to 1241 titles, including 189 that had not yet appeared on a single EOY list (remarkably, more than half of the latter were already in my own M-file list, although chances are a good many originally came from Metacritic.com). The data would have been much more useful had the scores been accompanied by sample size. For instance, the top-rated records are:

  1. Machine Head: Bloodstone & Diamonds (Nuclear Blast) 96/5
  2. D'Angelo: Black Messiah (RCA) 95/30
  3. Every Time I Die: From Parts Unknown (Epitaph) 92/6
  4. Behemoth: The Satanist (Metal Blade) 92/10
  5. The Hotelier: Home, Like Noplace Is There (Tiny Engines) 91/8
  6. I Am the Avalanche: Wolverines (I Surrender) 90/4
  7. St. Vincent: St. Vincent (Universal) 89/40
  8. Run the Jewels: RTJ2 (Mass Appeal) 89/35
  9. Trophy Scars: Holy Vacants (Monotreme) 89/4
  10. Swans: To Be Kind (Young God) 88/35

As you can see, four of the top ten records were reviewed 30+ times, and those four finished 1-4-2-19 in Pazz & Jop (26-4-2-8 in my EOY aggregate; D'Angelo was hurt in the latter by late released date, Swans in the former because it's something of a cult item even though it managed to get widely reviewed). Of the other six, the highest in P&J was Hotelier in 116th place; Behemoth's P&J rank was 134th, but did a little better in the EOY aggregate (128th; Hotelier was 177th). Only one of the other four managed as much as a single P&J vote (Every Time I Die). Machine Head was tied for 253rd in the EOY Aggregate, and Every Time I Die for 341st. I Am the Avalanche didn't place on a single EOY list.

Three of the top four above are metal albums. As I've noted before, metal is a sizable enough niche that some mainstream rock publications will hire a metal specialist, but not so big that mainstream critics feel any need to ever listen to the stuff (unlike pop, which alt/indie critics often hate, or hip-hop, which they sometimes like). A small sample size is a recipe for outliers, and that's what Metacritic.com's methodology delivers. (In practice, the sample sizes for jazz, country, and blues are too small to even register much at Metacritic.com.) The other three marginally reviewed albums are somewhere on the hard (or punk) end of rock. I Am the Avalanche's four reviewers were Rock Sound, Alternative Press, Absolute Punk, and Kerrang! Three of those four also reviewed Every Time I Die (out of 6 total); two also reviewed Machine Head (out of 5 total).

I also looked at Album of the Year's Best Albums of 2014 list (well, just the first 500 albums so far). AOTY doesn't survey as many music review sources as Metacritic, but their list makes it easier to find out how many of their sources reviewed each album. (Their minimum is also higher at 5, vs. 4 for Metacritic.) For instance, the number of reviews for St. Vincent drops from 40 to 25; Run the Jewels 2 from 35 to 23, and Black Messiah from 30 to 20. I started to build up a chart that sorted records by how many AOTY reviews they got, and was surprised to find that the most reviewed album of 2014 was Warpaint's eponymous effort (with 27 reviews and an average score of 74, same as MC). Beyond it, the most reviews were 26 (FKA Twigs), 25 (Beck, St. Vincent), 24 (Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus, Stephen Malkmus, New Pornographers, Spoon, Swans, War on Drugs), and 23 (How to Dress Well, Liars, Perfume Genius, Run the Jewels). The top records beyond those 16 in my Aggregate are: 6. Caribou (21), 9. Sun Kil Moon (19), 10. Angel Olsen (13), Sharon Van Etten (21), 14. Mac DeMarco (18), 15. Taylor Swift (17), Todd Terje (19), 18. Future Islands (21), 19. Sturgill Simpson (7), and 20. Lana Del Rey (20).

Warpaint wound up 51st on my list (90th in Pazz & Jop). The highest rated (my list) albums with Mc:74 or less (with AOTY review count in parens): 20. Lana Del Rey (20), 39. Alt-J (21), 40. Temples (16), 51. Warpaint (27), 57. Black Keys (17), 59. Jungle (16), 62. Jessie Ware (20), 66. Metronomy (18), 95. Banks (15; by the way, the only album on this list to finish beyond AOTY's top 500, with a 67 critic score). Aside from Warpaint, I'd say that each of those albums has a niche advantage (pop, prog, and psych for the top three), but the general rule is that the more reviews the higher a record places.

New records rated this week:

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries rated this week:

Old records rated this week:

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week: