Top Ten Albums of 2012 - #10
Ben Gibbard's Former Lives Editor's Note: This is the 1st in a quasi-weekly series of reviews marking my favorite ten albums of 2012. The 10th edition is wrapped into the larger year-end post I call "The Ho Media Awards", which will be published just after the new year. Stay tuned! We kick off the 2012 music season with the hardest-to-choose slot in the countdown. So many good records hit the stores this year that it feels criminal to pare it down to just ten. It took a wild combination of scoring methods (to be detailed in the final awards post) to get the top nine, but the tenth slot saw a 4-way tie that had me listening to the contenders repeatedly for two weeks. Ben came out on top. "Fun" isn't usually a tag that gets you very far in a countdown like this with me. My M.O. follows a melancholy track pretty much top to bottom - autumnal albums that warm the air of a drizzly day like sunlight filtered through those dark, rainy clouds. But th...