2.3.12
Looking at Pitchfork's top 50 albums list, I match on twelve, but similar to the singles list, there are only eight of those records that I would consider to be pretty great albums worthy of consideration for a best-of list for 2011, and three of the other four are records that I more or less despise.

I haven't looked back to see how this compares to previous years, but I have a feeling that it's a pretty low match rate. Even including the honorable mentions, which gets the album category up to 70 releases, there's only one additional record that I have in my collection (although it's one I happen to like a lot, Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer).

2.2.12
Continuing this idea that my tastes are falling out of step with the tastemakers, I did my annual review of which tracks in Pitchfork's top 100 tracks for the year were actually in my library. This year, I matched on 19, which is not the lowest total ever, but of the tracks that I actually liked (ranked four stars or more), the total was very, very low——only 11 of the 19——not quite 60%——made the cut with me. With my previous low match of 15 tracks, my taste was much more aligned with theirs——13 of the 15, or 87% were tracks that I not only had in my library but also rated highly myself.

Some of the tracks that they liked were from albums that I owned and liked overall, but they were picking tracks that I consider to be the weaker ones. A good example is Eleanor Friedberger's "My Mistakes" from Last Summer, which Pitchfork had at number 61. A great album with some killer tracks on it, but "My Mistakes" not even in my top three favorites. "My Mistakes" is a sold track, and worthy of four stars for me, but the song that makes that album is the closer, "Early Earthquakes"——nothing else on the record even comes close to that one. And there are other examples of this, too——Tune-Yards and Frank Ocean would both make my top 10 list of tracks for 2011, but not for the tracks that Pitchfork selected.

Probably the most telling thing about my disconnect with the Pitchfork staff is their top 10 tracks——in that group, I only owned one track, and although it happens to be the number one track (M83's "Midnight City") and it's also my favorite from off that album, it's not my favorite track of the year, and I'm not even sure if it's in my top 10.

2.1.12
A full month into the new year and only two CDs purchased. I know January is typically a prett slow month for releases, but this has got to be the worst in years. And February's not looking much better at this point——I think I've got two or three things preordered, and I'm pretty sure that's lower than usual as well. Either I'm finally falling out of step with music enough that there's not much new that I'm interested in, or this is just a weird year and I'll end up buying way more later.