KUT Staff Picks Top 10 Albums for 2012
Whoa. What happened to 2012? This has been a very busy year, and it’s hard to believe that December is upon us. I guess it’s time to sum up.
I’m sure I don’t need to point out how arbitrary these exercises are. We could have easy compiled our top 3 or 300 favorites. It’s just a number. If you want to get all zen-like, a year is a pretty arbitrary designation, too. But boundaries must be drawn, and here are ours: each of our hosts was asked to come up with their ten favorite albums of 2012. The albums had to have been released in 2012 and made up of new material. And that’s pretty much it.
With all the election hubbub, it might be easy to forget that there were a lot of great artists out there making tremendous music. While no Adele-like idol broke through this year, there were still some real standouts. UK quartet Alt-J made almost everyone’s list of favorites, a bracing across-the-board crowd pleaser. Locally, Gary Clark Jr.’s long-awaited debut got a lot of well-deserved attention as well. And there is a lot of consensus among these lists, as well as many surprises. And, as always, there are many worthy artists who just missed the cut. You have to stop somewhere.
So dig in, and explore these worthy releases. You can hardly go wrong.
In the meantime, excitement runs high among the music staff here at KUT as we prepare to migrate to the all-music 98.9 KUTX on January 2nd. We’ll see you all there soon! In the meantime, enjoy the music, and happy holidays!
Jeff McCord
Music Director, KUT
