Favourite Releases of 2012: Preamble and First Entry

There are three reasons why I never make year-end "best-of" lists: 1) I find them too time-consuming to compose. 2) I usually don't hear enough good music that won't already appear on every other best-of list. 3) I find ranking and rating equally frustrating, impossible and pointless. But this year, I feel I've heard enough music that may (or may not) have been overlooked, so I've decided to give making a list another shot.

As I have around thirty releases in mind, l've decided to attempt mini-reviewing one release per day until the New Year, despite blogging having stalled over the past couple of months. Call this an exercise against writer's block - in writing concisely and prolifically without over-thinking grammar and structure (two of my most formidable roadblocks in becoming a serious writer). And in order to save myself the headache of ranking my favourites, I've decided to simply list them alphabetically.


Angel Olsen - Half Way Home (Bathetic)

2012 was a year of folk revival for me, incited by new discoveries such as Chelsea Wolfe and the late Bert Jansch, having embraced Nico's 1967 album Chelsea Girl as one of my favourite albums of all time and pushed forward most significantly by Canadian filmmaker James Cullingham's documentary In Search of Blind Joe Death: The Saga of John Fahey, a long-overdue definitive biography of the late American guitarist which debuted at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival.

While not as haunting as Wolfe's "doom-folk," musically delicate or emotionally naked as even Bert Jansch's least moving pieces or environmentally transformative as the soundscapes conjured by John Fahey, Angel Olsen's greatest draw for me is the tension that exists within her music: her quivery treble rings out so pronouncedly against the inviting warmth of her clean and relatively spare arrangements (usually no more than twangy acoustics). Half Way Home opens with a song called "Acrobat," a title that could describe her singing which she topically demonstrates right out of the gate. If Angel Olsen can retain the amount of originality found in her voice alone, she'll definitely be an artist to keep an eye on in the coming year.