CT.com's Best Albums of 2012

Is it us or was 2012 the year of streaming music? It seems like most everyone we know is now listening to music — new music, old music, super-obscure music, pop bubble gum, the latest releases, old-school hip-hop, brutal metal, avant classical, out jazz, indie flavor-of-the-day, guilty pleasures, and almost everything else — on Spotify, Pandora or Rdio or some other streaming service. (Trent Reznor is supposed to launch yet another music-streaming site early next year, this one with supposedly new ways of helping listeners navigate the overwhelming volume of music that's available.) Except for those music-giant holdouts who haven't yet permitted the licensing of their choicest songs — Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Kinks, um, Bob Seger — it's all basically out there. That means that music fans, especially the older kind who like new music but never quite learned to embrace the outlaw thrill of file-sharing, can get a taste of what 2012 sounds like without all of those so-2008 encumbrances like MP3 players or hard drives or, god forbid, CDs. In some ways the near-limitlessness of streaming music has served to reinforce whatever genre bubble many of us were already stuck in. Many of us have listened to more new music in 2012 than in years. And so when it came time to assemble our list of music-you-should-have-heard 2012, this year was maybe a little easier. But at the same time, the flood of good new releases forces us to steer clear of making any definitive or comprehensive statement about the nature of music in 2012. Our list, as you can see, is pretty skewed toward indie rock and metal. That's where our preferences lie. Jazz, hip-hop, country, classical and a million other subgenres go mostly overlooked here. But the ether flows with more new music — in all those genres — than you could probably listen to in a lifetime. If you've never heard of these titles, check out something that might be unexpected. If this music leaves you scratching your head, questioning our good taste, let us know what struck your ears as awesome this year.

By CT.com Staff

December 19, 2012