Do Year-End Lists Suffer From Seasonal Affective Disorder?
I like You & Me, by the Walkmen, but seeing it on so many year-end lists made me a little suspicious. After all, it seems almost designed to appeal to anyone listening to it in November or December. It’s not only a wintry album, warm and soft and a little bit logy, like you’ve just eaten a big turkey dinner—but there are even explicit references to the holiday season in there, including a whole song about New Year’s. Since year-end lists get made in precisely this period, and the album does sound uniquely good on a snowy day, it made me wonder if the idea of best albums lists really being “best winter albums” lists was a widespread problem. One way to find out would be to see what the lists would be like if they were made around, say, the fourth of July. There’s probably a better way to do this, but my first thought was just to check Metacritic and see what the top albums were around the middle of the year. This seems fair; their top-rated albums for 2008 look pretty much like everyone
