I'm listening to Icons of Evil this morning and asking myself stupid butterfly-collector questions like "is this year-end top three or top five material," which are questions I generally try to avoid asking, for reasons I've gone into before. This year I kinda gave up though and started keeping a running list of what was killin' me just so I wouldn't forget at the end of the year when people started asking me to send 'em "my top ten." If Icons of Evil weren't just kneecappingly great, I probably wouldn't have thought to do this at all, but it is - no joke - so here's the list as it stands so far, first presented alphabetically and without album titles, since as far as I know none of these people have released more than one album this year.

Angels of Light (Young God)
Bloody Panda (Level Plane)
Bone Thugs (Interscope)
Bowerbirds (Burly Time)
Coco Rosie (Touch and Go)
Dizzee Rascal (XL)
Foetopsy (Barbarian)
Kings of Reggae (Rapster)
Laethora (Unruly Sounds/The End)
Mayhem (Season of Mist)
Melechesh (Osmose Productions/The End)
Missy Higgins (Eleven/Virgin)
Phazm (Osmode Productions/The End)
Pig Destroyer (Relapse)
Rwake - Voices of Omens (Relapse)
Rotting Christ - Theogonia (Season of Mist)
RTX (Drag City)
Vital Remains (Century Media)
Year of Desolation (Prosthetic)

Some years I feel ornery and cantankerous about lists; other years, like this one, I find or invent reasons to just get into it (the profusion of great metal releases that came out early in the year, for example, or the ever-pressing need to put off doing real work, like the lawn or the dishes). When I look over the list I think that if I were to order them they'd look roughly like this:

Bowerbirds
Coco Rosie
Vital Remains
Pig Destroyer
Bloody Panda
Kings of Reggae
Rotting Christ
Mayhem
Laethora
Missy Higgins
Foetopsy
Dizzee Rascal
Angels of Light
RTX
Rwake
Phazm
Year of Desolation
Melechesh
Bone Thugs

But then I think "the Bone Thugs album is easily better than the Melechesh album," and then "the Dizzee album feels like top-ten material to me but I sure don't wanna kick Laethora out of the top ten," and then "how can anybody argue with the proposition that Foetopsy's In the Bathroom is the album of the year?" And "why must I be scorned for loving MIssy Higgins the way I do"? Or "Ain't Rotting Christ totally awesome? Oh yes they are too you damn hater monkeys." Things like that. You know, really worthwhile use of my time and energy. The pressing stuff.

Anyhow, that's where it stands right now, and I think I'll spend the next several occasional entires picking over the list and seeing what it seems to say.