urgency to bleed

Alright, I can't delay this any longer as it's already way overdue. Well, sort of - on the 27th of December, I promised it within the week but on the 15th, I gave myself a month so I at least have to get this posted before I break both deadlines. Anyway, it's been nearly done for at least two weeks now but I've been a. lazy in writing thoughts on each album (which, if you know me, I can't go without including) and b. obsessed with slightly re-arranging the list so that if I didn't force myself to stop I'd never be able to. I'm pretty happy with it right now, for the most part, especially the top ten; the rest of the list is more fluid, as is to be expected, but I just couldn't bring myself to make the lower ten "honorable mentions" and call it good - they deserve better than that so I had to include them.

So, since otherwise this is going to be extremely tl;dr, I am going to split it up into two entries to make it only slightly tl;dr. I was going to do four but considering I'm already later than I wanted to be, that seems pretty unnecessary. So, two it is. Back ten today, top ten tomorrow. Remember, it's all my opinion, my tastes, etc., etc. so if you want to tell me how bad it sucks just do it in a constructive way, okay? I don't like arguing.

And for the record, most surprising thing about this list? 14 of the bands have prominent male singers in them. This is shocking because about two or three years ago, I basically used to shun most male vocalists and only listened to female vocals. This is a big step for me. Sure, about 8 of those also have prominent female singers, but still. I am proud of myself for this, people! There were only three bands out of ten on my list last year (four if you count Rilo Kiley - which I don't; poor Blake only got one song, after all) and those all had female vocals as well. Anyway, yes, this is exciting to me. Now, onto the important stuff!...

P.S. Click on the album covers for Amazon links if you are interested. I actually own physical copies of 15/20 of these which is pretty good for a downloading fiend like me. So support these artists if you like them, okay? Also, remember to change download links from hxxp to http for them to work. And the key tracks are listed roughly in order of how much I like them, so if you don't want to download them all, just try the first song from each.

( Without further ado, #20-11... )