A.V. Club's Best Music of 2012

A.V. Club's Best Music of 2012

Original Source →

24.

Dion - Tank Full of Blues
January 24, 2012
Critic Score
75
4 reviews

23.

September 10, 2012
Critic Score
84
33 reviews
If he has any final statements, he’s saving them. There’s too much work to be done.

22.

September 4, 2012
Critic Score
79
43 reviews

Sun isn’t the greatest collection of songs she’s ever released ... but even her B-game is always worth hearing. 

21.

May 29, 2012
Critic Score
72
21 reviews

Kozelek’s usual self-flagellation shares space with relatively lighthearted lyrics, with mixed results

18.

February 14, 2012
Critic Score
77
29 reviews

Like its predecessors, Plumb is polite and smart, arranging its unceasing collection of hooks like books on a shelf.

18.

May 29, 2012
Critic Score
79
35 reviews

For The Walkmen, heaven is a place where the momentous has become mundane, and vice versa. 

18.

June 12, 2012
Critic Score
81
19 reviews

Plot smoothes some edges and makes others more ragged, but the songs, shaped by the sharp guitars and martial drumming, are some of the strongest Falkous has ever written.

17.

March 6, 2012
Critic Score
82
25 reviews

Compared to Leave Home’s murky smear of scream-fueled, shoegaze-shrouded punk, Open Your Heart is practically a party album.

16.

January 31, 2012
Critic Score
81
35 reviews

The album is all warmth, putting Cohen’s improbably expressive smoker’s purr in the middle of simple yet sumptuous instrumentation

15.

June 12, 2012
Critic Score
78
14 reviews

The highs are higher, the lows are lower, and the dynamic is even more exhilarating.

14.

September 18, 2012
Critic Score
79
38 reviews

Delicate beauty and refined presentation still rule on the Brooklyn mainstay’s fourth album, Shields, but the balance is subtly shifting.

13.

September 25, 2012
Critic Score
80
16 reviews

On his bolder follow-up, Kaleidoscope Dream, Miguel takes full advantage of his new commercial standing by abandoning genre conventions altogether. 

12.

August 28, 2012
Critic Score
76
25 reviews

Game as Daniel is in a supporting role, his spotlight turns provide the album’s highlights. 

11.

October 22, 2012
Critic Score
90
32 reviews

Good Kid is an exercise in tasteful restraint, with Lamar employing his boundless budget in creative ways.

10.

October 22, 2012
Critic Score
69
11 reviews

We Don’t Even Live Here never sounds anything less than meaningful, yet manages to evade sounding self-important or overworked. P.O.S. has indeed never been better. 

8.

September 4, 2012
Critic Score
73
26 reviews

Rather than turning into something new, it settles into some comforting old sounds.

8.

October 23, 2012
Critic Score
76
21 reviews

Three guitars, a sense of humor in the face of despair, and an unwavering commitment to the underrated art of the rock ’n’ roll sing-along are what define Local Business.

7.

August 28, 2012
Critic Score
86
34 reviews

With The Seer, one thing is certain: Even during its quietest lulls, Gira has never sounded louder. 

6.

April 24, 2012
Critic Score
82
41 reviews

There are at least five songs on Blunderbuss that match the excellence of The White Stripes’ best, and on the whole the album performs the tricky task of updating White’s musical aesthetic without euthanizing its primal nature.

5.

June 19, 2012
Critic Score
87
33 reviews

The Idler Wheel… is an innately private record, as Apple’s tend to be, but she has a way of drawing listeners in as she pushes them away, luring them, siren-like, into the maelstrom of her own reflection.

4.

February 7, 2012
Critic Score
81
34 reviews

Tramp is Van Etten’s most confident-sounding album to date, pushing at the boundaries of her music and suggesting a turn away from the romantic wound-licking that has dominated her lyrics.

3.

January 24, 2012
Critic Score
78
30 reviews

On Attack On Memory, he’s moved in the opposite direction, opening up wide spaces in his music and letting the fury beneath breathe and then bellow.

2.

June 5, 2012
Critic Score
82
35 reviews

Celebration Rock finds that some of the best moments in life can come from uncertainty.

1.

July 10, 2012
Critic Score
91
42 reviews

Snubbing nearly every contemporary radio trend, it positions itself instead as the latest in a line of revelatory, late-period neo-soul albums

Original Source: http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-music-of-2012,89711/
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