Beats Per Minute's Top 50 Albums of 2012

Beats Per Minute's Top 50 Albums of 2012

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50.

May 1, 2012
Critic Score
78
16 reviews

The jump from one record to the next is made even more revelatory by the English producer’s refinement and assuredness. 

49.

White Fence - Family Perfume Vol. 1
April 3, 2012
Critic Score
75
8 reviews

49.

White Fence - Family Perfume Vol. 2
May 15, 2012
Critic Score
77
6 reviews

48.

February 7, 2012
Critic Score
81
34 reviews

Tramp is simply her most fully-realized album yet, and that’s all there is to it.

47.

March 13, 2012
Critic Score
85
5 reviews

The Italian duo have put together a timeless and beautiful dance record that slides easily to the top of 2012's best.

46.

April 21, 2012
Critic Score
83
26 reviews

Despite the unwelcoming persona, repeated listens will uncover an embarrassment of spine-tingling details and hidden corners that any headphone enthusiast will revel in.

45.

March 12, 2012
Critic Score
81
5 reviews

44.

August 28, 2012
Critic Score
81
34 reviews

Everything here is bigger, and feels more important and wise, even than the spectrum of ego on Bromst.

42.

July 10, 2012
Critic Score
80
44 reviews

Swing Lo Magellan is generally celebratory, relishing in life, music, collaboration, and creativity.

41.

Ital - Hive Mind
March 6, 2012
Critic Score
75
13 reviews

Hive Mind, offers a more arresting and intricate, at-home listening experience.

40.

January 14, 2012
Critic Score
77
14 reviews

He’s now picked what tricks he could from Lamar, and grown beyond his input.

39.

February 21, 2012
Critic Score
77
30 reviews

It manages to sound familiar while sounding entirely new, all the while making it clear that this is a sound only Lambchop could create.

38.

LHF - Keepers of the Light
April 2, 2012
Critic Score
83
2 reviews

It plays like the best dubstep singles collection never released, typifying the genre’s bruised and reclusive paranoia while transcending it.

37.

September 4, 2012
Critic Score
74
43 reviews

Centipede Hz is dense and unforgivingly full-throttle ... and home to some of the band’s best and most involved lyrics to date.

36.

August 20, 2012
Critic Score
81
35 reviews

Ware might still be feeling out her surroundings, but considering the results, getting to see that evolution take place is an exciting and exceedingly worthwhile prospect

35.

October 15, 2012
Critic Score
77
44 reviews

If Khan’s last two albums were tapestries, this one is a prayer book, adorned with pictures of the exalted, stained with tears, and almost too personal for the eyes of strangers to look upon.

34.

May 22, 2012
Critic Score
81
35 reviews

This is a high point in his already illustrious career; a labyrinthine and ultramodern take on hip-hop that will likely age like a Cabernet.

33.

September 11, 2012
Critic Score
78
46 reviews

The end result is a quieted, more suppressed record that steps delicately from one note to the next and shines even more of a spotlight on the twin vocal sentiments of longing and crumbled romance. 

32.

June 5, 2012
Critic Score
82
35 reviews

Celebration Rock is in perpetual motion, driven by a visceral sense of urgency that most modern guitar music is so sorely lacking.

31.

June 19, 2012
Critic Score
87
33 reviews

Since there’s so little to grab onto, The Idler Wheel might be better understood as an emotional statement rather than a musical one.

30.

June 26, 2012
Critic Score
77
23 reviews

Oshin is undeniably a record tailored for driving around with some friends in the dead heat of summer, but the music also packs a range of raw emotions

29.

August 28, 2012
Critic Score
79
23 reviews

This kind of high-emotion, omni-genre electronic music is becoming the measure of artists working without geographical or scene ties and Held is one of the best examples. 

28.

Nü Sensae - Sundowning
August 7, 2012
Critic Score
75
5 reviews

Nü Sensae are one of the most formidable punk outfits working right now and Sundowning is the work of a band whittling themselves down to occupy the very tip of fury.

27.

February 10, 2012
Critic Score
79
4 reviews

26.

October 16, 2012
Critic Score
83
33 reviews

Allelujah! seems more immediate and more organic, but instead of feeling blown away by it’s unreachable drama and grandeur, with a decade of age behind us and the band, it feels inhabitable in a way Godspeed never has before.

25.

May 15, 2012
Critic Score
77
40 reviews

The aching sweetness of Bloom’s ten tracks should override any misgivings one might have about the band’s seeming lack of stylistic evolution.

24.

February 21, 2012
Critic Score
81
8 reviews

23.

May 15, 2012
Critic Score
83
28 reviews

The resulting album is one that is deceptively simple, a send-up to the aggressive cultural awareness of old-school rap on the surface, filtered through a hundred different post-apocalyptic scenarios, musical and lyrical.

22.

June 26, 2012
Critic Score
80
19 reviews

Ty Segall Band bring a sharpened and astonishing lighting-in-a-jar kind of intensity to the proceedings others are hard pressed to capture.

21.

July 24, 2012
Critic Score
78
35 reviews

Shrines often operates like a series of paintings, each of its pieces a variation on a theme, the full breadth of the artist’s vision only realized within the context of the whole.

20.

October 16, 2012
Critic Score
75
19 reviews

Free of any hip genre-signifiers, 2 sees DeMarco find his home in an endless jangle, humming down the Main Street of your brain with a guitar slung over his shoulder.

19.

The Weeknd - Echoes Of Silence
December 21, 2011
Critic Score
79
18 reviews

Echoes of Silence is arguably The Weeknd’s most fully formed album-oriented statement thus far.

18.

April 17, 2012
Critic Score
78
36 reviews

Spiritualized have mastered the use of these instruments to be able to lift a song effortlessly from its standard verse into a magnificent chorus.

17.

May 14, 2012
Critic Score
77
4 reviews

It functions, without a doubt, as Evans most accomplished release of her career and one of the more accomplished ambient albums in recent memory.

16.

March 6, 2012
Critic Score
82
25 reviews

It rages, rages more, tapers off, creeps up behind you, knocks your block off, takes a step back, then does those last two simultaneously – and that’s just the first half of the album.

15.

February 21, 2012
Critic Score
80
31 reviews

While there are utterly heartbreaking moments throughout, they are usually balanced with enough optimism and hope to make every tear a little easier to swallow.

14.

February 14, 2012
Critic Score
82
24 reviews

The album is vital and alive, and it culminates into these unsuspecting breathless, religious moments that reach well beyond its surface qualities.

13.

October 9, 2012
Critic Score
78
23 reviews

With Twins, Ty Segall has once again tapped into the well of 60's garage rock and come out with something vital, new, and undeniably his own. 

12.

Lost In The Trees - A Church That Fits Our Needs
March 20, 2012
Critic Score
77
11 reviews

It’s also one of the most cohesive and powerful records to come around in a long time, and it doesn’t tire after multiple spins.

11.

September 4, 2012
Critic Score
79
15 reviews

It’s complex, destructive, and infinite.

11.

May 22, 2012
Critic Score
81
19 reviews

This record, as much of Elverum’s work is, is a grower in the most beautiful sense, and one that I can’t imagine will lose its brilliance any time soon.

10.

August 28, 2012
Critic Score
86
34 reviews

Just be thankful that the new Swans are as clever, as terrifying, and as proficient in their craft as presented on The Seer. There still aren’t any other bands out there quite like this.

9.

March 8, 2012
Critic Score
81
24 reviews

Ekstasis is a challenging listen, but a rewarding one. It’s fiercely experimental and aggressively unfamiliar. Yet it’s an album that doesn’t try to intimidate or hide within its unfamiliarity.

8.

September 18, 2012
Critic Score
78
27 reviews

It’s an album that ceaselessly overflows with love and a desire to reach out and relate, and it’s this that makes such a heavy album so accessible and so resoundingly good.

6.

September 4, 2012
Critic Score
75
29 reviews

I Know What Love Isn’t is more than a great pop album – it’s the most singularly rewarding statement from one of the more uniquely gifted songwriting voices of the past decade.

5.

October 5, 2012
Critic Score
86
35 reviews

This album is meditative, layered and confident, simultaneously cooler and more temperate than its predecessor.

4.

July 10, 2012
Critic Score
91
42 reviews

Frank’s strengths are his versatile voice, the breadth of his songwriting capabilities, the way he mixes and matches old aesthetics and ends up with strange new combinations

3.

October 29, 2012
Critic Score
83
18 reviews

The record has an engrossing, alternately glassy and foggy tactility, as if you’re groping blindly through a dark, thick dream logic-riddled haze only to find something smooth and cool and comforting at its center to wrap your sweaty limbs around.

2.

March 26, 2012
Critic Score
82
24 reviews

Kill for Love‘s pop numbers are leaps and bounds better than almost anything else released this year, and when the album pulls away from them, it can’t help but lose quite a bit of its strength.

1.

October 2, 2012
Critic Score
83
34 reviews

UTQC is a testament to imagination and vision and the capabilities of the human soul by way of music.

Original Source: http://beatsperminute.com/features/the-top-50-albums-of-2012/
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