Top 20: Mute Duo — Migrant Flocks
[Some flashing imagery in this one too, some lights at the beginning but more like Morse Code speed, and then some Clockwork Orange-style clips later on. As always, there's Bandcamp too.]
Ever since I started thinking about year end stuff before, say, November (years ago), and especially since I began keeping track of what I've listened to throughout the year, it's been interesting to observe how I think about these things over the months. Maybe someone who takes time tweaking a numbered list of 100 top records to get the placements just right could back up those placements, but one of the reasons I started doing these alphabetically a while back is because any order would be vibes based and wildly provisional even by the standards of these things. (As it is, when I'm submitting a list somewhere that does require ordering I spend a bit of time on it and then don't worry too much.)
As you might expect, giving how listening can shift over a whole 365 days, I do a lot of due diligence towards the end. Not just trying to give a fair shot to albums I hadn't gotten to yet, but checking back in with ones I liked earlier one. Sometimes that means ones I thought were definitely going to make the cut get downgraded to "this is great, but..." and sometimes as with this Mute Duo record (review here) it reminds me that something I listened to much earlier in the year still deserves to be here after all.
