It took me ages to write this list. Please don’t take the numerical order as any degree of quality, merely personal preference. To be honest, I’d probably write a totally different one a week from now. Whatever the case, the top slot would never change; Ian MacKaye and Company simply surpassed themselved with their fantastic label retrospective. If you haven’t at least heard even some of it yet, you should feel deeply ashamed.
So without further ado I present to you, as selected from albums and compilations heard in their entirety more than once within the previous 12 months, my Top Eleven Albums of 2002:
#1 Various Artists Twenty Years of Dischord
#2 The Blood Brothers March On Electric Children
#3 Sonic Youth Murray Street
#4 Various Artists Rough Trade: Rock And Roll 1
#5 Boards Of Canada Geogaddi
#6 (Smog) Accumulaton: None
#7 Agoraphobic Nosebleed Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope
#8 Various Artists Dynamite With A Laserbeam
#9 Bilge Pump Let Me Breathe
#10 GoGoGo Airheart Exitheuxa
#11 Isis Oceanic
Honourable mentions go to Sigur Ros, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Q and Not U, Orthrelm, Craw, Uphill Battle, Radio 4, Suicide Note, Rotten Sound, Erase Errata, Oxbow, The Leaving Trains, Interpol, Low, The Flying Luttenbachers, Neko Case, Cex and Black Dice for releasing great albums this year.