One of my favorite things at the end of the year (apart from all those more traditional wonderful things) is reading cartoonist John Allison’s top twenty albums list. I don’t usually know who most of the bands are, since I’m really not that into the latest music that most wine-sipping hoody-wearers are listening to, but the way he reviews each album with a few sentences in the snarky, witty voice of Shelley, one of his characters, warms my heart. Here’s number 10, for example:

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: “CYHSY: are a band who are famous because they made this record popular all on their own without help. They didn’t “burn” the CDs, they pricked the songs into them with pins! These are good songs for people who like Talking Heads but don’t like to hear the words of the songs enunciated (perhaps they find the lyrical conceits distracting from the process of counting the notes).

As far as my favorite album of the year, which I promised you in this post header, it’s a cd that my friend Loren gave to me twelve or more years ago. I’ve listened to it scores of times this year. It’s Nordisk Sang, a cd of traditional music from Norway published by New Albion.

It’s a vocalist accompanied (sometimes) by hardanger fiddle and occasionally willow bark flute. It’s spare. It’s unpredictable. It’s old. It’s interesting. It creates a peaceful place that I want to live in. A place where, as a matter of fact, with tea in hand, I am living right now. Here’s a track from the album for you.