I don’t make lists. But I know people who do. They are happy people with an order in their lives that I’ll never know. But it happens once a year that everyone I don’t know — every publication and every faux expert — gets the opportunity to be proud of a list that they made with their own hands. They spent 12 months listening to every album they could get their hands on to make themselves well-versed. They listen to records that have only been released in the UK (Lily Allen and Peter, Bjorn and John come to mind) and they tout them and lend as much credence to their picks as they possibly can. It’s the end-all, their final say on a year in their life. I don’t really like reading lists, but I do it anyway. I find that they don’t say as much about the records as they do about the person making them. They can tell you immediately if someone has the barest minimum of good, solid, rad taste and they can tell you immediately if that very writer had spent a goodly portion of time reading the lists of others and latently coordinating. (Just once, wouldn’t it be great to see Me First and the Gimme Gimmes’ Love Their Country or something like that honestly make someone’s best of list? The sheer joy that would bring, knowing that one person was completely uninfluenced by another out there — legitimately possible only in the pre-blog world.) When it comes to making a list of what you consider to be the best records of the year, you’d better just say, “Fuck all the rest of those lists. These are mine. Fuck all those other records. I’m standing by these doggs. They’re the best out there. I hear what you’re saying Blogger X and Blender magazine and I politely and respectfully think you’ve got everything all asswards. Your list is dead to me.” The list that lies below is the first official Daytrotter year-end list. It comes with no guarantees and it comes laughably at least two months later than it should have. You might not be pleased. Maybe someday it will mean something when a record makes it onto this list — fitting for an album packaging sticker or a press sheet blurb. For now, it’s just a list. It’s my list. Enjoy it, if you like this sort of thing. — Sean Moeller

1. Cold War Kids — Robbers & Cowards
Without question, the album that had the biggest impact on me this year was Robbers & Cowards. This record, as far as I know, isn’t acknowledged by any serious critics as the their album of the year. It checks in around 25 or 30 on lists that long. It could be print journalism’s gag reflex turning on, unable and unwilling to recognize something so initially heralded by the land of the bloggers as being dope. This shouldn’t have been a deterrent, for Cold War Kids made me have to ask myself how big souls are, more specifically, how big old souls are. The answer I came up with is, they must not actually have to fit inside a human body. They must, along with auras, exist in some ethereal state, not of our person. The souls that made these songs — those of lead singer Nathan Willett, bassist Matt Maust, guitarist Jonathan Russell and drummer Matt Aveiro — are bigger than kegs, bigger than gas tankards, bigger than the Great Lakes and bigger than reason. This record is the only record I heard this year that was made equipped with the ability to live on its own. It could walk off a page or out of speakers and live in a bed or living room. It could sell out every room in a bed and breakfast. They can all breathe on their own. They have their own hearts. And that’s great, but what really makes these sketches of those calling in for desperate measures and cashing in on their mulligans, those testing the limits and usually paying for it, is the general sense that these songs still have growth in them. This album — Willett’s beautifully clamoring, poignant voice — will not be impervious to age. It will grow with the years. It’s sloppy in places, like a child, even when it’s supposedly at its most adult. One of the questions I asked Willett earlier this year was, “What’s something you know today that you didn’t know yesterday?” to which he replied that he learned he can never sing one of their songs the same way twice. It’s as if they can’t be heard the same way twice either. Spiritual references, which are scholarly and ones you’d never recoil from, make this album an interesting piece of art to decipher and that deciphering may never get completed. Willett’s words are laden with dilemma and wisdom and salvation. They’re secular in the same way that the songs on Jenny Lewis’ 2006 solo album were. Eef Barzelay’s 2006 effort is the same way. Willett makes things clear with a line from the hidden track on the album, “Lord have mercy on me/We’re talkin’ bout two different things.” It’s the wail of almost every sad sack and every noble character in this masterpiece of novelistic fiction that’s still just a baby.

2. TV on the Radio — Return to Cookie Mountain
At the time when I spent five days writing about this back when it was released, the latest from New York’s TV On The Radio made me think that I wasn’t listening to rock and roll. It was atypical and streaming with ideas that were so absolutely untapped that making something of it was a process. You’re forced to go blue collar on this record, getting your hands dirty and throwing some elbow grease into understanding it and following it as it gets twisty and drives you straight over cliffs. It’s probably the NEWEST record of the year and unable to be defined well by even someone with the world’s thickest thesaurus.

3. Joanna Newsom — Ys
As much as I wanted to name this my record of the year, it wasn’t that to me. This is not a record. It does look the part. The packaging suggests that I must be mistaken, my prescription must need refilling. Only, it’s not a record. Were I to have needed to create a list of best excursions or best traversals or best new universes created, then I wouldn’t have thought longer than it takes to check the wind with a damp finger. I would have had my answer to all of those. And maybe being suited for all of those lists should unanimously make this awesome block of five songs — five four-course meals — the undisputed cake-taker. These songs have more beauty and sorrow and complexity than a Shakespearean anthology and they play together like musical chandeliers, dancing like bears and monkeys.

4. Midlake — The Trials of Van Occupanther
Not since the Dixie Chicks did it a few years ago have some many in the 18-to-34 demographic gone a hunting for Fleetwood Mac albums as they did after this incognito Denton, Texas, band put together this lush album about time travel that feels like how fetching water at the pump across the yard with pails does. You live a different variation of life when you clock through the soothing minutes of Occupanther, one that involves prairie grass as far as the eye can see and a hermetic existence. It also brings up an interesting question: If one had access to a time machine, would you choose to go back? For Midlake, that’s home.

5. Paleo — Misery, Missouri
We’ve shown mad love to David Strackany already in the last few months, but there’s no denying this album, which is the deluxe edition of his (not really mad) scientist nature. These are the same kinds of songs that you can hear in his exhaustive Song Diary. These are those songs dressed up in suit coats and slacks, with cuff links, but they still manage to retain their unavoidably shoestring reps.

6. White Flight — White Flight
I’ve heard that Justin Roelofs is unpredictable. I’ve heard that he just doesn’t show up for tours. I hear that he leaves Sonic Youth hanging when they want his band to open for theirs. What’s great about Roelofs (formerly the best songwriter in The Anniversary) is that he wraps all of these shifty qualities burrito-like into this record that I was turned onto by Conner lead singer James Duft. I’m happy this happened. White Flight the album is mysterious fractured into a jillion personalities that feel like Caribbean freakouts, hang-gliding and mind fucks. I for one am happy he’s crazy.

7. Sunset Rubdown — Shut Up I Am Dreaming
Spencer Krug makes you quiver on this first real Sunset Rubdown record. He calls the other recordings he’s done under the name “milky.” This record is anything but. It’s as vibrant and thrilling as the Northern Lights.

8. The Hold Steady — Boys and Girls In America
A fascinating personal take on social behaviorism that goes from one boy to the next girl and gives us evidence that even if we aren’t all making each other unhappy, we’re trying. There’s an attempt being made to find the black cloud in most situations, and even when characters are seeding those clouds in hopes that the whole sky will open up and ram some wet sadness down their throats and all over their clothing, a massive night or two will break out to keep spirits steady. Craig Finn shows that without a doubt, he is a memoirist for all of those moments in relationships that no book editor who consider marketable, yet they’ve got universality that can be appreciated by a demographic that, stretched end-to-end would wrap around the earth 10 times. It’s incredible how truth can have the smell of beer on its breath. But it does. Truth occasionally smells like Miller High Life. Deal with it.

9. Secret Machines — Ten Silver Drops
I love sadness and depression. But only in song. This record is one of the best for that this year. All about the dissipating relationships of the three band members as they toured non-stop for their previous record. It’s tragic and it finally shows (not that they needed to do this) the Texas band writing the concise songs that they always had in them.

10. Black Fiction — Ghost Ride
A slinky, unsettling and absolutely unforgettable record of dreamscapes, far-off fantasies and black magic that is an exhilarating piece of work. At times, this California band is the Flaming Lips at its freakiest, Royal City or Belle & Sebastian for melodies that move like molten caramel, Midlake during its Bamnan and Slivercork days and Animal Collective for its trippy nonsense. How this record slipped through so many cracks has to be blamed on somebody, but who? Perhaps, they will exact a career just as Midlake’s, where they go from wholly unappreciated to a little less wholly unappreciated as those Texans did from record No. 1 to No. 2. Either way, this is a fucking keeper.

11. Regina Spektor — Begin To Hope
Begin To Hope, Spektor’s second album and major label debut, is another momentous piece of pulsating confection that flutters, drips like candlestick wax, shocks, goes on adventurous lyrical benders and knocks you flat on your ass. She’s America’s best-kept secret, hands-down. She creates a world all her own with nearly every song on the disc, which is the true pursuit of anyone who sets out as a writer or artist. Her music is akin to a bearskin rug—abnormal, warm, soft to the touch and unable to ignore. Forget the elephant, it’s the bearskin rug in the room that’s the Regina-approved idiom. Love abounds.

12. Benjy Ferree — Leaving the Nest
This man from the nation’s capital is a bartender by day (or night, it’s all semantics) and this peculiar singer and writer by night. His peccadilloes include walking and riding a bike around national monuments to feel the history, the ghosts. There’s some of that on Leaving the Nest, an album that was mostly written after he’d gotten his ass figuratively chewed up in Los Angeles. Songs of every make and model crop up and Ferree freely entertains them with a comforting air.

13. P.O.S. — Audition
In a year full of really great hip-hop discs, Stef Alexander – pissed off or not – made the best of all of them. Better than Ghostface and Clipse and all of them. He’s spent the year opening on a lot of odd punk and indie rock tours, but the songs from this disc and his punishingly great live show could make any crowd his. It’s honest and in your face and he’s shown himself to be one to watch closely.

14. Eef Barzelay — Bitter Honey
There’s nothing I’m looking most forward to this year than TWO new records by the Clem Snide front man. Bitter Honey is a collection of insightful pieces written in various perspectives that contain spell-binding lyrics and some kind of electricity that can only be conducted through bones and spines and cells. It’s so fucking lovely.