I am curious: do the people who are bemoaning the absence of the likes of Spoon, New Pornographers, Belle and Sebastian, of Montreal, and Wolf Parade think these albums are great artistic achievements or do you just love those bands? Not that it matters, it just seemed that the consensus was that those were lesser efforts by accomplished bands.

My personal list of missing bands include Menomena, Aloha, Besnard Lakes, Erykah Badu, and Northern Portraits. But, hey, there’s lots of great bands already on there and music is great and let’s just listen and be happy and stop being such little bitches about it.

For the record, it’s not just pitchfork. Per metacritic, Raekwon is the critics’ concensus favorite for hip hop album of the year:
http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/raekwon/onlybuilt4cubanlinxPt2