Nothing’s more fun that pontificating on how one year-end poll or the other got so many things wrong – Idolator has had a field day with it in one of their fine regular postings chronicling the year.
It was a problem that college football faced at the end of the 1990s and they decided to employ a cockamamie system (the BCS) to decide exactly who should play for the national title. They get their final 25 from a host of factors, among them, the polls of sportswriters, football coaches, computer rankings and, one would suspect, personal biases and geographically based whims.
What if the Bowl Championship Series system were employed to decide critical mass among the masses of critics rather than the polls of the Village Voice and Idolator? (Full disclosure: I have proudly voted in both).
To create an MCS – Music Critics’ Series – I took into account the best-of lists of 11 publications: Blender, Fact, Mojo, NME, New York, Paste, Q, Rolling Stone, Spin, Time and Uncut. From there, a collection of factors were used: Position on lists, number of mentions, average position on lists and the yearlong reputation of the album and/or artist.
TV on the Radio’s “Dear Science” and Vampire Weekend’s debut were the only albums on all 11 lists, some of which were as short as 10. (Others were as long as 50). Just as there are schools that go undefeated against unranked teams and have to be considered among the heavyweights, so, too, must albums that score strongly on just a handful of ballots.
That helps Elbow’s”The Seldom Seen Kid,” Lucinda Williams, “Little Honey” and Glasvegas, which has a huge collection of British fans. Every album in the top 25 received at least four mentions on the counted lists, which were compiled before Pitchfork’s potential announcement of Deerhunter’s “Microcastle” at No. 1. (That’s an NME rumor right now that's false).
Receiving first place votes were “Dear Science” (2), Portishead’s “Third,” Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” Fleet Foxes, Lil Wayne, “Tha Carter III” (3), MGMT’s “Oracular Spectacular,” Kings of Leon’s “Only by the Night.”

THE MCS FOR 2008
1. TV on the Radio, “Dear Science”
2. Vampire Weekend, “Vampire Weekend”
3. Portishead, “Third”
4. Bon Iver, “For Emma, Forever Ago”
5. Fleet Foxes, “Fleet Foxes”
6. Lil Wayne, “Tha Carter III”
7. MGMT, “Oracular Spectacular”
8. Kings of Leon, “Only by the Night” 
9. Elbow, "The Seldom Seen Kid"
10. Santogold, “Santogold”
11. Beck, “Modern Guilt”
12. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” 
13. My Morning Jacket, “Evil Urges”
14. Hot Chip, “Made in the Dark”
15. Metallica, “Death Magnetic” 
16. Glasvegas, "Glasvegas"
17. Erykah Badu, “New Amerykah, Part 1 (4th World War)”
18. Lucinda Williams, “Little Honey”
19. The Hold Steady, “Stay Positive”
20. Coldplay, “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends”
21. No Age, “Nouns”
22. Randy Newman, “Harps and Angels”
23. Girl Talk, “Feed the Animals” 
24. Duffy, “Rockferry” 
25. Sigur Rós, "Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust"
Also receiving votes: AC/DC “Black Ice,” Conor Oberst “Conor Oberst,” Of Montreal “Skeletal Lamping,” Hercules & Love Affair, Paul Weller “22 Dreams,” R.E.M. “Accelerate.”

Story by Matt Kivel

There's been a lot of buzz going around about Franz Ferdinand's new material. The Scottish quartet has posted some samples online and announced that their first single will debut on EA sports' forthcoming mega-hit Madden '09. For the media, it's been an endless game of speculation with outlets offering various predictions as to what "new sound" Franz is likely to employ.

The new issue of Rolling Stone poses "afro pop" as a possibility, but it seems that publication is still suffering from a severe case of Vampire Weekend fever (glancing through the reviews page I spotted a suspiciously large helping of references to afro-pop and world beat) ... so the legitimacy is suspect.

In this situation, it's best to let the music do the talking ... so here's a video (with some iffy sound quality) of the soon-to-be Madden soundtracking "Katherine Kiss Me." It employs the same sort of tense-funk riffage that was Franz's bread and butter for their first two albums and sort of makes all the "new direction" talk seem silly ... though a few demos from the band's site surfaced recently, and those do mark some significant sonic changes in the group's sound ... I guess we'll just have to wait for the finished product.   

"Katherine Kiss Me" June 9, 2008 - London