Expert Witness Poll: 2015
Brad Luen ran this poll at the last minute, just before Pazz &
Jop appeared. He posted a request for ballots in the closed Facebook
group Expert Witness, and posted the results there. I thought they
should be given a more permanent home. He solicited ballots through
Facebook, and received "34 in the voting thread and 13 solicited
through other means." (I missed the Facebook post, but it appears
that he scraped my ballot off my blog, since the numbers add up.)
Voters allocated points according to the P&J formula. He broke
ties by "(i) points per vote, (ii) points after dropping highest
score."
To finish, Luen required that a record appear on at least two
ballots (hence some single ballot 30-point albums were dropped).
The numbers following each album are (points/votes/highest ballot);
I've also added Robert Christgau's (where available) grades in
brackets (the voters are, by definition, Christgau fans; doesn't
make sense to include my grades, although they correlate pretty
well, and help explain some of the ungraded albums):
- Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (423/35/20) [A]
- James McMurtry: Complicated Game (282/26/18) [A]
- Sleater-Kinney: No Cities to Love (272/26/18) [A]
- Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (269/19/30) [A-]
- Yo La Tengo: Stuff Like That There (190/19/15) [A]
- Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf (187/20/15) [A]
- Jeffrey Lewis & Los Bolts: Manhattan (183/17/20) [A]
- Laurie Anderson: Heart of a Dog (161/15/18) [A+]
- Mbongwana Star: From Kinshasa (147/15/15) [A-]
- Ezra Furman: Perpetual Motion People (141/14/16)
- Heems: Eat Pray Thug (139/17/16) [A]
- Grimes: Art Angels (113/10/17) [A]
- The Paranoid Style: Rock and Roll Just Can't Recall (91/10/15) [A]
- Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) (89/6/20)
- Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (62/5/20)
- Jazmine Sullivan: Reality Show (58/6/12) [A-]
- Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too (57/5/15) [A-]
- Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (57/5/16)
- The Chills: Silver Bullets (57/6/15)
- Joanna Newsom: Divers (50/3/25)
- Future: DS2 (50/6/12) [A-]
- Robert Forster: Songs to Play (48/5/11)
- Sleaford Mods: Key Markets (45/5/10) [**]
- The Mountain Goats: Beat the Champ (43/5/11) [A-]
- The Velvet Underground: The Complete Matrix Tapes (42/2/22)
- Hop Along: Painted Shut (42/5/14) [A-]
- Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls (40/5/12)
- Lana Del Rey: Honeymoon (39/3/15) [A-]
- Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete (35/4/11) [A-]
- Kacey Musgraves: Pageant Material (31/2/19) [*]
- Miguel: Wildheart (31/4/14) [A-]
- Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell (30/4/10) [*]
- Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Ba Power (29/3/13) [A-]
- Fabiano Do Nascimento: Dança Dos Tempos (28/2/14)
- Lyrics Born: Real People (28/2/18)
- Jack DeJohnette: Made in Chicago (27/2/20)
- Aram Bajakian: There Were Flowers Also in Hell (27/3/12) [A-]
- J.D. McPherson: Let the Good Times Roll (26/2/20)
- Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 (24/3/9)
- Protomartyr: The Agent Intellect (23/2/13)
I scraped a lot of additional data off the Facebook posts, including
more (possibly all) totals and many individual ballots. I may add some
of that data here if time permits.
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