I'm kicking off my year-end list-making as I usually do, with my picks for the best albums of 2012. Below is my list: The top ten albums and then ten more honorable mentions. All of this music can be found on my "best of 2012" spotify playlist.  I also created a "best songs of 2012" playlist. Enjoy!

It's December, which means one thing for a guy like me: list making. I'm starting my "best of the year" series on my blog with my picks for best albums of the year. Here they are: my top ten list and honorable mentions for the best music of 2011. (You can listen to all 15 hours of this music on Spotify here).

It's December 1st, so therefore officially OK to listen to Christmas music! Below is my Advent playlist for this year's season. You can listen to the whole thing on Spotify here. Enjoy!

Why is Coldplay hipster kryptonite? Why have most self-respect indie kids long abandoned Coldplay to the realm of painfully saccharine, popular radio-ready mainstream bilge? I think the key words are “popular” and “mainstream.” The gist of it is simple: Coldplay is too popular. Too many normal people know about Coldplay and like them.

If the abiding truth of reality is that everyone in the world (including me) is exactly as they ought to be—every last broken, frail, misguided, treacherous one of us—then the world is a far darker place, and virtuous existence a far more futile endeavor, than any of us previously imagined.

It's that time of year again. Best of the year time. I'm starting with albums, because I doubt any new release between now and 2011 will disrupt the top ten I've been compiling in my mind the last few weeks (I'll be exclusively listening to Christmas music for the next few weeks in any case). So here are my picks, in reverse order.

It's the second week of Advent, 2010, and I've put together a playlist of songs that feel appropriate to this moment. They are songs that represent both the darkness of the world and the power of the penetrating light. They are songs about waiting, hoping, and dwelling in the now-and-not-yet. I'll be listening to them with plenty of hot cider and a hopefully quieted soul, beckoning Emmanuel to come and ransom this captive creation.

But auto-tune is just one of many digital enhancement tools in the air-brush arsenal of the Photoshop world. The irony of auto-tune's disposition as the joke of Y2K remix culture is that it's really no worse than any of the other digital tools we have at our disposal to, for example, take clips from TV and turn them into re-edited assemblages ripe for viral video glory.

The following are songs that are quiet, longing, nostalgic, and unsettled. That is, they are songs that feel appropriate for fall.

I pulled out 10 CDs that were either my most treasured or most listened-to recordings of the period from about 1995-2000 (more or less my high school years). They are the albums that comforted me most in the tumultuous adolescent years, the albums that taught me how to truly love music.

The Suburbs, though not a “concept album” per se, is cohesive and literate in ways few albums are any more. Each of its 16 tracks (neatly divided into two 8-song halves) follows smoothly and deliberately from the previous one, with repeated words and phrases (and ideas) that tie things together.

Last week on the Hipster Christianity Facebook page, I posted YouTube videos from the last 4 decades of "Christian hipster" music, or music that was at least pivotal in the ultimate development of today's culture of hipster Christianity. Here they are, in chronological order... Enjoy!

A lot of Christian hipsters today were raised in the evangelical Christian subculture in the 90s. Thus, while most of them have completely abandoned CCM by now, they still look fondly and nostalgically (with a smidge of irony) upon the Christian music they were reared on. Here are 20 albums that Christian hipsters today love to listen to for a trip down memory lane. What would you add to this list?

I don't really listen to contemporary Christian music, but I LOVE hymns and older Christian spirituals. And during Lent and especially during Holy Week, I've been retuning to these sacred songs--some old, some new--that speak of Christ's passion and our hope. I've compiled a playlist of some of my favorites this year, most of which can be purchased on iTunes.

I recently wrote about hipster music trends for Relevant Magazine's "New Music Guide," which you can read in full (three pages worth!) here.

It's been a good year for music, and a good decade. 2009 ended with some truly forward-thinking genre development (glo-fi/chillwave) and genre resurgence (shoegazer), and an overall spirit of musical innovation that makes me excited to see what the next decade has in store. It was hard to pick my top ten this year (and any of my honorable mentions could easily have made the top ten), though the #1 was never in doubt. Anyway, here are my picks.

It's time to commence the end-of-year list-making here on The Search... and we'll start with my picks for the best songs of the year. I've opted not to put them in any sort of order (except alphabetical), because it takes too much time to arbitrarily decide whether Neko Case (pictured above) should be #11 or #18. So here they are... 50 songs that you should definitely think about downloading!