Album Rankings

As laid out in my ridiculously long “About RIAHP” section, the original idea was to rank every album I own from 1-to-too many. To do so I first needed to get my collection into some manageable smaller groups and chronological seemed to be the best way to do that. So here they are, the year-by-year rankings of every album I own (based on year of release). These are not meant to represent a true “best of”, as I don’t consider myself a critic. Instead they are a ranking of how vital a given album is to my collection. Quality albums by artists I have a lot of music from may rank lower than lesser albums by other artists merely because within the context of what I own they aren’t as necessary. If forced to give up my 10th favorite Rush album or the lone album I own from an unknown hair metal band like Hericane Alice, I’ll probably keep the latter, just for variety’s sake.

I started accumulating music in 1983 and kept at it pretty steady up until 2002. My music buying after that got pretty sporadic, so for the most part the lists from 83-02 will consist entirely of albums I physically own. From 2003 and beyond it will stretch to include stuff I have listened to online and which made enough of an impact that I can remember doing so (and bothered to throw down a rating). These later years lists will obviously be representative of my likelihood to add them to my collection as opposed to keep them in my collection. I’ll try to highlight any albums from that period that I actually bothered to purchase, although those can be a little misleading as they often are subject to momentary whim rather than true “need”. What can I say, I’m weird.

(see above for drop-down menu to access a given year)