2001 to 2002 - a vintage period for Irish music?

There was one thing I was conscious of when I opened the polling booths for the CLUAS writers to vote for their top Irish albums of the last decade - the possibility that the final results could be biased towards releases from more recent years, considering more recently albums could well be to the fore of a writer's mind when casting their votes.

The first chart below however testifies that the CLUAS writers are not such a fickle bunch. It shows the breakdown - by year of release - of the CLUAS writers' top 50 Irish albums of the last 10 years and it is encouraging to see their choices are nicely spread across the full decade (although memories apparently don't stretch too well back to 1999, with only one fin de siécle album making the top 50...).

One thing that is striking in the above chart is 2003, which saw the release of more albums in the top 50 than any other year. Before rushing to the conclusion that 2003 was, therefore, a vintage year for Irish music I thought it'd be instructive to check the average ranking in the top 50 of albums released in a given year (see chart below).

First up, it shows that 2004 does not appear to have set the writers on fire in terms of memorable releases - the five 2004 releases had a low average ranking of 38 in the top 50. The other end of the scale reveals that, while 2003 may have produced the highest number of albums in the top 50, the average ranking of the 2003 albums (8 albums with an average ranking of 25.3) was lower than the releases of 2001 (3 albums with an average ranking of 16.7) and 2002 (5 albums with an average ranking of 18.2).

Conclusion? It is clear that, without any shadow of even a micro-doubt, the real vintage period for Irish music in the last decade was 2001-2002. So that's one discussion laid to rest then (until someone asks a different 35 people for their fave Irish releases of the last 10 years and get a completely different answer...)

Annex 1: The albums in the top 50 released in 2001 and 2002, i.e. the "vintage period":

Year	Artist	Album	Ranking
2002	Damien Rice	O	3
2002	Cathal Coughlan	The Sky's Awful Blue	13
2002	JJ72	I To Sky	34
2001	The Frames	For The Birds	1
2001	Ash	Free All Angels	5
2001	David Kitt	The Big Romance	16
2001	Divine Comedy	Regeneration	25
2001	Snow Patrol	When It's All Over...	44

 

Annex 2: The albums in the top 50 released in 2004, i.e. the poorest performing year in terms of rankings:

	Artist	Album	Ranking
	U2	How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb	29
	The Tychonaut	Love Life	35
	Alphastates	Made from Sand	38
	Damien Dempsey	Seize the Day	39
	Waiting Room	Catering For Headphones	49

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