Top 10 Tuesdays 5 Best Albums of 2012 So Far

In a slight variation on that eternal music nerd's question —"what have you been listening to?"— that proved telling, a compadre recently asked of me "what have you been listening to this year?"

And, sure enough, I rattled off a list of the records that had ruled me 2012 thus far; that had soundtrack these six weeks of the Mayan apocalypse with audio rising head-and-shoulders above the soundfile rank-and-file.

For some, doing a 'best of the year' list after six weeks would seem comically absurd; but in the blogosphere six weeks is an eternity, roughly the length of an entire discovery/hype/backlash cycle.

And so I set about typing up a list. For the world to read. This list will grow and grow, over the next 10+ months, until it swells to something more like 50, but at the moment it's so slight, so specific, and so focused to as seem ascetically pure. Five albums. Just five. But what a five!

With Grimes (pictured!) sitting atop like a queen on her throne, here is the countdown in question. Read them and rejoice, anew, in the brand new: it's the Top 5 Albums of 2012 So Far...