CoolBlogMan’s Absolute Best Albums of 2020
The CoolBlogMan staff has spent most of their waking hours over the last 9 months laboriously compiling this definitive list of 2020’s greatest (and best!) album-recordings of music.
Any time a new album came out, it was listened to 4-6 initial times (depending on genre) and scored against our Initial Listen Rubric (ILR), which is optimized to assess these artifacts with limited contextual biases. Weeks later, each album is given additional listens (usually 5-7 passes through, depending on genre). At this phase, our staff is permitted to pursue contextual or biographical information that may aid in their assessment. For example, each employee is given a $25 iTunes gift card per week to aid in any ancestral and/or geo-scenic research. Impressions are quantized, qualitized, and weighted.
Upon the completion of each listen in the above process, a brief assessment is written and number values assigned (in accordance with Additional Scoring Rubrics, or ASR). These reviews and “scores” are stored on a private server (encrypted) in a multidimensional spreadsheet system.
At the end of the year, all of the scores and assessments for each album are reviewed. A final overview is written for each album and a final scorecard is established. Our data center in Ahmedabad, Gujarat processes these scorecards and sends us back the below hierarchy.
Because we believe in ethics, all scores and descriptions have been removed from the below analysis to eliminate potential bias. That said, the hierarchy is definitive and its assembly was scientifically sound.
Enjoy the list:
