The chief appeal of participating in either one, for me, is that it ensured that everything I voted for would be mentioned at least once. And not, as it turns out, much more than that. Both polls take "ten" literally, so my ballot was Joe Jackson, the Loud Family, the Clientele, Camden, Sarah Dougher, Park Ave., Plumtree, the Weakerthans, Sarah Harmer and Nina Gordon. In the IMWP, the Loud Family, the Weakerthans and Nina Gordon got two other votes each, Joe Jackson and Sarah Harmer got one, and on the rest I was alone. In the P&J, five other people voted for the Clientele (two of whose votes are mistakenly listed separately, at the moment, dropping Suburban Light to 234th when it ought to be 153rd), two each for the Loud Family and Nina Gordon, one other for Joe Jackson. One obvious interpretation of this is that I don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about. P&J editor Robert Christgau, by comparison, voted for Eminem, PJ Harvey and OutKast, and the only one of his choices that didn't garner at least ten votes was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four, which we can guess was a victim of the elimination, this year, of a separate category for reissues. New York Times' Jon Pareles voted for five of the top seven. Of those seven, I voted for none, reviewed only Radiohead and U2, bought PJ Harvey's album but only bothered to listen to it once, and know of the others only because they've been fairly hard to escape. And therein lies the essential flaw in both polls, and the reason why the P&J is, just due to the way the Voice reports it, far more interesting. In any reasonably large survey, the results will be easy to predict. It took a friend and I all of thirty seconds of deliberation, at a New Year's Eve party, to conclude that the rock votes would come down to PJ Harvey edging out Radiohead, with U2 trailing somewhere close behind, and I'm fairly certain that anybody who keeps up with rap could have told you that race would be between OutKast, Eminem and D'Angelo. The only thing I'm even mildly surprised about is how many people apparently believe "Shelby Lynne" is an alternate spelling of "Sheryl Crow". But I don't need music critics, either individually or en masse, to tell me about albums of which I'm already well aware. By now surely everybody who cares to has heard Eminem, and can make up their own mind. What I need to know is what I've missed, or what I might have underestimated. The IMWP results, at least online, are presented merely as a contextless list of albums and vote-counts, so there's nothing to be gleaned but the obvious, and so nothing to be gleaned. The Voice, on the other hand, puts up a complete hyperlinked database of all votes and voters, so you can totally ignore the tabulation, and instead wander through the ballots in associative order, seeing who voted for your favorites, what else those people voted for, who else voted for the other things the people who voted for your favorites voted for, what else they voted for, etc. A broad sampling of musical opinion is dull by its nature; the P&J is interesting because it doubles as 586 narrow samplings of musical opinion. The other vote for Joe Jackson's Night and Day came from Billboard's Jim Bessman, whose number one was The Best I've Ever Been, by Porter Wagoner, who I've never heard of. (One short research break later: 73-year-old country legend, got Dolly Parton her start; first new album in twenty years!) Stephanie Zacharek, one of the people who voted for Suburban Light, also cast one of the poll's four votes for Black Box Recorder's The Facts of Life, one of the albums I was sad I couldn't fit into my top ten. I didn't think the new Go-Betweens record was very interesting, but almost every one of the 37 voters who did also voted for something I really liked. The ten people who thought Elastica's The Menace was one of the ten best records of the year ought to thus qualify as borderline lunatics, in my opinion, but after looking through their full ballots I'm more or less convinced that most of them have odd but defensible tastes. These are observations I can do something with. The IMWP brings us homogenous anonymity; the P&J gives us that, too, but also little windows into hundreds of souls.

Of the pile of albums from last year I'm still working through, several got a vote or two in one or the other poll. The clear critical standout, though, is the Canadian group-project The New Pornographers' Mass Romantic, which got three votes in the IMWP and nine (!) in the P&J. An easy explanation would be that Mass Romantic is benefiting from proximate affection for part-time singer Neko Case, whose own album Furnace Room Lullaby got 25 votes in the P&J and 17 in the IMWP, but looking through the nine ballots with Mass Romantic on them I find that only two also mention Furnace Room Lullaby. I come to Mass Romantic belatedly, in fact, in part because Furnace Room Lullaby was a little too earthy for me, and I assumed Case's presence implied the two would be similar, but this ends up being wrong. Mass Romantic is, if anything, good evidence suggesting that Plumtree's This Day Won't Last at All might have made a few more ballots if more people had heard it. The New Pornographers are obviously older and more experienced (songwriters Carl Newman and Dan Bejar are from Zumpano and Destroyer, respectively, and the other players all have other bands as well), but the records share, it seems to me, an artless, percussive exuberance, bedroom in spirit but garage in volume. "Mass Romantic" itself is choppy and rattling, wiry keyboards crisscrossing over shuffling snares, Case's lucid vocals leaping into the midst of Yes-grade multi-part harmonies in the bridges. "The Fake Headlines" starts off with just an acoustic guitar and one of the guys singing, as if it's going to be a Neutral Milk Hotel or Bright Eyes song, but once the rest of the instruments come in the dense, fondly nostalgic arrangement is closer to Velvet Crush. The clanging, piano-driven "The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism", which might have had a shot at my top ten song list if I'd heard it in time, is as expansive and bouncy as Ben Folds or Sloan at their most shamelessly exhortative. "Mystery Hours" borrows synth tones from some old Cars song, and a jagged rhythm from early Game Theory, but the soaring falsetto in the choruses reminds me of Sunny Day Real Estate. Only unapologetically nasal singing keeps "Jackie" from turning into silky jazz-pop.

The P&J singles poll has five votes for songs from this album, three of them for the Case-sung "Letter From an Occupant". You'll find few better examples, I think, of how a vocal performance can transform a recording. The music here is obsessive and snarled, largely based on long runs of unvarying chords, and even the melody isn't especially articulate or unusual. Case rips through it, though, as if being pursued by Maria McKee and Corin Tucker armed with tasers, but hardly breaking a sweat. Frilly chorus harmonies can't disguise her frightening self-assurance, and eventually quit trying. "To Wild Homes", with group vocals buried under piano reverberations, verges on an blaring indiepop genre exercise, but the swooping "The Body Says No", with a slithering sax part from Davidian Chorley, strays back into Sloan's territory. The angular "Execution Day" falls somewhere between the confessional intimacy of the Weakerthans and the jerky experimentation of Think Tree. The demonstrative "Centre for Holy Wars" could be a kids song if it was remade with a less noisy arrangement and a less menacing title (the refrain, a sunny "Hope grows greener than grass stains", can stay). The galloping "The Mary Martin Show" marries a Michael Quercio-ish paisley-pop ornateness to a frenetic Guided-by-Voices-ish urgency. Only "Breakin' the Law", the slow and meandering final song, fails to capitalize on the album's momentum, to me, shooting for redemption via a "Let Love Rule"-esque crescendo when it might have been better off just crashing to a stop without any pretense at ado. I stand by my selection of This Day Won't Last at All over Mass Romantic, if we imagine this as a category, but at least partly on the grounds that Plumtree's accomplishment is more surprising, so if you don't care as much as I do about context (and both critics' polls and general observation suggest that most people don't), maybe you'll like this one better. Then again, why not buy both and decide for yourself?

Rainer Maria have hovered around the fringes of my awareness since I came across them a year and a half ago, one of several bands (Death Cab for Cutie, the Delgados, Jejune...) that I'm pretty confident I like, but would be hard-pressed, if interrupted on the street, to explain why. I think, from hearing A Better Version of Me, I've finally reached a useful operating hypothesis about Rainer Maria, at least for the moment, which is that they have found another idiom in which to express the same sort of delicate, melancholy sobriety that I loved so dearly on Suddenly Tammy's We Get There When We Do. Many of the details are different, inevitably, as Suddenly Tammy were a quiet piano/bass/drums trio and Rainer Maria are a guitar/bass/drums rock band who rarely go a whole song without reminding me of their stentorian emo roots, but Caithlin De Marrais' delivery has become the element in control of the music's emotional level, to me, and apparently guitar feedback lends itself to poetic clarity as readily as damper-pedal breathing. If you expected punk thrash or pop munificence from this record, I bet you'll find it disconcertingly becalmed, but to me the pervasive sense of suspended animation is electrifying and evocative. "Why is this technology an anathema to me?", Caithlin asks in the plaintive "Artificial Light", and on one hand it's bizarre to pick lights, of all the intrusive and destabilizing technology around us, as the center of the problem, but on the other hand we probably can't resolve our attitudes towards machine translation and life-support until we address our relationship to the underlying premise of technology. "Thought I Was" pulses and wails, but its cathartic revelation is the terrifying "I'm not the way I thought I was", and we need more anthems of recognizing what certainties we've lost. "Ceremony" is tentative and swaying, a lullaby in search of the will to live. The faintly Rose-Chronicles-like "The Seven Sisters", its guitar parts all channeled feedback, is a war over metaphors. "Save My Skin" isn't quite a song, musically, I think, as much as a textural monologue, but it's my favorite poem here. "The first thing I want to do is to overcome my temperment", Caithlin sings (the misspelling of "temperament", which she echoes in her pronunciation of it, reminding me pleasantly of the point in my last song where I clearly say "obstinance" instead of "obstinateness"). "Tried to mention all my sins," she says, "But I didn't know where to begin. / Should I forget them? / Or should I let them begin again?" And of course, I think, forgetting and accepting, and not renouncing and pursuing, are the correct options, stripped of the illusion of conscious control. One of the men takes an unsteady lead-vocal turn for the obsessive litany "The Contents of Lincoln's Pockets", but at the end, after he's finished the inventory, Caithlin's return question goes "Slammed to the back of your head. / You've never been hit before. / How can you deal with that kind of information?" In a way this is a question, physical experience processed as intellectual data, as embedded in the character of emo as angst about "The center cannot hold" is in the nature of progressive rock, or the petulant craving for a Pepsi in skate-punk. But it's a little too late to tell us we shouldn't become alienated from ourselves, and even harder to see how we're going to undo it without figuring out how to phrase the imperative for self-inhabitation in anything other than the very grammar that encodes the problem. The hushed "Atropine" is the worst lullaby in the world, a memento mori for the brink of sleep, when you least want it, and one that gets louder at the end, to boot. The pealing "Spit and Fire" is something like a rewrite of Juliana Hatfield's "Choose Drugs" in which we give the half-remembered magic of what the relationship used to be one more chance to shine through the chemicals. "Knowing that you've opened up yourself to me is no victory", she acknowledges, "But a consolation prize will suffice tonight", leaving hope that in the morning they can keep trying. And the album's fastest, least guarded song is its finale, the writhing "Hell and High Water", Caithlin slipping for once back towards the cadences of Fugazi and Braid. I can't decide whether the girl in the story, the improved version of the narrator that the album title refers to, is literally the narrator's boyfriend's next girlfriend, or whether it's her own next self the narrator is imagining, wondering if she's willing to relinquish who she is in order to make the relationship work, but I'm leaning towards the latter, and either way it's harrowing. "Every time I try to get out of her way, / The day's full of kids giving you the finger / And speeders gonna kill you on your tiny street." We give up on ourselves for the noblest reasons, or for the simplest, because we're so flattered somebody thought to ask us to. And under the guise of improving, we disappear.