My top ten albums of 2004 was an easy list to put together. Actually, in the lower reaches of that list I was struggling to pick albums that were worthy of reviewing.

This morning I put together a shortlist of my top albums of 2005, and there’s twenty. I have bought a lot of albums this year – over one hundred – so it’s not like I was spoilt for choice. More remarkable is that of these twenty, thirteen were released in 2005, so it is quite possible that for the first time, my yearly top ten will only contain albums released in the same year.

Today I started listening to these twenty shortlisted albums – although last.fm are currently having database problems, so if you think either a) I’m not listening to anything or b) I’ve got this Kelli Ali fixation, you’d be mostly wrong. Anyhow, for 2005’s list it’s going to be so difficult to pick just ten, let alone rate them.