The big kahuna, the granddaddy of EOY lists, otherwise known as the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, should be revealed very soon (hopefully today, certainly no later than tomorrow). I wanted to give a heads-up to anyone who goes to the Voice site to try to sneak a peek: there actually is a working link to a 2009 albums list if you replace "2008" with "2009" once you get to the P&J homepage, but at the moment it's completely screwed up, with tons of duplicate listings (including for the album that you should be able to guess is #1). I trust that the problems will be fixed before this year's poll results officially go live.

they don't do a decade-end thing. Not like it would be that hard- just have the participating critics fill out two forms, rather than one (for the year-end).

The number of participants peaked at 700 (I think it saw a notable decrease either last year or the year prior). But, even still- when it was 200+ critics, that's still a decent-sized pool to poll.

A note to Otisredding: You may know this already, but for P&J I believe you'll only need to enter the top 100 albums into the EOY spreadsheet.

In past years, Henrik only cited the top 50 for Pazz-N-Jop. If top 100, maybe some past years (in which 51-100 are accessible online) should eventually be added to the site.

I don't think I will include more than 50 albums for the all-time ranking, but 100 albums have always been included in the EOY sheets and that's fine with me. If this doesn't make sense, I can explain myself later.

It makes sense, in terms of the EOY lists capturing a moment in time whereas the top 50 are the consensus picks, the ones the critics in a given year have anointed as having the best chance to stand the test of time. Fortunately, the all-time rankings have enough checks and balances to compensate for those instances when the critics in a given year have been wrong.

Henrik, maybe I am confused. hehe If I'm understanding correctly, the top 100 goes into the EOY sheets- but, they are not included/listed among an album's year-end citations on the site. Do I got it?

Yes.