This is primarily because - brace yourselves - the people who write for such places really like those albums. Still, given the sheer volume of options, it's funny how the best-of lists that started cropping up earlier this month, and will continue to do so for another few weeks yet, seem to share at least 75 percent of the same titles, whether you're reading Rolling Stone or Blender at the barbershop or browsing Pitchfork and The Onion online. Since when was anything related to music ever supposed to be objective, anyway? The best records are whichever ones you say are the best. So then how does any one person decide what the "best" records of the year were? That's easy. Even the most fastidious critic has to reconcile him or herself to the fact that they'll only hear a sliver of what's out there, especially since every hour spent listening to a stiff like Smashing Pumpkins' Zeitgeist is one they'll never get back. Thousands of albums were released this year on labels large and small, some of them excellent (Donnas, Bitchin' Wu-Tang Clan, 8 Diagrams), some awful (Soulja Boy, Lifehouse, Who We Are), most merely okay (Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction the Cult, Born into This), so listening to them all is simply impossible. Of course it does, but that's beside the point. If we don't think Arcade Fire's Neon Bible is the greatest thing since indoor plumbing (or their last album, Funeral), we wonder, does that make us a bad person? The pedagogue in us can't wait to reveal the recordings that rocked our world over the previous 52 weeks, while the approval-seeker nervously hopes that list isn't too far out of line from all the others. The end of the year is a conflicting time for music writers and editors.