We’re getting close to the end of the year, which means very soon everyone will be rolling out their best-of-year lists. In this particular case, I am an enthusiastic lemming; expect to see the countdown starting in December. But while we’re still on the normal schedule, a note about those end-of-year lists.

The latest these lists ever come out is January or February, which causes any number of problems. For one, you don’t get to read them during the year they reference, which is sort of a bummer. But more objectively, is a month or two really adequate time to know what’s been great and what’s been awful during the year? A lot of releases come down the pipeline during the year, and it’s a rare year where I don’t find a great album I’d somehow missed the previous year, and subsequently forgot to list. One look at my last.fm stats is telling: at the top of the list is Rilo Kiley, a band who’ve never made it into a yearly post-mortem. It’s because I have horrible timing; the first album I bought of theirs was at the very tail end of last December, and it wasn’t even the album they’d put out that year; it was The Execution Of All Things, released back in 2002 and totally out of the running. I didn’t pick up More Adventurous until early this year, and by then it was too late.

All this illustrates is the foolishness of year-end lists; like we could possibly show such authority so soon. But it’s fun for the writers, and occasionally interesting to readers too, and so they’ll never die. But it’s worth looking back and remembering the 2004 albums I missed, like the Brunettes’ Mars Loves Venus or the Troublemakers’ Express Way. And of course, there’s More Adventurous, the album that propelled Rilo Kiley to its greatest heights yet. Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett and company played the Opera House in Toronto this past summer, and I had middling-to-low expectations. It is, after all, the Opera House, home of the most uncomfortable floor to stand on, mediocre sightlines, and plastic beer cups. But the Brunettes put on a lovely opening show (hence the purchase of Mars Loves Venus), and after a bland and uninteresting set by Nada Surf, Rilo Kiley hit the stage and proceeded to sweep a fairly large Toronto crowd off their feet. By the end of the concert Lewis had the crowd singing the verses to “With Outstretched Arms” unaccompanied; a woman who can wield that much power over a Toronto audience must deal in the black arts. After that Toronto show, Rilo Kiley went on to open for Coldplay. Very soon, not even the Opera House will be able to hold them.