Amazon Would Like To Sell You On The Kings Of Leon Album

This year’s first best-of list comes to us from Amazon, which I guess wanted to get a jump on holiday shopping by deeply discounting the albums it found better than the rest way before Black Friday rolled around. Top 50 after the jump, but first, here are a few impressions:

THE GOOD: A top 10 with enough personal favorites (Santogold, No. 2; Al Green’s Lay It Down, No. 4; Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah, No. 7; Estelle’s Shine, No. 8) to make me forgive the obligatory Fleet Foxes inclusion (at No. 3, for real). THE BAD: Amazon is an e-commerce site, though, and once the list gets into its teens, a few decisions seem to have been arrived at by factoring in both sales and critical appeal. Metallica’s Death Magnetic at No. 19, for example: Surely there were better albums put out by metal bands who were going for a serious image makeover after a string of semi-disastrous albums and a movie that let them get a little to emo? (OK, maybe not.) THE WHAAA? Yeah, I kind of can’t get over that the first “best of ’08” list that I’ve come across so far has Kings Of Leon’s Only By The Night as No. 1. But maybe you’ve found other rundowns out there? Feel free to send them our way.

1. Kings Of Leon, Only By The Night 2. Santogold 3. Fleet Foxes 4. Al Green, Lay It Down 5. Adele, 19 6. Death Cab For Cutie, Narrow Stairs 7. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part 1: Fourth World War 8. Estelle, Shine 9. Hayes Carll, Trouble In Mind 10. MGMT, Oracular Spectacular 11. Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago 12. Joan As Police Woman, To Survive 13. R.E.M., Accelerate 14. Johnny Flynn, A Larum 15. Duffy, Rockferry 16. Throw Me The Statue, Moonbeams 17. Sigur Ros, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust 18. Portishead, Third 19. Metallica, Death Magnetic 20. She & Him, Volume One 21. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! 22. Laura Marling, Alas I Cannot Swim 23. T.I., Paper Trail 24. Beck, Modern Guilt 25. M83, Saturdays = Youth 26. The Roy Hargrove Quintet, Ear Food 27. Ashton Shepherd, Sounds So Good 28. B.B. King, One Kind Favor 29. Esperanza Spalding, Esperanza 30. Coldplay, Viva La Vida 31. Ra Ra Riot, The Rhumb Line 32. Thao, We Brave Bee Stings And All 33. TV On The Radio, Dear Science 34. Ting Tings, We Started Nothing 35. The Magnetic Fields, Distortion 36. Little Jackie, The Stoop 37. Amanda Palmer, Who Killed Amanda Palmer 38. Destroyer, Trouble In Dreams 39. Dr. John And The Lower 911, The City That Care Forgot 40. The Helio Sequence, Keep Your Eyes Ahead 41. Think Of One, Camping Shaabi 42. Juno soundtrack 43. The Mighty Underdogs, Droppin’ Science Fiction 44. JJ Grey & Moffro, Orange Blossoms 45. CSS, Donkey 46. Katy Perry, One Of The Boys 47. The Raconteurs, Consolers Of The Lonely 48. Calexico, Carried To Dust 49. Jamie Lidell, Jim 50. Jeff Healey, Mess Of Blues

Best Of 2008 [Amazon]