The Top 50 Albums of the Year

>> Hate 'em, love 'em -- don't be shy in telling us -- but if you think you can really blow us away, build your own Best Album of the Year showcase here.. Yeah, you might even score some cash.

46 You Don't Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker [Listen]
WILLIE NELSON
The outlaw-country king of Texas pays loving tribute to the state's songwriting queen. Nelson played many of the songs on this album in his youth, on the way to his own songwriting fame, and he revisits them with such affection and Texas-dance-floor authenticity that you can almost smell the sawdust.

47 Brightblack Morning Light [Listen]
BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT
With their second album, Alabama bohemians Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes created the perfect chill-out soundtrack for roots-music fans, all slow, glacially pretty songs that toss in traces of the Band, the Dead and grimy blues. The result: Zen-like peacefulness that keeps your ears perked.

48 Public Warning [Listen]
LADY SOVEREIGN
Public Warning was one of the year's oddest hip-hop discs: a daft, electro-tinged record starring a nineteen-year-old Brit girl fond of booze and shepherd's pie and given to playfully barbed rhymes like "Just check how my flow differs/I'm droppin' lyrics like a ho droppin' knickers." But the album is also completely lovable: Nimbly rhymed cuts such as "Gatheration" show that cheeky monkeys who sound more like Austin Powers than Jay-Z can make it in hip-hop.

49 Pick a Bigger Weapon [Listen]
THE COUP
Longtime Oakland, California, rapper Boots Riley does things his own way -- big Afro, a live band and a militant leftism better informed than that of, say, Dead Prez. "Baby Let's Have a Baby Before Bush Do Somethin' Crazy" is his sexy love song, and glory be, it's actually erotic. "Head (of State)" shares a character with that one and is also sexy in its own way: "Bush and Hussein together in bed/Giving h-e-a-d head/Y'all motherfuckers heard what we said/Billions made and millions dead."

50 It's Never Been Like That [Listen]
PHOENIX
These sleek french rockers made their none-too-French name with light, dreamy synth confections designed for film soundtracks, such as their Lost in Translation theme "Too Young." But Phoenix achieve a harder, more aggressive guitar-driven sound on this, their third and best record. "Second to None" and "Long Distance Call" rock out, without losing the band's original conception of elegant melancholy; the exquisitely surging "North" is their pithiest ballad yet.