Yes, it’s time once again to get all judgmental about the local music scene and pick the best albums of the year for further breakdown into a fancy PDD poll. There were at least four-dozen albums released by local musicians in 2014, which means few people have listened to them all. So, how do we begin?

Well, it’s fairly simple. In the comments to this post we ask you, the local brain trust, to mention your favorite albums from the past year, then we use that list to generate the nominees for the poll we’ll run a few days from now. It is acceptable, by the way, to nominate an album that came out late in 2013 and maybe didn’t capture much attention until 2014.

With so much local music being produced, of course, it’s hard for even devotees to feel like they have much of a grasp on everything that’s out there, but note that the list of albums linked above contains numerous links to Bandcamp pages where you can listen to many, many tunes for the low, low price of free. So browse, listen, or just spout off about how good the new album by your best friend’s band is and consider yourself an expert. It’s only rawk and/or roll, after all.