Thought I'd start this up rather than pollute the nice, currently clean one with my woes.

This isn't a moan about end of year lists as such, more a question as to how you reconcile things when you start forming them.

What I always find hard to do in these polls is balance the excitement and originality levels of a record against a consistent end product. For example, there are several albums such as These new Puritans, Janelle Monae, Gil Scott-Heron, M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem etc where I far prefer 4 of the tracks on each to the standouts on half of my list. But then the other half of those records do so little for me that, when taken as an entirety, it allows people lower down my list to sneak in and steal their spots due to the whole record being stronger.

Catch my drift? Anyone else struggle with this?