2011 seemed to be a strange year for music, at least to me. I can detect no real trends, at the moment. And yet at the same time the flow of promos that EvilSponge receives has become a raging river, now that everyone is simply emailing download links. I seriously get about 3 to 4 promos per day. That's right, about a thousand this year. I am not exaggerating.

But i don't listen to all of them. Many i can eliminate just from the promo text that comes with the download link. Others get one brief listen to the "sample track" that is being pushed, and then get eliminated. That leaves me with 4 or 5 albums per week to listen to. Of those, 3 can be eliminated pretty fast, but the others need some serious consideration. That leaves me with about 80 records that i have spent time listening to this year. Now, on top of that add in all of the records that i purchased from bands i like, as well as the fact that EvilSponge went and reviewed the complete catalogs of Superchunk and Archers of Loaf in 2011, and somehow i find myself wondering how i got anything done with all that listening i needed to do.

Of all of those albums, i sorted through and discovered a few tracks that i felt i needed to share with you. This year's compilation comes in several different ways.

I burned a CD that contained 18 tracks. If you are not in Atlanta, you can download the CD in MP3 form here, and burn your own copy.

There is a longer download mix that adds in 7 additional tracks, bringing the song total to 25. A few of these songs are the ambient stuff that i enjoy, but which sometimes ruins the flow of a CD. However, in a longer mix played from your MP3 player, they work. I have arranged the 7 additional tunes in between the 18 tunes from the CD, maing one coherent flow. You can download that here.

Finally, if you have the CD and just want to hear the digital-only bonus tracks, you can download them here.

The downloadable files use RAR compression. RAR is like ZIP, only it works better for media files. You can download WinRar, a free decompression program, from this site.

Enjoy.