and maybe give a paragraph explaining why, in the style of a DiS review.

Mine:

1975 - Physical Graffiti is simply one of my favourite albums ever, but a chain of brilliant albums came out this year: Born to Run, Wish You Were Here, Another Green World, A Night at the Opera, and others I need to hear (Horses, Blood on the Tracks, Siren, Tago Mago, The Hissing of Summer Lawns.) This may be bullshit but the way I see it is that a lot of music in 1975 has this calmness and euphoria to it, as though it was acknowledged that rock had attained perfection with the advent of DSotM and Wish You Were Here, albums which changed the game completely and raised the bar for music to a stratospheric high, but couldn't go any further. A weirdly underrated, slightly on-edge year in music. The eye of the hurricane before the dirt and excitement of punk.

1996 - A weird choice since this was a duffer year for landmarks albums (unless you're into Beck/DJ Shadow/90s hip-hop), but the best Britpop singles were released this year: Street Spirit (Fade Out)*, Don't Look Back in Anger, Champagne Supernova, A Design for Life, Everything Must Go. 1995 might have technically been a better year for Britpop but the Manics do it for me. This was Britpop's swansong year and it has the saccharine balance of unbridled ecstasy and melancholy.

2008 - Again, another crap year for albums, but I really like Viva La Vida and this is the first year in which I started liking music, that being of the first albums I kinda liked. And this was In Rainbows' year really, despite it coming out in 2007. It was also the year of some last semi-hurrahs from Oasis and R.E.M.; I'm no fan of Dig Out Your Soul or Accelerate but I get my nostalgia-fix from songs like Supernatural Superserious, Falling Down and I'm Outta Time. It was also the year that Manchester band James released their underrated late-career high: Hey Ma, another nostalgia joint for me.

*not really Britpop, but it might as well have been.