intransitive preferences, iia, or extreme preference change?

again pitchforkmedia is the subject - they just published there best albums 2000-2004. and you may recall that not to long ago they published their top 50 for 2004. interestingly enough arcade fire - funeral was choosen the best of the rest in 2004. Yet it only makes it to no. 45 in the period 2000-2004. so was 2004 such a bad year in music compared to the previous four? well, not really according to the results: no. 9 animal collective - sung tongs, no. 13 madvillain - madvillainy, no. 18 devandra banhart - rejoicing in the Hands, no. 25 brian wilson - smile (sic!), no. 36 the streets - a grand don't come for free, no. 37 ghostface - the pretty toney album, and no. 40 the fiery furnaces - blueberry boat. obviously there is some inconsistency here. or did pitchforkmedia happen to change its preferences so radically over the course of a month or so? a more likely explanation are the rules used to come up with the ranking - i.e. the may not guarantee transitivity (if A is better than B, B is better than C, then A must be better than C) or perhaps it just fails on the independence of irrelevant alternatives (like when the presence of Ralph Nader determines the outcome of what is really a contest between Gore and Bush in 2000 - maybe?). at any rate, although i don't disagree a whole lot with the list, this just goes to show that lists like these are rather meaningless and we can all just relax....