is what Brian? their best release? or best of the year?

I don't think you ranked it as best of the year so it can't be that and their best release well I still say this is about tied with Benefits.

or the relevancy of whether or not it is better than anything I've done? I never said I could play a guitar better than than any of them but even if I could that wouldn't make a better album per say. I have different aims in my life and if AWS were going for similar aims I'd say that issue would be relevant on whether or not our output stacks up. Academia is the field I'm pursuing, music is their field, they would have a right to say whether or not a paper I've written is any good just as much as I have a right to say whether their albums are any good and I wouldn't say "oh well it is a better paper than you could write" if they didn't like it cuz that is some extremely flawed logic.