Login / RegisterTop 10 albums of 2011: Martin Turenne
In an era when nearly everyone has a digital device soldered to their hands, it’s no surprise that electronic music has gone mainstream. It’s the million-monkeys-writing-Shakespeare theory come true; when we’re all bashing away at keyboards, some of us are bound to make a joyful noise. Let’s call 2011 the year rave broke. Again.
The Field
Looping State of Mind
More a refinement of Axel Willner’s signature style than a breakthrough, the Swedish technoist’s third full-length is a fascinating achievement, a dissertation on what it’s like to be perpetually on the brink of ecstasy.
Holy Other
With U
There’s a druggy haze permeating many records on this list, nowhere more thickly than on the English export With U, a set of postapocalyptic R & B dirges that sound like transmissions from a dying planet in some distant corner of the Milky Way.
Hyetal
Broadcast
This debut album by the U.K.’s David Corney uses lustrous tones to shadowy ends. In his deft deployment of ’80s-era synthetic flourishes, he evokes an episode of Miami Vice as seen on a black-and-white television.
Jamie Woon
Mirrorwriting
As the singer Craig David was to two-step garage, so Woon is to the new beat science. Where David embodied his genre’s bottle-popping effervescence, the latter’s hushed croon channels dubstep’s trademark urban desolation, and gloriously so.
The Weeknd
House of Balloons
Scarborough’s Abel Tesfaye combines computer-made beats with a psychosexual vocal approach that’s part Prince, part R. Kelly. In the process, he creates something startlingly new, a sound with no trace of nostalgia in its DNA.
