Slant Magazine

10. The Weeknd, House of Balloons. The Weeknd began 2011 in total obscurity and ended it as the year's most talked about new artist. The collaboration of producer Doc McKinney and singer Abel Tesfaye, House of Balloons is entirely without precedent in R&B. The gothic production aesthetic is influenced as much by industrial, trip-hop, and downtempo as it is by urban-radio mainstays like R. Kelly and The-Dream, while Tesfaye's tortured falsetto conveys both vulnerability and predatory intent. It's a lurid exercise in subterranean world-building, its depictions of dependency and desperation soundtracked by some of the catchiest, sexiest R&B jams you'll never hear in the club. MC

9. Wild Beasts, Smother. True to their name, Wild Beasts continue to build on and fully inhabit an undomesticated musical world far removed from the familiar grounds of their indie peers. The band's experimentation in flaky, embellished baroque pop is ultimately a reward for its loyal audience: The weirder they get, the better Wild Beasts become. For those who stuck with them through Two Dancers, Smother is another masterful step in that surreal journey, albeit a quiet, sensuous one. Largely shouldered by the band's two lead vocalists (a libertine cooer in Hayden Thorpe and the earthier, huskier Tom Fleming), Smother is both alluring and purposeful, not to mention full of beautiful surprises. What other group could achieve something like "Invisible," an undisguised hat tip to the kind of soft, safe ballads one would expect from Phil Collins circa 1985, and still manage to infuse it with their own brand of unpredictable artistry? KL

8. Katy B, On a Mission. Katy B's debut album is a euphoric journey that manages to make dubstep sound a little less ugly. Three out of the four singles that were released this year from On a Mission were shortlisted for our 25 Best Singles of 2011. That none of them cracked the final list speaks more to the embarrassment of riches from which we had to choose than to the weakness of the individual singles. Not to mention, some of the very best cuts haven't even been released as singles yet. The single "Witches' Brew" rides its oscillating synth line just as smoothly as the album's closing track, "Hard to Get," bobs along to its vintage deep-house groove. SC

7. Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Wisconsin breeds crazy, but it also allows for glimmering brilliance. There are flashes of both in Bon Iver, the connoisseur's choice vehicle for robotripping this year. Justin Vernon's second album boldly sheds For Emma, Forever Ago's sequestered, no-fi realness in favor of a thawing, immersive, yet still remote existence outside of the cabin—though admittedly naming all the songs for near and distant locales may have been a tad too on point. While clearly some fans would have preferred everyone's perceptions remain gruffly unaltered, others found it within their Movember hearts to allow this acoustic Robert Bly a chance to tap into his secret Björkian loins. EH

6. Tune-Yards, w h o k i l l. Merrill Arbus is theatrically, radically, self-reflexively weird, but she's also the rare example of an artist earning that distinction completely. She goes about justifying her style in the same way she justifies her rampant borrowing from African polyrhythms, vocal approaches, and percussion, an activity many artists have engaged in recently with far less originality or success. In both respects, there's the sense that a uniquely creative mind is behind all this, turning what could be dissonant, irritatingly obtuse music into something fascinatingly daffy instead. JC

5. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy. Annie Clark's last album, Actor, showcased a performer with a considerable range of talents, but there was scant evidence to suggest that she'd make a credible bid for guitar-hero status. Strange Mercy thrives on the interaction between the said and the unsaid, with Clark using her guitar to evoke the shuddersome feelings she can't bring herself to vocalize. That means it has to make some pretty awful sounds, so Clark channels some of noise rock's great guitarists (principally Steve Albini and Lee Ranaldo) to give voice to the voracious id lurking behind her coyly measured singing. MC

4. Shabazz Palaces, Black Up. It was a banner year for independent hip-hop, and Black Up was the scene's pièce de résistance. Shabazz Palaces managed to give rap both its most experimental album and its most compulsively listenable, and in doing so they vindicated the massive preparatory work done by pioneers like De La Soul, Anti-Pop Consortium, cLOUDEAD, and the Anticon crew. The rhymes are loose, funky, and cerebral, but the production is what makes Black Up such a masterpiece. The backing track on "King's new clothes were made by his own hands" is a swelling, orchestral mass of loops that sounds like its being shaken as it plays—and it's breathtakingly poignant. The subliminally appealing sonics work, like the album's oblique political slogans, to nurture a consciousness that is both personal and shared. MC

3. Lady Gaga, Born This Way. To call Born This Way one of the year's best albums will come as heresy only to the pop-, queer-, and woman-averse who Lady Gaga assails throughout this magnum opus with the force of a Gatling gun. A self-consciously, some might say Warholian, act of re-appropriation, Born This Way rises cannily and hilariously phoenix-like from its primordial soup of influences, which includes chunks of Cher, Madonna, David Bowie, Queen, Klaus Nomi, Grace Jones, even Dead or Alive. With its relentlessly throbbing beats and plethora of fierce breakdowns, this resuscitated vintage would be perfectly content as the soundtrack to fashion weeks and underground sex dungeons the world over, though really it's intended as a sincere ode to the bedazzled hearts of outsiders past and present, real and imagined, from Marilyn to trannies, Jesus to unicorns. EG

2. Lykke Li, Wounded Rhymes. Right from the get-go, Lykke Li's Wounded Rhymes gets some. "Youth Knows No Pain." Youth delivers it. Slinging her rigid vocal cords like a truncheon, the Swedish songstress sure knows how to bring a party down, purring and pleading in "Sadness Is a Blessing" (which sounds every bit like Phil Spector song bouncing off a curved funhouse mirror), adding twang to her pangs in "Unrequited Love," retreating into a sad clown-infested trash compacter in the stark, album-capping "Silent My Song." If Betty reached her emotional apocalypse listening to Rebekah Del Rio, you can be sure the spirit of Diane Selwyn is now perpetually being torn asunder to the strains of "I Know Places." EH

1. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake. Polly Jean Harvey has howled at the wind, men, cities, and scripture. Now she shakes her fists and barbed dulcet voice at England, the country of her birth. This bewitchingly strange album, so retrograde by design, not only invokes images of the Great War, both solemnly and sarcastically, to comment on a once powerful empire's currently slacken political identity, but also sounds of yore—sounds, such as the perfectly utilized bugle from "The Glorious Land," I've never heard referenced outside of old black-and-white Hollywood war dramas and Looney Tunes shorts. Of course, this being the product of Polly Jean, Let England Shake doesn't simply rage against a nation's history of war, past and present, and its place in the West. It's also a canny confession from one of music's greatest poets that her own evolution, as a woman and a musician, is forever intertwined with the light and dark of her birthland's own. EG