About five years ago, one of those serendipitous quirks of the music business made it seem, fleetingly, as if a bunch of underground folk musicians might find their way into the mainstream.
Many thanks to all of you who stopped by and registered your votes for this Albums Of 2011 Thus Far poll. I've finally done the requisite dark mathematics and come up with this Top 20. A big gap between the top three and the rest of the field and, perhaps, an unexpected winner…
Given we’re coming up to the end of June, I figured it should be time for this annual bit of anal-retentive album-crunching. A lot of fine records here , though not necessarily the 30 I might have envisaged at the start of 2011; as I’ve alluded to before, I feel like there have been a lot of eagerly-anticipated letdowns this year.
An extra-long list this week, since we seem to have worked our way through more stuff than usual. A lot of good stuff, too, I’d say, with one or two exceptions, and a tremendous new mystery record that’s coming out in the summer and which hasn’t, I think, been announced as yet – hence the necessary evasiveness.
It may be a touch rash to suggest that Oneohtrix Point Never are challenging, say, Lady Gaga for influence and ubiquity all of a sudden. Nevertheless, more and more psychedelic records I’m sent seem to follow levitational synth patterns rather than more rockist jams, and there’s even been a few weird instances of PRs dropping the Oneohtrix name as an eyecatching influence, when the actual music sounds nothing like him (last week: a very lame pop-dubstep thing with faint ethereal trim).
Thanks for all your responses to my Top 100 over the last few days. In case, you missed it yesterday, please post your own Top Tens here, and I’ll crunch them into a chart in a couple of weeks or so.
