50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2011

On first glance, Janine Rostron’s Planningtorock project seemed a peculiarly art-world experiment. Even discounting her co-writing credits with The Knife on ‘Tomorrow, In A Year’, there 
was enough eerie percussion and drone at play on ‘W’ to suggest an artist who spent most of 2011 poncing around Berlin’s avant spaces. And while pretentiousness is good, pair it with a pop instinct and you isolate the strain of brilliance which made her second album so good. Cutting through disco fashioned from shifting planes of sickly synth and pizzicato strings (‘Living It Out’), medicated songspiel (‘Milky Blau’), and gender-blurred mutant-soul (‘I Am Your Man’) was that voice, pitched down, androgynous. A pop record dressed up as art piece then, and 2011 was richer for it. LB