Critics’ choices: The best albums of 2011

21; Bon Iver; Watch the Throne; The Whole Love; Let England Shake

1. Adele: 21

“With a touch of sass and lots of grandeur,” Adele’s magical second album “insists on its importance,” said Sean Fennessey in The Village Voice. The young British chanteuse co-wrote 10 of the album’s 11 tracks when she was 21 and nursing wounds from a nasty breakup. What emerged is a “raw, flatly stated document” of heartbreak that deftly toes the line “between melodrama and pathos.” Winning the Grammy for Best New Artist for her 2008 debut afforded Adele the opportunity to fill 21 with “a slick retinue of current Top 40 producers,” but “the vibe is unabashedly analog,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. “Strings swell, pianos shiver, and Adele unleashes 21’s most powerful instrument: That Voice.” Her singing nimbly modulates from “a blues-soaked howl” (as on the thundering hit single “Rolling in the Deep”) to a “languid bossa nova lilt” on a cover of the Cure’s “Lovesong.” All the while, Adele’s voice evokes “the full-throated ardor of Etta or Ella” more than it does “any pitch-corrected contemporary.” In this album’s best moments, the music is “that rarest pop commodity: timeless.”

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