Ada

Like the late Rodney Dangerfield, female singers in the electronic field too often get no respect — tending to appear either as disembodied disco loops or dropping their essentially un-credited voices over some well-known (predominantly male) producer’s beats. Clearly the trick is to just make your own music and so Ada crafts her own experimental electro-pop productions while crooning over top, using techno torch songs to steal the spotlight at the sausage party. The one-time "pop vocalist” ditched her live band a few years back for some machines and after wowing Europe with a series of underground twelve-inches — staples of many fine mix-discs and compilations — is raring to deliver us Blondie, sort of an edgier Everything But the Girl, except without that dude. To hammer that point home, the Cologne, Germany-based crooner even lays the Tracey Thorn lyrics from EBTG’s "Each and Everyone” atop her own melancholy beats and winds up the album on a cross-genre solidarity note by covering the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s "Maps.” But Blondie is not in any way about gender politics, though its very existence shows up the boys who, in marrying their micro-beats with pop structures, have largely lacked the necessary pipes while Ada’s voice proves as impressive as her pulsing bleeps.