Yup, I'm gonna be yet another one of them wankers who writes a list on a blog of the most obscure albums they can find just to try to look all 'down with the kids' and 'Hoxton' (because anyone who knows anything about being a hipster knows that you can't type the word 'Hoxton' without scare quotes or non italicized, its just one of them rules that the hipsters made up, which I am blindly following.)
The problem with that last bracketed ramble about hipsterism, is that I am not a hipster, and as such I am going to try not to just give you the XX, yes I liked it, but you are already going to know it. I am going to try to give you 5 classy albums that you might have missed that I most certainly didn't.
First up. Com Truise, one of those bands or artists where they swap the first letter from the first and last word, like Cunning Stunts or Meetwood Flac. Com Truise- or Seth Harley as he is known to his mother and father- spent the year riding high on a wave of praise from the hipster bloggers, music journo's and people like me, who think that everything should sound like the Tron soundtrack. And it does sound like Tron, or something from the Drive soundtrack but less Schmalzy. Put out on Matthew Dear's Ghostly International(more from him later) the album along with a lot of the labels other output this year has been the first time the label looks like it is going in a solid direction instead of just putting out anything that is a) Electronic and b) from Canada. In Decay is a shonky weirded out ket addled set of Don Henley instrumentals with Vangelis adding more than his fair share of synth lines. of course it isn't really, that's just me trying to be clever and do analogies, something I learned at school recently. Anyways. Com Truise, silly name for an artist. Great sound from a great label. Next up is 'World, you need a change' by The Kindness. You would expect 'The Kindness' to be a band that wears tight jeans, doing television style ditties about things that happened yesterday evening. Adam Bainbridge is in fact a UK born lover of New Wave, Post Punk, Talking Heads, Talk Talk and the longrunning BBC soap Eastenders.
That's right, he has done a cover of the Eastenders theme and plonked it right in the middle of his debut album, there is a part of me that thinks that this is brilliant, and totally iconoclastic, on the other hand, if I were in a nightclub or at a party and someone played the theme from Eastenders even as a joke, I would leave immediately, and never speak to anyone in the room again... unless they apologised by playing 'Swinging Party' by the Replacements, or even covering it. Good job that this is exactly what Adam Bainbridge did. It's as if he knows EXACTLY what to do to fix a very specific mistake. Anyways, it's the lads debut album so we can't be too hard on him.
The further I get into writing this top 5 the more I realize that all the musicians are white post 30 men with odd sudanims, and why should the next one be any different.
Daphni- JIAOLONG. (His capitalisation, not mine.)
Dan Snaith spent most of the noughties arguing with a band who had also claimed his original AKA 'Manitoba' before renaming himself Caribou, after the Pixies song. He wasn't only arguing with people and changing his name of course, he also prolifically smashed the underground with Psychadelic masterpieces which sounded as if they were taken from Laurel Canyon, sprayed with fairy dust, LSD mysticism and flutes before being played backwards and looped through some early 70s tape machine. Snaith is incredibly leftfield, and I would say that Milk of Human Kindness was one of the albums released in the between 2000 and 2009 that defines my taste in music. I can't really think of a better album released in that decade, at the moment. In recent years Snaith has had one eye on the dancefloor as 'Swim' took a much more house and techno orientation. his mix with Jamie XX in the BoilerRoom in August was an absolute carcrash, but I have been told his mixing skills have improved since then.
If Swim Saw one eye on the dancefloor, then his new sideproject Daphni, turns faces and shits on everything else keeping the dancefloor moving. It doesn't follow the rules, it isn't mastered properly, all the levels are wrong. These are complaints from DJ's who are at odds with the Sound of Daphni, to them, I say fuck off, this is what the kids should be listening to. I have been lucky enough to year 'Yeye' at a warehouse party this year, where I am sure I was the oldest person. it was good to be in a room with 3000 pogoing spastics all dressed up as zombies and not giving a shit about whether the Mastering is right. While I look forward to the next Caribou album, this is more than enough to keep me happy.
Matthew Dear- Beams.
What to say? I said Ghostly International were having a good year, and with releases from Com Truise, Tycho (who narrowly miss out on this completely subjective list) and This from label boss and legend Matthew Dear sums it up really. I know that 'This' from the last sentence has unnecassary capitalisation but when you listen to 'This' album then you will know why I am getting remarkably overexcited with the shift button. Dear, began his career on Plus 8, the nosebleed techno sister label to minus, which is the weirdy techno label run by Richie Hawtin. Both have a penchant for minimal techno, as you would know if you had ever listened to Dear's Alter Ego 'Audion.
He spent the majority of the noughties being on of the most in demand remixers/DJ's on the techno scene, slotting himself among the legends of the scene like Carl Craig and Laurent Garnier, but when he released his first album under his actual name, it had all songwriting and stuff in it. It turns out, Dear wasn't just someone who made weird squelchy noises, but he like melody and nice warm fuzzy sounds as well, and he even wrote lyrics. Asa Breed was a minor success with moments of bliss and a new Eno'esque direction, Whereas Dan Snaith's sound edges towards the dancefloor, Dear seems to be turning away from it.
Well, that might be a bit of a reach, you can still pretty much dance to anything on this album, but instead of simply bleeps and squeeks, Dear sings, and his lyrics are about feelings and emotions and things like that, and although its the bopps and beeps that keep me listening to the album, I appreciate Dear as a songwriter.
Had I had written this tomorrow or yesterday, this may well have been the number one album of the year, but...
BEAK >> (my capitalisation.)
People have been refering to >> as two, or the second album. There is something so totally irresistable about this monster of an album, produced and performed by a band put together by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, it harks back to Neu! or Harmonium or Cluster or La Dusseldorf or any of those other bands that helped to completely rip up the rulebooks and start again in 70s Germany. Proggy? a little. Anonymous? yes, but would we have it any other way? With every note played you can hear the band losing their ego, surrounding themselves with the fuzz of the notes that they are making, or some other pretentious bullshit analogy. Truth is, its balls out, uncompromising, it can leave you feeling a little uneasy, like when you tune into those shortwave numbers stations, which might be spys broadcasting coded plans of a nuclear attack on your home. Yes your home!
The production is deliberately shoddy, the keyboards are all packing up, the bass guitar might be slightly out of tune, but I love this shit, I love this shit about 100 times more than I love the XX album. The BBC had this to say about beak: "Barrow, who founded Portishead over two decades ago, certainly has the widest recognition of BEAK>’s line-up, but previous projects by Billy Fuller (also of Fuzz Against Junk and a session bassist for Massive Attack among others) and Matt Williams (who’s released short-run experimental music under several names, Team Brick probably the best known) suggest they’re invaluable to the results."
Having never quite gotten over Krautrock, anything I hear with the slightest nod to them has me singing its praises. Trans Am's 2008 album Sex Change topped my list of that year, simply because it sounded like NEU! and perhaps that is why I love this album so much, because it is so far removed from James Arthur to make people who listen to it feel evolved and from the future, a future where the bass guitar tuners have been made obsolete and keyboards dont work properly, granted, but a future, nevertheless.
