2007 that was (by Tim)

One:

This year a sizeable majority of the music I’ve really enjoyed I’ve been grouping under the rubric of “Balearic” – sunny, rhythmic, sometimes pretentious, sometimes whimsical. It hasn’t really been that kind of year for me though (except for “sometimes pretentious” perhaps) so it must be some sort of escapism thing.

This is the first entry in what may become a loose commentary on the year in music – each entry will include a little gift for y’all. Not everything will be 'Balearic', although it might be in spirit.

The Tough Alliance – Silly Crimes: http://www.zshare.net/audio/538941503b16fe/

The Tough Alliance – Something Special: http://www.zshare.net/audio/539038250e23bc/

I don’t know much about The Tough Alliance but it’s easy to imagine what they might be like: their songs come across like Junior Senior trying to be Saint Etienne circa ‘So Tough’, only parts of it also remind me of The KLF at times, and other parts of that whole lineage of inventive chartdancepop from Betty Boo to Xenomania. Plus maybe some of Future Bible Heroes' winsomeness about them. And they love now-housey, now-reggaefied piano vamps, which speaks highly of them. And technically “Silly Crimes” is, um, dancehall I guess. It goes down well with Sean Kingston’s excellent new single “Me Love”. Anyway, The Tough Alliance: I imagine this duo of young, slightly goofy guys who have spent the last five years hosting small but enthusiastic house parties (for, like, about five people) soundtracked by cash-in compilations with names like ‘Sorted!’. So they sing like they were in some also-ran Manchester band, but their tunes are good enough to be Rosalla or Corona, and the production is gobsmackingly perfect early 90s illusion-of-depth dubbed-out dance-pop homage that I can’t praise highly enough.

Two:

Italo-disco doesn’t need to do much in order to sound like the best music in the world, which is one of the reasons it’s been revived to death these past five years or so. The Italians Do It Better label have somewhat belatedly raised the bar for such efforts, just when it seemed like the last vestiges of electroclash were dying a slow death. On the label’s ‘After Dark’ compilation what stands out is the awesome solemnity with which the artists approach their particular strain of revivalism: check the Mirage remix of Indeep’s “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”, wherein spectrally shimmering synthesisers cast a deathly pallor over the celebration of the original – as if the singer’s life wasn’t saved after all, and she now exists in a compulsive disco afterlife administered to by DJ Death.

Indeep – Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (Mirage Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/55100299d173c7/

My favourite track is Farah’s “Law of Life”, which takes this solemnity to astonishing new heights (or, perhaps more properly, depths). As I understand it, Farah is a young Persian, er, beat poet from Texas, and she recites her state-of-the-world soliloquy in a voice that moves through paranoia, insight, resignation and hallucination, while behind her impossibly statuesque synth arpeggios quietly announce the end of the world. On the equally brilliant “Dancing Girls” she slips in and out of Persian, and sleepily murmurs tantalising phrases like “Oriental dress/the one you love is a mess… dancing from the opium.” Oddly, the one interview with Farah I’ve read has her obsessing over Justin Timberlake and George Michael. Girl knows what she’s talking about.

Farah – Law of Life
http://www.zshare.net/audio/55103110604fb8/

Much of the responsibility for the glittering synth arpeggios that the label tends to bring to mind can be attributed to Johnny Jewel, who performs as Mirage and also produces Farah’s records, as well as being part of flagship acts Chromatics and Glass Candy. The older Chromatics stuff I’ve heard is skeletal, atmospheric post-punk reminiscent of early albums from The Cure. On their new album Night Drive this residual element is filtered through Jewel’s synthesisers for maximum elegiac effect. My favourite track is the short but overblown instrumental melodrama of “Let’s Make This A Moment To Remember”, whose torpid slow-mo pulse and minor key synth patterns are so voluptuously morose it verges on becoming comic. They also have a wonderfully numb new female vocalist – keep an eye out for their ghostly, reverent cover of “Running Up That Hill”.

Chromatics – Let’s Make This A Moment To Remember
http://www.zshare.net/audio/55330408e83bbb/

I made the mistake of buying Glass Candy’s 2002 album a few years ago, and it was pretty unremarkable post-Yeah Yeah Yeahs shouty rock stuff. They’ve improved immensely though, first with a wonderful eight-minute punk-funk track that was floating around a few years ago called “Sugar and Whitebread”, and then their rudimentary version of “Iko Iko” ran over a loop from the Geto Boys. Now everything they do seems to expand their range – on ‘After Dark’ they cover Kraftwerk and old disco records to great effect. More theatrical, sensual and restless than the other Italians Do It Better artists, they remind me variously of Gina X Performer, Lene Lovich and Blondie; singer Ida No has a great way with campy excessive enunciation. I’ve included a demo of “Candy Castle” from their new album ‘Beatbox’, which is a great example of their dark cabaret swirl – check out those doomy synth-horns!

Glass Candy – Candy Castle (Demo)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/55364723dfe505/

Invisible Conga People are a new act on the label who technically haven’t released anything yet, but I stumbled across “Weird Pains” about six months ago and have been obsessed with it ever since. This is coming from a totally different place to the other label acts (I believe Invisible Conga People are in fact a duo from Japan): “Weird Pains” sets spaced out minimal bleeping against close-mic muttering and ticking beats, before giving way to hypnotic tribal percussion that’s seemingly wandered in from a Luciano or Ricardo Villalobos record. The overall effect falls somewhere between Kompakt’s Matias Aguayo and Can. It’s not really a song as such, but as mood-music it’s weirdly compelling (the track title works perfectly, by the way).The track “Cable Dazed” on their myspace page is just as good, a fantastically spaced out synth pattern exploration with eerie close-harmony vocals that should appeal to fans of Delia & Gavin – I’m hoping this makes for a two sides of a vinyl release some time soon (update: it will soon, coupled with the possibly-even-better "Cable Dazed").

Invisible Conga People – Weird Pains
http://www.zshare.net/audio/55338805f71ffd/

Three:

In September, in preparation for visiting London, I thought it was time to start paying more attention to what the various post-UK Garage scenes were doing – a task that is usually somewhat thankless from the vantage point of Oz. Ultimately I bought quite a bit of grime but and not much else while I was over there, but I’m glad I started to investigate bassline more as it increasingly dominated my time as the year drew to a close.

Bassline, a scene concentrated in the north of England and other regional centres rather than London (esp. Sheffield apparently) is kind of like the return of speed garage – the bumpy sped-up four-to-the-floor version of garage which immediately preceded 2-step. The big difference is that Bassline is harder and nastier, with all the remaining New York garage-style organic sensuousness purged in favour of a cold, metallic sound that can often seem surprisingly close to electro-house: stiff house percussion, razor-sharp synth riffs and enormous, glinting basslines. Otherwise, the raw ingredients that made speed garage such potent dance and pop music remain present: gratuitously catchy vocals, including lots of fabulous post-Todd Edwards cut-up monstrosities, a restless magpie approach to sonic source material, and a great line in awesomely profane pop songs. Here are some of my favourites.

T2 ft Jodie – Heartbroken
http://www.zshare.net/audio/5532477109bcaa/
Bassline’s big hit… I’ve even seen the video clip on Video Hits here in Australia, and it’s easy to see why: “Heartbroken” really leaps out of the stereo with the kind of buffed candy-pop largesse that also defined Shanks & Bigfoot’s “Sweet Like Chocolate” (which occupied a similar role vis a vis 2-step as “Heartbroken” does to bassline). The tune perfectly captures the split personality vibe that characterises the best diva bassline tracks, the evil multiple basslines doing battle with achingly pretty pizzicato strings plucks and morose synth string sweeps, while Jodie’s minnie mouse vocals flit between affecting simplicity and cut-up madness seamlessly, as if (in between calmly explaining her bereft emotional state) without warning lapsing into speaking in tongues.

Jamie Duggan – No Cocaine
http://www.zshare.net/audio/5523325b0579c9/
Great conceit: sampling the vocal from “Under Mi Sensi” on a bassline track works on so many levels. Firstly, the warmth of reggae vocals (even paranoid buggin’ out vocals) nicely balances out what can be a certain sonic severity to bassline grooves. But contrarily, the actual vocal “in my brain, no cocaine, I don’t wanna I don’t wanna I don’t wanna go insane” perfectly captures bassline’s coked-up (polydrugged up, really) vibe. Also, Duggan comes up with the most marvellous funked-up bassline to accompany it. In recognition of the big debt to Carribbean, the track even lurches into syncopated soca beats at regular intervals – let’s see more of this in 2008!

DJ Q ft. MC Bones & Laffy – Get Mad
http://www.zshare.net/audio/553201206715d4/
Often my favourite bassline tracks are the ones with rapping, partly because they remind me of the brief emergence of 4X4 garage rap circa 2002 (remember the blazing Elephant Man version of Blazin’ Squad’s “Standard Flow”? "No", you shake your head and sigh, "only you remember that sort of thing, Tim"), and partly because there’s few things that sound better than manic rapping over manic house beats. Bassline’s rappers tend to be more in the old hype MC than grime MCs are – Bones and Laffy remind me a bit of Heartless Crew, exciting the crowd with tense, slightly terse exhortations (“Get mad! Get mad!”) that blur the line between entertainer and gunman. “Get Mad” is also notable for dabbling with a staggering schaffel-style groove – a trick that increasingly dominated tracks emerging in the second half of the year, and a tactic that bodes well for the scene’s sonic and rhythmic invention.

TS7 – Hazy
http://www.zshare.net/audio/55323017b20b57/
TS7 is my favourite producer in the scene: what’s most notable about tracks like “Hazy” is how thoroughly he has absorbed so many different lessons. Chief amongst them being excellent cut-up, woozy female vocals that draw equally from ‘ardkore, 2-step garage and that brief golden age of diva-pop takes on grime (“r&g”); plinky-plonky harpsichord, organ and pizzicato string melodies and flicker-riffs that startle with their prettiness; and multiple and multivalent basslines that climb right up in the treble registers with vertiginous queasiness before plunging into radioactive depths – not to mention schaffel interludes, which he uses more than anyone. Also check out the awesome “Stone Island”, which includes eerie choral vocals and a bizarre synthetic flute solo.

Dizzee Rascal – Flex (DJ Q Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/5522937704cc53/
The original “Flex” was already a four-to-the-floor dancefloor monster, so it didn’t take much for DJ Q to freshen it up for bassline crowds: his version is faster, nervier, harsher, reticular snare snaps duelling with soupy bubbles of bass and turgid synth riffs – if anything, the sonics here remind me of Dizzee’s own “I Luv U”, which gives you a sense of the strangeness of bassline’s take on “house music”. But anyway, how fucking great is Dizzee? It’s not like “Flex” is particularly deep or anything, but maybe that’s the point: I was perversely pleased that ‘Maths + English’ wasn’t too heavy on the introspection, as Dizzee’s usually best when he’s just talking shit. And this paean to the female figure is even more shit-talking than usual, but I just love every single “golly gosh” and “my oh my”. “Life’s too short to be cautious – innit!?!” he asks rhetorically, one presumes while he’s already got his hand halfway up your thigh.

Tinchy Strider – Dance 4 Now
http://www.zshare.net/audio/558505538d535e/
Not remixed by a bassline producer, but Tinchy’s own take on four-to-the-floor grime actually captures the bassline vibe perfectly, its relentless pumping groove managing to sound ruthlessly functional and totally widescreen pop at the same time. Hard to believe that five years ago Tinchy was this little codger who couldn’t string a decent rhyme together – his ‘Star in the Hood’ album is probably the best non-Dizzee grime album ever, the kind of polished collection of knock-out hits the scene has always cried out for. Curiously, grime-friendly critics largely ignored it. Their loss: the rhyming is ace and the music is endlessly exciting.

The T2 and Jamie Duggan links are broken unfortunately - I will fix this soon.

Good to have you back Tim, look forward to checking these out.

Four:

R&B, bitches.

Cassie
Is It You
http://www.zshare.net/audio/63066461518ce1/
Largely shorn of its futurist pretensions, non-megastar R&B has dropped off most corny critics’ radars (“Umbrella” and maybe T-Pain aside), but 2007 was a banner year for those who know. “Is It You” pretty much perfects R&B’s penchant for innocent romanticism, ideal for stolen glances down endless US teen-drama school locker corridors. Cassie’s sweet, limited vocal serenades the listener over a cascade of bass riffs, emotive guitar and triumphant strings, each component perfectly content to escape notice if it can successfully point you towards the secret crush you’ve been entertaining. You possibly won’t remember it, or Cassie later, perhaps especially in a pop environment so fixated on personalities. Cassie (as with several R&B divas) is arguably the anti-Amy Winehouse. One never gets the sense of an interesting backstory with her songs, but this in itself is perhaps the primary source of their charm: blank canvases upon which you can paint your own high school hopes and fears. And don’t think I’m damning with faint praise: this capacity to humbly and secretly colour your life is one of pop music’s greatest joys.

Ne-Yo ft. Kanye West
Because of You
http://www.zshare.net/audio/63073612130a9d/
The best thing Kanye West was involved with in 2007, but is that a surprise when Ne-Yo is one of the pre-eminent songwriters of our generation? For those who found “So Sick” pretty but too prone for repeat plays, the insistent four-by-four thump of “Because of You (Remix)” may offer a bewitchingly versatile attraction – heartbreak on the dancefloor time. Amazingly, Kanye’s loverman rap works pretty well on this (is it because he consciously decides it’s time to “hit ‘em with the Mase flow”?), but the star is Ne-Yo and the flying, searching chorus, his aching falsetto moving from solitary conviction to multi-tracked resignation – “You have become my addiction,” he wails accusingly, “…and I’m so strung out on you, but I like it…” The Chorus (in the Greek Tragedy sense) of Ne-Yos feel strangely detached from their own dilemma, like they’re observing and pondering their own quandary, musing on the vagaries of a fate that has so thoroughly disempowered them.

Ciara
Get Up (Polow Da Don Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6306942c09e33f/
This probably came out in 2006, but I listened to it so much this year. Ciara is the quintessential mid-00s R&B diva: her unshowy, whispery vocals are ripe for too-quick dismissal as so very post-Janet. She is, I’d argue, better and more deliberate than Janet – Janet doesn’t belt it out because she can’t, whereas with Ciara one gets the sense that she chooses not to. “Get Up” actually has a great tension between its whispery verses, choruses and middle-eight and the quietly soaring bridge, a brief lapse in which Ciara’s throbbing desire busts its cage and takes flight (forgive the purple prose). This internal friction only becomes fully apparent on Polow Da Don’s remix, which follows his excellent work on Ciara’s “Promise” in ‘06: Polow was my R&B producer of the year, absorbing an entire arsenal of other producers’ sonic weapons and combining them in rococo, oddly emotive constructions. His version of “Get Up” circles around thudding timpani drums and orchestral flourishes and ghostly synth tinkles and whines whose tenuousness imbue this dancefloor anthem with an unusually mystical vibe (see also: Kelly Rowland’s marvellous “Like This”).

Fantasia ft. Polow Da Don & Young Jeezy
When I See U (Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6307668eb4480c/
Another Polow Da Don remix! This one introduces some of his approach to hip hop production: all big rave synth chords and heavy metal bass and loud clunky percussion. But he still brings the emotion with superlative ease: indeed, so exquisitely, excessively emotive is Fantasia’s every guttural sigh (not to mention howl, groan or throaty grunt) that the best – perhaps only – available strategy is to frame it in the sternest musical frame possible, offering a certain life-or-death gravity to Fantasia’s tale of love and lust she’d rather suppress. As with her still-unsurpassed American Idol final performance, Fantasia’s hypnotic gift is to always threaten to go over the edge, her sudden wails and warbles somehow reintroducing the danger to soul that most attempts at trad hollerin’ lost long ago. It makes even mediocre songs exciting, but “When I See U” is very good indeed – how are these opening lyrics for scene-setting: “I put your picture on my mirror/Start to blush when somebody says your name/In my stomach there's a pain/See you walk in my direction I go the other way.” I find this kind of internal conflict in pop songs totally irresistible.

Bobby Valentino ft. Ludacris
Rearview (Ridin’)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/63082605ba449a/
In 2007 there was an avalanche of histrionic ballad R&B by emasculated nu-Tevin Campbells with sumptuously swoony post-Timbaland electronic production, and although I loved this sound about two years ago, last year it started to wear a bit thin through sheer repetition and a paucity of new ideas (or, frequently, memorable tunes). Bobby pioneered this sound on his first album, but little from his second album caught my attention, except this astonishing song, which takes the whole form to uncomfortable new heights. Sickly, warped strings and effervescent synth bubbles combine to form a melody that’s at once jaunty and faintly upsetting, like when Charlie floats too close to the exhaust fan in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Meanwhile Bobby gives his most melodramatic performance, driving dangerously down the highway and daring his lover to speed even faster to catch up to him and stop him from skipping town. “I’m pushing 80 mph, I’m popping No-Doze!” he threatens, but then relents, “I see your face in the mirror and I miss you dearrrrrr…”, his pronunciation a grandiose conceit in a song that more than merits it.
Lloyd
Get It Shawty
http://www.zshare.net/audio/63086971c8711e/
Hard to believe that Lloyd could best the spine-tingling, Spandau Ballet-quoting “You” – probably the best piece of narcoleptic floaty R&B in 2007 aside from “Rearview (Ridin’)”, plus it has the ace line (sung with deadly sincerity) “I’m a playa, yeah it’s true/but I changed the game for you.” But Lloyd’s follow-up, the gorgeous “Get It Shawty”, was even better. “Get It Shawty” is perkier and sprightlier, its sudden fizzy synth bursts and sparkly harp chords driven by a purposeful beat and Lloyd’s high-pitched performance, filled with sudden and startling shifts in tempo as Lloyd speeds up and slows down flawlessly. Lovely stuff.

again (following on from what was said about it last year), i think what's remarkable about 'when i see u rmx' isn't fantasia's performance – which remains wonderful, for all the reasons you give, but is served equally well by the original's fantastic production imo (all careful butterflies, yet still with that life-or-death importance slowly dawning throughout the song) – but polow's reframing of it. cos there is something of a riddle about this remix, something disquieting; almost as if the looming, simmering certainty of the beat (angry nearly) doesn't quite belong to fantasia. “how are these opening lyrics for scene-setting” you say, well yeah damn right because the actual opening lyrics – polow's, over that original romantic beat, as the lover spurned – are incredibly good, and incredibly unexpected: “guess all you really wanted was a man”, spat out with disdain, knowing now that that's all he is to her too. so what are we to make of what we hear after that? and what of jeezy's inadequate, preening cameo, taking if not yet fantasia's then another girl's song for granted? perhaps - perhaps! - the real remix here is that it's fantasia who's the u being seen, that it's jeezy that's “a man”, and that we're watching this whole story through polow's stalking eyes, widening with squalling synthhorror as he and fantasia finally realise that “something now is taking over meeeee”. the rear window to bobby val's rearview riding, no less.

(and THAT, my wincing friends, is how fanfic gets DONE)

otherwise good stuff tho yeah

Great to see all this here. Rah the Tim! (Feeling better, I take it?)

Great read, Tim, and we are as one about "Because of You." Wonderful track.

Ha ha rItIc I delieberately avoided discussing Polow's rap on the grounds of it being your territory!

And yeah, Ned, apart from a slightly sore head I'm now off meds, no longer woozy and feeling remarkably good. Almost guilty about the fact that i've got several weeks off work - but it's only that which will make this possible.

All good. :-)

Here are fixed links for the T2 and Jamie Duggan Tracks:

T2 - Heartbroken
http://www.zshare.net/audio/632495578bff44/

Jamie Duggan - No Cocaine
http://www.zshare.net/audio/63246962a5d3ea/

thanks tim!

good thread

holy shit. what a wealth. thank you so much.

great stuff as always man

Lovely reviews — as always — and the songs are great.

Cassie (as with several R&B divas) is arguably the anti-Amy Winehouse. One never gets the sense of an interesting backstory with her songs, but this in itself is perhaps the primary source of their charm: blank canvases upon which you can paint your own high school hopes and fears. And don’t think I’m damning with faint praise: this capacity to humbly and secretly colour your life is one of pop music’s greatest joys.

Oftentimes, I see Cassie described as 'soulless' or 'robotic.' I never really agreed with that description...I think people tend to mistake her limited vocal capabilities with an inability to deliver emotion. She comes across as 'robotic' on "Me & U" for a reason; she's playing a character on the prowl. She sounds nervous because she's trying to express (and act on) her lust, and that fear translates into this tense, 'robotic' vocal performance.

Maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but in my mind, both "Is It You?" and "Sometimes" reinforce that idea, that Cassie really knows how to deliver an emotional performance. She sounds so sincere on both those tracks; yeah, she has a tendency to understate her emotions (probably because of her limited vocal capabilities), but really, i think that only adds to her performances. She's a nice break between the in-your-face emotional meltdowns of Mary J. Blige and the less showy yet completely disconnected vocals of Paula DeAnda. Here's to more airplay in 2007...

Or 2008, y'know...

Thankzx Tim, and good on your recovery.

i was just wondering if tim was ever going to start up his blog again, and now this comes along. thanks tim!

hey tim i put this on the ATTN TIM F thread, but i'll put it here, too:

have you heard this?: Trusme - Working Nights 2LP

you might like it.

I thought the best thing about When I See You is the 'normally I wouldn't do this but... here goes nothin' bit, which is like the least convincing display of sheepishness ever.

good lord the beat to that fantasia/jeezy song

The TS7 track is fantastic - I think I'm slowly coming round to bassline.

there's a bassline remix of 'bed' that i'm in love with, but i'm kind of a sucker for the orig song, ymm, as they say, v

when i see u is amazing. love it.

Yeah the TS7 track is outstanding. i have to admit this is the first time i've ever heard anyone do a "schaffel interlude" in music like this but Tim you say it like it's a "thing"?

My other favorite of this bunch is Farah – "Law of Life". Chilling! This is what LCD Soundsystem should sound like!

that jamie duggan is teh wickedness. havent heard anything like that before in my bassline ramblings actually - i'd almost hesitate about bigging it up (exposing as it does so blatantly a (our) early 00s bias), it seems unfair to other more regular bassline! at the same time though i guess it does helpfully triple underline the strong and indiscriminate nostalgic undertow of the genre.

the ts7 reminds me a bit of something off tropical - dance banger absentmindedly drifting off into noodling halfway thru. perhaps that is just a canard i have cornfed to albatross proportions though.

a canard i have cornfed to albatross proportions

!!

i know right

rtc making it rain on you hoes

i have to admit this is the first time i've ever heard anyone do a "schaffel interlude" in music like this

it's a trick that's already been used a lot in trance/hard-house/italo-dance/etc (for instance, this 2001 hit by DJ Scot Project)... i've even heard some gabber with schaffel interludes!

great thread, thx so much

been wanting to hear that conga people track for a while now

apparently the tough alliance are a couple of baseball bat wielding hoolies! or maybe theyre just posers. tunes are great though!

Five - Minimal aka Euro House & Techno:

The sheer volume of uploaded stuff this time around shouldn’t automatically suggest that I enjoyed Euro house and techno more than anything else this year; but it would be true to say I enjoyed more Euro house and techno than any other genre. The attraction of this area of music is largely that there’s just so much good stuff that if you choose the right gatekeepers you can get away with almost never hearing a duff track (that said you’ll probably hate some of these… you know where to send your outraged e-mails).

The big news in 2007 was deep house revivalism, which was a bit distorted by both fans and detractors. Deep house proper remained largely as per, while European house/techno – dominated by “minimal” over the last few years – didn’t so much slide headlong into it as simply adopt some of its sonic signifiers. In fact it might be more accurate to say that the more ostentatious/predictable markers of “minimal” fell somewhat out of favour this year, but while that meant less scratchy, insecticle, unnecessary fussy rhythm tracks, most of the best European material remained as complex, as restless and as inscrutable as in previous years – just with heavier sounding drums, thicker textures and slightly more pronounced hooks. The simplest way to express it would be to say that while stereotypical minimal leaned towards a very “dry” sound, this year a lot of the big tracks felt very “moist” – with all the blurry and foggy (i.e. druggy) connotations this implies.

Despite my “see also” inclusions, there were a lot of tracks I loved this year that I’ve either knowingly or unwittingly failed to mention below just because I had to draw the line somewhere or it just didn’t fit in. The one absence that I must mention is Ame: the duo not only put on my favourite DJ show for 2007 (at Cookies in Berlin) but may have been my producers of the year, what with their own tracks “Balandine”, “Enoi” and “Fiori” and excellent remixes for Underworld, DJ Gregory and Etienne Jaumet. For some reason every time I tried to upload one of their tracks it would all go horribly wrong. Perhaps I’ll correct this later.

Anyway:

Matt John – Soulkaramba
http://www.zshare.net/audio/655482941b0795/
As per my intro rant above: this year the best house and the best minimal were indistinguishable from one another: the vibe was for a moist, hypnotic, drugged-out deepness that allowed everyone to take from the groove what they wanted. “Soulkaramba” was the best (because most rigorous) example: based around a remorseless three-note piano figure and deceptively simple clattering house percussion, its relentlessly mutating repetition seemed to glance back to every famed proponent of house hypnotism (from Mr Fingers to DJ Pierre to Paperclip People to Villalobos), and then gaze forward to an endless horizon of Jon Hassell trumpet and strangely meaningless exchanges passed along the way (“may I introduce you to…” a stranger begins, but then this track makes a virtue of never finishing what I starts). Unlike the more freeform minimal, on “Soulkaramba” the panoramic vistas are glimpsed from within engine-like house groove, its propulsive intensity making the detail all the more engrossing (see also… too many to list in this general vein: Petre Inspirescu’s “Sakadat” and “Le Crème Bonjour”, Kabale Und Liebe & Daniel Sanchez’s “Mumbling Yeah”, Radio Slave’s “Bell Clap Dance”, Andomat 3000 & Jan’s “Postpartum Psychosis” EP)

Dennis Ferrer – Son Of Raw (Loco Dice Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6556354f8ad428/
Equal to “Soulkaramba” in my affections was this remix of Dennis Ferrer’s “Son of Raw”, a track even more telling in its attempt to fuse US and European sensibilities. Which makes sense: “Son of Raw” was the big crossover US house track for minimal DJs in 2006, its sharp bounce, jazzy keyboard noodling and mysterious falsetto diva vamp (“You don’t know!”) at once mirroring and standing aloof from all the murky pointillist minimal. For their remix, Loco Dice and co-producer Martin Buttrich drag “Son of Raw” back towards pointillism, but in several other directions as well: in particular, the groove’s deep, close-mouthed moans, disintegrating burbles, portentous faux-timpani percussion and serene, metallic synth sweeps remind me as much of Carl Craig’s recent expansive space techno… It’s “house” not in the sense of reminding you where you’ve come from, but rather in offering a place of rest at the crossroads for a dozen destinations. (see also: Minilogue’s hypnotic “Birdsong” and Dennis Ferrer’s irresistible “Transitions” and “A Drumstick and a Light Fixture”)

Tiger Stripes – Hooked
http://www.zshare.net/audio/68817720ea2c88/
Ed Davenport – Eyespeak
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6980766afd2f76/
If you wanted the most concise and cogent explanation of 2007’s minimal/house fusion, it was hard to go past “Hooked”, with its urgent, pulsing deep house groove and dancing, deliquescing synth arpeggios conveying an airiness and lightness of touch that must have been the envy of every other producer going for this vibe (“if only we’d realised it could be so simple!” you can almost hear them thinking to themselves). The Liebe*Detail label made this kind of sound it’s staple this year, and you can hear the same kind of light-fingered deep house urgency on “Eyespeak”, with its glowing one-note bass driving the syncopated snare groove ahead of it like unruly cattle. It’s those restless snares and hi-hats, practically bubbling over like a jazz drummer waiting for his turn to solo, that make the track so addictive. That and the warped vocal samples, which seem to combine to request an answer to a prayer before being sucked into a wind machine. (see also, Jerome Sydenham’s excellent remixes of Argy and Motorcitysoul)

Jacopo Carreras – Olanto (Lee Jones Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/68857970a12c1f/
This track didn’t get all the attention of the above two (wrong record label perhaps) but it’s their equal, if not the best of the three. Almost kaleidoscopic in detail, Jones’ “Olanto” remix is an excellent example of how 2007 saw a good deal of “minimal” distance itself slightly from its more tiresome sonic signifiers (“plip plop”) but retain its trademark restlessness. Every four bars or so Jones introduces some new effect, from feverishly ticking house hi-hats to sea-sick sounding metallic waves to suddenly disconcerting dub whooshes to winsome ambient synth patterns – and yet it never sounds anything but good-natured and almost muscular in its devotion to basic house physicality. (see also: remixes by Jones’ group My My of Motorcitysoul and Simon Baker)

Tracey Thorn – It’s All True (Martin Buttrich Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6557129933c006/
An anthem that was curiously underrated for all its popularity: I imagine many listeners found Buttrich’s remix of “It’s All True” too obvious somehow, too easily summed up as a hyper-competent minimal producer’s homage to Round Two’s “New Day”. What’s wrong with being obvious, though, when it results in Basic Channel’s (only occasionally explored) bleep-house aesthetic being pushed so far into gorgeous pop territory? Thorn still has one of the best voices for techno-pop ever, her clarity and depth always conveying a sense of tranquillity and resilience that she herself seems unaware of. It’s this vibe which Buttrich mirrors perfectly, his aching, repetitive synth motifs emerging as if from a grotto at the bottom of an enormous lake. Instead of getting larger, more apocalyptic, the track gets deeper and more lustrous, with melodic patterns first played in succession and then laid on top of one another with the languid grace of nature’s own ego-free accommodations. (see also: Ada’s similarly awed-sounding remix of Tracey’s “Grand Canyon”)

Stereotyp – Keepin’ Me (Fauna Flash Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/68518543a1ec23/
Another “New Day” homage perhaps, but this time a little more strident: broken beat producers Fauna Flash making a belated virtue of house’s strictures with forbiddingly frigid synth pulses and stern hi-hats, while above them a succession of divas (or one diva with a very accommodating and ambiguous vocal style) make increasingly overwrought accusations – “Keeping me in your world… that turned me… into a… desperate refugee!” This track makes no apologies about its emotional largesse; if anything, it really hits home when you belatedly realise that no-one involved is joking. As the succession of synths build up and spills over into a Carl Craig-like overblown breakdown (resembling some stage of Craig’s career being 2007 house and techno’s most persistent meme), the unashamed melodrama also marks this out as the halfway-respectable cousin of The Freemasons’ life-or-death pop-house explosions (see also for big emotions: Outlines’ “Listen to the Dreams” and Booka Shade’s “Numbers”; see also for big emotions + divas: Jazzzanova’s very pretty remix of Paul Randolph’s “Believer” and Wahoo’s remix of Ben Westbeech’s “Hang Around”)

Jacek Sienkiewickz – Good Luck
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6632805a76efb0/
The only reason I don’t have a Villalobos track here is that I don’t have a standalone MP3 of his excellent remix of Beck’s “Cell Phone’s Dead”, but this stands in for the guy quite handily. Sienkiewickz is perhaps more rococo: fitful, waterlogged rhythms and unpredictable bleepy synth patterns trace ever more complex patterns across eachother’s surfaces before finally being swallowed up in wistful, gratuitously teary-eyed early Warp Records melodicism, the swirling tinkerbell twinkles only partially concealing the remaining riot of detail that continues unabated beneath. Of all of the tracks I’ve uploaded this is the most self-consciously and self-righteously epic – serious music for serious dancers. I’m usually not that serious but this still sounds lovely in any mood. (see also: Ricardo Villalobos remixes of Beck, Shackleton and Shinedoe; Tolga Fidan’s “Venice”; Onur Ozer’s Kasmir album; Daniel Stefanik’s remix of Johnny Wagner’s “Intercity”)

Jichael Mackson – The Grass Is Always Greener
http://www.zshare.net/audio/6883590e5a5e5f/
Nearly as abstract and as all-encompassing as “Good Luck”, “The Grass Is Always Greener” might feel epic if for a moment it gave the impression of having paid a second thought to structure. Mackson quite openly splits the difference between two of the year’s biggest trends, running a gorgeously warm deep house groove through massive Basic Channel dub-techno filters. The result is a track that takes “deepness” to near-unsustainable levels: half the fun is in trying to pick up the detail of what sounds like a monstrously funky bassline being played in an underground bomb shelter five miles away, while the echo-drenched house percussion threatens to constantly decompose into mere whispers. The track’s sudden swerve into the morose slide guitar of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” would be the pay-off of the year if the rest of the track had felt remotely like hard work. (more slightly perverse tunes: Sebbo’s “Beirut Boogie”, Das Krause Duo’s “Good Man Invasion” and DJ Koze’s marvellous remixes of James Figurine’s “55566688833” and Sid Le Rock’s “Naked”).

IT – Women In Toilet (Stefan Goldmann Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/688418818d3627/
I was a bit frustrated by how little people cared about this one, but by the end of the year everyone was over-compensating by throwing hosannas in the direction of Goldmann’s excellent (but slightly inferior) “Lunatic Fringe”. The “Women In Toilet” remix is less look-at-moi but more loveable, a flawless demonstration of Goldmann’s trademark pinging synth tones. I use “demonstration” quite deliberately: the main hook on this remix is a one-note bobbing synth riff that bobs across the spectrum from clipped to bleary in the most remarkable manner. I reckon I could draw it quite easily, but Goldmann’s sound is hard to describe in words, at once immediately identifiable but not obviously distinct – it sort of sounds a bit like Kraftwerk going mad with EQ filters, I guess. Curiously, the track doesn’t sound too thought-out at all: must be that lovely, bouncy and warm bassline, or those lonely-sounding synth whines that make this one of the year’s most widescreen sounding tunes. (see also: Goldmann’s fabulously queasy remix of Marc Romboy’s “Helen Cornell”; “Lunatic Fringe”)

Mari Boine – Vuoi Vuoi Me (Henrik Schwarz Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/68875807fadd81/
Really you should just grab Schwarz’s live album from this year, but if you insist on sampling just one production, go with this one. Of all the producers discussed here, Schwarz is the one who feels most out on his own, forging connections that no one else would dare. While the “Vuoi Vuoi Me” remix fits amongst all these records as yet another accommodation between rococo complexity and rootsy house lushness, its methods are totally distinct – delicate house percussion, blunt but muted bass riffs and gorgeous surround-sound synth chords that bleed imperceptibly into a chorus of beautiful but distressed sounding woodwinds that could have come from a late-era Talk Talk album. Not to mention the loving recontextualisation of Boine’s eerie, frail-sounding vocals, those finally wordless wails helping to make this almost too overwhelming for any dancefloor. (see also: Schwarz’s marvellous remixes of Kraak & Smaak’s “No Sun in the Sky” and Boundzound’s “Louder”, plus his own “Walk Music”)

Zander VT – Then & Before (Redshape Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/69145811966207/
2007 wasn’t just about deep house revivalism, and there was a sub-trend of melodramatic, synthesiser-heavy tech-house tracks whose ridiculous sci-fi melodrama had me group them together under the banner “space battle techno”. Ink & Needle did several tracks in this vein, but my favourite remained Redshape’s remix of “Then & Before”, perhaps because of the way it draws out the exponential curve of its climaxing groove – spacey percussion and squirming riffs and apocalyptic strings that make me think of spaceships shifting into warp speed and stars stretching from pinpoints into lines. Except that the track just keeps spiralling towards ever higher and higher climaxes, so it’s like you’re speeding past stars whose line-of-light just keeps stretching further and further. One for everyone a bit “over” subtlety. (see also: Ink & Needle’s “Seven”, various Audion tracks and remixes)

Faze Action – In The Trees (Carl Craig Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/697269001fbf07/
Whatever the trend was, Carl usually got there first. If his remix of Delia & Gavin’s “Revelee” helped (re?)initiate the space battle techno sound I described above, this unlikely remix of Faze Action’s old disco-revival classic was an unexpected pinnacle. Given the familiarity of the original, it remains such a shock (almost an illicit thrill) to be confronted by little more than a heavy throb of evil synthesisers, like a swarm of wasps marshalled to attack at random in time with a house beat. When those unmistakable disco strings finally come in, the menacing groove that surrounds them imbues their aristocratic refinement and dandyesque flair strange new sensations and implications – like the fine poetry that sends young people to war, they are at once a document of culture and of barbarism. (see also: Craig remixes of Siobhan Donaghy and Junior Boys)

OMG @ 'space battle techno'!

I was there, in 2007 bobbins thread when Tim said "space battle techno".

This post was probably wasted on you ronan (as in, told you nothing you did not know). I'm glad you got a joke out of it.

We're all glad!

No I enjoyed it thoroughly!

could the lack of love for 'women in toilet' be down to people being reticent to rep for a track called 'women in toilet'? it sounds a bit pervy!

those schaffelly bassline tracks at the top of the thread are doing my head in, in a great way. cheers for all this Tim!

x-post haha otm, the word 'toilet' has no place in respectable dance music.

Thanks dude!

I hadn't heard that Loco Dice remix before (despite you and others repping for it for ages), lovely stuff. Warm bubblebath minimal is always the best kind.

Six - Balearic (Part One of Three)

Poor Kylie. In fairness, her time off from pop should afford her some special consideration, but it remains difficult to hear the post-Goldfrapp glamstomp revivalism of “2 Hearts” as anything other than a strategic error, belatedly latching onto a sound that was already tiresome two years ago. Still, she got one thing right, handing the original over to Swedish band Studio to demolish and reconstruct into a glittering jewel that effortlessly outclasses its source material. It’s a move reminiscent of her drafting in Fisherspooner on remix duties back in 2002: both groups are simultaneously rock bands, production teams, and, at a certain point in time, bywords for the zeitgeist of the era. But if Fisherspooner’s frigid synth riffs were the very definition of electroclash, Studio are synonymous with 2007’s most enjoyable big trend: the return of Balearic.

Studio’s remix of “2 Hearts” is this tenuous movement’s aesthetic highpoint to date, draping Kylie’s coy vocals with glittering spiderwebs of Spanish guitar, supremely supine pulsing disco beats and endless layers of dub echo. In this new and impressively otherworldly context, Kylie’s vocals are genuinely moving: “I can’t even see up here,” she gasps, her previously sly performance suddenly sounding overwhelmed by the enormity of the emotions surrounding it. All the glam ambiguity of the original is sensitively excised from this version: the song’s deadpan sarcasm had no place amongst Studio’s endless horizons of lovestruck earnestness.

Kylie Minogue – 2 Hearts (Studio Version)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/70425497aec619/

One of the key differences between the disco-punk revival (and post-punk revivalism generally) and Balearic is the fact that, unless you pay any regard outright disco-sceptics, disco-punk never needed to be critically rehabilitated – bands like Gang of Four, ESG and P.I.L. have always benefited from a critical consensus regarding their greatness. By comparison, Balearic happily intermingles good and bad taste reference points, ranging from prog to soft-rock to the fag end of late 80s studio-based pop. Studio may fashionably reference krautrock, Arthur Russell and the Happy Mondays, but their high-buff sheen is equally reminiscent of Peter Gabriel and Sting. Most of all, their more songful moments sound like a loved-up version of The Cure, which makes sense: The Cure have always hovered on the good taste/bad taste fault line, like the witty, sharp-tongued friend who is always in danger of going too far and offending everyone with their next indelicate observation (I can sympathise with this).

I’ve included the original and much longer version of their track “Self Service”, only available on the now out-of-print Scandanavian 2006 first print of their album West Coast. I hope it doesn’t sound too snooty to say that not only do I greatly prefer this to the more widely available truncated version of the song, but in fact suspect it’s their finest moment to date. The way that the baggy groove, cheesy electronic effects, morose vocals and sharply glinting guitar build up to a narcotic plateau of tribal intensity captured my heart as much as anything could this year.

Studio – Self Service
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7020158bb7e2eb/

Studio’s British cohorts A Mountain of One offer an even more conflicted take on similar territory: if the first band’s polyrhythms and moping add a certain sharpness to their allure, at its best A Mountain of One’s self-conscious grandeur aspires to match the brooding atmospherics of Phil Collins’ “In The Air Tonight”; at its least successful, their work drifts closer to a vision of Mike & the Mechanics meditating in Goa. A Mountain of One leave me behind when they seem to gesture towards some mystical destination beyond the music itself: at its most torpidly overworked, their lush, meditative MOR-rock evokes the baffling earnestness of the pagan convert, the scent of incense and patchouli oil disconcerting not in itself, but because it cannot support the amassed weight of meaning and significance invested in it.

I find their recent and self-consciously epic instrumental single “Brown Piano” a bit of chore to listen to – I can’t help but feel that the band are placing themselves in the lineage of Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis (two bands I love, mind) when they should be kneeling at the alter of The Blue Nile instead. What a relief it was to find that Studio could so effortlessly resurrect the tune by adding a disco beat and turning the whole thing into a hypnotic weave of ever-shifting patterns. If A Mountain of One spread themselves across a spectrum from focused to diffuse with all the quality stacked up at one end, Studio somehow short-circuit the two poles, implausibly conflating their impulses towards pop and towards smacked-out expansiveness.

A Mountain of One – Brown Piano (Studio Version)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7044950111a0c9/

Unlike Studio’s glorious earnestness, A Mountain of One’s music work best when it seems uncertain of itself: see for example the wonderful and utterly inscrutable “People Without Love”, a bizarre carcrash collision between Fleetwood Mac’s “Caroline” and a streetcorner sermon on the perils of superficiality. Or this: a gorgeous italo-disco homage featuring a marvelously frail duet between AMO1’s singer and Martina Topley-Bird, over a disco arrangement that stars off wry and whimsical but becomes progressively overshadowed by a chorus of moaning guitars.

A Mountain of One – Can’t Be Serious
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7016464c12f766/

To be continued...

My iPod now has a Tim Finney best of 2007 folder to go with my Resident Advisor best of etc....

The parts on the Studio Kylie remix seem to disconnected to me.... there's not much motivation to them, the various parts dropping in and out seems kinda random. It's probably my least favourite thing by them that I've heard.

To continue kvetching, “People Without Love” is my least fave AMoO tune though that may be down to the time I saw them live where the guy who does the vox was a DICK. AMoO threw a great party in Brighton where they played and Studio DJed (along w/Beyond the Wizards Sleeve).

"Can't Be Serious" is a cover of this right?

I love the Kylie remix, in fact it's my favourite thing they've done, I think. I like the way the flurries of guitar pause for breath, (rather than drop out) and the heartbeat rhythm.

Part of the fun with this stuff is walking the bad-taste tightrope. The ongoing Dire Straits fascination scares me, though - I didn't mind that Otterman Empire edit, but Lindstrom put the whole of Private Investigations on a recent mix - aghr. (Disclosure: I was a huge fan of Dire Straits as a child, and I really don't need to hear it recontextualised or whathaveyou.)

This whole thing is ace, though, Tim. Cheers. Look forward to parts two and three.

Private Investigations is good once it gets past the talky first part. Unfortunately that first part feels like it's two hours long.

The Kylie remix >>> all other records from last year.

I'm left out in the cold about Kylie it seems.

x-post steady on

apart from two or three it actually prob is.

My iPod now has a Tim Finney best of 2007 folder to go with my Resident Advisor best of etc....

Yeah, I need to put that together myself! I've been slack!

Tim looking at your choices here and listening to many of the tracks I haven't heard before, I'll say it: Tim likes it LUSH!

The Kylie remix is truly great. It reminds me of "Jumpin Jumpin (Azza's Remix)" from 2000 with the way it luxuriously straddles R&B and techno and latin groove (maybe this is what "Balearic" has always meant and I just never knew!) It's got this warm feel but with a kind of hard candy gloss to it, too. I never want it to stop, and it almost never does!

IT - "Women in the Toilet" is such a delicate, flawless track - very much in the vein of "Rej" by Ame, which was in turn in the vein of "Beau Mot Plage" by Isolée, but each of these has successfully stripped more and more away from this baroque, dubby, quaver-wiggle template so that we're left with this, a minimal trance-style ideal version of the form. It also has a lot in common with "In White Rooms". All of these tracks have a brooding quality but the ticking mechanics of the bass and beat suggests a kind of inevitability of routine. I dunno, for the video I imagine a person who lives alone, looking at his or her room, cloudy morning light coming in through the window, they look at their watch, they may not ever see this place again...

Tracer "lushness" is something I've thought about a lot this year. I think it's always been something I rate higher than most others but this year took that to ridiculous extremes. Which is maybe why "balearic" feels so useful as an organising principle - sort of an 'International Secret Society of Lushes' kind of thing going on.

"To continue kvetching, “People Without Love” is my least fave AMoO tune."

I really didn't like it to begin with, or liked parts of it and hated others perhaps. But when I listened to this album repeatedly for the purposes of writing an album review, "People Without Love" began to seem like the most interesting track on there, certainly my favourite on the second EP (though "Arc of Abraham" is pretty ace as well if I remember correctly) - and much less obvious (as in "I see what you're doing here") than I first thought. "Caroline" is of course a tune about an almost Lacanian obsession, a kind of hate/love cycle (following the verses and the choruses) except all that Buckingham has on the "love" scale is the repeated chant of the woman's name. And then AMO1's added arrangement really teases out the underlying melancholy and desperation of the original song. So it's not clear whether they're siding with the preacher against "Caroline" or with "Caroline" against the preacher, or if they ultimately think the two arguments can be sublated.

Redshape remix of Zander VT is a BANGER

Goldmine of tunes here! Thanks Tim F.

Tough Alliance deserve to be huge.

re: "space battle techno"

what about smith'n'hack's "space warrior"??

PS I like how "Then & Before (Redshape Remix)" by Zander VT works itself up into a totally Red Planet/UR frenzy.

the Studio remix of '2 Hearts' may as well remove her vocals entirely - they feel just left in as a formality altho i like the slight dub aspect of this (would've preferred this to be empthasised). i don't think the track particularly magnifies the song's theme, lush as it is - it intentionally goes beyond that i guess. it's a very pleasant treatment but maybe it's too breezy and could sound more exotic or intoxicating. but unlike many i kinda like 'X' so...

the Zander VT remix is still too subtle for me!

you should check the redshape remix of markus enochson 'red coffe', it's like the soundtrack to a galactic victory march. so epic

all this galactic space music talk has reminded me of "third stone from the sun" by third electric

-- http://www.sendspace.com/file/dt80vl

how the fuck did i miss this thread

Thanks Tim, really enjoying your discussion.

Re Stefan Goldmann I really liked his remix of Blackjoy's 'Untitled' which worked similar territory to the IT remix with possibly a little more swing. His first release on Macro was great too, although it maybe lacked the touches that made 'lunatic fringe' stand out.

the Zander VT remix is still too subtle for me!

-- blueski, Wednesday, February 6, 2008 10:03 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Link

???
subtle is maybe the last word i'd use. banger!!!

To be fair it's so elaborately mapped out that the bangerishness of the second half comes a bit of a surprise. Maybe Steve thinks it could stand to be more Vitalic?

BTW it occured to me that nu deep house vs space battle techno is basically the first part of Underworld's "Cups" versus the second part of Underworld's "Cups".

PS. Bee I haven't heard that remix! Will have to check it out.

Also haven't heard "Space Warrior" :-(

i love how just adding the high hats at the climax of the ZVT remix makes it sound even larger

big big lol at finally having the screwed voice on "grass is always greener" coalesce into... bob ross!!

""Can't Be Serious" is a cover of this right?"

yes! i was trying for ages to work out where i had heard it before - it's on dj harvey's sarcastic mix. thanks dude!

the second part of Underworld's "Cups"

kinda breaksy

Tim i don't suppose you can do a spot on '07 Breaks ;)

going back to The Tough Alliance, getting big A R Kane vibes more than anything else

they're on Ramosi's label!!

woooo @ this thread!

i like "people without love" a lot, but it is easy to see why it might turn people off: too preachy, too hippy.

it is nice to see the "vuoi vuoi me" remix get a shout out. definitely a singular remix from an already unique producer although his remix of "atoms" comes close to that style.

"space warrior" is so good, too! it's like so much pastiche that it has come out the other side. i completely forgot about that track. what about their remix for herbert? (not that it's space battle techno, but it was huge last year and i didn't see it mentioned around here much if at all.)

Haha I'm amazed anyone could think Redshape was too subtle for anything. Maybe that's because the first time I heard it, it was playing very loudly indeed.

Should we have a 'space battle techno' thread, for new and old stuff in this vein?

Also I totally disagree wrt removing the vocal from the Studio mix of Two Hearts, it works entirely because it offers an entirely new and (IMO) more appropriate backing for Kylie's vocals. That bit where she goes "looks good in the sunshine" and you hear this Pure Shores-esque beach-cafe-at-sunset bleepy noise gets me every time.

Matt, try Ink & Needle's "Seven":

http://www.zshare.net/audio/7311397364e74e/

Amox & Atle - A Witch's Kiss (Ink & Needle Remix):

http://www.zshare.net/audio/73134200c380ce/

Tim have you heard Stefan Goldmann's remix of 3rd Face - Canto Della Liberta? It's from 2004 I think, although I didn't know this when I downloaded it expecting more along the Lunatic Fringe/Woman In Toilet lines. It opens up into an enormous space battle about half way through!

so happy to see you boosting polow's get up remix. it makes for a great sequel to "promise".

Balearic Part 2:

Perhaps the other key difference between Balearic and disco-punk is the way in which the two styles pursue their strategies of intensification. Disco-punk approaches its desired fusion very seriously, combining urgent disco rhythms with the most honest-to-goodness rock signifiers it can think of (jagged guitars, shrieked vocals, songs about girls and politics), as if to say: “I can be both of these things absolutely without compromise.” Balearic’s strategy is more oblique, preferring to fail on both rock and dance music’s terms, as if by doing so it could establish a new yardstick. As dance music it’s too torpid, decadent and tentative; as rock it’s simultaneously blanched-out and excessively manicured. A lot of my favourite records this year felt a bit like inspired failures: on Kathy Diamond’s gorgeous ballad “I Need You”, the arrangement drifts from deep sublimated bass riffs into an unnecessarily loud and showy percussion work-out, the yawning gap between Kathy’s delicacy and the robustness of the drums coming on like some lurid combination of alcohol and pink lemonade I can’t stay away from.

Kathy Diamond – I Need You
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7019331e142227/

Of course at the edges “Balearic” begins to break down and become nothing more than a convenient tag for describing stuff I liked that otherwise I’d have to group separately. But the genre works this way too: Erol Alkan’s Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve project doesn’t have much of a solid aesthetic identity beyond a gimmicky love of backwards guitar – used to great effect on the sighing, surround-sound folk of their remix of Findley Brown’s “Losing the Will to Survive”. The remix of Midlake’s “Roscoe” is even more subtle, more like a proper 80s extended mix than a remix (it actually reminds me of the extended mixes The Cure had done for the singles from Disintegration): all shimmering keyboards and slippery backwards guitar being subsumed into the glorious harmonies of the original song. Perhaps Alkan and his co-producer Richard Norris knew they didn’t have to do much to perfect “Roscoe”: as a rock song I find this deeply treasurable and inscrutably affecting.

Midlake – Roscoe (Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/72147876f273a4/

The Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve remix of Badly Drawn Boy’s “Promises” is more radical: you can hear the duo trying and failing to produce something brilliant from less sterling material (A Mountain of One’s effort is much better, but “effort” is the right word – its overblown avalanche of sound feels like hard work for creator and listener alike). Reverso 68 succeed where Alkan and Norris fail, concocting moody MOR disco with all the duo’s classic touches – hushed and reverent strings, breathy swirls of synthesiser, heartpiercing Chic guitar, breezy bongo patterns and a bassline as old and as constant as the universe itself.

The first piece I wrote on “Balearic revivalism” was almost three years ago, talking about Reverso 68 remixes and their deep forest vibe: humid, luscious and decadent in excessive plushness. The not-terribly-prolific production team have hardly changed their sound in this time, but they haven’t needed to – like spiders at the centre of an enormous web, they’ve been able to sit and watch dance music come to them. “Promises” isn’t their best work but it’s perhaps their ultimate, their effortless disco grooves finding a perfect partner in Badly Drawn Boy’s vocals – here sounding particularly ghostly and melancholy as they glance off Reverso 68’s carefree arrangement. If much of Reverso 68’s work is unabashedly utopian, this feels conflicted, wondering: does dancing your cares away somehow dishonour what you care about?

Badly Drawn Boy – Promises (Reverso 68 Remix)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7215764dcf9792/

In many ways, all this nu-balearic is a feminised (perhaps effete) take on the sort of hoary “beardo disco” offered by Rub’n’Tug or DJ Harvey, but with beardo’s rock signifiers stripped of their proletariat masculinity in favour of androgynous and worldly refinement – if the hypothetical pinnacle of beardo disco would be a DJ edit of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock’n’Roll” (play it next to Zazu’s “Captain Starlight” for maximum thrills), Balearic already found its ideal standard of soft-hands androgyny in Todd Terje’s astonishingly pretty, dub-drenched remix of Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” (although I reckon a disco version of The Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” would also work nicely – apart from Dario G, I mean). Of course, the two sounds overlap significantly, not least because one senses that the pomo bad taste running through them both is born of knowing too much music history rather than not enough: widely accepted consensus picks begin to seem too obvious, while the dodgy marginalia of genres acquire an aura of comparative freshness and unpredictability.

Paul Simon – Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes (Tangoterje Edit)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/737340969272d0/

“Marginalia” might be overstating it somewhat: “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes” is hardly obscure. But in a sense it’s contextually marginal: hitherto, it was by no means clear that this song and hip dancefloors had much if anything to do with one another, and the Paul Simon’s 80s output has long been verboten as a reference point for new artists (if anything, the sudden success of Vampire Weekend supports rather than refutes my point). The same is doubly true of Bob Seger, not to mention all the big middle of the road guitar rock bands of the 80s – Foreigner, The Doobie Brothers, Journey etc. All of will inevitably be receiving the Balearic “edit” treatment at some point soon. Some already have: Rune Lindbaek’s edit of Toto’s “Africa” suffers only by its failure to top the cod-spiritual, touristic glamour of the original.

While Dolly Parton is both relatively respected and no stranger to dance music – of late I’ve been obsessed with house versions of her cover of “Peace Train” – the Peter Visti edit of “Jolene” has something of the same frission about it… a well-known and loved hit that nonetheless has little business being reproduced as a cosmic disco epic. My MP3 copy of Visti’s edit appears to have been ripped at 33rpm rather than (the proper) 45rpm, but sounds great in a totally new way: slow, ponderous, and melancholy, it approaches the 4X4 beat as if it were the soundtrack to an arduous quest for enlightenment. Dolly’s voice, sounding male and oddly, resonantly histrionic in the way so many 80s rock singers were inclined to, throbs with distress. The sudden new homoerotic connotations don’t hurt either.

Dolly Parton – Jolene (Peter Visti Edit)
http://www.zshare.net/audio/7375265fba4b1c/

!!!!!

I've only heard the Midlake, of this lot, and really enjoyed it. Particularly looking forward to this section.

tim f i kiss you. been looking for that reverso 68 remix for ages. the mountain of one remix is one of my favourites from last year (the "overblown avalanche of sound" may have been hard work for the creator but not this listener, it makes me teary. i know what you mean though)(ps. whisper it but i even have a soft spot for the original despite disliking damon gough's voice a bit). this whole thread is a gift btw.

Actually TBH the thing that keeps me from absolutely loving the AMO1 remix of "Promises" is that I don't know whether i'm supposed to play it at 33rpm or 45rpm, so I'm never sure if I'm actually listening to it at the right speed.

i've only ever heard it at 33 (i assume, is it slo-mo at 45?). i think it's the best thing amo1 have done.

the whole EP of "promises" remixes is really pretty great. and so is the peter visti "jolene"--i have 2 mp3s ripped at 45 and 33 each and both sound awesome in their own special way.

but tim you really should upload stuff i havent heard! i was really excited when i saw youd bumped this but i have all of those songs. sheesh.

Yeah how dare he

no "caramellas" tim? That mixed with the r68 dub of promises was gold for me during the end of last year.

Isn't much of this stuff also kinda screwed and chopped synth pop?

oh god I cannot thank you enough for the Cassie and Fantasia songs, ESPECIALLY the latter

also, have you heard the Beyond the Wizards Sleeve remix of the Real Ones' "Outlaw"? Same basic technique of just expanding on what's already there in the song (they even keep the verse-chorus-verse structure, which is rad since "Outlaw" is such a great little celebration of pop classicism anyway). Also notable (in a really good way) for being possibly the least wistful BtWS production yet.

a disco version of The Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” would also work nicely

Well, as Tim said, it's already happened with Dario G's "Sunchyme":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY2OFztWiuY

a thread they'll speak of ages to come! amazing work here tim, can't thank you enough...

that said, no love for pilooski's edit of beggin'?!

the lex described a song as space battle techno in friday's guardian!

Stereotyp – "Keepin’ Me (Fauna Flash Remix)" -

Obsessed with this! UB-sessed! Sort of a less baroque "Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ewan’s Objects In Space remix)."

Still, it'd never occur to me to call it minimal (house) in any significant way. An interesting genre question - does the addition of soulful diva voices automatically negate the "minimal" and make the track something else, e.g. Euro house or deep house?

Ha ha Kevin I almost posted that for you on the Dixon thread, but thought it might be too stiff/euro given you liked the first 1/2 of the Dixon set more than the second. It also reminds me a lot of that Martin Buttrich remix of Tracey Thorn.

Both tunes are "minimal" insofar as they sound a bit like Kompakt or Mobilee tributes to early-to-mid nineties Basic Channel house records (see "I'm Your Brother" - billed to Round One - and especially "Find A Way" billed to Round Two).

They're mostly artier and less diva but some similar records from the last few years along these lines:

1) Rodney Hunter - Wanna Groove? (Christian Prommer Remix) - Prommer's a member of Fauna Flash
2) Sebo K ft. Prosumer - Moved
3) Hell ft. Billie Ray Martin - Je Regrette Everything (Superpitcher Remix)

But most of all (though not European or minimal), Armand Van Helden's "Conscience", one of the greatest and most undersung vocal anthems of the last ten years.

Ugh, I love that Je Regrette remix.

Dumb question, Tim, but is there any chance you might be able to pack all these songs into one convenient download spot...

the lex described a song as space battle techno in friday's guardian!

yeah it was son of raw 'a black man in space'. not very battle-y, maybe it could be playing in the cantina. one of my favourites this year so far too. pepe bradock's new one was mentioned in the same feature!

lex thieving, who'd have thunk

oh yeah and it was petridis mentioning the bradock! xp

The Lex has been saying he coined 'space battle techno' last year.

Hey Tim, have you heard Ewan Pearson's mix for Allez Allez?

I'd been trying to place where I'd heard that BtWS mix of Midlake, and it's on here, along with Hatchback, Kate Bush, Can, Vangelis... It's Ewan Pearson does balearic, kind of. Anyway, it's LUSH.

x-post Well it'd be pretty easy to debunk that theory. I like these memes until they become concrete and all of a sudden everything must be space battle techno. Or the actual amount of stuff that sounds like that is overstated.

i more prefer space exploration techno, like "ginger" by speedy j

I prefer techno!

yes me too. but sometimes i like to add adjectives onto words in order to describe them more specifically.

"welcome to Ronan's techno shop, may i help you?"

"have you got any kind of... dark, moody.. kinda.. techno?"

"we've got techno son, if you want something moody try the hair salon next door, nora's always complaining about something. good afternoon!"

xpost

Space exploration techno would still sound, well, "spacey", though wouldn't it? What I like about space battle techno as a description is it doesn't evoke any of those psychedelic signifiers. It conjures up cold precision, hard vacuum, trillion-year-old dying suns, galaxy-spanning civilisational conflicts! That sort of thing. Not sure how many records live up to this, though.

(This reminds me that I must read the new Iain M Banks.)

There's no sound in space so only silent records count as space battle techno.

haha@tracer....

I do like adjectives to describe things indeed, I just have some reservations about shoehorning stuff into them I guess.

It's not a trend surely? I've never been to a night where they play stuff that sounds like "Then & Before" and "Seven" and "In The Trees" (insert remix credits as required) for more than a track or two at a time. Mind you I haven't been out that much in the last six months!

If we're gonna talk etymology, credit to Vahid: I think he started a thread asking about "deep space techno" or something along those lines, mentioning some of the Carl Craig mixes and Villalobos's remix of "Cell Phone's Dead" (which is less "battle" and more "the engine's broken and our spaceship is gliding through an asteroid belt very slowly").

I would have thought it goes without saying that "space battle techno" is a pretty ridiculous sub-genre term for any context other than a music message board - I kind of enjoy using ridiculous terminology.
And abstract situation descriptions like that never catch on. There's a reason that dance music likes words like "minimal", "deep", "funky", "bouncy", "intelligent". "Haircut house" and ""hairdresser house" are the closest perhaps, and even then such titles tend to be functionalist and perjorative (I like the notion, though, that there is house for while you're having your hair cut and house for when you've had it cut and want to show it off - presumably Kompakt et. al. are pre-haircut house?).

Ned I don't have any server space and even if there was a free server I could load everything too I'd be seriously disinclined given how slow my computer is. On the other hand I could make a page which contains all the links in a row.

No need, just curious! Thanks much.

What was going to be the third part of my Balearic wrap-up mutated into this article for Idolator on Mungolian Jet Set. To make it up to you all, here is the Mungolian Jet Set remix of Mari Boine's "It Ain't Necessarily Evil":

http://www.zshare.net/audio/956047512a0bd2/

Don't think I'm likely to add to this any more. Here's a gratuitous extra - Tinchy Strider's "Wonder":

http://www.zshare.net/audio/7280022f21f8f3/

tim please do this again

thanks,
max

wow. yes, please do.

I'll just syndicate from Facebook again.

Aeroplane ft. Kathy Diamond - Whispers

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18731000adb8e0fb/

Aeroplane basically have the same set of ideas with every track (set up low-slung disco beats with burbling italo synth-riffs, add some oddly melancholy bass and Nile Rogers guitar scratching, dig up a few more atmospheric synth-sweeps, keep layering things until everything gets ridiculously anthemic and bittersweet, stir and serve) but it's such a good strategy that it transcends its own cynicism - like, what, now that they've stumbled across the perfect blueprint they're supposed to do something different?

"Whispers" is marginally distinct owing to the wonderfully unruffled vocals of Kathy Diamond, whose tightly controlled performance, rather like Gwen Stefani's "Cool", reminds me of the Baroness in The Sound of Music, first winning and then graciously sacrificing the Captain who really was totally unworthy of her anyway.

Miley Cyrus - See You Again

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18729610b0dcb403/

One of those great pop songs that seems to get better and better as it goes along, until you realise that Miley was just holding herself in reserve and lulling you into a false sense of complacency.

The convoluted musings of "See You Again" start off rather general (as in "I can't wait to see you again" means she really wants to see this guy) and then becomes super-specific - she embarrassed herself last time she saw him and won't make that mistake again. The line "the next time we hang out I will redeem myself, my heart can't rest 'till then!" is then the moment where it all starts to seem a bit creepy and stalkerish, but in a, well, c'mon this is MILEY kind of way, so you can't really hold her slightly scary fixation against her.

Absolute best moment: the final chorus, where Miley sounds like she's run right off a cliff without looking down, Coyote style, and then the muscular kick-drum arrives, all guns blazing, to say she's gonna blow this school to pieces.

Solange - I Decided (Part Two)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187517286ea7ccde/

Ms Younger Knowles tries very hard to be that space-age jetpacked superwoman you used to know by the name of Imani Coppola, except actually most of her new stuff sounds a bit like Amerie's first two albums. This is a good thing!

Still rather typically I end up liking "I Decided Pt 2" most of all her work (give or take "Sandcastle Disco", possibly to be posted here later).

The toe-tapping jazz-ballet patter of “I Decided Pt. 1” is fine but rather arch, sounding a bit like an off-Broadway paean to Motown, and largely relying on Solange's brilliantly declamatory vocals to make it work. On “I Decided Pt. 2”, a straight-to-the-point remix of its predecessor by erstwhile commercial house merchants the Freemasons, she unabashedly embraces streamlined pop form, her sassy performance somehow finding a new urgency amidst the very anonymity of song’s sugary, Phil Spector meets glam strut arrangement. Call it “generic”, but here the term is a compliment: any hint of eccentricity would just be a blemish marring the song’s perfectly proportioned, irresistibly svelte figure.

Crazy Cousinz - Bongo Jam

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187474684ab384d6/

There's so many reasons why UK "funky house" has been my raison d'etre this year (and it's nice to have one again), but one big reason is that these guys are unafraid of serving up cheeseburgers with extra cheese. Accordingly, "Bongo Jam" is to tribal percussion as 10CC's "Dreadlock Holiday" is to reggae.

Basically it's impossible to overstate the greatness of this track, though less as a peerless example of funky house than as a superlative pop song – perhaps it’s the “Sweet Like Chocolate” of funky house? Yes, the groove is killer: the supple bongo percussion, those marvellous “woooh!” sounds, the maracas, the faux-menace of those moaning backing vocals. But really, this is all about that vocal: “Sometimes I wake up early in the morning, to play my con-con-congo"... You mean you don't?
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Shy Child - Cause & Effect

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18930532c87ab611/

It was eight years ago, but I remember it like yesterday: at some birthday drinks at an unassuming pub, the hoary pub band pulling out all the chestnuts (“Brown Eyed Girl” etc.) and running them through with a grim protestant workmanship that further drained already desiccated “classics”. So far so typical, but then right at the end, the previously uninspired drummer struck up a 4X4 beat, a hitherto unheard keyboardist started unleashing trancey chords, and to my dawning horror and delight, the band launched into a live rendition of Chicane ft. Bryan Adams’ “Don’t Give Up”.

Which was awful, but if it had been GREAT it might have sounded a bit like “Cause and Effect”.

I’m already very positively disposed to Shy Child’s love of rhythm and maximalist synthesizer pyrotechnics; here, both are exploited to a ridiculous extent, with the track morphing from DJ Sammy-style atmospheric arpeggios through acid house bleeping and finally settling into the woozy warp speed churn of goa trance, sort of. Where "Don't Give Up" seemed to achieve its yearning soar a little too easily (soaring being the natural state of trance-pop), “Cause and Effect” benefits from the friction between the music's effortless lift-off and the singer’s yelpy but grounded call and response chanting. It's probably the best rock song and the best trance song I've heard this year, and as a side-benefit shows up just how myopic the usual conceptions of "dance-rock" can be - almost the first thought that ran through my head was "why hasn't someone tried this before?"

Lil Wayne - A Milli

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18978220a976b7b1/

It’s pretty much impossible to write about Lil’ Wayne at this stage without seeming like a newjack, but maybe I should just own the newjack status on this one and make like every other rock critic trying not to be exposed as a hip hop fraud (the weird “oh, you!” thing about being in Australia is that whenever I’ve ever tried to talk to other Oz people about Lil’ Wayne they’ve looked at me all leery and suspicious, if not blank and uncomprehending; meanwhile in the US he’s been overexposed since like forever).

More generally I just don’t trust myself to get across why I love something like “A Milli”, largely because I’m not good at writing about hip hop lyrics. Mostly what I like about Weezy – apart from the obvious stuff like his way with a simile, his repertoire of vocal effects and accents and so on – is just that he likes a corny one-liner as much as I do. But don’t ask me to try to express it better, ‘cos it looks so weak written down. I can’t explain why “It ain’t trickin’ if you got it, but you like a bitch with no ass, you ain’t got shit” makes me laugh.

“A Milli”, like my other favourite Weezy track “Donks” (from the Lil’ Weezyana mixtape) is self-consciously hyper-minimal and repetitive, in this case literally sounding like a skipping cd as it stutters over a deep screwed vocal reciting “A milli a milli a milli a milli a mi a mi a milli a milli a milli a milli a mi am am a milli…” All the better to give the impression of an endless now: no narrative, no point really, just an endless succession of silly jokes and dubious rhymes over a beat you could listen to forever. But there is some variation in “A Milli” after all: the most delicate yet desultory snare shots, intermittently ratatatting like a gangsta’s boo-boom chik punchline signal.

Hercules & Love Affair – Blind (Club Mix)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/189320740f9d08e3/

Rather predictably I love the Hercules & Love Affair album (especially the brilliant first three tracks), and even more predictably I think the use of Anthony’s voice on several tracks is inspired, making for the most histrionic, unstable dance-pop since The Associates’ “Party Fears Two”. But Anthony’s key track – lead single “Blind” – strikes me as a bit underwhelming in its original form, edging back from the icy primitive house-pop of H&LA at their best and into a vaguely flaccid, churning take on disco-revivalism that peaked years and years and years ago on the Playgroup album, the excellent horn contributions notwithstanding.

Luckily H&LA saw fit to make this brilliant, none-more-epic “club mix”: and truly, this does demolish the dancefloor more thoroughly, but that’s only half the story. Around a relentless house pulse (think Nitro Deluxe’s “Let’s Get Brutal” but more, ahem, brutal; Master C & J’s “Dub Love” is even closer actually) floats a succession of ever more creepy effects, from eerie keyboards to poltergeist-like horns trapped in dub housing, to distant baleful dance-off stomping, to eerie buzzsaw whines that make me flash on Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration album. In and throughout all of this, Anthony’s astonishingly solitary, blasted performance, a guilt-wracked quiver of the unfulfilment that literalises all the longing and emptiness secretly beating in the heart of all diva house.

Jordin Sparks ft Chris Brown - No Air

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18978844f0cd537c/

Oddly for an American Idol winner, on her own material Jordin usually performs most strongly when she realises that her baby-Mariah voice actually works best prosecuting baby-Janet material (see for example current single “One Step At A Time”): fluttery and almost ostentatiously pretty, with Jordin’s voice never resting on a single note for more than a moment – with Janet this is done to obscure her vocal limitations, with Jordin it’s a choice.

“No Air” is a bit risky therefore, with Jordin lingering lugubriously over heartbroken notes and phrases like she’s been shot in the chest. But death-fixated pop songs are the exception to every rule, and this suicide note is simply gorgeous, a deep pool of intoxicating emotion perfect for every wallower. Chris Brown also does fantastic, understated work, his gentle, yearning delivery providing a trace paper outline of a hidden mountain of regret.

If the song is devastated, the arrangement is utopian, all twinkling starlight tinkles and the most graceful stuttering kickdrum. The chorus, when the two get wrapped up in suffocating clouds of cumulus synthesiser is probably the largest moment in pop this year, like two giant space babies finding each other in a Hollywood remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey redone as a romance. And we haven’t gotten to the fabulous artificial strings in the last two minutes, then that absolutely desolate, almost discordant harmonised moan, and then the stadium drums come in, and, oh… words fail, truly they do.

Tosh - Action

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1893309652a27e87/

After peaking with an intense obsession circa 2003, my engagement with dancehall has waned only to the point that I hear enough to suspect I’m missing a lot of amazing stuff. “Action” is one of those charming uptempo girly numbers that even dancehall skeptics can’t deny (he says – underwhelmed responses below plz); if you squint it’s like the chorus of Beenie Man and Miss Ting’s “Dude” expanded into a whole song, which is a fantastic idea really. Tosh is sweet and lighthearted, but nonetheless knows what she wants and is having none of yr prevarication – “G’wan wit ya bag a mout’, an ya bag a talk!” she starts off as if she’s already seen right through you. That kind of thing is like catnip for me. It helps that “Action” has such an awesome arrangement, a retro yet vaguely Oriental pots’n’pants percussive groove, and an irresistible sense of rising joy. I play this a lot in the morning.

Donaeo - African Warrior

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1887844919b1cc52/

Donaeo was responsible for one of grime’s earliest and still most purely fun anthems, 2002’s “Bounce”, a fabulously sillytrack that managed to mock menace and still sound kinda menacing in spite of itself. In 2005 he made “Bark”, a slightly tuffer but still cheeky number that has one of Danny Weed’s best production efforts (there was stuff in between but I’m giving you the abridged version). Now he’s jumped on the UK funky bandwagon, initially with the vocally smooth, rhythmically rude “Devil In A Blue Dress” – abandoning rapping for a yearnin’, bustin’ R&B performance over rippling syncopated kickdrums.

The even-better follow-up “African Warrior” splits the difference between “Bark and “Devil In A Blue Dress”, and things are now sounding rather aggressive. There’s also a lot of R Kelly aping going on here, from the double entendre lyrics (“I’m an African warrior, rolling with my stick in my hand” – needless to say I misheard this the first time through) to the hoarse vocals for the chorus, to the lilting singjay quasi-rap interludes. The groove is absolutely cavernous, a surround-sound explosion of spiralling tribal drums reminiscent of Lenky’s dancehall riddim Dreamweaver (e.g. Elephant Man's "Blessed", Chico's "Thick & Thin"), and an evil speaker-tearing bassline straight from Sticky’s “Booo”.

T2 & Addictive - Gonna Be Mine

http://www.zshare.net/audio/194487493c836937/

Have to admit to not following UK’s bassline scene very closely this year, especially after UK funky house became my drug of choice some time in May or so. This was my favourite track of the ones I’ve heard, which is not that surprising since it was probably the scene’s biggest 2008 hit aside from the underwhelming “What’s It Gonna Be” by Platinum & H20. Otherwise what I said on facebook re bassline last year still stands:

"Bassline is kind of like the return of speed garage – the bumpy sped-up four-to-the-floor version of garage which immediately preceded 2-step. The big difference is that Bassline is harder and nastier, with all the remaining New York garage-style organic sensuousness purged in favour of a cold, metallic sound that can often seem surprisingly close to electro-house: stiff house percussion, razor-sharp synth riffs and enormous, glinting basslines. Otherwise, the raw ingredients that made speed garage such potent dance and pop music remain present: gratuitously catchy vocals, including lots of fabulous post-Todd Edwards cut-up monstrosities, a restless magpie approach to sonic source material, and a great line in awesomely profane pop songs."

“Gonna Be Mine” is particularly notable for its sweet (if strident) diva vocal and slashing beats that sound like Freddie Krueger and Edward Scissorhands playing clapping games. The human vocals on the one hand and sickly music on the other make for predictably enjoyable vibe of so-wrong-it’s-right buzzy intensity, sort of like when you have a legitimate reason to take wonderful painkillers, and the pain and the bliss are duking it out in your body.

Jennifer Hudson - Spotlight

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18822591c51aebdc/

Unlike most of my friends, I enjoyed Dream Girls on the first run through, and liked it much much more the second time. "Spotlight" wasn't in the film, and if it had been would have stuck out rather like "You Must Love Me" did in Evita, but nevertheless this continues Hudson's performance essentially; you can hear her substantial chest quiver as she injects heartbreaking melodrama into oddly expositional lyrics like "is this relationship fulfilling your needs as well as mine?"

But if "Spotlight" can feel set-piece-ish lyrically, this rococo vibe is counterbalanced by the utter simplicity of the music, calm piano ripples and sighing strings formally rotating round one of those oh-so-oh-eight steady 4X4 beats, here signifying... resilience, persistence, a refusal to be bowed down, and other emotions perfect for the blackened stage and the lone star illuminated by a single... well, you get the picture.

Leave it to Hudson to find a theatrical core in Stargate's otherwise utilitarian production style, but when she launches into the stratosphere for the ridiculously soppy middle-eight any ambivalence I might have felt gets swept aside by the brute force of her emotional manipulation. You oughta show her some deference.

The Veronicas – Untouched

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18979489640c32b3/

First The Veronicas raised insouciance to an artform. Now they’ve become like gamblers who don’t know when/how to quit while they’re ahead, and are rapidly descending into full-blown self-parody – the video for new single “Take Me On The Floor” is like if Bladerunner had been set in the aisles of Supre. “Untouched” caught them at their best: from their robotically identical haircuts (predictably, one of them has now gone totally yuck to distinguish herself) to the utterly blank performances to the kinda ridiculous but still compelling warp-speed spoken word verses to a chorus that is to my mind formally perfect (we’re talking ABBA level here).

It’s worth quoting the chorus in full: “I feel so untouched and/I miss you so much that/I just can’t resist you/it’s not enough to say that I miss you/I feel so untouched right/now need you so much, some/how I can’t forget you/been going crazy since the moment I met you.” Okay, so that scans rather like standard-issue pop-lyrics, but the way it all hangs together, the sheer pedantry of its internal rhyming, reminds me of one of those ridiculously elaborate borders that medieval illuminators would draw on the borders of pages in copied out religious texts (think The Name of the Rose) – a perfectly balanced, perfectly dovetailing pattern of exquisite detail that bespeaks immense, practised skill.

I don’t really want The Veronicas to become full-blown electro-pop, ‘cuz their personalities aren’t strong enough to demarcate them from the rest of the “Sex Shooter”-style sexy sexy mersh electro-house-pop that is so persistently popular in Australia (this is my issue with “Take Me On The Floor”, which admittedly is very earworm-ish). “Untouched” achieves the perfect balance, decorating its future-rock electro-churn with slashing, rococo string riffs straight from “Papa Don’t Preach”. The purified sound of 1987, and totally irresistible.

Flo Rida - In The Ayer

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18821384a948741a/

Of the three big Flo Rida singles, this is my favourite because it's the most purely jock jam-ish. Its straight poppin electro beats and awesomely earwormish chanted chorus (“Oh hot damn! This is my jam! Keep me partyin' to the A-M! Y'all don't understan! Make me throw my hands in the a-yer a-a-yer a-a-a…”) seem purpose-built for soundtracking greatest moments in sports montages. I must admit that jock jam rap is more of an amateur hobby than professional going concern than mine, so there were probably better examples of the form this year, but nonetheless this touches that place in my heart I thought was reserved for Trick Daddy's "Take It To The House" 4 eva.

Young Jeezy - Put On

http://www.zshare.net/audio/196897551a2c2718/

Every year needs at least one high-octane end-of-the-world dirgathon rap track that makes you feel impossibly small and puny. Last year I guess it was the big DJ Khaled track which I didn’t actually go for all that much (of course the year before we had T.I.’s “What You Know” obv) so I’m pleased that 2008 has offered up the massive “Put On” which I can enjoy with uncompromised masochistic fervour.

Not much terribly surprising to this (as if surprise is really what you want from a grinding tectonic plate of a rap anthem): Young Jeezy’s typically on the down low, muttering about life in the hard lanes, Luda’s Vegas-ready punchline extroversion, Wayne stumbling about stoned, Trae and Rick Ross both rapping through gritted teeth, Kanye contributing a kinda overrated but still fun autotune devotional interlude (now used to more high profile effect on his own “Love Lockdown”) worthy of ‘serious cat’ lolcat photos. But what a groove: the tinkling dystopian synth arpeggios, the playground-in-hell recorder loops, the dazzling faux-fanfares, and just… the sheer largesse, the bloodied but unbowed implacability of it all.

Alphabeat - Fascination

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187585316795d3fb/

Normally I’d be rather suspicious of a song like this. I mean… it’s rather INDIE, isn’t it? The almost inhuman chirpiness of it, the tweeness of the band and especially the boy/girl singers (both of whom may be oddly cute, but nonetheless in an almost criminal twee manner), the “LOOK AT MOI” grandiosity of the verses, the “DO YOU SEE” explosiveness of the choruses, and the “LOOK AT MOI DO YOU SEE” ridiculousness of the middle eight leading back into that chorus.

I know all of the above, and yet it simply cannot dampen my enjoyment of this song, which reminds me of a hungover drive from Melbourne to Geelong one Sunday afternoon six years ago with three equally hungover friends and a tape of greatest hits of Huey Lewis and the News for company. And I love this like I love Huey Lewis, or Pat Benatar, or mid-eighties Phil Collins: this stuff is simply Beyond Good & Evil, indeed beyond the master/slave dichotomies that suspicious music fans like myself spend so much time constructing to show how X is good because Y is bad. It simply is.

Taylor Swift - Love Story

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5myu87

My two biggest non-2008 obsessions this year have been Fela Kuti and Taylor Swift. Fela, of course, invented afro-beat. Taylor meanwhile is the latest young star of mainstream country, her 2006 eponymous debut album one of the best pop albums of this decade – certainly as a collection of confessional pop only Ashlee Simpson’s ‘I Am Me’ (and, perhaps, Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Breakaway) comes close.

Those suspicious of mainstream country tend to think that an example of greatness in this arena would require some fundamental undermining, subversion or, at least, transcendence of the style’s modus operandi. Taylor does none of this: her first album is glowing, maximalist studio-perfected country-pop, every inch of the stereo speaker filled with glowing guitars, hokey mandolins, gratuitous violin refrains. Taylor’s voice is just twangy enough to be clearly of its genre without seemed confined by it. Most difficult to pin down is Taylor’s songwriting, which manages to combine the generic with the idiosyncratic in ways that are just endlessly loveable (most famously, her first single “Tim McGraw” is a sweet curse laid on an ex-boyfriend to always think of her when he even thinks of country singer Tim McGraw, let alone hears ‘their song’). Rather than break with tradition, Taylor finds new and interesting ways to say things within that tradition; if you’ve never quite “got” with mainstream country I can’t think of a better gateway drug. Plus, she’s definitely one of the best lyricists in pop right now.

“Love Story”, as you might expect from a forthcoming second album arriving on the back of an ever-expanding public profile, is much more internationalist in feel. Oh, there’s a twangy mandolin throughout, but this is more than matched by the burnished sheen of the almost new wavey guitar and the unexpectedly subtle slow burn of the chorus. The tale of fantastic (in both senses) young love is also much more in line with the expectations of broader pop audiences – whereas Taylor’s first album was filled with the typically country concerns of failed romances, “what does he see in her?” pining, and one of my favourites, “Mary’s Song (Oh My My)” which covers about eighty years of a proudly domestic long term relationship like an ad campaign for life insurance.

Taylor’s capacity for astonishingly on-point specificity is largely jettisoned as she paints more a widescreen, mythological tale of love found, lost and regained, but even if the eventual marriage proposal has an air of broad brush strokes about it (I liked this denouement in “Mary’s Song” just a little more), Taylor finds space to inject the mythic with her own sensibility. “You were Romeo/I was a Scarlet Letter”, she sighs, encapsulating the imagined and then real disapproval of her father and a broader conservative community at her shameful seduction (“Romeo” gets off scot free, of course). It’s rare for pop to find a way to express the intimacy of love while simultaneously painting in the landscape of the outside world, and most songs ultimately plump for one or the other. But Taylor learns as much from ‘Romeo & Juliet’ as you could hope for from an adolescent, and in “Love Story” each world traces the outline of the other, throwing the contours of the other into relief - abandonment is even harder to bear in the face of the whole world's "I told you so..."

In an odd way, I’m reminded of Vanessa Carlton, who at her best combined that earnest literateness with giggly youth and a deadly grip on a good hook – “Love Story” is a companion piece to “White Houses” in my head at least. Taylor is typically funnier or nastier or more voluptuously morose than Vanessa, but the distance is smaller than usual here: “Love Story” sacrifices such shadings for the sake of providing proof that she can deliver an anthem “straight”, without a tear or a chuckle. It’s not all of what I want from her, but it’s as much as I could ask from a wistful, heart-pumping pop song.

Pussycat Dolls - I Hate This Part

http://www.sendspace.com/file/x5hld3

I recently described Nicole Scherzinger – lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls – as a pop Trojan Horse. Ostensibly, Nicole’s songs (and really, almost all Pussycat Dolls songs are basically Nicole songs with the other Dolls providing indistinguishable backing vocals) are straightforward cookie-cutter robot (R&B) pop. And she's not really made any attempt to disprove this (her failed solo career aside - which produced at least a few fabulous and underrated singles most people never heard - check "Superhero"), although she's perhaps contractually obliged not to run down her fellow Dolls in interviews in an effort to distinguish herself. Apparently the new PCD album includes each member singing lead at least once, and on a bonus disc songs written by each Doll. This strikes me as a recipe for disaster but I’m oddly curious to hear the results.

You’ll understand the “Trojan Horse” bit if you actually listen to the better PCD singles, in particular “Buttons”, which you’d think would be one of the group’s more generic efforts. But Nicole is just so ON as a singer and performer and persona, she more often than not can take what are fairly good cookie-cutter R&B tracks and push them over the line with the inventiveness, the precision and the sheer personality of her vocals. On “Buttons”, she stakes out the verses with a declamatory flair, her vocals sounding at once resonant and distant, as if she’s singing down a long, echoey tunnel (it’s a bit Wizard of Oz: her voice an ominous and frightening effect emanating from a large video screen while the real Nicole presumably sings a bit more humbly behind a curtain).

The first single from the second PCD album, “When I Grow Up” struck me as kinda grimly authoritarian, but new single “I Hate This Part” is excellent. Jumping on the increasingly crowded Ne-Yo bandwagon (in style at least: I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s definitely of a piece with “Closer”), nonetheless it’s an unusual and charming mixture of fragile piano ballad wailer and pumping 4X4 pop stormer. This is a great showcase of Nicole’s ability to carry a dramatic song with precise but totally distinct and emotionally charged phrasing (whereas of course the glorified back-ups are not just anonymous but completely inaudible) – switching from firm to frail to strident to resigned with unusual agility and grace. I love, too, how the lyrics short-circuit the generic and specific – the details about driving in a car with your lover listening to the radio because there’s nothing left to say to one another ring totally true.

The music is ace as well: the moody cloud-of-wasps of bassline, the fragile piano, the swarming strings, the way the extra beats in the chorus stuttering around the 4/4 kick imply a sort of collapse or disintegration. But most of all, I love the disarming frankness of its bittersweet conclusion: “I hate this part right here” Nicole admits as she plunges the knife into a moribund relationship, delivering the chorus in a breathy, emphysemic whisper by the end. ABBA were the masters of this sort of ambivalent, self-reflective, pathos-laden pop. It’s rare to hear it being reproduced so effectively today.

Air France - No Excuses

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2paenz

I have a lamentable weakness for a certain brand of twee, tearjerker dance-pop (or sample-pop) that manages to short-circuit the distance between the rave and the bedsit: Saint Etienne’s “He’s On The Phone”, The Avalanches’ “A Different Feeling”, Omni Trio’s “Thru The Vibe”, Amira’s “My Desire (Dreem Teem Mix)” – this is all “LOL Tim” music. Softcore, you know the score.

Air France have released their two-EPs-to-date on The Tough Alliance’s label Sincerely Yours, which already bodes well; TTA have pretty much made “twee, tearjerker dance-pop (or sample-pop) that manages to short-circuit the distance between the rave and the bedsit” their raison d’etre, and made a lot of my favourite music last year. Air France and The Tough Alliance don’t really sound that much like each other, though they do both sound a lot like Saint Etienne. Maybe it’s just that they start to break Saint Etienne down into their component parts, with TTA taking “He’s On The Phone”, “Pale Movie” and “You’re In A Bad Way” (the Pet Shop Boys influence, basically) and Air France taking “Railway Jam”, “London Belongs To Me” and “Avenue” (the A. R. Kane influence perhaps?). So a lot of Air France’s songs are dreamy, exquisite textured, melancholy sample-scapes but aren’t terribly anthemic.

“No Excuses” is where the two sides come back together again: just about the fizziest, trembliest, most joyful thing I've heard this year, all smeary piano and cascading strings and flutes that sound like rave riffs, and cherubs sighing “nah nah nah”, and cheesy handclap percussion, all swirling around in endless layers of fairy floss like ambient happy hardcore.

So many moments to love here: the breakdown of wibbling tinkerbells, the singer sighing “No…” and a ragtag chorus of children shouting “No!” in response, the glorious false ending, like stumbling across an empty field the day after the circus has left town, only to find the entire troupe hiding in the tall grass, waiting to surprise you. I simply have no resistance to this sort of thing; but why would you want to be able to resist this?

The-Dream ft. Rihanna - Livin' A Lie

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1974513803ec0a51/

As with fellow ghost-writer/rival/hypothetical love interest (slash fiction writers get on it) Ne-Yo, The-Dream is more central to the beating heart of US Pop 2008 than many people realize. It’s not so much that his fingerprints are over so much great material of recent times (most notably Rihanna’s “Umbrella”), although there’s that too; what I’m getting at is a certain pop sensibility that just seems oh-so-current.

For one thing, both artists have in their own work made “generic” (as in, clearly of its genre, rather than plain) male-sung R&B a viable career proposition in a non-JT, non-Usher context. In doing so both draw heavily on the mid-90s, a time before staccato post-Timbaland beats and the like crucially remapped R&B’s formal co-ordinates across hip hop lines (I’d propose Tevin Campbell as a touchstone for Ne-Yo and Jodeci as the alter at which The-Dream worships). Back then the R&B club number, the slow jam and the ballad were all much closer to each other, such that many tracks kinda fell into a winning interzone drawing elements from all three. It’s R&B qua R&B, and it’s a unified sound: you wouldn’t and couldn’t love the beat but hate the singer or vice versa. You simply had to buy the whole package, for the mood it conveyed.

In other words (not to belabor the point but) The-Dream and Ne-Yo are not just singer-songwriters in fact but also in feel: on their best work there’s a sense of everything coming together perfectly, lyrics, tune, performance production. For The-Dream in particular, this gives him the opportunity to bring together disparate strands (Bobby Valentino-style suffocating wispiness, R Kelly intensity neurorisis and sex-addiction, Chris Brown winsomeness and directness) into a glorious constellation.

“Livin’ A Lie” most likely isn’t even my favourite song on The-Dream’s debut album ‘Love/Hate’, although that’s probably just a reflection of its absurd strength – how do you choose between the shiny R Kelly bounce of “Shawty Is Da Shit”, the flawless Prince revivalism of “Fast Car”, the bitter dirge “Nikki”, the apocalyptic “She Needs My Love”, the irresistible glide of “Playin’ in her Hair”, the sumptuous coital sludge of “Purple Kisses”, the sci-fi club joint “Ditch That”, the architectural magnificence of “Luv Songs” or the tearjerker ballad “Mama”???

But “Livin’ A Lie” is the one I expect my sceptical readers may actually stoop to checking out. And really you should: it’s the perfect R&B power-ballad anthem for these uncertain times, a megalith of brooding 4X4 pulse, messy “are we? aren’t we?” secretive post-break-up stolen kisses (to be honest though I’m not quite sure what is preventing The-Dream and Rihanna from just getting together again – it seems like just pride and their reputation amongst their friends), and an unstoppable chorus wherein the two symmetrical viewpoints combine in a bittersweet flash of self-insight.

The other thing Ne-Yo and The-Dream have in common is an industrious protestant work ethic absent from pop for two decades: Ne-Yo’s pumped out three solo albums in three years, and The-Dream is set to release his follow-up ‘Love vs. Money’ imminently. Hype!

Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream

http://www.zshare.net/audio/192052261b6fe561/

I didn’t want to like this: I disapprove of Australian pop supergroups, and the idea of an Oz pop supergroup trying to jump on the Balearic bandwagon seemed purpose-built to make me wake up one morning and hate myself circa six months ago. Like when you realize that once you actually wanted Mark Latham to be PM.

I was too hasty. For one thing I’ve got nothing against The Sleepy Jackson (who provide Empire of the Sun’s singer) and I actively like Pnau (who provide it’s, um, instrumentalist I suppose). And sometimes Australians get Balearic right: after all, we are responsible for Flash and the Pan and The Avalanches, and I have a half-baked notion of inserting Wendy Matthews into Balearic DJ set lists. More recently and prosaically, Cut Copy’s So Cosmic mix (which this rather resembles in condensed form) was really very pretty.

As is “Walking on a Dream”, or at least it will be until it becomes a modest hit on JJJ (perhaps it is already?) on the basis of sounding vaguely like MGMT. The sheer sleekness of those glittering endless autobahn synth chords, the cynical but nonetheless undeniable lift of the ghostly falsetto chorus. The general lightness of touch. More than Balearic, what this reminds me of is primo Thin White Duke remixes (think “Mr. Brightside” – though not nearly as good as that behemoth to be fair) – a smoothness so smooth it slides right past your defences.

Luomo - Gets Along Fine

http://www.sendspace.com/file/czgnaa

Luomo (aka Sasu Rapitti aka Vladislav Delay aka Uusitalo aka etc.) has the distinction of making not one but two of my absolute favourite albums ever, 2000’s luxuriantly deep dub-house album ‘Vocalcity’ and 2003’s spangly and lustrous epic dance-pop collection ‘The Present Lover’. I was disappointed by 2006’s ‘Paper Tigers’, not because it’s a bad album, but because (largely reiterating the charms of ‘The Present Lover’) it failed to turn my life upside down like its predecessors had – an unfair standard perhaps, but it’s Luomo’s fault for raising my expectations so.

Happily, this year’s ‘Convivial’ is a return to form: if ever so slightly beneath the peaks formed by those first two albums, it’s close enough to tear me up at times (I’m kinda corny like that). The secret of ‘Convivial’ is how Luomo carefully extends that trademark quivering, vulnerable embodied emotionalism (like the thrill that runs up and down your body when someone to whom you’re painfully attracted accidentally brushes your arm) into new sonic territory. Partly it’s gorgeous songs – see the brooding Depeche Mode meets Junior Boys goth-balladry of “Love You All”, or the impossibly kaleidoscopic swirl of “Slow Dying Places”, which is like Mouse on Mars falling in love while on an E honeymoon.

Possibly my favourite track here is “Gets Along Fire”. On the one hand it’s classic Luomo, riding a familiar, trademarkable wistful bass riff and liberally sprinkling cut-up male diva vocals, now celebratory now bittersweet. On the other, it’s quite unlike anything else the guy has done, its chorus irrupting in an astonishing combination of bleeping synthesiser and pseudo-African percussion – someone on I Love Music suggested that it actually sounds like coupe de cale (Ivory Coast dance music sonically halfway between kuduro, and, um, UK funky house I guess?), which I can totally hear.

I have a bad habit of turning it up so loudly that those assailing drums start to hurt my ears. It’s simultaneously the most aggressive and purely joyous Luomo production to date, the muscular assault of its universalist affection like an embrace so fierce it crushes. The marvel, and perhaps the necessity of the Luomo project, is bound up in the shock of physical intimacy; pleasurable, overwhelming, and at times a little scary. “Am I really feeling this?” “Is it you who is making me feel this way?” Yes, and yes.

Scarface- High Powered

http://www.sendspace.com/file/knabw7

Am I growing more aggressive as I get old? Maybe it’s just that hip hop generally has been a bit harder of late: my favourite rap album of the year is Young Jeezy’s vergin’-on-apocalyptic ‘The Recession’, and perhaps my favourite rap track is Scarface’s gritty “High Powered”. Or, not really. “High Powered” is gritty in the same sense that pirates are scary. Scarface has that awesome, won’t-take-your-shit thick flow that’s unimpressed by just about everything, which is lucky because his fixation with fake-ass drug dealers (specifically snitches, roaches, anyone who passes themselves off as bigger entrepreneurs than they are; on his excellent new album ‘Emeritus’ – awesome title btw – he also spends a lot of time talking about being sued) needs that kind of blunt laconic swagger-not-swagger (not-swagger because, well, Scarface doesn’t need to impress anyone) – Scarface is so good at this that “High Powered” positively drips gravitas.

Musically “High Powered” is only gritty in the sense that “This Is Why I’m Hot” or “Grindin” or The Game’s “One Blood” are – parading its screechy screwfaced minimalism (ooh those sudden floods of bottomless bass) front and centre, but ultimately too tuneful and too widescreen and too, um, Jamaican not to end up sounding a bit pop. The way the rhythm breaks into a dancehall beat at the end of each verse is one of those simple but devastating effects that makes me mourn all over again the crappiness of local urban clubs (they never seem to play stuff like this) – it's total bust an ominous move on the dancefloor business.

Plus that awesome reggae chorus vocal “Beep beep goes the sound of my celluleeuuurr” – so dank and lugrubrious! (the title track to this album is another highlight, but the whole thing is great – check it!)

Animal Collective - My Girls

http://www.sendspace.com/file/g2f3jr

Seeing Animal Collective live in Berlin last year was something of a minor revelation, like witnessing a band/artist/etc. stumble onto a wonderful new twist in their aesthetic in real time. I really liked the group’s 2007 album ‘Strawberry Jam’ (and even more so bandmember Panda Bear’s solo release ‘Person Pitch’, one of my top two albums from last year), but as much for what it hinted at as what it was: gleaming through the crevices of those slightly angsty, ridiculously over-stuffed technicolour indie rock songs was a more utopian vision of blissed-out dance-rock, somewhere between the ethnodelic indie that Gang Gang Dance have since made their own, the swooning neo-Balearic of Studio, and the dreamlike sampladelic ambient-techno-pop of Primal Scream’s Orb-produced “Higher Than The Sun”. ‘Person Pitch’ was already inching into this territory, but was so blissed-out as to be positively supine: cross-referencing that sound with the dense and energetic approach of ‘Strawberry Jam’ seemed like the way to go.

This is what Animal Collective did when I saw them, especially during their encore: the combination of starsailing widescreen techno-pop and the trippy light show made it the best fusion of live rock with the feel (as opposed to merely sound) of dance music that I can remember. “My Girls”, the first song to leak from the band’s next album ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’, excellently captures the sound and the feel of the best bits of that live show. Organ arpeggios, atmospheric keyboard swirls, Panda Bear’s very familiar multitracked Beach Boys-aping declamatory vocal style… None of these things in and of themselves suggest a massive stylistic shift; what’s changed is how these things all come together in a manner that is unabashedly pretty, and unabashedly pop. The slightly reverent intro soon gives way to a brisk (albeit unpredictable) quasi-tribal percussive groove, all woodblocks and what sounds like rolling timpanis, as Panda Bear’s chanting slowly coalesces into an implausible hook: “I don’t mean to seem like I care material things like my social stats/I just want four walls and a door besides, for my girls!” (punctuated at times by an excellent falsetto “woah!!!!”). The actual lyrics are typical of Panda Bear, triangulating the space between earnestness, mundanity and weed-derived epiphany, and I’m not sure how or why it works so well.

In the final minute of this gorgeous song, the steady quasi-disco pulse (not to mention the marvellous handclaps, awesome backwards-filtered strings, those organ arpeggios suddenly resembling italo-house keyboards) leads the song into a too-brief climax that, like Air France’s “No Excuses”, somehow evokes euphoric rave-pop. And then (rather like Booka Shade’s trancey electro-house anthem “In White Rooms”, my favourite track of 2006), it ends abruptly, as if to remind you gently and sympathetically that no one can ever actually feel this good for more than about a minute at a time.

Chris Brown - Dreamer

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1q6e44

The realisation that Chris was maybe the pop star of the year dawned on me quite slowly. Partly that’s because he’s risen to this position by default – no other pop star really had a sustained run of greatness throughout the year that might challenge him (Mariah’s a possible exception, but even then she felt less epochal this year than a couple of years back). Partly it’s that he led off his new album with its worst single, the only-kinda-good club track “Kiss Kiss” which (like most songs featuring T-Pain) really felt like a T-Pain song. And partly it’s that I was slow to warm to his other big singles. “No Air”, his duet with Jordin, is of course one of the greatest songs of the year, but that could be chalked up to Jordin’s efforts. And like most people I talked to, I found the glutinous acoustic ballad “With You” a bit too sugary and limp to begin with, while the neo-trance fireworks of “Forever” seemed pretty but insubstantial. The former won me over through sustained radio exposure, the latter via its particularly inspired recontextualisation in a dance routine on So You Think You Can Dance US. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to recognise just how much I love this guy, such that the maudlin “Superman" (his new duet with Keri Hilson) immediately tugs at my heartstrings whereas before I probably would have dismissed it as overwrought.

Undiluted regard is the necessary mindset with which to approach “Dreamer”, the track Chris cut in tribute to the Olympics. In a manner remarkably similar to Beyonce’s subsequent “Halo”, it combines massive end-of-the-world churning synthesisers with inspirational piano vamps straight from mid-eighties stadium rock (think “Don’t Stop Believing”) and typical 2008 R&B Sturm und Drang percussion. But in a lesser singer’s hands all this would be for naught, especially given the song’s slightly nauseous aspirational optimism. What pushes this over the top is Chris singing with that sort of effortless inhuman clarity that marks him out amidst all the other much more obviously embodied male R&B singers (like, even Ne-Yo can’t aspire to this sort of universalism, though he brings other stuff to the table). This is why Chris works so well with ever-so-slight autotuning on his vocals: it gives him a preternatural quality, like some sympathetic higher being sent to observe and then redeem the human race. In the chorus he divides into a scary multitude of auto-harmonising existential cheer squads, and this manoeuvre is executed with a ridiculous seriousness that probably spelt doom for any hopes of this becoming a popular song. Predictably, I love it.

Lyrically this is some high-stakes (if incomprehensible) stuff: “High speed/like I’m racing/it’s like lightning/sky is blazing/but you’ve lost your way/you’ve been led astray/are there better days/for my Fallen Dreamer?” Narrative is jettisoned in favour of a hearty engagement with the Big Themes (made explicit in the spoken word intro: “Live… or die… I just gotta believe”), which is as it should be – pop usually can’t capture big themes coherently without reducing them to triteness. A poetic incoherence is pretty much always the preferred route, and Chris’ almost religious invocation of emblems of the struggle for survival gives “Dreamer” a kind of accommodating flexibility: even if it was written for Michael Phelps it very easily becomes my personal prop for making it out of bed in the morning.

There's several more yet to be written. Many of the above were written several months ago, if they now seem a bit odd. There's also been a lot of cross-plundering with comments made here, reviews wtc.

haha oh shit i completely forgot that fbook group existed - sorry tim!! i did mean to contribute to it but fbook never lets you know when groups are updated. i pretty much wholeheartedly agree/disagree in all the predictable places. 2008 has been so good, my top 10 tracks currently numbers 88.

should have linked animal collective to a rickroll, but otherwise great stuff as always -- one of the most interesting things to me tho is when u mention listening to fela kuti bcuz on ILM i generally pretty much just associate your posts with new music (a good thing mostly as it keeps me glass-is-half-full about a lot of stuff id otherwise avoid) and ive always found it kind of interesting to get what your context is w/ a lot of older stuff (haha totally crazy that i remember this but i THINK i remember you dropping Disco Inferno in a write-up of a petey pablo song once)

fyi just for future reference it seems like zshare links get dropped pretty quickly now even if it says its still available to download it wont let you get the song on a few of these

i'm pretty sure that's a specific problem with newer zshare links (hence the switch to sendspace on newer posts) - the above links should predate it but if there's any broken links people let me know and I will fix.

The reference to Fela Kuti is a bit of a lie if only because (in typical ILM fashion) I've also fallen hard for Steely Dan this year, after having Aja for years and barely listening to it. Listened to a lot of Rickie Lee Jones, too, but i already liked her a lot. I don't like the slight air of defensiveness that saying "i've been listening to Fela" gives off actually... The impetus for noting it was more that Fela (and Steely) and Taylor Swift (though more her first album than "Love Story") were the music that hit receptors I don't think I'd used much if at all previously. In a lot of ways afrobeat and country-pop are asking for critical articulations of enjoyment that are almost diametrically opposed.

Yeah I think the Petey Pablo thing was "Get On Dis Motorcycle", the sample on which sounds a fair amount like a Disco Inferno track which does a similar trick. I used to make those kinds of "Destiny's Child = Mouse on Mars!" comparisons a lot more. I try to avoid it if i can these days because it usually implies that it's the comparison that validates the worth of whatever yr reviewing.

Whereas the truth (in this case) is that in retrospect the Disco Inferno track sounds like it's trying to work out how to be the Petey Pablo track (sans rapping obv)... An example of the influence flowing backwards effect that mark s used to talk about, if it didn't seem so lolworthy to talk about DI and PP in those terms.

As a general rule I think it's a good idea to be very cautious when trying to write about old and well-known music you're just getting into. Me on Fela or Steely Dan would be tedious and wrong for the most part.

Some writers use that naivete to be better/fresher/more clearsighted than well-versed critics, but I think that's a rare skill. In fact I'm having trouble thinking of anyone offhand.

ha yeah i didnt mean you needed to defend it, sorry --i found it more interesting just for providing a context for what you listened to and i think at the time i was just sorta seeing your writing in some kind of pop-centered universe so it just gave me a clue as to what dimensions you were working in musically --

whats most interesting about actual-serious-ilm music posts to me is its as much about knowing the writer as knowing the music -- an example is guys like dan perry who has a musical background and just knowing that fact helps me 'get' where hes coming from sometimes -- occasionally in ways i think are just wrong, i.e. "this person cannot sing" and im like "thats not the point" (sorry Dan for using u as a rhetorical example here) but other times in ways that help me better articulate what it is that makes music 'work' (or not work) for me.

Anyway point about that paragraph is that i think understanding the context a writer is coming from a lot of times is interesting and informs so much of how people on here write about music and what they bring to the discussion

n-e wayz im drunk and its like 630AM here sunday morning so im out ____

um also sorry for not googleproofing dan's name --

yeah that was my self-criticism kicking into gear there not me responding to you so much. i do find all of that stuff interesting w/r/t other posters here, like when I see you or vahid talking about jazz...

I use Dan in the same rhetorical manner. Sorry dan!

so rad. thanks tim.

argh totally stymied by zshare - 1) i click download, then 2) click download again, then 3) it tells me to wait for 20 seconds which i do, then 4) a "download" link appears, which i click, taking me back to (2) with no downloading ever actually happening

tried in safari and firefox both

same here, with safari and firefox too. It would be great to re-up these, Tim; last year your picks were among the best things I heard this year.

yeah those zshare links are expired/broken

ya not working!!

still, awesome job again...

yeah the zshare links dont work

zshare doesn't allow you to use it if you have ad-blocking on

are some of you not getting directed to the page which tells you this? just a thought

speaking of which, I can be bothered so rarely to download individual mp3s anymore

that muxtape thing mostly passed me by but having got the general gist, wouldn't that be ideal for something like this?

a streaming playlist of all this would be so rad.

Great stuff Tim, as always. But just wondering, I understand AC's My Girls lyrics to be like this:
"I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls"

status being stats

Tim you rule.

zshare is broken, btw. pretty sure those links aren't dead. it's just the adblocking/popup detection (which is lame in the first place), doesn't work consistently. i have turned off both and I still get stuck in the same loop as Tracer. would be great if someone who can get at the zshare files could upload them all to mediafire or sendspace.

same here, all plugins turned off, don't work

yeah, zshare usually works for me but isn't there.

was wanting to listen to "I wake up early in the morning, to play my con-con-congo" :(

most of those can be found on, like, itunes or similar

i recommend googling the song's name + rapidshare

xpost. they can also be found on soulseek or whatever, but when i was reading tim's bits i was hoping to have the thing down in 30 seconds and listen to it. I is lazy.

the zshare thing should be able to be worked around by right-click/"save target as"

I will upload these to sendspace over the next few days.

Great reading, Tim. What is the name of the Facebook group these are appearing on?

thanks tim!

This thread is so good I almost feel like it should be funded by private donations! Thanks for going out of your way, a lot of this stuff slipped under my radar, I kindof love end-of-years for catchup.

thanks Tim, looking forward to hearing these and re-reading - loved it last year too.

Pnau (who provide it’s, um, instrumentalist I suppose

The other half of Pnau was involved too, he just doesn't have his face airbrushed on the front cover.

nah the zshare links dont work

Jesus dudes, none of these tracks are particularly hard to get hold of if you want to hear them.

(NB - we aren't really meant to allow linking to full MP3s of commercially available music. I've been turning a blind eye here because Tim is Tim and doing sterling work promoting this stuff, but any future links responding to "anyone got that Aeroplane track?" or similar will be deleted).

Tim surely you don't prefer the original 'Fascination' to the Bimbo Jones and Linus Loves remixes

i notice there's a Van She Tech remix of 'Walking On A Dream', as if they read my mind...

the underwhelming “What’s It Gonna Be” by Platinum & H20.

also surprising! maybe it helps if you see the video

"I've been turning a blind eye here because Tim is Tim"

Appreciated! However if you'd prefer I'm happy to just syndicate the write-ups and let people e-mail me or join the facebook group for the download links - let me know if so.

The Facebook Group (which will continue into 2009, perhaps with a name change) is called "Strictly The Best: The 2008 Glamourous Pop Club". I made it quasi-private so I'm not sure if it comes up in searches. Feel free to send me a message on facebook asking for an invite.

hahaha Tim of course you've been getting into Steely Dan and Rickie Lee Jones--you like the Ne-Yo album! it's a '70s singer-songwriter album!

should have been a TIM @ KFC . EDU thread

his zshare links wda worked

(great stuff as usual tim, I'm only messing)

Motorcitysoul – Change You
http://www.sendspace.com/file/v9je9e

I’ve written several times of late about the resurgence of “deep house” as a determining stylistic principle in (the classy end of) dance music. This was a big thing last year too, and was responsible for lots of my favourite music of 2007 (stuff from Henrick Schwarz, Matt Johns, Dennis Ferrer), but this year it began to feel like THE THING in dance music. My interest has fallen off quite a bit, and I’ve provided several different theories as to why this is the case. But the key issue is probably that 2008 was classy dance music’s least ‘pop’ year in ages: lots of minimal (though no longer “minimal”), barely inflected “quality” productions so full of “soul” that there was no room left for a tune, so “deep” that all topographical dynamism gets smothered, all made by “cats” so jive that a positive reaction from plebian suburban, adolescent, gay, drug-using and/or female audiences would be rejected with distaste even if it was possible. I really don’t like the notion of “quality” anything in dance music: it suggests a reliability that is born of an aversion to making mistakes. Pop versions of dance music meanwhile tend to flirt with disaster, as they jump from the safe ground of niche stylistic affectation, across the yawning chasm of middlebrow crossover and towards widespread acceptance and adulation amongst people who don’t even know what rhodes keys are, let alone how to make them sound good in a house track. (NB. I'm not trying to suggest a "quality"/"pop" either/or here)

“Change You” is a nice exception to this trend, although for all of that a fairly middlebrow one; perhaps Motorcitysoul are as “quality” as my dance music listening tends to get these days. What marks this out is that it’s faux-US House in the broadest sense rather than the narrowest, less about getting a certain bass sound and more about the aching melodrama of its smooth male diva performance. It starts out fairly unobtrusively, its slowly morphing one-note synth bass pulse and nonchalant tenor vocal suggesting a tune happy to lounge in light-coloured calico pants in the afternoon sun. How it changes is obscured by one of those curious tricks of repetition that is hard to catch even when you’re listening for it. At about four minutes in, the groove is stripped back to a (relatively) intense staccato pulse while the diva sighs in a new melody: “Love has always been like this/a whispered prayer beneath a kiss…” In a pop tune this would be the middle-eight, and in a dance remix of a pop tune it would be the ostentatious breakdown which coincides with that middle-eight, when you realise that the song you’ve happily been dancing and singing along to is actually skating across a paper-thin surface covering a void of existential uncertainty.

House can capture this bigness of emotion with restrained gestures through an adjusted economy of scale, with even relatively mild expansions in the terrain of the groove suddenly evoking a sense of destabilisation or loss of identity. In “Change You” the shift in register moves from relaxed confidence (I imagine a game of unhurried, subtle flirtation) to a kind of barely concealed, urgent desperation, the groove’s imperceptible immersion into cavernous bass and tense bleeps resembling beads of sweat on a nonchalant pokerface. By itself this would be just about enough; what makes “Change You” magical is the way this is wrapped around the smooth diva’s performance, as he unwittingly sinks from his master’s perch and finds himself the slave of his own game of desire. Like Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”, this is mood music on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

New link for Aeroplane's "Whispers":

http://www.sendspace.com/file/nxnckk

Geeneus ft. Katy B – As I
http://www.sendspace.com/file/4hx06s

Possibly my biggest regret (among several) with regard to the year end lists contributed to Pitchfork, In Press etc. was my failure to adequately rate this absolute gem of a poppy UK funky house tune – certainly one of my absolute favourites of last year. One interesting thing about UK funky is how, perhaps due to the absence of a clearly identifiable sonic marker that would form the equivalent of the 2-step beat for UK garage, it’s gradually developed a much more distinct, treasurable homegrown song-style (in retrospect, UK Garage never really did this – perhaps because it never had to). So many of the great UK funky female vocal anthems – “Do You Mind”, “Mr. Seduction”, “Make Your Move”, “Tell Me” etc. – fall within strictly circumscribed parameters: very young, girly sounding singers, performances pitched exactly midway between R&B reserve and house diva histrionics, all driven by a sex-frenzied hunger that is entirely its own. Oh, and lyrics that surprise with their scrupulous formalist perfection.

On “As I”, the rhyming is almost decadently perfect: “I tried to put my finger on the time/when I started to see you in a different light/did it creep into my mind?/Or did you give me a sign?/I ain’t sure…/When your hand brushes past mine like that/did you mean to or was it an accident?/I wish that you’d do it again/so that I could feel your skin/once more…” There’s a… tightness to funky’s songwriting which marks it out from most vocal house, which usually draws a sharp line between the tension-building verses and the all-bases-go release of the choruses. In funky, the jump from the verses to the choruses is actually quite subtle, a very slight ramping up of the air of tension that is always already hovering close to fever pitch.

The music, of course, is delectable and irresistible, the usual perky funky beat moulding itself to ravey yet feminine soft-centered synth chords, like T99’s “Anaesthesia” or Nasty Habits’ “Dark Angel” remade as an unabashed singalong pop anthem. Plus the icing of the cake: that strange cantering beat that sprints across the end of every eighth’s bar (I like to pretend this is Geeneus’ sly response to Simon Reynolds’ complaint that too many funky rhythms have the awkward gait of a horse). In terms of context, “As I” wins for being a superlative demonstration of funky’s openness to whatever idea works. But context would be nothing without the seductive, sumptuous swing of its galloping groove, or the swooning desperation of Katy’s desire.

hey tim, do you think you could re-up that veronicas song

I am so good 2 U:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vzw9qz

thx u