100+ underrated dance albums 1998-2008

revenge of the underdogs

Alphawezen - L'Apres-Midi D'un Microphone

Hell - Munich Machine (I even started a thread about it, but apparently no one on ILX has heard it)

Eat Static - Crash and Burn!

It's a weird mixture of electro, trance, and pseudo-50s exotica and instrumental rock music. I think Eat Static originally was a Goa trance act, but this is something a bit different.

I think Eat Static were the dance offshoot of the unspeakable Ozric Tentacles.

Minion, "The Crash Session" (actually released in Nov 1997, so I'm rounding up by two months)

I started a Starfish Pool thread a few years ago and got maybe ten posts on it. Starfish Pool >>>>> most minimal released over the past five years. Dude was way ahead of his time (and his earlier, harsher-sounding albums like "Interference '96" are also still amazing.)

I think Eat Static were the dance offshoot of the unspeakable Ozric Tentacles.

yeah .. and most of the stuff is very dated, but i do seem to recall crash and burn ventured off from their usual alien obsessed trance groove.

Spirit Catcher - Night Vision

Presence - All Systems Gone - like a deep house Massive Attack (the pre-Mezzanine variety)
Kid Loco - A Grand Love Story - it's only trip hop but I like it
Thee Madkatt Courtship (aka Felix Da Housecat) - I Know Electrikboy
Aim - Cold Water Music

All 1999, I think

yeah .. and most of the stuff is very dated, but i do seem to recall crash and burn ventured off from their usual alien obsessed trance groove.

Yeah, the earlier stuff by them I've heard is trance, but Crash and Burn! is quite different, though it has some trance flavours too.

I was a bit underwhelmed by I Know Elektrikboy. The moodier tunes with vocals are nice, but the straight house bangers are not particularly memorable. I wish the whole album would've been like the title tune, which is ace.

kelly polar's love songs of the hanging garden is amazing, eclipses that dreary second record.

That hell album is a bit patchy but if it has los muchachos gruesos for the other side of suicide commando its worth owning. Interesting to hear him sketch out the ideas of early gigalo stuff

speaking early gigolo i spun the first mount sims record the other night and its great

neil landstrumm - she took a bullet meant for me

I bought that album when it came out, but the sound was a bit too industrial and deliberately harsh for my tastes. "Something Different" has a cool groove though.

julien chaptal, 'tokens' (2008)
in flagrsnti, 'wronger than everyone else' (2006)

in flagranti, even!

neil landstrumm - she took a bullet meant for me

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 28 January 2009 12:24 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
great record, new neil llandstrumms ace as well. In flagranti's ace, we had him DJing just after this came out

Jeff mills metropolis always gets forgotten but it has some of my favourite tracks by him on it.

ace ace ace bloody hell

later drexciya bits get a raw deal (lab rat XL, Harnessed the storm, shifted phases) but i prefer them to the UR stuff

how about toktok - "run.stop.restore"

later drexciya bits get a raw deal (lab rat XL, Harnessed the storm, shifted phases) but i prefer them to the UR stuff

I think the Hydro Doorways EP was probably my fave Drexciyan thing of the 'later' era tho it's been a while

Spirit Catcher - Night Vision

these guys had a couple of great singles. "Dirty Circuit" was really big that summer in whatever it was, 2003 or so.

armand van helden always gets slept on - "killing puritans" for instance

ditto the Presence album up there

2005 - jackson and his computer band - 'smash'
2004 - the emperor machine - 'aimee tallulah is hypnotised'

2001 : Playgroup - Playgroup

didn't quite hit the charts despite the double cd reissue/promo excess, but i still rate this highly.

1998: 16b - Sounds From Another Room

2000: Bell - "Numbers" techy electro in the vein of Aux 88 or the like.

you can hardly say jackson was underrated, you couldnt get away from it for about a year

Yeah I felt like saying that about Playgroup but I think these things are hugely dependent on the circles you move in. Jackson completely passed me by at the time FWIW

Presence album thirded. Good old Charles Webster, the grumpy old Ee-yore of deep house...

1998: The Children We Were - House Of 909.
1999: Low Life - Layo & Bushwacka.
2000: Wookie - Wookie.
2001: Curvatia- Spacek.
2002: Our Noise - Herrmann & Kleine.
2003: Up In Flames - Manitoba.
2004: Likes - Dani Siciliano.

you can hardly say jackson was underrated, you couldnt get away from it for about a year

helped by the fact that O2 picked up a few bubbly loops from one of the album tracks for their adverts.

[or am i mistaken?]

pantytec - ponyslaystation

Is Up In Flames underrated? Is it even a 'dance' album? It got pretty raver eviews at the time.

pantytec - ponyslaystation

― rio (r1o natsume)

lol, i just deleted that off my hard drive yesterday while going on a cleanup. Underrated indeed!

dani siciliano is yums

raiders of the lost arp - 4 (2004)
richard bartz - midnight man (2004)

Bjorn Torske - Trobbel

pantytec - also dandy jack

Those Norwegians - Kaminzky Park
http://www.discogs.com/Those-Norwegians-Kaminzky-Park/release/547

ok ok it came out in 1997 but it's pretty goodt. Really sludgy, organic house music. One of the guys went on to be part of Royksop, but I think this was better than that.

if you like quirky music, the entire 56 stuff label -

http://www.56stuff.ru/eng/

Killing Puritans really isn't very good, but 2 Future 4 U is great great great and belongs on this list for sure. Gandhi Khan is ridiculous in a jokey way but I still like it more than Puritans.

i completely reject the idea that either Playgroup or Armand Van Helden were underrated.

both danny wang full-lengths are from this time period right?

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Daniel+Wang

I have fond memories of 16B and House of 909 too, as well as Muzique Tropique's Collection - all of them, like Presence, deep house. Maybe all deep house albums are doomed to be underrated, at least British ones.

well okay then:

Danny Wang - I Was A Disco Malcontent (2xLP) OMW (Oxygen Music Works) 1998
Daniel Wang -Idealism (LP) Environ 2001

Alpinestars - both albums; they were wrongly written off as another batch of Air-imitators, but they had an electro/mid-career New Order element that made their records a lot more danceable &, generally, fun than the Zero-7's of the world.

Speaking of deep house, I think this album was a really interesting and good combination of the sort of deep house F Comm was best known for, and the more abstract/minimal house sound of the 00s:

http://www.leninimports.com/readymade_bold_cd.jpg

Too bad this Readymade dude has since then moved on to doing indie rock or something.

Richard Bartz seconded.

I enjoyed last year's "Skip the foreplay" by Pan/Tone but it's super functional and am not sure how much longevity it'll have.

2000: I-F – Mixed Up In The Hague Vol. 1 (Panamamix)
not underrated, you crazy american rock dude you.
yeah this is easily one of the touchpoint albums of the decade!

How are we defining "underrated," then? This may have been a critics' fave (for those who even got their hands on it), but in terms of larger impact upon electronic dance-music culture (or let's just say pop-music culture generally) I'd say it's definitely an overlooked gem. I'm with Chuck.

wow that mix was way more than a critics fave from my where i sat at the time. i heard it all over the place. the first pressing was pretty easy to get (in a big city, anyway) and i think it was re-pressed in 07. there was even a volume 2 IIRC (not as good). i think we need a better definition of underrated here. i also don't think you'd get say, the knife, without mixed up in the hague.

i guess i would say that it's underrated in that it's really difficult to overrate it.

I think vahid's redefinition "unjustly ignored" is a better one. More specifically, I think this thread is about records that are overlooked even by gatekeepers and the like - whereas any dance music gatekeeper worth their salt praises the I-F mix. Inevitably pipecock et. al. will come on here and make a case for Theo and Moodymann, but they similarly strike me as having their place in dance music history (at least amongst the cognoscenti) secure.

There's heaps of examples of records like Mixed Up... which ended up (through permeations of influence) having a big ultimate effect above and beyond who actually heard them.

I mean, by that definition stuff like kompakt schaffel circa 2003 is underrated insofar as the people who like Katy Perry and Britney records now aren't aware of their formative role in shaping that sound. But that strikes me as a different dynamic. An interesting one that's worth talking about, but a different one nonetheless.

Fumiya Tanaka - Unknown Possibility Vol. 2

I'd be tempted to add Surgeon's "Force and Form" too, but that one wasn't underrated as I recall. The Tanaka album on the other hand was not mentioned much anywhere, but it was a bit of a new techno universe for me, listening over and over while riding the trains. It's hard to say what it sounded like.

"unjustly ignored" is how i understood the premise of the thread.

in that case how about:

afx/aphex twin - chosen lords, which has moments that are like the prodigy if the prodigy actually made good records these days. it's still aphex twin doing his thing with his machines. look at it as selected ambient works vol 3 if that will get you to check it out. i'm sure the cd has nothing on the ten 12-inches from which it is compiled. i lost track after 1 & 2.

omar-s - just ask the lonely. before "psychotic photosynthesis" there was this lp and the song "just ask the lonely", which is just as good. i remember groove charting this, but not hearing about it too much elsewhere. deep destroyed (filtered, fucked with) detroit house in the theo parrish/moodymann mold, but he takes it to his own place. (there's a pipecock review of this on discogs)

stefan goldmann - the transitory state. a micro-house album in 2008? that's actually good? yes and yes. micro-house is actually really shitty shorthand for this music, which has melodic-harmonic drone, perlon trickery, and a reduced sound palette used with real economy and panache. it's too maximal to be minimal.

pub - summer. ambient house that befits its name (with epic introverted vladislav delay remix that somehow inverts most of the melody of the original while sustaining the same kind of feeling.) really really good on hot lazy days. technically this is a comp of two singles.

scion - arrange and process basic channel tracks. does what it says and very well.

mathias tanzmann - restless. a micro-house album in 2008? that's actually good? yup. this one actually is micro-house and probably relies too much on fussy software edits and tricks for some ears, but every time i listen to it, it draws me in. all of the sounds on this album are crazy clipped, there is little in the way of sustained hooks or basslines (as is the style of a large proportion of contemporary minimal techno), but the grooves are what saves it. if you don't like micro-house or minimal, don't go near this.

process - re-processed. this is technically a comp (and 2cds at that) of remixes of process (the guy who is also cosmic sandwich). i guess the notable thing about this comp is that it came out at (or very near) the peak of trapez/traum. you get the sense that the artists were all very enthused to be involved.

Gosub - Watchers From The Black Universe

A solid electro 2x12 preceded by three excellent 12"s as Gosub(and a great 12" on Southern Outpost as Dcast Dynamics) that didn't seem to get much play when it came out a couple years back. This project deserved a lot more attention then it received.

Kobol Electronics - Computer Pervaded Society

This record was recorded in memory of James Stinson and is about as derivative of Dopplereffekt as you can get. The up side is that everything on this record could fit seamlessly into Gesamkunstwerk. It's running time is just under 30 minutes so it might be a couple songs short of an album but something very worth looking into. It came out on some no-profile Italian label and didn't make much noise when it was released. It was made by a duo with very little other released work. They dropped one mind blowing 12" and disappeared.

Arpanet - Wireless Internet

The best Arpanet record and a concept album about pervasive internet connectivity via smart phones that was released 7 years ago. I don't know if this album is underrated per se, but it definitely does not have the profile that the Other People's Place record had. Everybody who knows about this record thinks its good, it is just too bad more people don't know about it.

Markus Nikolai is like duh EXCELLENT SUGGESTION

yeah it's *amazing* how many people have heard "bushes" but not "back"

Lexis - Branch of Knowledge - Lexis just gives off this vibe of being a lesser light, like, if Source Direct were the ravey Photek, Lexis was just the pleasant Photek. "Just the pleasant Photek" seems like a potentially noble aspiration to me though, and I adore pretty much everything on this album

yeah, i would make a similar argument for like, the entirety of the certificate 18 catalogue, especially those incredible "hidden rooms" compilations they put out.

3) Dom & Roland is a good suggestion. I sometimes wonder if it's improved reputation these days is solely down to my own proselytising. Still the best single artist techstep album ever, both for maintaining the rhythmic danger half the time, and for making great arguments for rhythmic conformity the other half.

i am actually going to agree with your rather immodest proposal, partly because i feel solely responsible for the critical reevaluation of motorbass' "pansoul" album. still not there yet with jess & crabbe, though, wonder why people haven't realized they're actually better than basement jaxx?

you're wrong though, tim, on another count - "industry" is only the 2nd best techstep album, the best was "diagnostics" by technical itch.

I'd be tempted to add Surgeon's "Force and Form" too, but that one wasn't underrated as I recall

surgeon in general is rather underrated around these parts. i particularly like the counterbalance collection.

i mean maybe by underrated i mean the dance thread equivalent of "damn this shit still sound good, why does nobody mention it anymore?"

that Arpanet record even sounds like a lost classic

i seem to recall the arpanet album being sorta boring dopplereffekt-by-numbers but i guess i should go back. "other people place" maybe was rated higher because it came out on warp (duh) but also because it was like drexciya doing sunny, boogie / r&b / deep house inflected electro, which was a welcome change at that point from the usual acrid synth & drum machine workouts.

and i will totally cosign the whole theory of dance mag boosterism - i remember the day that i opened up ... uh ... one of the defunct dance mags ... either muzik or DJ and i saw that icons "emotions with intellect" was the album of the month and they had given it like 10 stars out of 5. and then the new cj bolland got the album of the month the next month or something. and i was like "damn, if this isn't payola ..."

i'll say i do think the recent dopplereffekt was pretty underrated. i mean considering how many people rep for john carpenter movies and soundtracks who could resist two discs of gerald donald produced john carpenter soundtracks?

the "linear accelerator" suite is completely creepy and utterly visceral drone music and i can't believe all the people who are buying mika vainio albums and early cluster albums didn't pick it up.

I have Hidden Rooms 2 and Hidden Rooms 3 and both are pretty amazing, esp. the Teebee tracks on the latter.

"you're wrong though, tim, on another count - "industry" is only the 2nd best techstep album, the best was "diagnostics" by technical itch."

This I don't get though, I picked this up a while back owing to ILX support (poss. yours) and was like "um isn't this just well-produced 2-step techstep circa 1999?" I mean that sound is nice sometimes too but I can't fuck with a whole single artist album of it.

I would say that the Kryptic Minds/Leon Switch album is underrated but it's about as rated as any golden age of techstep album released in 2007 could expect to be.

Stefan Goldmann's The Transitory State hasn't drawn me back as much as I expected it to, and I wonder if it's because a) his style can seem slightly schticky at times, or b) he's a bit self-conscious about that and so tries to go all serious on the album. There's something a bit Trentemollerish about him in that sense - for both producers it's hard to top the experience of their first few tracks. This might be part of why he's a little bit underrated; people don't really expect him to be a long term artist. Unfairly, I'll probably never be able to dig anything by him as much as I dig his remix of IT's "Women In Toilet".

How are we defining "underrated," then? This may have been a critics' fave (for those who even got their hands on it), but in terms of larger impact upon electronic dance-music culture (or let's just say pop-music culture generally) I'd say it's definitely an overlooked gem. I'm with Chuck.

I'd have thought seriously that everybody has heard 10000 people rep for that record, over and over and over, we don't need to underline that by saying "all the praise is still not enough, lets remove our hats one final time in awe".

It's so far from being just a critic record too, practically everyone I know who got into electroclash/electrohouse listened to that I/F mix. I really can't stand the tendency in dance music to repeatedly label the same oft-discussed things as underrated underdogs to the point where it's part of an ongoing narrative surrounding those works.

I/F definitely is one such record, so many people who like it will always say it's underrated, and if the "wrong" people like it then that's not good enough either.

yeah, when pitchfork is writing lines like After Dark ... is practically a Mixed Up in the Hague for present-day Italo you know then record doesn't really need any more notice.

maybe the correct answer then is i-f's fucking consumer. "space invaders are smoking grass" eclipses the rest of that lp and indeed some of the tracks sound like rehashes of it (not always a bad thing!), but as far as dance albums go it's pretty underrated. great title, too.

my thumbs up to other albums mentioned here go to: jeff mills (great cover piece in this month's wire), arpanet, markus nicolai (one of the best perlon lps), raiders of the lost arp (nature records in general is pretty underrated), dom & roland and to a lesser extend tech itch and panacea.

i wanted to like the i:cube albums, but his singles always are way better than the full-lengths and single releases are something he just keeps getting better at.

would like to hear: spirit catcher, in flagranti, richard bartz

and in other news, dance music is still a singles and mix genre.

i can't remember the name of the artist or album, but i am almost positive the album came out on position chrome (it was german d&b) and gave tech itch and panacea are run for their money. it is nasty industrial but not funkless tech-step.

polar's 37 deg and falling is a very good d&b album, too.

ronan, i think you are reading more into my comments than i actually said. but whatever.

properly underrated, then, is Pink Elln's Electronic Dreamplant (Saasfee*, 2002) -- wonderful blippy melodic electro that doesn't get mentioned much.

yeah i'm a huge i:cube / chateau flight fan and i find it hard to rep for i:cube's albums. i mean i have all of them and they're great, but when you compare them to like the prophetization EP, chicago sur seine EP, the deep end EP, acid tablet EP, fr33z EP ... it's just like no fucking contest.

all of those are available on itunes btw.

jesse rose and chateau flight's body language were sorely underrated, at least compared to the attention that dixon and matthew dear's volumes got.

Phil sorry if it seemed I was on the offensive, it's not specific to you I made my points above but I do think they were worth making/valid, Tim said quite a similar thing albeit less bitterly...

just can't help but feel a bit off at seeing such a huge canonical mix on a thread like this...in the current climate it's just like how/why

back on topic...what a shame this music doesn't exist anymore http://www.discogs.com/release/129604 or does it? the red jerry tune on this is incredible.

http://www.discogs.com/release/48566 (this is one of best mix cds of all time, pre-empted so much of what came after but remains a strange mix of styles too, eg who plays deep house like that amazing Hotel Costes style Charles Schilling record and something like the Rapture)

i never got into that "le future le funk" comp. i think i threw it away about six months ago. the only i remember are the swag mix of metro area, pearson's freeform five track and JLC's mirwais remix. all of those being incredible and epoch-defining tracks (for me, anyway). but other than that i found it to be a sea of blandness (and i am a total chicken lips booster).

so what gives? tell me what you liked about it, ronan.

ps - i would argue that the milder bits of that disc have continued on in the form of BEAR FUNK family of labels. the tougher electrohouse bits not so much, i guess.

It seems sort of quaint in hindsight or something, that UK house scene feel, I mean now everything is through Germany and even tho say "Mushrooms" is a hugely popular record you hear a lot there's not actually that much of that Salt City Orchestra style house music being made...I like stuff like the Swag track, the Chris Lum record, I love the Brooks track on it, seriously brilliant vocals and a real pop feeling to it.

And as I said the Red Jerry remix is amazing, v melancholy and v deep but not connected to Detroit/Chicago...v 90s in feeling, not part of a sci fi narrative...part of a Mixmag one.

I have a really big love for that quirky or camp pop inflected deep house which is on that mix. Again there aren't many records like that about at the moment, or whatever quirkiness there is doesn't appeal always (eg Noze or someone is too much for me, and not actually funny.)

I feel like I should mention Andre Kraml's "Safari" here as a really good example of Germany doing this style, but a pretty rare one too. Dave Aju's "Anytime" from this year was another good recent example. But yeah more of that style (or a different environment of underground "deepness" which could accomodate it more) would be cool.

sorry I am in ribbons today btw hence muddled thoughts but consider the first two pars and the second two as two separate points!

also on a totally different topic, it's not an album but I've been using a really old ipod lately and Luomo's remix of Black Dice came on shuffle recently....one for the ages.

well speaking of SCO, you know that i am like the biggest fan of paper recordings and classic and glasgow underground and pagan and whatnot, but honestly i don't really see the connection between that sadly forgotten vibe and the le future le funk comp

"And as I said the Red Jerry remix is amazing, v melancholy and v deep but not connected to Detroit/Chicago...v 90s in feeling, not part of a sci fi narrative...part of a Mixmag one."

YES, I love this tune. When I finally inherited an old turntable in 2003 it was, I think, the first thing I picked up on vinyl.

I like the idea of "Mixmag narrative" too - isn't Red Jerry actually one of the key backroommen of Hooj Choons? I feel like people like that and the music they make will always be sniffed at by whole swathes of dance music listeners and critics, though it probably never hurt them commercially. Of course if this track had been made by Richard Davis it would have sold less but gotten more plaudits.

Presumably there's lots of albums in this tent (esp. the further you drift towards prog) that are "unjustly ignored" insofar as that while Mixmag gave them 5/5 at the time, Mixmag will struggle to create a longlasting historical context for them (if it even wants to now?). Resident Advisor has prog roots too but I don't see them doing loving retrospectives on Tilt and Quivver the like. The excellent 16B seems to be reasonably rated, perhaps as the one prog producer that all non-prog listeners check for (and I must find his albums one of these days). Beyond that, I don't know - Sasha & Digweed mixes and (in a different sense) Underworld were always enough for me.

"well speaking of SCO, you know that i am like the biggest fan of paper recordings and classic and glasgow underground and pagan and whatnot, but honestly i don't really see the connection between that sadly forgotten vibe and the le future le funk comp"

Ha, that SCO remix is pretty much at the centre of everything - the druggier end of deep house, romantic prog, Hypercity-style microhouse, US cap-donning.

I get what Ronan is saying - I could easily imagine that track on the second disc of Le Future Le Funk nestled up against Red Jerry and 16B. But that's as much due to its flexibility as anything essential about the track itself.

For me it will always "belong" in the Andrew Weatherall Live @ the Social mix.

bigtime. it is a fucking unbelievable record...like prob in my all top time top 5 if I ever drew one up...

Wait, which one, Red Jerry or Mushrooms? I assume you mean "Mushrooms".

Could well be for me as well.

the incredible thing about mushrooms is that it was written by hard loop techno stalwart CHRIS LIEBING of all people

Richard X: "The X Factor".

tim & ronan i put up a mix in the djs post your mixes thread; it is sorta wack but i tried hard to get at that vibe of the druggiest end of deep house.

Once the free service is no longer at full capacity I will get on this vahid!

But watch out, you'll get in trouble if you keep talking about "the druggiest end of deep house" around these parts.

yeah i'm the same, it wasn't working when I tried to get it.

I love drugs btw. I can't even take drugs without being on drugs.

just for you, ronan & tim: http://www.sendspace.com/file/an0umh

Vahid this is great. I am surprised you describe it as druggy deep house though! Strikes me more as uptempo, celebratory, occasionally bleary and certainly tipsy. A great middle-ground between french-sounding disco glamour and more of an American rough-hewn feel.

yeah in my world drugs are basically things i take for backache or sore neck, sometimes unwisely mixed with margaritas ... so bleary & tipsy = druggy. i know, i know, it's not like k-hole villalobos house or anything like that.

actually i wanted to do a "live at the social" (chems and jon carter, not the others) type of thing. celebratory, but super messy.

sort of bummed that i could figure out how to fit "run 2" (off the technique b-sides) onto there.

I'll cosign on Process, "Reprocessed" and Scion, "Arrange and Process Basic Channel Tracks". I don't think the Scion mix went unappreciated at the time, but it pretty much vanished not long after (although wasn't it re-released last year?). Still one of my favourite mixes, though.

I thought the whole point of late-90's/early-00's Speedy J was the muddy production! "A Shocking Hobby" is as noisy and frazzled as techno can get without turning into industrial/rhymthic noise.

That Scion mix is awesome, makes Basic Channel sound even more amazing than they are.

andrea parker's "kiss my arp"