Best electronic albums of 2020: these special mentions will not be intimidated by a mop

It's time for a penultimate set of special mentions, consisting of albums I flipping loved but couldn't find space for in my final Top 25.

This lot are filed in my notes as, and I quote, "jungle / dirty". As with previous notes, it's a misnomer. All of the "jungle" is drum 'n' bass. And it's hardly dirty: it's not as if I'm going to sloosh this lot with a mop to make them sound better.

Calibre rummaged in his archives yet again for Shelflife Six (Signature) a selection of sharp-suited soulful drum 'n' bass pleasers. Really good fun, and a superb entry album if you're investigating the busy beats of d&b music. On similar lines, the ever-reliable J Majik produced another corker in the form of Always Be (Infrared), his breezy Bukem sounds delivered with a warm hug (copyright Electronic Sound issue umpteen).

dgoHn's Undesignated Proximate (Love Love Records) was a darker drum 'n' bass listen, but no less liquid. It's just the liquid was a heavily fortified sherry rather than oil: just listen to that woozy swagger of Robin's Windmill. It was great to see the return of Krust, member of Roni Size’s Reprazent's back in the day. The Edge of Everything (Crosstown Rebels) was a thrilling listen: lots of robust rolling beats with synths so threatening, you half expect them to pounce on you the moment you drop your guard.

Moving away from drum 'n' bass now. I suppose this is the "dirty" stuff. Pinch's astonishing new album was, as I wrote in one review, "UK bass music with a nocturnal gloom": the wobbling basslines on Reality Tunnels (Tectonic) seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in our psyche. Gábor Lázár's more minimal Source (Planet Mu) was equally bassy and wobbly, his cut-down production style playing ping-pong with frequencies with skilful abandon.

Finally, Cylob was a busy bunny this year: one of the albums he put out was the squelchy One Less Pitch (Cylob Industries) with acid so corrugated, you could make it into a shed. It's a strangely tense listen, but then again everything's strangely tense, so I'm not complaining. *mops self*

 

Browse the rest of the Best Electronic Albums of 2020

Album reviews: Shlohmo's clunky knobs, Ambient News's sepia hue and Mark E spluttering all over your face

Right then, enough about Autechre's leakiness for now. Time for some slap-dash album reviews.

Ambient News

The recent self-titled album from Ambient News doesn't push the envelope so much as snuggle inside it to avoid disturbing the postman.

The busy little beat smothered in vocoders on Moon On My Forehead is as energetic as this album gets. It will appeal to those who like looking at their ambient music with sepia-hued retinas: think Tangerine Dream, 1990's Plaid in simmering mode, or particularly the Feed Your Head compilations.

Hiding behind the Ambient News moniker is Cylob, the man who brought us a superb subversion of rave culture in Rewind. This alternative guise gives him the chance to mess around with harmoniums and gamelan-style 'earth' ambience.

Ambient News sounds incomplete. If it was BBC Ambient News 24, at the top of every hour, it would have about 15 minutes of newsreaders filing their nails. It's almost as if Cylob had been gathering ideas together for a long time, but never quite realised his vision...

Mark E

...unlike Mark E. This hypnotic house music peddler has also been hoarding tracks, but his resulting Works 2005 - 2009 compilation is a much grander affair than Ambient News. I wouldn't normally delve into disco house on this website, but this album splutters quality all over your face, licks it off with a big lizard tongue, then spits all the quality back in your face again.

You see, for someone who's made his diminuitive name giving us his take on Janet Jackson and Diana Ross (now there's a duet I'd like to see), a lot of these tracks are a bit too slow, a bit too subtle and dangerously hypnotic. And that's a good thing.

As for individual cuts, I'm not mad on the funkiness of Sun Shadow, even though Mr Scruff has been pummeling away at that track like a Daily Mail reader who's just discovered a hammer for the first time. But Mark E's reworks of Slave 1 and Plastic People are house music at its most sexy and sublime.

Shlohmo

Finally, us IDM fans have been dropped a cracking album from Los Angeles beat scientist Shlohmo (pictured above, not to be confused with the beatboxer with a similar name).

Shlomoshun Deluxe is an album of brittle lo-fi beats in the Hudson Mohawke / J Dilla vein. And when I say lo-fi, I'm not kidding. He plugged a mic into his laptop, along with his dad's ancient Jupiter 6 (an old Roland synth with clunky knobs) and, somehow, expected to produce a good album.
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He did: it's my favourite album this week. The emphasis is all on the groove, and it has a David Holmes wideness to it - which is a remarkable achievement considering he made the whole thing from sellotape, string, splittle and sausages. Well, maybe not the sausages.

Stinking heave and hoik-encrusted walls: how Cylob saved my sleep

My 18-year-old cat puked in the middle of the night. It's what cats do.

Except she connived to sit on a chair and projectile vomit at a height before switching direction twice to complete a scattered ring of her her brown, festering insides.

And so with my bedroom covered in stinking heave while the rest of the universe was sleeping, I retreated to Youtube to find a remedy for my predicament.

Skimming neatly past the 'how to clean vomit from carpets' tutorials, I bumped into Cylob's mid-90s single Cut The Midrange Drop The Bass. This was a playful splatter-rap of rave lingo over cheery melodic electronica, and playing it at full volume at three in the morning somehow rendered my hoik-encrusted walls immaterial.

Just on the strength of the video, though, take a look at Cylob's Rewind (above). The unofficial sister single to Cut The Midrange, it features martial artist Chloe Bruce who bizarrely shares a name with a former Hollyoaks character. Apparently.

For the full Fat Roland experience while watching this video, please imagine the smell of rotting, regurgitated meat, some of which is still dripping from your computer screen.

If you are duly enchanted, then set your mouth to 'O' for 'wow' because I have exciting news*: Cylob's human alter-ego, former trombone player Chris Jeffs has set up his own label Cylob Industries.

In other words, one of electronica's creative clever men has a license to print records.

That means three Cylob albums in three months. Yes, wow! Trojan Fader Style is already out, Bounds Green came out on Monday, and next month sees the release of Formant Potaton. Find how to grab a copy of any of them here at Cylob's blog.

I slept easy after getting all excited about Cylob on Youtube. I don't know about you, but a pillow lumpy and slippery from feline barf isn't so bad once you've recovered from the brain-damaging smell.

*when I say 'news', I mean in the sense that it happened ages ago but still may be news to people that haven't heard of him

Reqing out* to retina.IT gets the headnod over stalking Sven Väth and Andrew Weatherall in The Orbit

So what musics have been troubling me ears?

Let's begin with Cylob (pictured), who made his name in the 90s remixing the likes of Aphex Twin and Mike Flowers Pops, both of whom sport more hair than they deserve to. The 'lob span his first reel-to-reels in The Orbit club, Leeds, a venue which arguably spawned my Fat Roland career. I remember watching DJs Andrew Weatherall and Sven Väth with intense interest, hovering behind them like a stalker. As I left the club, I had a lucid moment when I decided, with a theatrical flourish, that yes the world needed my DJing skills. (It didn't, but I went into DJing anyway.)

Cylob's new track Rock The Trojan Fader isn't as immediate as his lovable classic Cut The Midrange Drop The Bass, but it has the same playfulness and eccentricity. Vocoded voices dance up and down analogue keyboards while everything else collapses into a heap of flurried beats.

It bodes well for new album Trojan Fader Style, which I haven't bothered to listen to yet because it's all one long track.

On to everyone's favourite aging relative, Unkle.

The moment Unkle persuaded arch-miserablist Thom Yorke to wail about rabbits and headlights, I was transfixed like a rabbit in some headlights. Yeah, neat simile, I know. Since that high point last decade, we haven't had much output from the band founded by James Lavelle and David Holmes-collaborator Tim Goldsworthy. So the new Unkle album War Stories should be a rare elixir.

It isn't. It is a decent rock album, and comparisons to Kasabian and Stone Roses are fair. The opening tune Chemistry reminds me of Puff Diddly's ridiculously entertaining Come With Me: that's not necessarily a good thing.

But the Fat Roland blog is about electronica, and when Unkle are collaborating with the likes of Josh Homme and The Cult's Ian Astbury, it just ain't gonna ring my bell.

Like former member DJ Shadow, they seem to have found a formula that works. Generally. Most of the time. Kind of. They just need to move on from trip-hop rock crossovers, which were vogue about 52 years ago.

Back to the good music. When I played retina.IT's infectious Tetsub at Manchester's TV21 bar recentlly, I was overwhelmed with a head-noddy Req moment. Anyone who's got into Req will understand me.

retina.IT have now released Semeion, a greatest hits of sorts, full of mid-tempo glitchy bleeps and distorted yet distant funk.

Their studio lies within erupting distance of Mount Vesuvius, and I wonder if they haven't got a satellite or two picking up the sinister clicks and scrapes sprinkled across this sparse, lunar album.

It's such a pleasing effort, lying somewhere between the coldness of Robin Rimbaud and the chunkiness of Clark, that I'm going to give this the head nod over Cylob and Unkle.

I'm careful about who I hyperlink to on this site. Thankfully, I got through this post without mentioning that Unkle used to record in Meatloaf's recording studio. Ah dammit, there's a link to Meatloaf. Oy, stop linking to Meatloaf. Aaw look, Blogger's gone and put a label down there too...

*yes, Reqing out. I just invented it.