Best electronic music albums of 1995: Moby versus David Holmes

What's black and white and red all over? I have no idea, so why not ignore that sentence and instead read this continuing contest to find the best electronic music album of 1995. With today's post, we reach the halfway point of the opening knock-out rounds, with each winner going through to the quarter-finals. See the series so far here, and see the 16 albums I started off with here.

I use a random number generator to pick each pairing. Today it is:

Everything Is Wrong by Moby
This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats by David Holmes

Here we have very different producers whose music has worked brilliantly in film and television: Moby in Heat, The Sopranos and Stranger Things, and David Holmes in a tonne of on-screen stuff including Ocean's Eleven and Killing Eve. But which one will stand up to my strict criteria? Let's find out.

Criteria one: which album would make a better biscuit?

The filmic flavour of Holmes' work is brilliantly suited to the rich history of biscuits and its many flavours: ginger, plain, chocolate, a bit more plain. As it tumbles from dirty beats into evocative samples, his debut album bridges the gap between his DJing career and his movie scores. And what is a biscuit other than a bridge between cake and bread? In contrast, Moby is the name of a fish and no biscuits taste of fish.
Winner: This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats

Criteria two: which album has more bangin' choons?

Holmes has a great ear for melody, and the album neatly loops back to the same hazy chords. But Moby's album has screaming rave tracks and angry thrash metal, with brilliant turns by Rozz Morehead for the fast stuff and Mimi Goese for the slow stuff. Bangin'? It's bulldozing down the doors while shooting foghorns out of a cannon.
Winner: Everything Is Wrong

Criteria three: which album's track titles better remind me of cute animals?

With track titles like When It's Cold I'd Like To Die, Moby's album isn't focused on cute animals. Many critters enjoy the cold, such as baby seals, baby penguins and all those baby spiders secretly hiding in your fridge. Holmes's track titles evoke a grizzly bear tearing through an orphanage, particularly with Got F***ed Up Along The Way and Slash The Seats. All in all, a disappointment for both albums. Moby scrapes a win because of the track name First Cool Hive: bumble bees are fuzzy.
Winner: Everything Is Wrong

Criteria four: which of the two would Jesus listen to?

The melancholic claustrophobia underpinning This Film's Crap feels more like purgatory than a heavenly place, despite the clanging church bell that ushers in the album. It's this uneasiness that made it such a remarkable work. On the other hand, Moby gives us rousing anthem after rousing anthem ("take me away!") that could easily be hollered from a pulpit. Everything Is Wrong is the sound of a coked-up church revival meeting. No wonder his early albums included the credit "Thanks to Jesus Christ".
Winner: Everything Is Wrong

Criteria five: which is the better album to sing songs about eggs to?

The best I could do with Holmes was "she don't even yolk" which isn't even a verb. Meanwhile, after the chorus in Feeling So Real, Moby has a sample that sounds like a truncated "eee-ee-eeggs". In other songs, I found myself singing "every time you touch me, I feel like I'm being boiled" and "I am white albumen, poaching forever, I fry into the blue" and on Bring Back My Happiness "these hard eggs let you go". So much fun. Another win for Moby.
Winner: Everything Is Wrong

Criteria six: which album has the better cover design?

An album called Everything Is Wrong and there's Moby looking depressed on the cover with a sad blue face? It's a bit on the nose. A metaphorical nose, that is, not Moby's nose. Stop thinking about Moby's nose. The montage that comprises the cover to David Holmes's album isn't particularly memorable: what do a few rips, a couple of hands and a big knife represent? Gordon Ramsay making whoopie? Yeesh. Don't think about that: think about Moby's nose instead. Holmes wins it because at least it looks like the cinematic layerings of his music.
Winner: This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats

Criteria seven: miscellaneous and worryingly random

This final selection of judging criteria comes to you courtesy of Wikipedia's random page function. Which album is most like a Bulgarian footballer? Holmes because he looks like he can dribble along a touch-line. Which album would make a great motto on a commemorative coin? In Brexit Britain, that would definitely be Everything Is Wrong. Which album should have represented Ireland in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest? David Holmes is from Belfast, so he's the closest. Which album's hindwings are whitish with an orange subbasal fascia? Moby has the most orange and white on his album cover so, er, that. Which album is scaaaaandalous (said in a RuPaul voice)? The seat-slashing David Holmes, obviously.
Winner: This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats

Overall winner and going through to the quarter-finals: This felt like a pretty easy win for Moby. Although he'll be mostly remembered for 1999's Play, selling 12 million units to Wrong's 250,000, it's nice to honour 90s raver Moby with this little success. Everything Is Wrong goes through to the quarter finals.

Stay tuned for another head-to-head battle to find the best electronic music album of 1995 as decided by a jury of one: me. See all the riders and runners here.

Further Fats: See the whole Best Albums Of 1995 series here.

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.
.
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.

Kelpe and Klimek: from the faded to the filmic

Cambio Wechsel is the third album from Kelpe (pictured), who, as you can see from that link, needs to update his website.

There's plenty of head-noddingness to the ambience, especially with the thin Woodstockian groove of After Gold and the Prefuse-infused buzz bass of Eye Candy Bath.

The seaside cheefulness of The Blankout Agreement is a little underwhelming, but spiralling from psychedelia and radiophonic samples to post-rock hip hop in the course of one album is pleasing - in fact, it's frequently scrumptious.

The whole effect is like listening to a postcard from a long forgotten era, and you can just make out the words Music Has The Right To Children on the postcode. I just wonder if it's sometimes a little too slight and faded.

Klimek also throws an album at us this week, in the expansive shape of Movies Is Magic.

It's filmic. Crikes, I've called Klimek 'filmic' before, but that's the whole point of this album. The idea of producing an album of cinematic audio vistas is not new - just ask David Holmes - but this is epic stuff. It's pretty much what I imagine it's like to hear the whole universe at once.

Tracks like Pathetic And Dangerous and the fabulously-titled Exposed To Life In It's Brutal Meaninglessness sway and wash against the surround-sound speakers.

Others, such as opener Abyss Of Anxiety (Unfolding The Magic), are darker, danker, and much less multiplex, giving this album much more crunch than ambient music often offers.

Pathetic, turgid and very unKylie - number two of a descending series of five

Hop across to Ebay and look up item number 120274828675. I've never sold on Ebay before, but there are my Kylie tickets right there.

Right then. Back to my enthralling series-- wait-- that doesn't quite sound right.

Back to my interesting series on customer reviews-- hold on a sec-- I'm not sure if that really sums things up too well.

One final try.

Back to my turgid attempt at a "series of posts" about customer reviews on i-tunes, as if anyone really gives a hamster's crotch.

Towards the beginning of the month, I decided to put up five reviews on i-tunes in a descending order of positivity. The first review got five stars, the second would get four stars, and so on until my fifth review which would be a scathing one-star rant.

And so to my four star review, referred to on this blog as "that album that had the red cover and it sounded a bit like a movie soundtrack," and otherwise known as Deadly Avenger's Deep Red.

This series will get interesting when we get into the lower stars. Honest.

Go, Kylie! You got it, guuurlfriend!

A warm, filmic engrossing album for fans of DJ Shadow and David
Holmes.

It ranges from gorgeously dark, low-down depths (Black Sun, Lopez), to
weaker easy listening down-tempo (Blade, Love Sounds), to Avenger's particular
area of strength - grand, spacious, friendly, meaty, beaty pieces of enjoyable
soundtrack pomp (We Took Pelham, Punisher).

Electronica that positively breathes down your neck. Four stars.

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.