Best electronic albums of 2019: lovely earworm soup

For the last time in this best albums countdown, let's park the rollercoaster for a moment and smell the candyfloss. Here's a longlist of music heavyweights who failed to make the final cut: they're totally good and brilliant, but I kicked them to the kerb like a sassy Simon Cowell.

First up in this best-of-the-rest is Kornél Kovács and the thoroughly likeable Stockholm Marathon (Studio Barnhus). What starts as sugar-sweet vocal pop becomes a sun-glazed soup of instrumental  earworm after instrumentalearworm. Not that I'd drink a soup filled with worm ears. It sounds disgusting.

Jacques Greene got his epic on for Dawn Chorus (LuckyMe), which balanced the bright boldness of Jamie Xx and the scuzzed darkness of Clark. Jenny Hval dived into some sparkly electronics on The Practice Of Love (Sacred Bones Records), a seventh studio album fired off while writing a novel – hashtag multitasking. And Signals Into Space (Les Disques du Crépuscule) was the soft-focus return of Ultramarine, techno's answer to Channel 4's Watercolour Challenge.

The ever-filmic Amon Tobin was in an ambient mood on the intricate Fear In A Handful of Dust (Nomark). Flying Lotus was as generous and as overwhelming as ever on Flamagra (Warp Records), a work pepped up with a strange appearance by David Lynch. And although I thought Modeselektor's Who Else (Monkeytown Records) was a mixed affair, there was enough fried gold to make this longlist.

And finally here are some giants of electronic music who I've consumed in small portions in 2019, but haven't absorbed enough to include in my final list. Because I can't knowingly give full recommendations, I shall describe each album with a meaningless simile. James Blake's Assume Form (Universal Music) was like a hot toaster on a day trip to a dog-strewn beach. Hot Chip's A Bath Full of Ecstasy (Domino) was like a hovercraft balancing atop the concept of green. And finally, Metronomy's catchy Metronomy Forever (Because Music) was like a metronome catching the metro with a, er, gnome, um, er, jeez, this is worse than the fruit puns. *destroys computer with chainsaw*





Scroll the full best-of-2019 list here.

Time for a poke: new music from James Blake, Req and Mikron

Here is some new music that has just dropped from the sky like a shower of frogs.

First. After a teaser advert in a tube station, which displayed the name of the album so really was so much as teasing as being poked in the face with a telegraph pole, James Blake has blurted out a new album. It's called Assume Form.

He's much more than a Singer, capital S, these days, with all his harmonies and sweetness. I'm an instrumentation junkie, preferring the punch of his 2010 single CMYK. Still, I'll give it a listen - his delicate vocals are like chocolate-dipped honey served on the eyelash of a unicorn.

Second. Req is delivering us Tape Transport: 1994-2000. Contrary to what its title may suggest, it's not the chronicles of a troubled VHS delivery company during the rise of DVDs. The Brighton b-boy beatsmith has a truck full of rare and lost recordings. His Sketchbook album on Warp back in 2002 is well worth a listen.

Third. There's also Mikron’s Severance, out now on Sheffield's Central Processing Unit. It's right lovely sounding and will tickle the ear of anyone into Detroit techno, Ulrich Schnauss and Boards of Canada.

I review two of these in the next Electronic Sound magazine, which you have to buy otherwise James Blake will come round your hovel and tease you with a javelin.

Clips below. Enjoy.







Further Fats: BPA's album is a trouser-fiddling mess of buffalo proportions (2009)

Further Fats: Listen (and cry) to Ulrich Shnauss's Love Grows Out Of Thin Air (2016)

Best electronic albums of 2016: sixteen

16 – James Blake – The Colour In Anything (Universal Music)

The curse of the Mercury Prize. You know how it goes. Whoever wins is confined to a cellar for the rest of their career, never to be seen again. This is James Blake’s first album since he bagged the award in 2013. Uh oh. Down you go, Blakey, into the darkness.

Getting a more famous Blake to do his cover of The Colour In Anything was a smart move. Yep, this is work of Quentin. Although James still sounds like an adorably sulky teenager, he's fattened up his sound. He even worked with Rick ‘Def Jam’ Rubin on the production.

Which is the key, really, It’s never all about the voice for me. Listen to the urgent ringing alarm that slices Radio Silence (listen below) in two. The shattered shakes of Modern Soul’s percussion. The fuzzed brass of Timeless. There’s more going on with post-Mercury Blakey. If he is confined to a cellar of obscurity, he’s sure making a lot of lovely sound.


Scroll all of the best 2016 electronic albums by clicking here.

James Blake's The Colour In Anything: Spot The Difference quiz

Let's play Spot The Difference with the cover of James Blake's new album The Colour In Anything.

What, you don't want to play Spot The Difference with the cover of James Blake's new album The Colour In Anything? Shut up. We're playing Spot The Difference with the cover of James Blake's new album The Colour In Anything.

There are TEN differences between these album covers (below). Some are more obvious than others. See if you can spot all ten. You can click on each picture to make it bigger.

Here is the solution (will open a new page).

Click for bigger

Click for bigger

Here is the solution.

Further Fats: This blog is jenerally only bothered with blokes with the initials JB (2011)

A new James Blake tune (or "James Blune" if you will)

I always thought James Blake's Achilles heel, or his "James Blilles heel" if you will, was his quietness. Obviously, that's what you buy into with JB, but I thought it was such a shame that CMYK, a beatier track, was left off his debut album. Maybe I'm still bitter that James Blake once killed my computer.

His new single sits I Need A Forest Fire neatly between James Blake quietness, or "James Blietness" if you will, and something a bit more substantial. And it's got a hook that will nestle in your memory for some time. I like.

Here's the single edit (or "James Blingle edit" if you will). Enjoy.

Best electronica albums of 2013: live blog

Welcome

Welcome to my live posting of what I reckon is the best electronic music of 2013.

How this works

There will be about nine or ten updates of this one blog post during New Year's Eve 2013. We start now and I'll slowly reveal my top ten albums until we hit the number one some time in the afternoon. Keep checking back here or follow the progress on Twitter.

As with previous lists, there is no way my list is comprehensive. I may even miss some big albums because I am forgetful and slightly high on Windowlene. But any punk will tell you, daft or otherwise, that this has been a massive year for electronic music and I believe this list represents the most memorable, the most moving, the most affecting long-playing electronica of the year.


Apologies in advance if the amount of text is more paltry than in previous years. I usually write all this well in advance, but 2013 hasn't afforded me that luxury. The panic-buy Windowlene queues took weeks out of my life. Instead, I have my list and I am writing this 'live'.

Previous winners of my best album award have been Clark, Mount Kimbie (although it should have been Luke Abbott), Rustie, Andy Stott and Lone. Who will be this year's number one? Who cares? Where am I? What's that on my shoe? Who knows.

Edit: See also the best electronic music of January 2014.

10 - Factory Floor - Factory Floor (DFA)

Journalists practically milked themselved shrivelsome over the tense industrial swagger of Factory Floor. Its post-punk sensibilities, drenched as it is in analogue synthesisers, percussive stabs and detuned vocals, encourage you to wiggle your shoulder pads in robotic-style on the dancefloor.

The album probably reflects DFA Records maxim of "too old to be new, too new to be classic". It's written through with history and yet it's measured: it never lets its acid tweakery or drum foolery drown the memorable melodies throughout. LCD Soundsystem fans take note.

9 - Chvrches - Bones Of What You Believe (Virgin)

Such glorious, spangly 80s pop. You see, I never got on with Erasure. Too cold. But the moment I heard Lies for the first time, I understood that Chvrches was an electronic pop band that melded synthetic immediacy with emotion.

This Caledonian trio probably wooed the indie set more than the EDM kids, but the electronics spark from the speakers because, in the construction of the rhythms that punch and snap, Chvrches understood what to leave out. 'Do a Miley' and lick off the saccharine sugar to find something mesmerising. In fact, forget Miley: this is the pop sound of 2013.

Some also-rans (part one of four)

Sometimes in a litter, a puppy has to die. Here are several puppies, all neatly snuggled inside a bin bag. Let's take a trip to the incinerator. (Sorry. What? The RSPCA have been on the line. They would like a donation every time you gasp at a brilliant album included in these top ten rejects.)

I couldn't hook onto Oneohtrix Point Never’s Warp Records debut R Plus Seven enough (pictured) even though it's probably their most, er, immediate album yet. Maybe I wanted it to be more visceral, like Roly Porter’s brilliantly epic Life Cycle Of A Massive Star or intense and spiralling like Holden’s The Inheritors. None of these found space in my top ten.

Jamie Lidell's Jamie Lidell just left me wanting Frank Ocean. There was much to be said for Tim Hecker’s harmonic and ambient Virgins, and the clanks and clicks of Logos' Cold Mission, while The Haxan Cloak's Excavation was slooooow and daaaaark. Finally, two genuine contenders that fell at the last hurdle were Forest Swords’ outdoorsy Engravings and fun drum 'n' bass chart botherers Rudimental with Home.

8 - µ-Ziq – Chewed Corners (Planet Mu)

Perhaps it's a blindness. Perhaps I don't want to hear the mixed reviews. Perhaps I'm distracted by track titles like Twangle Melkas, Tickly Flanks and Mountain Island Boner. But I'm having µ-Ziq's first album for six years in my top ten, dammit, because it sounds like the entire history of IDM ozzing from the pulsing heart of Planet Mu.

It's a soft album in many ways, eschewing (sorry) hard-nosed posturing for warm textures and delicate yearning. Perhaps these are studio offcuts - chewed corners, indeed - but I like the taste because it's familiar. One for the IDM aficionado.

7 - Autechre - Exai

I wish I knew why they released this download on Valentine's Day. It would only be suited to a romantic dinner if the candles were made of, um, angles and that. And the napkins were made of, er, awkward complications.

Autechre's 11th album is hefty, with some long track times that allow for rhythmic and melodic developments missing from some of their other work. Dirty bass, nasty percussion and an over-arching feeling of being in another world; positively head-noddy in places. It's a kind of funk, but only if the funk is made of, er, um, napkins and candles. Wait. I've lost the metaphor. What?

Some also-rans (part two of four)

Here are some other albums that didn't make the top ten. M.I.A. was reliably electrotastic with Matangi (pictured), while Fuck Buttons' Slow Focus was suitably scuzzy. The bass music of Akkord's debut Akkord was in my top ten for most of the year, which is more than can be said for Raffertie's Sleep Of Reason, which was a little too hazy to grasp.

Also missing out is the countryside psychedelia of Darkstar's News From Nowhere, Gold Panda’s pleasant house album Half of Where You Live and Mount Kimbie's warm Cold Spring Fault Less Youth. Crikes, they're dropping like flies.

Also spat out from the final top ten is Pantha Du Prince & The Bell Laboratory's Elements of Light, which had far too many bells, Four Tet's Beautiful Rewind, which was enjoyable despite a lack of bells, and Omar Souleyman’s truly excellent, Four Tet-produced festival favourite Wenu Wenu. Sorry, Omar.

6 - Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest (Warp)

Boards of Canada achieved two things in 2013. With their first studio album for many years, they avoided the pastoral bleaching-out that may come with age. I'd suggest that if this had been their debut album, it would have had enough crawling melancholia to mark it out as classic as Music Has The Right To Children.

And secondly, in the track Reach For The Dead, they provided me *the* spine-chilling musical moment of the year. This album reduced me to crumbs. That's not a sunrise on the cover. It's not a sunset. It's their music suffocating the world. If this is the sound of the post-apocalypse, the sound of tomorrow, then I welcome it with quivering arms.

5 - James Blake - Overgrown (Atlas)
This was the year in which James Blake shaved his head, got arrested for drugs and walked shirtless through airpor-- wait, no, I may be thinking of other people. Blake is in fact sensible. And he focuses on the music.

Which may be why he confounded my expectations with a stupendously catchy and memorable follow-up to his ever-so-slightly disappointing 2011 debut.

He has walked a fine line between singer-songwriter (yawn) and electronic innovator (yes). For Overgrown, he's drawn his own line by producing an inventive soul album that somehow puts the song and the electronics first. By jove, the Mercury judges got it right.

Some also-rans (part three of four)

Thundercat failed to rock my world with his Brainfeeder album Apocalypse (pictured). Heterotic's Love And Devotion had some amazing highlights but missed out on the final cut (but in all fairness, Paradinas was recording two albums at once - see number 8 in this list).

It's a shame not to include two of my favourites, but they're albums worth checking out anyway: Machinedrum's Vapor City, with Gunshotta being a blistering highlight of 2013, and FaltyDL's lush Hardcourage. Apparat's theatre project Krieg und Frieden was interesting, and DJ Rashad's Double Cup was a footwork banger and no mistake.

Karen Gwyer’s debut Needs Continuum was glistening, trippy experimentalism. And Samaris’s track Góða Tungl should turn the head of any James Blake fan, as should their beautiful album Samaris.

4 - RP Boo - Legacy (Planet Mu)

After all that cynical chin-scratching I did at my computer screen when Planet Mu threw their considerable weight behind footwork. What an idiot. In no way did I anticipate a footwork album that would entertain me from toe to toupee.

RP Boo's debut album (it stands for Record Player, before you ask) is unlike anything else in this top ten. Typical of the genre, you get minimal percussion, all those little trills, cut-and-paste, cut-and-paste and yet there is something extra. The way he works the vocals makes this quite addictive, and it spins from comical to clinical with deft precision. As Record will tell you himself, this is red, red hot.

3 - SCNTST - Self-Therapy (Boysnoize)

A compelling, complete techno masterpiece and SCNTST is only twenty years old. When I reviewed this for Electronic Sound magazine, I called it a "stupendously listenable debut" with "blistering control of the most basic of ideas". I was wrong. The number of times I have returned to this album since means it is something better than that.

Each track has its own character, whether its pulsing or thundering or skipping along cheerfully. It's techno to the core, and it's never far from a 4/4 beat, but Self-Therapy takes in jazz, hip-hop and ambience in a way that rarely wavers.

The sampled mechanics of Percee Scan makes it sound like a hymn to photocopiers, while the operatic drama of Murder delights. He does a decent Plaid on Loqui. Even low-key house numbers like Throwback claw under your skin as the themes filter in and out, buzz and pulse, heave and ho. A self-assured, self-therapeutic debut that, if it doesn't hit you at first, will grow and grow and grow.

Some also-rans (part four of four)

The final selection of complete losers too pathetic to grace my top ten are as follows. Disclosure tried hard to revive the 90s but Settle (pictured) settled for a place outside the list. I enjoyed Pet Shop Boys' mostly-successful Electric return to form, which is more than I can say for Karl Bartos' indulgent Off The Record.

Ikonika’s happy Aerotropolis was almost disco. Which brings me to, yes, disco. Oh boy. None of it made my top ten. Letherette's ace Letherette was as if Justice got good again while a lot of you loved Starcadian’s Sunset Blood (really?!) and Kavinsky’s Outrun. Which brings us to my biggest omission, 2013's king of disco...

...Random Access Memories. No, no, no, no, no. I suggested in May that Daft Punk's new-found success would come at a cost. I believe I was right. Shame. Let's move on.

2 - Special Request - Soul Music (Houndstooth)

Italian house. Brutal junglism. Drexciyan IDM. Rave breaks. Sirens. Techno. Grime. Buckets of dystopia and misery. Get all of that and stick it in your washing machine. No, I don't care if it's pants-wash day. Fast-cycle it. Now tip the result onto the kitchen lino. Have you made a mess? Good. Best get it cleared up before your New Year's party.

Bad bwoy samples and jungle breaks blend and break on Special Request's astonishing debut album. Vintage gear and pirate radio underpins this brutal assault of musical memories and tributes. Baselines fart, breakbeats disappear into the upper register, vinyl fuzz cracks warm into the album's veneer.

A breaks album that is interesting, innovative and exciting; both listenable and uncompromising. There are so many albums like this: the jungle truly is massive. But the Houndstooth label, brought to us by the Fabric nightclub and Rob Booth of Electronic Explorations, have the magic touch and this is possibly the strongest debut album of 2013 - and in a year as strong as 2013, that's saying something.

1 - Jon Hopkins - Immunity (Domino)

The best electronic album of 2013 comes from a classical pianist who played with Coldplay and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. I might as well award it to Michael Bublé.

Jon Hopkins set his sights on the dancefloor for this release and yet the rhythms seem constructed from the static between the beats. He grabs wafer-thin sounds and ideas and polishes them up so brightly, it dazzles from start to finish. That breath near the start of Collider. It floored you, didn't it? The production is mind-blowing.

And so emotive. The analogue yearning that made Luke Abbott's Holkham Drones so essential, or indeed Orbital's more ethereal moments, soars to new levels on Immunity. I know it's calculated and I suspect Hopkins has graphed this out to perfection, but energy and sadness and hope swell from every programmed moment of this album, from the thudding first half to the fragile second half. Played with precision. Paced to perfection.

This has been the strongest year for electronic music for a while, and yet Jon Hopkins still ended up leagues ahead with Immunity. It's one of the best electronica albums for years. Just let's not talk about the Coldplay thing, yeah? What Coldplay thing? That's right. That's exactly right.

Thank you for reading Fat Roland on Electronica. 

Edit: See also the best electronic music of January 2014.

Best electronica albums of 2011: number 1

Brummie music thinkbod Andrew Dubber recently railed against the habit of hacks writing off 2011 as the ‘year of boring music’. He argued that it said more about the paucity of stimulation in the journalists’ lives rather than a lack of good quality music.

“I suspect that it is not our musicians that have let us down, but our champions of music.

"So if your job is to report upon popular music and you are unable to find ten incredible things in the past year to share with those of us who still read what you have to say, then that makes you a failure.”

“John Peel-ism should be the norm,” he added.

Let me extend that thought. If you’ve ever liked a YouTube music video then left a comment declaring old music to be way better than the mulch that is spooned down our gullets today, then you might as well piss all over John Peel’s grave, suck up the urine from the soil, wait for it to digest, then take a second slash whilst banging on about how the first piss was a nicer shade of yellow.

My difficulty was not finding ten incredible things, but narrowing it down to an arbitrary number that inevitably led me to exclude something quite important....

[This is part four. Click here for part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part three.]

Some also rans

...James Blake’s album James Blake (Atlas). The most important underground electronic music artist of the past year is not in my top ten, despite me doing everything I could into tricking you into thinking he was Album Of The Year at the end of my previous post. Sorry 'bout that.

Last December, I indicated the excitement that preceded his debut album. When it finally came it, I felt it was playing to a quite different audience. An intricate album full of beautiful bass that even caught the attention of Beyonce – but there were ten other incredible things I wanted to share more than Blake's LP.

Other also-rans include new kids on the block, Cant. I found their album Dreams Come True (Warp) too band-y. I believe the monumentally entertaining Ceephax Acid Crew had an Unstoppable Phax Machine (030303), but I didn't get the memo, whilst there was no space in the top ten for the industrial glory of Byetone’s Symeta (Raster Notion) nor for Brian Eno’s poet-poking Drums Between The Bells (Warp).

Which only leaves one thing: a young Glasgow musician who’s brandishing something long, transparent and deadly. It’s a glass sword. That was a reference to a glass sword. Not his penis.

1 - Rustie - Glass Swords

The arpeggiated mayhem of Zig-Zag was the first moment beat-nuts took notice of Rustie. With that track and the 2009 highlight Bad Science EP, he very much sounded like a kid earning his dues in the Lucky Me collective’s electronic workshop.

Meanwhile, his mentors Hudson Mohawke and Mike Slott lead the way for the Glaswegians with, respectively, the Butter and Lucky 9Teen albums. Rustie, perhaps, sounded like the talented apprentice playing with the Nintendo in the corner, biding his time until...

Glass Swords (Warp). It takes three minutes for the first insane slap bass to cut through the ambience to make way for an orgy of portamento mayhem and retro computer game wizardry.

It brings to mind the retro synth mischief of Lorn, whose 2010 debut sounded like a naughty Knight Rider breaking into the Blade Runner film set. Rustie’s debut takes that philosophy much further. If Lorn was Kansas in black and white, Glass Swords is so far over the rainbow, it has hypercoloured the sun itself.

This is the sound of a young pretender dicking about with his software, which would be really annoying at a party, but committed to record it is a joy. He pumps up the Hudson Mohawke beat aesthetic until it bursts.

All Night is a soul jam at the most disgusting sex party ever to be held in your bass bins. Hover Traps is simply the catchiest tune of 2011, Globes sounds like drums crashing against the dawn of time, while After Light throbs with so much minor chord desire between the cut-up voices and blistering bass, you’ll be writing love letters to Glass Swords well into your pensionable years.

Every synth crunch on Glass Swords is a Glasgow kiss that requires, if you so please, your full bleeping attention. And it is all underpinned with a crystal-clear balance of melody and emotion. It feels to good to have Rustie battering my ear drums. You know how you can get fish to nibble your corn-encrusted feet in pretentious shopping centres? In this case, your feet are your ears and instead of fish there are nice things like pies and ice pops and bacon Frazzles.

Which reminds me, I’m hungry. Rustie's Glass Swords is my Album Of The Year 2011 because it matters and I'll be humming it in a year's time. Do have a listen below. Thank you for reading my blog in 2011. It has been an extraordinary year in many ways, and none of it would be possible if lovely people like you didn’t dip your eyes in my word sludge every now and then. Let’s do the same in 2012, only more ridiculous, more unrestrained and with more bacon Frazzles. Did I tell you I was hungry?



[This is part four. Click here for part one. Click here for part two. Click here for part three.]

"Darius Versus The Venga Boys": Fat Roland's guide to the 2011 Mercury Music Prize nominations

Adele – 21

Imagine a human centipede but with cats. Now imagine the resulting howls autotuned into brown noise which is then magnified into an eternal feedback loop which bursts every eardrum on earth, eventually leading to the death of all humankind. Adele wants to be this, but actually she's just pleasant like a meadow or a Sunday.

Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi

The voice of God if God were a woman, which She is. In a yell-off, she'd scream Florence and her stupid Machine into a cocked hat. Her mouth is so cavernous, it is used as a venue for her own gigs. The entire Mercury Prize awards ceremony is taking place on her tonsils, so everyone's going to have to be careful because one gulp and we're all stomach juice. Probable winner, then, but only because of gastric terror.

Elbow – Build a Rocket Boys!

Don't be daft, our kid. You can't build a rocket in t'yard. You'll send t'pigeons reet daft and they'll not be eatin' their seed. I'm using t'NME for bedding for t'whippets again coz they're still using "fooking" every time a Northerner swears in their interviews. If only Elbow had named themselves after a less innocuous body part. Cock, maybe.

Everything Everything – Man Alive

It's it's good good to to see see a a truly truly original original debut debut album album on on the the Mercury Mercury Music Music Prize Prize shortlist shortlist. Everything Everything Everything Everything are are a a group group that that talks talks fast fast and keeps keeps breaking breaking into into falsetto falsetto. Oh oh and and their their name name has has this this in-in-built-built echo echo that that can can get get rather rather annoying annoying annoying annoying annoying.

Ghostpoet – Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam

The hattiest musician in the list, Ghostpoet does this singing / rapping thing that Plan B does except, unlike Plan B, he doesn't make you want you to put your tongue in a blender. A favourite for people who talk about "homegrown", "eclectic" and "seriously, where did you get that hat". Disclaimer: don't put your tongue in a blender. Waste disposals are fine.

Gwilym Simcock – Good Days at Schloss Elmau

Ba da ba da tootle tootle jazzhands. Don't bother.

James Blake – James Blake

Things that have been trendy, even only ironically: Nuclear disarmament. The 2CV. Poll tax riots. Grunge. Yoof television. Pez. Playing on railway lines. Things Can Only Get Better. Quad bikes. The colour yellow. Happy-slapping. Crystal meth. Friends Reunited. Barack Obama. Planking. James Blake. What's happened to everyone that was into those things? They're all DEAD FROM OLD AGE, that's what.

Katy B – On a Mission

Born to mixed race parents in Leeds, she studied performing arts before answering an advert in a newspaper to join a pop band called Touch. Taking on management from Annie Lennox's mentor Simon Fuller, Katy B's band changed their name and they had worldwide success as promotors of 'girl power'. Katy B (pictured above) is famous for her leopard-print dresses, massive hair and being 'scary'. (Have you gone to the wrong Wikipedia page? - ed.)

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine

The token celtic inclusion on the list, this collaboration between a Scottish singer songwriter and an electronic music genius makes this the new Edwin Collins Versus Brian Eno. Wait. No, that's a lazy comparison. Darius Versus The Venga Boys. No. Too far the other way. Del Amitri Versus Bibio. That'll do. You can use that on your album cover, guys.

Metronomy – The English Riviera

Truly brilliant electro disco with more hooks than a velcro factory. We've been waiting flipping ages for a new Metronomy album: we've been looking at our watches more than quality checkers in a watch factory. The Look is already one of the best singles of 2011, and they've got more sharp hairstyles than a mohican factory. Their live sets are simple, ordered and have more massive chest-lights than a, um, a factory that specialises in body-mounted illumination solutions.

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

If "what if I take my problem to the United Nations" isn't one of 2011's most catchy lyrics, I'll eat my 50ft Queenie promo CD. Polly has been unleashing her own version of Nick Cave hell since 1926, but she's on this list because her latest album was a true revelation. No-one ever talks about her amazing hair, though. OMG look at her hair. Hasn't she got amazing hair? She should win because of her hair. I love her hair. Her hair is the best thing about this list OMG LMAO FML.

Tinie Tempah – Disc-Overy

If you got a talent, you gonna have to use it / To bag a nomination for Mercury Music / Ain't exactly 808 State's Cubik / His pop songs are sharper than a toothpick / From Paris, Scunthorpe or Munich / He's on an odyssey like Stanley Kubrick / But he can't be quick to grab the winner's tunic / The token pop man will probably lose it.

Falty DL's been building something in his garage

I've been juggling three records with my many eared-tentacles of music appreciation. But I only want to talk about one, which is Falty DL's You Stand Uncertain.

Much has been made of DL's genre-slurping production skills, taking in two decades of dance music. It does genre-hop, but mainly in one one spot: UK garage. Let's get this clear: the new Falty DL album is a garage record. Garage. Not techno. Not bass music. It's garage.

You can bang on all you want about dubstep, post-dubstep and chilldubwavestep, but just take its lead track Brazil featuring Lily MacKenzie: it's proper UK garage. That's garage. It's a word you won't have seen on a blog for about 46 years.

You Stand Uncertain is Planet Mu's most notable release this year so far (although Boxcutter's got some interesting stuff on the way), and it is Mr Falty's follow-up album to his debut platter Love Is A Liability. The big female vocal choons on the album, such as Gospel Of Opal, seem to be a statement. It's Falty pinning up a six-foot banner emblazoned with the phrase I'M BACK.

Onto the outside of his garage.

There are many tools in his garage, though. Open Space is a good example of the variance on offer here: it lurches from tingling fairy techno to dark, low-hung rave (a tendency even more obviously splashed over the playful Lucky Luciano).

And I'm deeply in love with the early-Grid snare clickiness on The Pacifist. He's got that retro feel yet again.

You Stand Uncertain is an impressive achievement and, for my money, sets the standard more so than another one of the three records I'm hammering at the moment, namely James Blake's eponymous and ubiquitous debut album.

The third one? It's not an electronica record, so I can't mention it. All I can tell you is she has the same name as an invisible rabbit and she sings about England.

This blog is jenerally only bothered with blokes with the initials JB

James Blunt

Blunt is arguably Britain's greatest living vocalist, treading a fine line between sounding like Mick Hucknall from Simply Red and a home counties Jimmy Krankie. He was once unpopular, but then his mum went on radio and controlled the listening public with her mind rays. James Blunt has won Never Mind The Buzzcocks a record 27 times, beating Lee Ryan from Blue, Dappy from N Dubz and Cliff Richard from Cliff Richard.

James Blake

Blake is arguably Britain's greatest living vocalist and continues a long tradition of doo wop in the electronic music sub-genre known as dubstep. According to the 2011 Guinness World Records, he is the smallest known recording artist, but that is no surprise considering his tender age of four. James Blake plays many of his gigs during the daytime because sub-bass frequencies travel less well in the dark.

Justin Biebpipe

Biebpipe is arguably Britain's greatest living vocalist alongside fellow YouTube stars such as Chocolate Rain Guy, Keyboard Cat and Stephen Fry Sings Pantera. His babyish good looks are the result of post-accident plastic surgery following a rollerblading collision with a balloon full of hot oil being towed by a ferociously drunk David Hasselhoff. Justin Biebpipe's natural physical state is one of entropy and desolation.

Jeff Buckley & John Barrowman

Although Buckley and Barrowman are arguably Britain's greatest living vocalists, their famous cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah will be remembered as one of the worst duets of all time. Buckley's delicate soul voice and his wan physique sat fairly well with the song, but it was generally considered a mismatch with John Barrowman's show tune style and his insistence on ending every line with "well, howdaya like THAT!"

Jeff Beck & the Jonas Brothers

Beck and the Brothers were once known as arguably Britain's greatest living vocalists. It was a tragedy then that they were all killed in a landslide of emotion following the death of James Brown. Brown's tragic demise struck a strong emotional chord with the public and for weeks following his death, newspapers ran repeated headlines speculating about his Sex Machine theme park, his nine masked children and his relationship with his doctor, Mr Shipman. After he became ill, James Brown sued himself for writing I Feel Good. Jeff Beck & the Jonas Brothers were 63 and are survived by two husbands and six children.

John Barry

Barry (pictured above) is arguably Britain's greatest living vocalist and shares a passion with people called JB. In 1926, he married folk singer Joan Baez and was instrumental in her being jailed after he encouraged her to poke a police officer in the eye with a violin bow. Following their divorce, he wedded legendary r 'n' b singer Jocelyn Brown, although the marriage didn't last after he encouraged a violin bow to poke a police officer in the eye with Jocelyn Brown. The much-missed John Barry wrote music for Jason Bourne or something.

Jungle Brothers (the Jive Bunny remixes)--- okay, that's enough - ed.

I am downloading the James Blake album

I am downloading the James Blake album.

Digital kilobytes of James Blake are swooshing into my memory like recalled jokes or déjà vu.

James Blake is now sitting inside my machine, next to my Yorkshire holiday photos, discarded Ableton sessions and my Justin Biebpipe love poetry.

Listening to this album will be like a thousand swan feathers brushing my cheek in the breeze from the breath of a million angels.

Pressing play on track one will be like the tentative moment before a teenage kiss, that giddy feeling of nascent love-- oh hold on, the computer's crashed. Let me just press restart.

Sorry about this. It takes a while to reboot. Full of viruses, this thing.

So then. Done anything interesting recently? Oh, here we go. Let me just find the mp3s again.

Oh great, it's lost them. Thanks, computer, you galoofing mess of catastrophic circuitry. You've ruined everything.

I don't want to listen to the James Blake album now. That would be like listening to the wails of whales speared in a bloody sea. Like the last sighs of a cherubim skewered on a cackling devil's pitchfork.

Cocksocks.

Kilobytes of James Blake lie dead in my computer, exhausted sonic sperm on the sidelines of my digital tubes.

A very small 2011 preview featuring Radio 1, Planet Mu and Frankenstein

This time last year, I posted a colossal preview where I swept up every bit of electronic music I could find and shoved it into a crystal ball blog piece the size of Jupiter.

The problem with that was twofold. Firstly, there was a woeful lack of decent pre-release information, and it's not as if I have 92,000 press officers on speed dial on my phone, and so I ended up filling in the gaps with records that I would never have otherwise mentioned on my blog.

Despite that, I still ended up with endless snippets of data that had to be bashed into the shape of a blog post in such a short timeframe, which gave me my second problem: I couldn't edit or check the veracity of my facts to the standard I would normally try to achieve on this blog.

And so, despite what I may have promised on Twitter, I'm not doing an uber-preview for 2011. You'll have to stay tuned to Fat Roland On Electronica if you want to find out the latest from Surgeon, Battles, Luke Abbott, Joker, Instra:mental, Teeel, Flying Lotus, the bloke from Metronomy and, um, David Lynch.

I'm not entirely heartless, and I will allow you a wee preview. The first is happening on a radio station that I tend to assume all my readers are too mature or cultured for. Thanks to a top five album by dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man, Adegbenga 'Benga' Adejumo (pictured) and Oliver 'Skream' Jones will join the In New DJs We Trust roster. It makes me wonder what happened to Mag-Man's third leg, Artwork, but it makes Radio 1 at 9pm on every second Thursday worth listening to.

Also in January, Planet Mu (or Planet µ if you're being pedantic) will release 14 Tracks From Planet Mu, which will contain four new tracks as well as known favourites from Ikonika (her huge earworm Dckhdbtch), Floating Points and more. If you're wondering how essential this is, think heroin, think oxygen, think Santa hats at office parties. Now think of Santa inhaling heroin fumes using an oxygen tank. Yes, children, Santa's a junkie.

Finally, 2011 will be the year in which James Blake (MySpace genre listed as "dub / grime / melodramatic popular song") will release his debut album, which everyone will laud as genre-busting and experimental. Blake will steal everyone's fire this year, although if you want a truly modern Prometheus, have a look at what Danny Boyle is up to later in 2011.... google for Underworld and Frankenstein.

Top ten best electronica albums of 2010: part four of four

This is part four. Please do read the other parts of this blog post: part one, part two and part three.
To read last year's top ten best electronica albums, click here.

1 - Mount Kimbie – Crooks And Lovers

Mount Kimbie have been a fundamental element of the journey of dubstep over the past few years, but while the purists were polishing their wobbly basslines and pressing thinly sliced beats, MK were busy widdling in the sink and toking on any old influence they could find.

2009's Maybes EP was their first big airhorn in the face of the music industry, all taut summer guitars, plunging beats and r'n'b vocals. The duo dipped from some people's attentions when their second EP Sketch On Glass was released, but by then they were shining lights in a scene that encompassed the likes of Martyn, Burial, Joy Orbison and Bibio.

And so it came to pass that Crooks And Lovers was one of the most anticipated albums of 2010, and I really don't think anyone quite knew what to expect. They were hailed as post-dubstep and their music spouted the language of ambience, house, glitch, post-rock, techno and hip hop.

The album opens with a gliding guitar mantra that quickly descends into the first real rhythm hit of Would Know, its slow wooden beats underpinning epic filter drops that spin your brain 720 degrees. A discordant three-chord theme adds sadness to a Hudson Mohawke-like jam for Before I Move Off, then we're moved into acid techno and minimal click-house territory - but not without being licked in the face by the fret-scraping guitar melancholia of Adriatic in the middle of it all.

Ode To Bear could be a Flying Lotus track, but before you start mentally noting comparisons, you're blasted by Field's proper rock guitar (played rather badly, it has to be said). Mayor is some kind of manic toytown rave stripped down to the barest of beats - then before you know it, it's over. Mount Kimbie have pissed in your post-dubstep sink and they're halfway down the road, their pockets bulging with most of the contents of your booze cupboard.

To understand why Mount Kimbie is my number one electronica album of 2010, you need a smidgen of context. For years now, I've been banging on about Warp Records this and Warp Records that, harking back to a time when phrases like "IDM" and "warehouse techno" meant something.

Meanwhile, the music scene changed around me. Some crusty danceheads got guitars out or started moving Beyonce to the front of their record collection, and the electronic world became a lot more eclectic. Someone somewhere invented "folktronica". This new freedom allowed the likes of Bibio to get away with pastoral, emotive real instruments disguised as proper techno, or the likes of Burial to wedge proper MOBO vocal slices into his work.

I fought against it. If I saw a guitarist, I would regularly break his or her fingers. If I heard an album with vocals, I'd chuck it in my Hasbro woodchipper. But then Clark (last year's best album) started using vocals, as did Bullion. Matthew Dear made guitars, like, totally lake superior, as did Battles. Crikes. Then there was the moment when Mount Kimbie's Maybes came out and the penny in my brain dropped with a pleasant clang.

The Mount Kimbie sound, all those clanks and thuds and strums you can hear on Crooks And Lovers, went on to define much of this year. With that album, Hotflush Recordings hit the stratosphere, already rocket-powered from the likes of Search And Destroy, Untold and Joy Orbison.

And most crucially of all, it laid the eggs that would hatch two words that look set to define 2011:

James Blake.

Blakey's CMYK is undoubtedly the tune of 2010: its flurry of mixed up vocals ("found her... red coat"), fast-step garage and bubbling atmospherics sounded like it either came from deep within the earth or from another galaxy altogether. What's annoying about James Blake is his failure to produce an album this year (it may well have featured in my top ten), but the anticipation of that record (February 2011!) has set musos, journos and fashionistas equally ablaze with excrement-- I mean, excitement.

James Blake would not exist without Mount Kimbie. Well. I don't mean literally. Kai and Dom from Mount Kimbie didn't give birth to James. Well... they may have done, but it's not mentioned on discogs.com. If you're reading, boys, you may want to clear this one up in the comments section.

And so, there we have Mount Kimbie's place in history, their moment defined, their ouvre, um, ouved. It's a sound that has weedled its way into the eardrums and quietly nags at 2011 to come up with something better. MK's rise to success has been rapid: two EPs and suddenly they're my album of the year - which, may I remind you, is much more vital and era-defining than any Mercury, Grammy or swimming certificate.

Thank you for joining me for my top ten albums of 2010. Buy Mount Kimbie's Crooks And Lovers from Bleep or Boomkat or Piccadilly and stay chooned for my round-up of this year's best films, and then my spectacular uber-preview of 2011, which I will slam onto this blog just as that Auld Lang Syne hangover's kicking in.



This is part four. Please do read the other parts of this blog post: part one, part two and part three.
To read last year's top ten best electronica albums, click here.

Ten plaudits Bleeping

Online retailer Bleep.com has hit December running with a series of top tens of 2010.

The other day, they posted their top artists of the year, which included Oneohtrix Point Never, James Blake, Roska and Caribou. In Oneohtrix, otherwise known as Brooklyn's Daniel Lopatin, they saw a "prodigal, prolific exponent of the synthesiser."

And if your order his album Returnal from Bleep, or his other records, you get his exlusive mix CD Objects In Mirrors.

Yesterday, Bleep.com revealed their top ten labels of the year. Their record label of 2010 is Numbers, a Glasgow outfit whose mission to "melt together the seemingly disparate sounds of R&B, techno, electro, house, dubstep, UKF and 80s funk under one glorious groove" was lauded by Bleep. The imprint's output this year included Deadboy, Untold and SBTRKT.

Because they're well chuffed and that with such high praise, Numbers have launched a compilation featuring every bit out output on their label along with a couple of new t-shirt designs.

Over the next few days, expect more 2010 from Bleep in the form of best albums, favourite EPs and most recommended reissues and compilations. I'll try and match them when I do my usual end-of-year round-ups later this month.

Meanwhile in another corner of the internet, Radio Scot Void has released some older tracks for free in a special mixtape that's worth getting simply for Shlohmo's Socks. The track, not the underwear item.

More pow than Batman: some singles from Ikonika, Falty DL and James Blake

Because I went a bit flappy on maintaining this blog for a while, I'm a bit behind on my single reviews. Here are three quick ones to keep you going while I sort out the other 3,927 I have in my to-do pile.

On an unrelated note, while the MPs aren't looking, can someone install Aaron Funk of Venetian Snares as prime minister, please?

Ikonika

I'm not sure if I've waffled about Ikonika's new album yet. I will do, but in the meantime, Idiot is worth grabbing. Its punchy Nintendo lead is rooted in a rolling bass, a contrast that is amplified by the Altered Natives remix - a track with more pow than Batman thanks to a repeating descending fill that sounds like someone's spilling LFOs.

Falty DL

Falty DL's All In The Place is not dubstep. Repeat. Falty DL's All In The Place is not dubstep. Let's stop calling everything dubstep, shall we? It is probably acid techno and it's all a bit ho hum - choppy synths, bouncy bassline, loadsa reverb - until he allows a muggy rave line pull the tune into fantastic, foggy Aphex territory.

James Blake 

James Blake, who has made his name touring with Mount Kimbie, sounds like he was in 1995 listening to an ethereal moment on Goldie's Timeless before jumping through a time tunnel to provide us with his sad, liquid r'n'b-tinged grime-tech. See if you can spot the Aaliyah and Kelis samples on his essential Cmyk EP.