Commended electronic music albums of 2022: part two

 

Here are more commended albums that didn't quite make my top 50. Each one is a peach, or a pair, or a pineapple. You pick the fruit, I'm not fussy.

This is the second of five Commended blog posts. See the full countdown here.

Caterina Barbieri: Spirit Exit (light-years)

This is the third album from the acclaimed synth experimentalist, and this time it’s inspired by female mystics. Despite being produced during the introspection of lockdown, Barbieri is typically light of touch. Elegiac, worshipful and drifting, and wonderfully listenable.

Rat Heart Ensemble: A Blues (Shotta Tapes)

Mr Heart abandons the dancefloor for a long, post-disco sleep. Boomkat gave this Mancunian’s Tascam driftings their Album of the Year accolade. Dark ambient pieces drifting from littered side alleys, echoing drones reverberating from smoking manholes. 

Waves: Low Altitude (self-released)

“This is a coastal collection of cockle-shelled ambience, barnacled synth meditations and sea-bound drones as wide-reaching as far-flung fish. There are lapping shorelines, seagulls, even a humming lighthouse… Manchester finally has its beach.”

Romance & Dean Hurley: In Every Dream Home A Heartache (Ecstatic)

Speaking of ambient. David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley produces an album of hazy, filmic ambience. Each set of wandering loops will run a movie reel in your head: abandoned beaches, sun-dappled forests, buffalo doing a tango. Okay, maybe not that last one.

Ulla: Foam (3XL)

This has been a really woozy set of recommendations, and this product of the US Midwestern ambient scene is no less heady. Imagine setting off a synth arpeggio, but then feeding the audio through a mincer, then making a lovely lemon mousse with the remains. That.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2022. Read it all here.

Commended electronic music albums of 2022: part one

 

Before we get to the top 50 best albums of 2022, here are some records that didn't quite make the cut. No particular reason. It's just how it all shook down when I was compiling stuff. Everything here is 100% worth your time, energy and ears.

I'll split this into five blog posts, with about four or five in each. See the whole countdown here.

Stephen Mallinder: tick tick tick (Dais Records)

“Its headline instruments are gorgeous bristly basslines that sometimes lead the march, and sometimes get caught in swirls of equally rhythmic lead synth…. Thank goodness Mallinder has rediscovered his solo groove. This ticks the boxes. All three of them.”

Soichi Terada: Asakusa Light (Rush Hour)

Festival-friendly house music from a Japanese video game soundtracker. Imagine playing an immersive game but wrapped in cotton wool and there’s an especially friendly manatee giving you a foot massage. Simply a whole bunch of nice.

Brassfoot: SWEAT (NCA)

Brassfoot runs a cassette tape label for experimental music, so this scuzzy techno has all the hissy roughness you’d expect. Warehouse bangers, chopped synth loops, lots of claustrophobia. You could probably play it on a 78 as well as cassette, I’d imagine.

Decius: Decius Vol. I (The Leaf Label)

The newly formed Decius would make a great accompaniment to Mallinder. Mechanical beats meet clipped acid and pumping electronic disco. Features Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family. Keyboard workouts to keep you going until the milkman delivers.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2022. Read it all here.

Best electronic music albums of 2022: an introduction

 

Welcome to the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2022.

2022 was a year which saw poverty go through the roofs no-one can afford, war writ ugly and large across our TV screens, and Twitter implode into a chasm of patriarchal billionaire sludge. The last thing we need is someone waffling about his favourite albums of the year, right?

You're wrong! We need this kind of blather more than ever. My best-of album countdown returns. I'm about to plonk 36 blog posts on your computer / Nokia / abacus screen. Here's what you can expect.

This is a list of my favourite electronic music albums of the year. I will mention 75+ albums, although the list is not complete nor authoritative. I will omit obvious choices, and I will make mistakes. I'm writing this within minutes of the first blog post going online, and it's all pretty much written (a) as live and (b) as a first draft. Expect it to be an absolute cack-pot of steaming gunk, and we can take it from there.

I will present you with the following sexy selections. Within each section, I won't rank each album in order. Gone are the days of sorting these numerically. What's the point: if I was blogging this next week, the whole order would shuffle anyway.

Commended Electronic Music Albums – albums that didn't make my final top 50

Top 50 Electronic Music Albums – what would have otherwise been numbers 50 to 21

Top 20 Electronic Music Albums – what would have otherwise been numbers 20to 11

Top 10 Electronic Music Albums – what would have otherwise been numbers 10 to 2

The number one best electronic music album of 2022

This will be laid out as 36 blog posts publishing between now and 9pm today, then resuming on New Year's Eve starting in the morning and ending at around 6pm. Plenty of time after that for you to get all dressed up for Jool's Hootenanny. Holland loves his glad rags.

It's important that this album countdown doesn't take over my entire life, so I will probably do fewer graphics and slightly shorter write-ups. It was a bit stressful last year. If a review is "written in speech marks, like this", the text is taken from my Electronic Sound magazine review of that album.

This all said, every album on this countdown is something I have properly liked or appreciated in 2022, so it's all pucker and brilliant and thank you in advance for wiping your reading eyes across my hastily written words.

Let's go. See the full countdown progress here.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2022. Read it all here.

Token November post with added Subway shutter

I can't let November pass by without at least one blog post, so here's what I've up to this past month (or so). Think of it as a show-and-tell although I'm not going to show you anything, and what I tell you will be pretty dull.

Plaid played the White Hotel in Manchester. It's a no-frills venue that makes you feel like you're about to get murdered by a Tesco Value murderer. But the sound system's great, the staff are lovely, and there's always a nice crowd. Highlight was the dizzying peaks of C.A. from their new album Feorm Falorx.

I nuzzled my nozzle in nostalgia at the Warehouse Party's Hacienda 40 bash. Orbital, 808 State, Graeme Park, Happy Mondays, Justin Robertson, K-Klass, Jon DaSilva, A Guy Called Gerald. It kind of boiled down to a warehouse full of men dancing like Bez, but there were lots of fun chats, and Orbital were all kinds of ace.

The Delightful Sausage delighted me for a second time this year when I saw their Nowt But Sea show again. The friendly farce is shot through with daftness and nods to classic TV comedy tropes. Amy and Chris are so good together, and there's an extended reminiscence by Chris which I just think might be genius.

With a clutch of cartoon cats, I read a co-written story with my embarrassingly talented writing buddy David Hartley. Fellow scribe and word-reader Adam Farrer sums things up pretty nicely when he posted on Instagram: "Got to hang out with some brilliant folks, sold some books and saw @fat_roland dressed up in a cardboard disguise, reading a story off the back of a cat’s head. It’s all I wanted from today."

Oh and I took a selfie in front of a colourful shop shutter (see above). I think it was a Subway. It was very late at night and colder than a whittler's canoe.

Not a bad November-ish overall, hey.

Hello, Halloween

I love a bit of Halloween. The ghosts. The witches. The turnips. Is it turnips? What's that orange thing? Watermelons? Anyway, I love it all.

To celebrate the best festivity of the year - let's be honest, it easily beats Easter and National Talk Like A Pirate Day - I've decided to collate my best spooky @FatRoland tweets.

Get ready to be scared. Wooooooh. Turnips. Aaaaaargh.

Fact:
Today is Halloween, which as we all know comes from the phrase "Hello, Ian".
31 Oct 2021

Foodie:
Ooo, I'm a scary biscuit. [climbs into biscuit tin]
23 Jul 2015

Visitors:
I only got one trick or treater coming up my drive last night. Thankfully, my blood catapult seems to have worked.
1 Nov 2010

Abbreviation:
The G in 5G stands for Ghosts. Be careful out there.
4 Apr 2020

Pick up:
Actual conversation with a taxi driver today, September 7th.
Driver: It's been quiet today.
Me: Change in weather, I suppose.
Driver (sternly): No.
Me: *all the awkwards*
Driver: It's because people are getting ready for Halloween.
7 Sep 2018

Liturgical:
"Wooooh, I'm Martin Gore, Demon of the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost."
7 Jan 2014

Digits:
Ooo, Halloween, oooo, fingers everywhere. Lots of spooky fingers. Is it a ghost? No, it's a finger. Wooooooh, fingers.
31 Oct 2017

And check out these spooky steel spiders in Sheffield. Oh and this creative use of pumpkins near where I live. While we're at it, here is a blog post about the most Halloweeny music acts ever,

Crikey, that was scary stuff, wasn't it.

Prodigy's Experience turns 30: that's a lot of small furry animals

The Prodigy's debut album Experience was released 30 years ago this week. It only seems like yesterday! 

Which is nonsense. 30 years is flipping ages ago. Shrews tend to live for less than 12 months. 30 years is over 30 full shrew generations. In human years, this means Experience came out during the reign of Julius Caesar. I hope you're following me on this.

I'm not sure Experience did much to separate the Prodigy from the xylophone-clonking mass of novelty ravers at the time. Their transformation into aggressive firestarters was some years down the line. But Charly pouncing into the top ten in summer 1991 was quite the landmark moment.

The best thing about that album is it's daft. Look at the lyrics. "Feel the bass come down on me  baby… Give me a number one, give me a number two.. . I take your brain to another dimension, pay close attention."

And whatever that cartoon cat was miaowing about. The boy tells us he was mewling road safety messages. I'm not convinced. Personally, I think Little Johnny 2D-face was gaslighting that poor cat. Let it dance into the road, you monster. Let it high five the cats eyes. 

This was originally meant to be a deep analysis of Experience, track by track, with 3,000-word essays and everything. However, I'm too busy listening to the new Bjork album to, er, pay close attention. Let's just say it's a classic that sounds as wild now as it ever did. Even better, actually, now we can consider Experience without the shadow of Jilted Generation, Fat Of The Land and all the chart-topping tomfoolery that came along with them. 

Let's finish this with some Amazon reviews of Experience. Really pay tribute to a great album. 

the album i received is absolutely shocking quality it jumps on every track, such a shame - one star

Record just doesn’t work, keeps skipping and jumping. Not pleased with this product - one star

I ordered it twice and both times the records jumped! Very disappointed - one star

The record arrived warped and not even close to being level. It wobbles on our record player - one star

Ordered Prodigy - Experience.... received Jimi Hendrix album. Rubbish - one star

Oh. Erm. Oops. 

The downfall of Ian Brown

Monkey-faced Mancunian Ian Brown is being roasted on Twitter for a gig he did in Leeds.

His concert at the O2 Academy Leeds on 25 September was part of his first solo headline tour in over ten years. And when he means 'solo', he really means 'solo'. Videos abound of him alone on the stage, drawling to a backing track.

One tweet has him murdering FEAR, Another tweet posted a clip of him looking distinctly lonely on stage as he sang First World Problems. The tweeter said:

"turn up to his £40 a ticket, sold out gig at leeds tonight WITH NO BAND. I’m a life long fan but it was bad. #ianbrown does karaoke and butchers his own tunes. Most were too pissed to care but I had to get out after this one. Longsight M13 was a highlight."

It wasn't all negative. A guy called Ryan said, "You absolutely smashed it tonight… You had the place bouncing and your performance was electric." While another complainer seemed disappointed with his singing and his lack of band, yet found it in their heart to say, "he still has the swagger and he’s still a legend in my eyes"

You can't really roast Ian Brown for singing out of tune. The whole point of Manchester acts like Brown and the Happy Mondays and Mark E Smith is that they sound like boozed-up karaoke. It's kicking-out time at the Brass Neck & Baggie and Uncle Darren's off on one. This is what marketers call a unique selling point. 

But it's a bit of a cheek to turn up without a backing band. I'm quite happy for, say, Karl Hyde from Underworld to be a one-man car wash inflatable, flailing around while Rick Smith keeps himself to himself behind his keyboards. But for indie bands, you need the guitars. The musicianship. Something for beardy journalists to write about in Mojo magazine.

He'll appreciate the extra cash pocketed from not paying a band, though. His caché has been increasingly passée in recent years. He's been churning out Covid-19 conspiracy theories, resulting in him being thrown off Twitter and losing a song on Spotify. I think at one point he used the phrase "lame stream media", which instantly loses him any credibility.

Twitter will have its fun. There will be lots more Brown bashing, mostly from people who didn't attend the gig. I still remember a recent tweet showing a few seconds of Mick Hucknall singing off key at a recent performance. People were scandalised. And they ignored a similar clip of Hucknall recently singing like the angels; a stunning set of pipes. Twitter's engine runs on decontextualized outrage. With someone as odious as Ian, it couldn't happen to a better person.

Is this the downfall of Ian Brown? Not for a minute. Do you really think his anti-vax rants will play badly to ageing bucket-heads? Although he may lose a few ticket sales, is his career really going to be harmed by singing like a drunken monkey man on the loose? Not a bit of it.

No. I reckon the worst is to come. Ian Brown is a crusty old white man with big opinions and a screw-them attitude. He is privilege, he is patriarchy, he is Morrissey. The controversy that fully downs his career hasn't happened yet. He'll overstep the mark in some horrible way. Say the 'n' word, become the new Savile, set fire to an orphanage? Probably not. But something.

To quote one of his songs: "I swim with the fishes; you come from the sea. The dolphins were monkeys that didn't like the land."

Nope. Me neither.

Further Fats: Who do I hate more? Morrissey or Axl? (2010)

Further Fats: Mmm Underworld, the world loves you (2012)

Further Fats: The new Stone Roses single is a barrel of thundering diarrhoea (2016)

It's got a cow as a logo

This weekend I went to Moovin Festival. It's got a cow as a logo. Moo. Moovin Festival.

It's a tiny music festival nestled in Etherow Country Park in Stockport. Lots of tree-covered rolling hills, an impressive multi-layered weir, and tonnes of geese honking all over the place. Actually proper gorgeous. 

Let's talk about the music. I loved Mikey Don's showmanship. Northbase and Mickey Finn brought some mad drum and bass. DJ Frosti provided a welcome shot of dubby progressive house. 

Black Grape replaced the Sugarhill Gang on the bill, which doesn't seem like a fair swap, but suited a crusty Mancunian like me. Shaun Ryder stood reading his lyrics from an autocue while a sprightly Kermit ping-ponged around the stage bringing the party. It was kind of wonderful, and they reminded me how much of a tune Reverend Black Grape is. 

The main reason why I was there was Orbital. They seemed on cheery form, and blasted us with their usual Satanic charms. At one point I got so excited, I turned to my fellow dancers and shouted "come oooon!". Someone shook my hand. You can see me significantly enjoying myself in the above photograph, taken by Orbital themselves. 

To my surprise, Orbital weren't the number one highlight of the weekend. I was there on my own, and most of the line-up, especially on the Sunday, held no interest for me. So a lot of the time, all I had to do was sit and chat to random people. 

And what people! I've never had so many random conversations, with one guy even scaling a hill just to talk to me. I've already done this on Twitter, but I must give a shout out to Rafe for his easy hospitality and the lift home, and Alex and Myles who became immediate mates and absolutely made my Sunday.

This was the best fun in a Stockport park since I went joyriding in a milk float. Would recommend.

What a great evening at @moovinfestival ! Amazing fans 😁 pic.twitter.com/Y39Oxc0V6R

— Orbital (@orbitalband) August 28, 2022

Further Fats: I'd advise skipping to reason ten lest you fall asnooze from my word vomming (2012)

One small BlueDot with Bjork, Anna Meredith, Jane Weaver and tonnes more (2022)