2010: I Know That You Don't Like the Future Like I Do

Albums/Reissues/Compilations/Whatever Honorable Mentions -

!!! - Strange Weather, Isn't It?
Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
Autechre - Oversteps
Beach House - Teen Dream
Benoît Pioulard - Lasted
Brian McBride - The Effective Disconnect
CFCF - The River EP
Deerhunter - Halycon Digest
Infinite Body - Carve Out The Face Of My God
Nest - Retold
The New Pornographers - Together
Mark McGuire - Living With Yourself
Massive Attack - Heligoland
The Morning Benders - Big Echo
Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal
School of Seven Bells - Disconnect From Desire
Shed - The Traveller
The Sight Below - It All Falls Apart
Surfer Blood - Astro Coast
Thoamas Fehlmann - Gute Luft

Top 10 -

10. John Roberts - Glass Eights

With Pantha du Prince flirting with cross-over appeal by joining up with Rough Trade and Efdemin releasing a lackluster follow-up to his self-titled album, it was starting to look like a not so happy 10 year anniversary for dial records (minus the hugely influential plug by yours truly, of course). Redemption came in the unlikeliest of places: John Roberts, the lone American on the label roster. While Pantha was out in the Swiss Alps trying to capture the sounds of nature in a bottle [I imagine Martin Hannett in 24 Hour Party People], Roberts was ransacking his grandmother's attic for vintage samples. Glass Eights sounds like if Trent Reznor went deep house: it is a delicately textured record of elegiac vinyl crackles and out-of-time piano snippets, evoking a feeling of nostalgia for an imagined past.


9. Tesla Boy - Modern Thrills

A serendipitous discovery while trawling music blogs - I think I was drawn in by the album cover font - Tesla Boy is a Russian trio (now duo -- another record looking increasingly unlikely) who sounds like Cut Copy or the Presets minus all of the modern technological flourishes and contemporary sensibilities. It's curious that bands at the geographic peripheries seems to be latching onto 80s synth revivalism years after it was fashionable stateside (anyone remember The Killer vs. The Bravery feud? Anyone? Buller?) -- not that I am complaining when Modern Thrills features such gloriously melodic hooks and and trashy dance-floor breakdowns. Completely derivate, but compulsively listenable.


8. Robyn - Body Talk Pt. 2

Artist in releasing a collection of unbelievable pop gems that barely makes a dent in American popular culture shockah. File it as case number infinity in why payola still dictates Billboard charting or why, as Das Racist uncovered, Lady Gaga "is so clearly an illuminati." Just compare two cameos by now gun-for-hire Snoop Dog: the unbearably gaudy "California Gurls" and the deliciously brassy "U Should Know Better". The prosecution rests. You can't blame Robyn for not trying: she released three back-to-back-to-back EPs stuffed to the gills with electro-pop anthems. And while the Body Talk album proper cherry-picks the (arguably) best material in a single package, I personally do not find it quite as perfectly sequenced as the flawless Body Talk Pt. 2. Did I mentioned that Robyn covers "Cobrastyle" live in concert? Heart!


7. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

I need to resign myself to the fact that perpetual cocktease Damon Albarn is never going to carry through with the promise of another Blur album. The question now is should I even care? Although it is unmistakably a Gorillaz record (as odd as that sounds for a fictions band), Plastic Beach is the surprising spiritual successor to Think Tank, ditching the borrowed productions of The Automator and Danger Mouse for Damon's increasing obsession with thrift-store Casio beats. Judging by the fly-by-night iPad album The Fall, Albarn is constitutionally incapable of not producing music. A blessing and a curse, I imagine -- which is probably why this current crop of songs is exuberantly melancholy. And while nothing on this record moves the needle quite as much as "Feel Good Inc." or "D.A.R.E.", all the songs feel like they are stitched from the same synthetic cloth -- unlike those of the previous two albums, which played more like disparate genre-exercises. Parting truth bomb: Damon Albarn is the most talented pop songwriter of the past two decades.


6. Four Tet - There Is Love In You

2005 feels like many lifetimes ago. Back then, I caught Four Tet playing a disappointing set of songs at Coachella that would eventually become his counter-expectation album Everything Ecstatic. It seemed like everything Kieran Hebden had done since then was to try and escape from the sound he perfected on Pause and Rounds. As fine as his series of improvisational records with jazz drummer Steve Reid might be, there was always the nagging feeling that Hebden was playing Prince Hal just for the sake of rebelliousness. I guess I would do the same if I were saddled with the label "folktronica." So it comes as a great relief that There Is Love In You is a return to form, meaning it still sounds like the Secret of Mana soundtrack albeit with more looped-vocals and four-grounded (tee-hee!) four-on-the-floor (okay, I'll stop) club beats. The prodigal son has even managed a bit of a coup: despite their Field-like circular complexity, these lovely tracks are inviting for electronic connoisseurs and neophytes alike.


5. The Black Dog - Music For Real Airports

Like releasing an Oscar-baiting motion picture in the last week of December, The Black Dog slyly crafted an album that would gain a whole new immediacy during the train wreck that is holiday travel. A transparent retort to Eno's seminal ambient album, Music For Real Airports has its prerequisite Foucauldian political dimensions: a critique of how, quoting the artist themselves: "airports have become microcosms of a future society, the totalitarian theocracy of the capitalist pay off in postmodern thinking, extreme marketing and control methods." The album, however, really gains its velocity in its subjective exploration of the liminal spaces of the airport -- of the bleary-eyed procession through that odd limbo which manages to transform the trivial hour delay into the an epic of Wagnerian proportions. Music For Real Airports is a bleak record set to the metronome of a barbiturated heart. Even the brief exhalation of the concluding track is uncut by its title, begging the question whether we ever truly depart from The Black Dog's dystopia.


4. Yeasayer - Odd Blood

I completely avoided All Hour Cymbals - partially due to the band name, but mostly because of the Animal Collective comparisons - so when I heard my brother had picked up Yeasayer's 12'' on Record Store Day, I decided to check out Odd Blood for sibling bonding, if nothing else. Little did I know that Yeasayer had been flirting with 80s New Romanticism on their sophomore effort -- and not that cool synth Britannia renaissance that sleeper cell agents The Killers tried to eradicate before it even began, but a revival of those chart-topping polyrhythmic worldbeat New Wave numbers with covers that look like this. "Mondegreen" is a long lost Oingo Boingo track -- hell, every track is the auditory equivalent of Oingo Boingo's appearance on The Gong Show. These are songs on the verge of a nervous breakdown, filled with jittery energy and claustrophobic arrangements that can not stand still long enough for a portrait let alone to reach the bridge. And while this seemed to give some critics heart palpitations, the record is all the better for it. One word of warning: the opening track kind of sucks.


3. Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?

I gave Emeralds a token honorable mention nod in my discussion of Choral last year because while I loved three-fourths of their self-titled release, it was unfortunately hunchbacked by a stridently dissonant opening track. For those who are able to track down it down (these dudes release endless amounts of tape), Emeralds will probably be seen in retrospect as a turning point as the trio pivoted away from their tape-scene noise origins to more fully embrace arpeggiated keyboards. The real MVP of Does It Look Like I'm Here? is Mark McGuire, whose textured and melodic guitar lines finally breakthrough the stifling noise and screeching sound effects that pockmarked the more atmospherically inclined What Happened. Anybody who loves his Eno & Fripp guitar tones should also check out his multi-tracked self-released albums such as Living With Yourself or Tidings-Amethyst Waves. The dude just seems like the best bro living the life: jamming and trading his tapes for illicit materials.


2. Loscil - Endless Falls

Loscil's albums have always orbited around a central visual metaphor and, as you might gather from the title, Endless Falls is no different. And although the record is the perfect soundtrack to rainy Cascadia afternoons, I find my imagination returning to a jellyfish exhibit I saw at Loscil's hometown Vancouver aquarium. Unlike Submers, which felt buried under leagues of ocean water, Endless Falls has an almost aquatic weightlessness to it. Perhaps this is why Loscil was the perfect fit for the iOS hit Osmos: he makes existential ambient music, the score to aimless spheres set adrift in a vacuous amoral universe. In fact, the record does not come back to earth until its extraordinarily nervy final track featuring a spoken-word monologue by Dan Bejar. It is an almost apocalyptic fever dream rivaling the ramblings of Blaise Bailey Finnegan III on GY!BE's Slow Riot for New Zerø Kanada. Yet, unlike mad BBFIII, Bejar muses on the music creation process -- and more specifically, ambience itself. Bejar's words are provocative and provide the record with a profound gravity, recontextualizing everything that came before it. Simply amazing.


1. Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise

This probably looks like a great inevitability, but please take into consideration the deflated expectations that had set-in after all the bad omens that preceded the album. The switch to Rough Trade. The news of a Panda Bear cameo. The middling Behind The Stars 12'' teaser. Surely, Pantha was setting us up for a colossal disappointment. Instead, Hendrick Weber has pulled of a minor miracle: Black Noise is arguably the equal of This Bliss, and in many ways much richer.

The album starts with a cacophony: as the orchestra begins its tuning, we hear what sounds like distorted human voices emanating from a radio on a distant motorcycle before it speeds away. It's an estranging opening sequence, but once the dim of the motor finally dies off, we hear the sparkling chimes of Pantha Du Prince's characteristic bells emerge from the clamor. It's like finding yourself alone on a trail in a national park once the last noisy tourist takes leave for the souvenir shop. Of that transcendental moment when the noises of your surroundings slowly come alive and you awaken to aural splendour of nature.

"Lay A Shimmer" establishes Black Noise as a minimal techno pastorale, an answer to the riddle of what sound a tree (or in this case, a landslide) makes when it falls and nobody is around to hear it. Pantha Du Prince is a zen master at digital percussion, constructing organic beats like a buddhist monk placing down a series of stones without any order or pattern. I saw this in effect when he opened up his live set at Holocene by spinning what looked like a glass stirring rod in a pint glass hooked up to a contact microphone; Weber let the natural order of the universe dictate the beat.

My only complaint would be the aforementioned Panda Bear track "Stick To My Side," which falls a bit flat - particular in comparison to "The Making of Grief Point". But I am pragmatic about hipstergate: it paved the way for Pantha Du Prince to headline a concert at a venue five blocks away from my house, so I can't bellyache all that much.