Best Albums 2012 - Pt.1

Christmas just isn't the same.  Every year, it seems less and less like Christmas.  Is it just me?  Anyway, here's a few of my top CDs of 2012 for anyone that's interested. Bah Humbug.....

Two Fingers - Stunt Rhythms :  Two Fingers is the work of the prodigiously talented and continually imaginative Amon Tobin. One of the first artists whose name leaps to mind from the Ninja Tune Roster, Tobin is a stalwart of the label, but his music remains in a state of continuous development. Stunt Rhythms is his second album under the Two Fingers moniker, and it follows closely the approach of the first in instrumental form, exploring the lower end of the frequency spectrum.

Tobin has always had a gift for expressing himself in these subterranean depths, but Two Fingers combines the bass with primal percussion, raw synthesized power and sheer adrenalin, as it looks to fill the biggest of dark rooms. It is ultimately an expression of his love for all things hip hop, but in characteristic fashion it is done with his own slant on the style. It could almost be called 'hop and bass', for it brings in elements of a much faster style, creating a thrilling clash of speeds and rhythmic meters.

Take the coruscating Snap, for instance, where the kick drum slams heavily down on the first beat, and the huge crashes of percussion threaten to wipe out anything in their path. Even more powerful is Fools Rhythm, a track that Tobin previously released for Ninja's XX box set. The huge beat has an army of clappers and a wiry synth line that drops like a snake almost beneath the audible threshold on headphones. It is a truly thrilling moment when music like this makes the ribcage rattle, tapping in to the primal rhythms that Tobin expresses so vividly.

And yet there is a little subtlety elsewhere, albeit in small measure. Tobin proves adept at handling threadbare string lines, which often pop up in the middle ground, but when they assume centre stage, as they do briefly in Stripe Rhythm, the effect is disconcerting, the percussion pulled from under the listener's feet.

It is easy to imagine a full on rap working well with much of this music, and indeed it did in the first Two Fingers album, a collaboration with Sway. In a sense that is the only element missing here, the vocal aspect which could make this music truly overpowering. Yet Tobin's music is so full on, so conspicuously lacking in any sense of holding back, that the proper thing to do is just leave any preconceptions at the door and lose control. Completely.

Holy Other - Held: I had the privilege of seeing Amon Tobin's ISAM 2.0 show this year in Minneapolis.  IT WAS AMAZING!!!  Beside that, he had Holy Other open up for him.  I had only heard bits and pieces so I wasnt sure what to expect.  He played this whole album live.

Holy Other's debut album Held is a curious straddling of sacral lament and erotic ballad, and its perpetual delight in painting varying musical shades of black is merely a continuation of the tone set by the Manchester producer's EP With U from last year. Despite being far more cohesive and richer, Held still shares significantly similar timbral ground with its predecessor: the same droning pedal points, shattered vocals and percussive expanse. Holy Other's expressive textures can seem relentless at times. But Held's mesmeric quality relies on this use of cavernous oppression.

Held is released via Tri-Angle, also home to Balam Acab and oOoOO, artists who've been variously described as a movement exploring the intersections of dubstep and the shadow of witch house. Burial's muted textures and ambiguous vocals are repeatedly cited as a reference point. But while Holy Other shares Burial's hallmarks of bedroom anonymity and the disconnect of the internet, this is not music particularly concerned with the recording of the urban landscape. Held seems far more interested in constructing fragility, romanticism and sensuality.

Vocal motifs are woven through the record, bathed in stuttered rhythms, to create waves and waves of sound that border on liturgy. The immediate effect is one of intense pleading. A clouded backdrop opens (W)here, dashed through with yearning voices and soaked percussion. Minimalist textures and liquid vocals well up on Tense Past as the album gathers pace. From then on, the music expands into a sequence of variations, from the darkened synth colours that form the bed of Love Some1 through to the blocks of dying breath on Nothing Here that bring the album to a close. But the most remarkable moment comes during the title track, as the mantra-like vocals shift from indecipherable incantation towards a defined yearning: "hold me", all dressed up in a steaming wall of sound.

While the ways in which Holy Other manipulates texture to filter his sound through the blackest of screens are an important part of his musical appeal, it is the slowing down of the music to a porous crawl that forms the most significant aspect of his success. The music works in much the same way as the drugged up, occult culture of the 1990s screw movement – slowing down music as both a minimalist and transformative act. Voices become androgynous, the bass tires, and the impact is both ambiguous and highly sexualised. Screw's shrouded sounds continue today, particularly in the diseased anthems and iconography of Salem. Similarly, from his performances in pitch darkness with his face veiled, through to the crumpled cover art of With U and Held, Holy Other reinforces an erotic, nocturnal imagery.

A couple of years back the track U Smile 800% Slower, an elongation of Justin Bieber's song into a soaring half hour soundscape, went viral. It was the perfect encapsulation of how slowness can unravel the façade of pop culture, revealing something mysterious, dark and unexplored. Held's seductive immersion points do not require the listener to work hard at all but instead merely follow the gradual expansion of a minimal textural palette into extreme drama and suffocating sonority. The resulting wash of sound makes for an escapist experience par excellence.  Check it out!  Open your mind.

Grimes - Visions:
While no record label can be a guarantee of quality, 4AD comes pretty close. Since 1979, the label formed by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent has been a by-word for quality, boasting names like The Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Bon Iver and tUnE-yArDs.

Grimes are the latest act to join the label. The stage name of Claire Boucher from Montreal, Visions is actually her third album but the first to be released through 4AD - and it's a tribute to the record's quality that it immediately sits comfortably next to other, more established, names on their roster.

Visions is, frustratingly enough for a reviewer, one of those albums that's almost impossible to describe. You could start throwing around adjectives like ethereal, spooky, slinky and eclectic - all of which would be accurate but don't even begin to scratch the surface. It's electro-pop but with emotion, arty but accessible: a whole mess of contradictions lie at the huge heart of this record.

Boucher is the polar opposite of the similarly excellent Sleigh Bells - where the New Yorkers take bubblegum pop and then sledgehammer it under a barrage of noise, Boucher's sound is so light and airy that, at first listen, sometimes the melodies pass you by. But, like her closest comparison, Braids, there's much to explore and once you connect with Grimes, you're in for the long haul.

Visions skips effortlessly from piano-driven pop (Genesis), euphoric twinkly dance (Vowels = Space And Time), and atmospheric, Mozart-sampling soundscapes (Nightmusic). Hooking it all together is Boucher's arresting falsetto, often multi-tracked in the fashion of Juliana Barwick - the opening track, Infinite Love Without Fulfillment, is simply a minute and a half of chopped up vocals over a minimal beat but you're immediately hooked and intrigued.

There's a ghostly minimalism at play, recalling the early days of the dubstep of Burial and James Blake, and on others it almost goes bubblegum pop. Be A Body and Vowels = Space & Time sound like pop songs from another planet while even the interludes - so often used as filler - have more depth than you'd expect, with Eight pitching a robotic drone against Boucher's eerily high vocals to produce something irresistibly hypnotic.

Yet Boucher is at her best on Visions when she lets her human side through. Oblivion gurgles and bubbles away like a lightly simmering geyser, but when Boucher sings that "when you're running by yourself it's hard to find someone to hold your hand" it's impossible not to get a shiver down the spine. Even better is the best track here, Skin, six minutes of yearning beauty, with Boucher's voice swooping and diving, casting an air of impossible sadness as she laments that "you act like nothing ever happened but it meant the world to me".

It's an album to live in and love, to dance to and to wallow in. It may be light years from the lo-fi bedroom recordings that Boucher started from, but it's also a massive leap forward for her - an album that sits comfortably in the 4AD canon of excellence.

 Shackleton - Music for the Quiet Hour: Although a dauntingly prolific artist, Sam Shackleton has thus far eschewed conventional release arrangements. Numerous EPs might have been expected to lead to the release of an album but this actually transpired to be a mix CD for Fabric consisting entirely of his own work. However, his excellent collaboration with Pinch last year suggested a burgeoning interest in coherent long form projects. This cleverly compiled set released on his own Woe To The Septic Heart label continues this trend in a typically imaginative, mischievous and rebellious manner.

In this age of virtual distribution, it’s refreshing to find a product so lovingly and carefully prepared. This is an object of considerable beauty, three slabs of vinyl and an accompanying CD album housed within a box and joined together with manically inventive and exciting artwork from Zeke Clough. Released as a surprise, highly limited edition package (although also available as a download), this is a fine example of how quality music and product design can serve to generate their own buzz.

The Drawbar Organ is a collection of three EPs containing music all built around the Drawbar Organ sound. Whilst there is a strong sense of continuity with Shackleton’s previous work here, the sound itself enables the creation of some uniquely unsettling moods. The thick textures and full harmony provided by the instrument actually mesh very well with Shackleton’s signature minimalism and paralysis. Shackleton enhances his tense and nervy aesthetic here with compelling results. This is some of his most sweaty and enclosed music, created with broad strokes and deftly juxtaposing his skeletal percussion backdrops with unrestrained gasps, sighs and expressive outbursts from the organ itself, without sacrificing any of his trademark restraint. The sustained eerieness of Touched or the patiently unfolding menace of Test Tubes are brilliant summations of Shackleton’s particular brand of mood music.

Yet whilst these EPs introduce a new sound into Shackleton’s established palette, they do little to really push him outside his comfort zone. Music For The Quiet Hour, an uninterrupted hour of music divided into five parts, is something else entirely - a major artistic statement that consistently dazzles and surprises. If Shackleton might have in the past been loosely connected with dubstep or bass music, ...The Quiet Hour transcends these spurious genre associations through its meticulous craftsmanship and through its textural and sonic variety.

Whilst the occasional dominance of bass and the repeated melodica motif of Part 3 suggests a continued kinship with dub tropes, this is often closer in spirit to industrial sounds or musique concrete. The percussion often sounds purposefully thin and trebly, whilst all five parts seem to float on a dependable bed of white noise and pitchless intrusions. It makes for a remarkable and nuanced headphone listen, even if Shackleton refuses to shy away from harsh or abrasive sound choices. It’s a thoroughly immersive experience that, despite its uninterrupted duration, demands to be experienced as a whole. A cursory listen to any fragment or snapshot would feel incomplete.

The first and fifth parts serve as mood-setting prologue and concluding epilogue respectively, drawing the listener into Shackleton’s weird world. Part two incorporates intriguing cross rhythms and rhythmic modulations perhaps drawn from Shackleton’s fascination with a range of African music along with a range of disorientating, head spinning vocal samples that collide with each other in a curious planned disorder. Whilst it has some of Shackleton’s Steve Reich-inspired relentlessness at times, it is also purposefully disruptive and unpredictable, occasionally lulling the listener into a false sense of security.

It also re-introduces Vengeance Tenfold, Shackleton’s vocal collaborator here. With the words ‘music is the weapon of the future’, he ushers in a long, mostly spoken apocalyptic quasi-poem. At first glance, this speaking voice feels curiously monotonous, but the occasional cadences and quirks of phrasing blend perfectly with Shackleton’s playful sonic refractions. In part three, it is the vocal lines that provide much of the music’s impetus and forward motion, to such an extent that Shackleton at one point strips away the beats to brilliant effect.

The longer movements of Quiet Hour blend insistent rhythms and percussive inventiveness with long passages of distorted, sometimes uncomfortable ambience. This feels like the electronic producer’s equivalent of a major, orchestrated composition, with Shackleton paying as close attention to sound, texture and dynamics. Ideas are sometimes repeated or restated, but more often this is a music of impressive contrasts and juxtapositions. It’s a brilliant exploration of the inevitable interaction between sound, the passing of time and the active process of listening.

Matthew Dear - Beams: "There’s just one in a million hearts that feels the way, the way I do,” laments Matthew Dear as Her Fantasy, the opening track of his fourth full length album Beams, stumbles into motion. Dear’s weighty groan is cast adrift amidst the slow motion gauze of vocal samples, translucent synths and tumbling percussion, cutting through the breezy soundscape with a profound, regretful melancholy. As the song continues, the sense of alienation expressed in the lyrics intensifies whilst the surrounding music continues to gain vitality in a surreal counterpoint of colliding emotions. As he questions “Am I one heartbeat away from receiving a damaging shock to my life?”, Dear’s inescapable isolation is embodied by the extreme contrast between this honest expression of inner turmoil and the ecstatic outpouring of the song’s instrumental climax which follows immediately after.

The dichotomy presented so deftly on Her Fantasy forms the primary concern for the entirety of Beams: Dear’s persona of a romantic, misunderstood soul is constantly forced into colourful, rhythmic and positively extroverted aural spaces. Yet, rather than presenting a two dimensional antagonism between conflicting factions, the relationship between Beams’ two sides is strikingly symbiotic. Where overwrought emoting and indulgence could easily have prevailed in a more manipulative musical setting, Dear’s laments take on an understated honesty as he plods on in earnest against the pervasive external forces. As such, this set of songs comes to enact its emotional content rather than simply representing it, culminating in an utterly absorbing and engaging listening experience.

Likewise, the playful production – a subtly textured take on synth pop and techno – sits perpetually in the shadow of Dear’s vocals, as if filtered through a dusty, warped lens. In this context the overt light-heartedness of the music appears forced and almost sleazy, tainted with an ulterior motive. At its most tactile, Beams takes on the distorted, half-remembered terror of early Disney cartoons in which the innocent joy of bright technicolour takes on a nightmarish foreboding in its sinister exaggeration of proportion. Indeed, the sickly cover painting could be seen as a manifestation of Beams’ claustrophobic atmosphere: there’s colour here, for sure, but it’s all become stretched somehow into a grotesque distortion of reality.

Far from coming off as a gimmicky or naïve mechanism, Beams’ contrasting tones are essential to the album’s stunning dramatic potency. That such a seemingly simplistic premise to the album could reach the levels of complexity and intrigue found on Beams is indicative of Dear’s fearsome skill as a songwriter and producer. These songs ebb and flow, build and release, twisting through labyrinthine structures without ever feeling overly sprawling or unfocussed. The uniformity of Dear’s vocals provides a cohesiveness to the eclectic aural territories explored throughout Beams: his deadpan delivery anchors the music, providing a dependable reference point as the album travels through an array of disparate sounds, from post-punk bass lines to wobbly, Boards Of Canada-esque synths.

If his reserved vocals – which simultaneously recall the unaffected deliveries of Nicolas Jaar, James Murphy and David Byrne – occasionally seem to lack in variation and colour, it is only because Dear sticks so steadfastly to his guns throughout the album. Beams is not intended as a forgiving listen. This album is unapologetic in its singularity, yet listening to this record is an experience that is as rewarding as it is exhausting. Beams is an uncompromising, forceful and darkly beautiful album from a formidable musical talent.

Actress - R.I.P: Darren Cunningham’s music as Actress has always had a nebulous, elusive quality, even as many tried to categorise it within the parameters of UK bass music. Now, with R.I.P., his third full length album, that sense of mystery and strangeness has become the core and focus of his sound. Following (perhaps sub-consciously) in the footsteps of a number of recent electronic releases (the two EPs from Andy Stott being a prime example), R.I.P. seeks to deny electronic music many of its powerful and most recognisable conventions. Four to the floor beats are often either absent or implied, and Cunningham seems most interested in exploring minimal textures and unexpected spaces.

The result is an eerie, peculiar hallucinatory world that is vivid, imaginative and, assuming the listener can yield to its demands, utterly compelling. Much of the music here is either misty of hazy, with its often beautiful vistas deliberately obscured. Bravely, Cunningham opts to introduce this approach from the very outset, with the opening title track both oddly mysterious and tantalisingly brief. The superb Ascending lives up to its title, its delicate layers of synths seeming to reach ever higher. Even better is Holy Water, an appropriately aquatic music on the nuance and impact of sound and texture. Like the title track, Holy Water is mercilessly concise at under two minutes, but it feels complete in its miniature form rather than sketchy or under-developed.

When Cunningham does allow a standard heartbeat pulse to predominate, as on the fantastic closer IWAAD or the more subtly insistent Marble Plexus, he makes sure to keep the overall mood angular and disconcerting. The result is a relentless, exciting hinterland between techno and murky, robotic shuffle. Marble Plexus has a ghostly character that somehow makes it timeless. It does not sound compulsively modern or of its time but neither does it sound historic or dated.

With individual track titles such as Jardin, Serpent and Tree Of Knowledge, there is a transparent Genesis concept behind R.I.P., although direct engagement with these ideas does not appear to be a pre-requisite to enjoying or understanding Cunningham’s thoughtful experimentation. The delicate clicks and whirrs that underpin the piano-meets-music box melody of Jardin might perhaps suggest tranquility and vulnerability, whilst Serpent does indeed have a more menacing, threatening tone. R.I.P. certainly has a strong sense of being a coherent suite of music, albeit one that is intentionally disjointed and fractured.

Paradoxically, the strong sense of coherence and form that emerges on R.I.P. seems to come from Cunningham’s delight in exploiting contrasts and strange juxtapositions. The heartbeat that finally emerges on Marble Plexus proves to be a false dawn, as Cunningham immediately dives back into more detailed, less immediate sound worlds. The subtle hint of danger in Serpent gives way to the stark brutalism of Shadow From Tartarus, which itself buries some relatively pretty sounds within its depths of noise.

Whilst R.I.P. certainly has some of the cold detachment that often characterises electronic music, it is also a remarkably thoughtful and creative work that has clearly benefited from a more personal and human compositional approach. It is the work of an open-minded, playful and hugely successful deconstructionist.