The Obligatory Best of 2010 List - Part Two

Following on from Part One, here they are... Our favourite nine albums of 2010:

9. Crooks & Lovers - Mount Kimbie

This year saw dub step evolve. Having previously felt like an excuse for people who should know better to listen to garage some of the genre's pioneers began to, well, actually pioneer. And the innovation really came from combining the music with other genres. Mount Kimbie's debut is a perfect example - tempered with a bit of intelligent soul you suddenly had a classic on your hands, particularly on the standout 'Before I Move Off'.

8. Total Life Forever - Foals

It shouldn't really have worked... Following their acclaimed status prior to the release of their debut album (and subsequent fall from grace when it disappointed some), Foals returned with a more melodic, accessible and populist album. And it was also the best thing they have produced yet.

Criticism has been levelled at Total Life Forever on the basis that it contains too many songs to appeal to summer festival goers. Which basically means it has too many songs people will actually like. Go figure.

By stripping back the math-rock and building some actual songs Foals made an album containing several of this year's best songs. And it isn't just the sings that shine - the production work from Luke Smith is sublime - a gorgeous, melancholic, sun-bleached feeling runs through the record from the dip-in-the-pool-refreshment of 'Blue Blood' through to the desperate 'What Remains'. With not just one but two completely killer tracks ('Spanish Sahara' and '2 Trees') Total Life Forever is already shaping up to be one of 2010's most overlooked albums in the end of year roundups.

7. InnerSpeaker - Tame Imapala

Whatever you think of Tame Impala - little more than plunderers of the past or innovators kick starting a new genre - it's difficult not to get caught up in it all. Sure, the production is epic - thick basslines, rhythms punched out of solid steel and guitars that encircle the listener in proggy bliss - but it is the songs that will keep you coming back, particularly the apathetic bluesy closer 'I Don't Mind'... It's the stoner equivalent of La Roux's 'Bulletproof' and the weird rave bit halfway through never fails to surprise. Genius.

6. Black City - Matthew Dear

Potentially Dear's magnum-opus, Black City builds on everything that has come before and turns it into something original. Darker than ever, it straddles a variety of emotions, at turns alienated, sexually depraved and wounded and needy. 'You Put A Smell On Me' is like Nine Inch Nail's 'Closer' re-made for 2010 - pure, unadulterated filth of the sort that will have you singing things you really shouldn't in public.

5. The Suburbs - Arcade Fire

BlackPlastic still isn't sure if The Suburbs is as good as either of the last two Arcade Fire albums but the fact that the question even lingers means this is an album that deserves a place on the list. A cleaner and sparser record, but potentially all the more weighty for it. On first listen it seemed to lack stand out moments but repeated listens just demonstrate that this is simply because every track is a highlight.  

4. Klavierwerke - James Blake

Not an album but still one of this year's most significant releases, James Blake seems to be making it his personal mission to upset hardcore dub step fans by tearing up the rule book, taking the genre's best ideas and running off to make something entirely new with them. 'I Only Know (What I Know Now)' is the sound of a man learning from his past mistakes. It is also this year's most emotive five minutes.

3. Vampires With Dreaming Kids / Color Your Life - Twin Sister

Not an album but really a double pack EP, this nonetheless was the sound of one of 2010's most promising bands. With the stripped back aesthetic of the XX, the rawness of early Yeah Yeah Yeahs and what sounds like sterling taste in 1980s pop music at their best the influences combine to make something marvellous, as on the slow burning 'The Other Side of Your Face'. Twin Sister will be ones to watch in 2011.

2. This Is Happening - LCD Soundsystem

If albums were judged on artwork alone This Is Happening would have owned this year. With its minimal type combined with that picture of James Murphy flying through the air in his suit it really felt like a statement of intent.

Whatever. This Is Happening is regardless one of the best things to come out of any stereo this year. With greater focus than Sound of Silver LCD's latest release felt more like a proper album. And with the monstrous bass of 'Dance Yrself Clean', the middle-aged-guy-having-an-epiphany gut-wrencher that is 'All I Want' and the subtly epic 'Home' it also had the tunes. It may not have another 'Someone Great' but it's the sound of one of our times' best bands all grown up.

1. Cosmogramma - Flying Lotus

It says a lot when a record has increasing amounts of praise heaped on it the longer it has been out. He may not have won a Grammy but he has made 2010's best album - a record that fuses genres like they don't even matter. The J Dilla comparisons are perhaps inevitable but Cosmogramma is no mere re-tread - it demonstrates that Flying Lots is one of the most innovative producers of our time.

So what are your thoughts? What did we miss?

Album Review: Cosmogramma - Flying Lotus

Sometimes you just have to go back.

BlackPlastic can't be everywhere all at once and that is why we never got around to reviewing Flying Lotus' latest album Cosmogramma. But sometimes an album keeps pulling you back in and that is how it is with Cosmogramma. To pass it by forever more would leave a little itch in the soul.

Flying Lotus is one of those artists that seems to continually expand his horizons whilst still retaining enough focus to make each release different, challenging perhaps, yet still ultimately accessible and magnificent. He once made instrumental Hip-Hop but Cosmogramma could never be so conservatively labelled.

Opening with in-your-face aural-enema 'Clock Catcher', followed by a couple of heavy-set funk numbers it is track four, the Eastern sounds meets soulful strings of 'Intro//A Cosmic Drama', before Cosmogramma shows its true colours. From this point things become increasingly psychedelic - next track 'Zodiac Shit' is a half bass-heavy, half string-laden epic.

The obvious talking point: Thom Yorke's guest turn is actually remarkably subtle - his soulful vocal used sparingly yet worked into the very fabric of the song itself. And more than anything this freeform approach reminds BlackPlastic of jazz. 'Arkestry' is wandering trumpet and rolling drums and it feels like big band gone loco. The result is a little bit staggering.

'MmmHmm', featuring Thundercat, is probably Flying Lotus' most J Dilla moment yet. The first of a run of three beautifully varied but complimentary tracks, joined by funky house-inspired 'Do The Astral Plane' and the blues-y 'Satelllliiiiiiiteee', it marks Cosmogramma's highest point. But there is so much else hear - we haven't mentioned the ping pong sampling 'Table Tennis' featuring Laura Darlington or the dizzy closer 'Galaxy in Janaki', for starters.

Clearly increasingly inspired by his heritage (it's all too often pointed out that Flying Lotus was great-nephew to Alice and John Coltrane), as Flying Lotus gets more experimental his music gets more and more generous. BlackPlastic comes back to Cosmogramma now because it still has so much to say... Every listen feels just a little bit fresher.

BP x

Cosmogramma is out now on Warp, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].

Album Review: Beatdown - Various mixed by Scratch Perverts

BlackPlastic always says that if you own just one hip-hop album then it should be the compilation album Hip-Hop Don't Stop: The Greatest. Across two discs Scratch Perverts member Prime Cuts manages to create an inventive mix of pretty much every vital old school hip-hop record in existence. It features some of the best mixing BlackPlastic has ever heard, let alone heard committed to record.

As such BlackPlastic holds a bit of a soft one for the Scratch Perverts and was pleased to slip Beatdown, inspired by the Perverts hosted night at Fabric, into the CD player.

Beatdown: eclectic, knob on, pedal to the floor. This mix certainly isn't backwards in coming forward - there are 37 tracks throughout this 65 minute mix and as a result some great moments are pretty much guaranteed - the Martyn's Heartbeat Mix of Flying Lotus' 'Roberta Flack', for example.

Sadly they are just too few and far between and there is far too much that feels like it is only here because it is currently en vogue. As a whole it's a full on party style mix and Scratch Perverts have made much of the fact that they still play contemporary, current selections, boasting the fact that the mix is modern and has plenty of dub-step...

...So here is the thing: dub-step is whack music for lame-o middle-aged urban wannabees. That includes Burial. Oh, and whilst we are sacrificing the sacred cows of the late 'noughties': Zomby (who features on Beatdown) is shit too.

So ultimately what BlackPlastic is saying is it doesn't matter if the mixing is fab and the track listing 'current': if the tunes don't stack up, they don't stack up. Just because your genre of choice is British and involves breakbeats it doesn't make it any good.  BlackPlastic would take Hip-Hop Don't Stop any day.

BP x

Available now - order on CD on Amazon.co.uk [affiliate link].

Five Electronic Albums of the Year

Putting together these lists is always exceedingly difficult. Usually just remembering every record of note from a year is a challenge in itself but to pick just a handful and bestow some sort of special honour on those is practically impossible, this year more than most. For this year has seen some utterly fantastic records. 2007 was a great year due to a few select releases whereas 2008 had a massive breadth of fantastic releases.

A few that deserve mention that fail to make our list: The sophistication of Morgan Geist (and Junior Boy's Greenspan's) sophisticated Double Night Time. Midnight Juggernauts' Dystopia, which successfully paints another chapter in mixing rock music with dance. Metronomy's beautifully wonky Nights Out, a criminally overlooked pop re-birth. Gang Gang Dance's Saint Dymphna didn't even get a BlackPlastic review (we struggle to catch them all) but trust us - it barely misses out getting in our top five, as do the similarly unreviewed Third by Portishead and Los Angeles by Flying Lotus. The Presets grew to be more than just an also ran with Apocalypso - showing a new level of emotion that was missing off of their debut. M83's ode to Donnie Darko teenage kicks, Saturdays = Youth was another terrific addition to Anthony Gonzalez' cannon - it may lack Before The Dawn Heals Us' more ecstatic moments but it did demonstrate an growing level of focus and a refinement of the overall sound.  Hercules & Love Affair's eponymous album has been credited with the rebirth of disco - BlackPlastic isn't sure that has actually happened but that's nothing to do with the quality of this album, which has a level of maturity and sophistication that should ensure it a place in your collection next to Morgan Geist's 2008 album. Hot Chip failed to make the list, possibly purely due to their own desire for experimentation - in places Made In The Dark matches anything the group have previously released, it just suffered for being unfocused (but hey, focusing IS difficult in the dark).

So here is what DID make the list:

5. Hlllyh - The Mae Shi

Not a perfect record by any stretch, but that is the point in the Mae Shi.  Much to the bemusement of his companions BlackPlastic had the luck to catch them live earlier in the year and it was an unfocused, chaotic mess.  And it was fantastic.  Hlllyh is a record that does everything at once and just about makes it work and for that it deserves applause and love.  It's a rambunctious, noisy, angry-punk-pop-hippie-love-in and it gets a big hug from us.

4. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

As BlackPlastic suspected back when it was reviewed, Crystal Castles' debut was an album that gets better with repeat listens.  Lonely, cold and yet never anything other than totally, uncompromisingly experimental, Crystal Castles have pushed the envelope for all those within the chiptune genre.

3. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires

A record that is already seemingly suffering from the "Oh I'm slightly embarrassed I got so excited about that one" treatment for some journalists: Fact magazine's songs of the year list contained a snide comment about this album's failure to 'save indie dance'.

BlackPlastic loves Fact but to that we say a big "fuck you" because this album is so platinum-five-stars it's not even funny. If it has failed to set the world alight it is the failure of Fact, BlackPlastic, music publications everywhere and the general public at large for choosing some talent-less twat off X-Factor EVERY SINGLE TIME. It certainly is not a reflection of the ten gloriously produced punk-funk house-jams hear: this is a record to skip a heart beat too.

2. Fantasy Black Channel - Late of the Pier

Like waking up from a 70s slasher porn flick nightmare Fantasy Black Channel sounds like Bowies' imagined future.  The sound is far more cutting edge than the Klaxons managed on their debut and yet it is filtered through a glorious haze of thick chunky basslines from the aforementioned decade that just make it sound sexier than their contemporaries.  By the album's close, Fantasy Black Channel should have you on your knees with a lighter in the air.

1. In Ghost Colours - Cut Copy

If, for some reason, you are in any doubt as to what makes Cut Copy one of the best acts of our time go and grab their superb So Cosmic mix (alternative link) and, if you can't wait, scan forward to 29:30, where they mix Fleetwood Mac's 'Never Forget' with Lifelike's 'So Electric' and create a hands-in-the-air-tears-in-my-eyes anthem that deserves it's own release, the warm electronic waves of Lifelike's tracks gradually surrounding Stevie Nicks' vocals in a beautiful swell.  It is this mixture of old and new that makes Cut Copy so utterly charming, their ability to combine seemingly disparate sounds into one fantastic piece of music, and in the hands of the DFA's Tim Goldsworthy this ability truly shined.  Just check the glorious combination of the shoe-gazing guitar line of 'So Haunted' with the floating-in-space chorus and the final New Order-esque outro.

What's more, In Ghost Colours is a beautifully sequenced album. Ditch the bonus track bundled with the UK CD version and you have a record that fits together just perfectly, tracks bridged with a series of not-inconsequential interludes.

Cut Copy's debut, Bright Like Neon Love, was a fantastic record.  That In Ghost Colours represents a complete step change in everyone's perceptions of their abilities is a testament to the record: You won't hear a better collection of electronic pop songs from 2008.

BP x