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The Year in Music 2008

December 10, 2008

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover MGMT or The Ting Tings, but music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

a) Introduction and the 30 tunes you HAVE to hear
b) Rock
c) Hip Hop
d) Dancehall & Soca
e) Electro House
f) House
g) ‘Funky’ aka UK House
h) Breakbeats and Basslines
i) Other styles
j) Albums & Mixtapes

a) Introduction

30 Tunes you HAVE to hear
Busy Signal – Up in her Belly
Apple – Total Sickness
Gotty Boi Chris – Bend Ova (Azz Up remix)
The Hundred in the Hands – Dressed in Dresden
Tru Skool – Boliyan
Richard Swift – Bully
Black Ghosts – Any Way (Fake Blood remix)
Raphael Saadiq – 100 Yard Dash
Jamie Lidell – Figured Me Out
Sis – Trompeta
Shurwayne Winchester – Road Jam (original and road remix)
Jan Driver – Rat Alert
Charlie Blacks – Buddy Buddy Buddy
5th Ward Weebie ft. Lil Wayne – Bend It Ova
Don Rimini – Let Me Back Up (Crookers remix)
The Shoes – Knock Out
Zomby – Strange Fruit
Jacques Renault – Bad Skinned
Emmanuel Jal – Warchild (Various Production remix)
Duke Dumont – Hoy
Mr Vegas – Daggering
Jay Reatard – All Wasted
Busta Rhymes – Don’t Touch Me Now
NB Funky – Riddim Box
Mr Figz – Rain remix
DJ Sobrino – Ultimate Rhythm Tribal
Lady Saw – Grudge Mi
Mr Vegas – Round of Applause
Discodeine – Joystick
Loungin Kollective – Riddim Come 4ward (Herve’s Fire Pon Dem version)

If music in 2008 had to be summed up in 3 words, it would be Funky Africa Disco, though not all together (good though that sounds). ‘Funky’, a rather confusing name for a new UK genre which took in influences from 2-step, grime, US house and soca amongst others, emerged as a potentially thrilling development for UK club music. (For more on Funky, see the separate section later on.)

African music is nothing new, but this year there was a focus on the continent in a way there hasn’t been before, with Western tastemakers highlighting the variety of thrilling sounds coming from different countries. The tunes were by no means the traditional hippy-ish world-music stuff, but cutting-edge stuff to rival anywhere else in the world.

Similarly Disco, and indeed disco revivals, are hardly new, but there is a lot of ‘bad disco’ around, and it was in 2008 that the really great disco music, which is much funkier, was pushed to the forefront, alongside some really great club nights and a few new disco acts.

b) Rock

Top 10
The Hundred in the Hands – Dressed in Dresden
Jay Reatard – All Wasted
The Shoes – Knock Out
Richard Swift – Bully
Wavves – Beach Demon
Jacques Renault – Bad Skinned
Whitey – Sweet words for the Sour
The Builders and the Butchers – When It Rains
The Teenagers – Starlett Johannsen (Rory Phillips Dub)
Late From the Pier – The Bears Are Coming

It’s felt like the most interesting year for Rock, a turning-point back to ‘indie music’ as it used to be. Since Britpop blurred alternative and mainstream rock, it has felt ‘indie’ has been very much corporatised as a concept, either by major labels having a segment for ‘alternative rock’, or the fact that a number of the hot underground bands such as Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand were obviously destined for the mainstream. This year it felt that this year there were a greater number of interesting (if not always good) more arty bands that seemed more interested in doing their own thing than commercial success (though that may well change with time!). Similarly the new Pure Groove shop, which has taken over from Rough Trade as the retail barometer for new bands, has fewer bands that you can imagine blowing up.

For all that, there are still of course many bands who do have the potential to cross over to a degree, and one hopes that one of them could be The Hundred in the Hands. They have released their debut single, the blisteringly good ‘Dressed in Dresden’, as a free download and hopefully this will mean their reputation spreads much faster than it would have as a 500-copy limited edition seven-inch (update: it is now also being released as a 7” by Pure Groove in 2009). It’s a proper, punchy, exuberant indie dancefloor anthem and it’ll be very interesting to see how they follow it up.

Another artist good at making dancefloor anthems is Whitey. He appears to have an uneasy relationship with record labels unfortunately, as his last few releases have been excellent. This year he came out with ‘Sweet Words for the Sour’, another hugely catchy, upbeat number. Let us hope his album comes out soon and can maintain his high standards.

The Builders and the Butchers are a new band who deserve more hype than they’ve received so far – their song, ‘When It Rains’ is a strong, very charming tune that places them in the same ball park as Cold War Kids and Arcade Fire. Wonderful singer-songwriter Richard Swift returned with a low-key EP containing the excellent oddity, ‘Bully’, a lo-fi 60s-style garage number which switched between a gruff voice-over and a doo-wop falsetto.

Jay Reatard has been around for a while but began to make waves in the UK this year, and deservedly so, for he is a master purveyor of poppy punk which sounds like a ragged collaboration between Supergrass and the Ramones. ‘All Wasted’ was the highlight of his album of collected singles this year, but to really appreciate him you need to see him and his band live, one of the most thrilling spectacles around at the moment, as they race through their set literally without stopping. The other really thrilling live act in small surroundings were The Death Set, though personally I never found them quite as satisfying on record.

The wonderful Sex Vid, a proper old school US punk band who keep it real by, er, not having a MySpace page put out another of their limited seven inches. ‘Nests” is a bright, brief burst of noise and over in less time than Johnny Rotten said it took him to have sex.

Esser is another hyped person who seems very likely to cross over – his latest single, ‘Satisfied’ sounds like it could have been a Lily Allen instrumental (that’s a compliment by the way), though his lyrics could do with a bit of work. Elsewhere the stand-out song on the Magistrates’ demo, Make this Work, was considered strong enough in that form to be their debut single. It’s reminiscent of Klaxons in that it’s poppy guitar rock with a falsetto vocal, and it is a great song, though personally I think they need a bit of production polish to really take them to the next level.

Whatever you may think about hyped bands such as Kasms, SCUM, Ulterior and An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (and some are definitely better than others), they appear to be trying to doing something a little different and interesting. An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump stood out, not just for their wonderful, stroppy image. Live to date they could be seen as a triumph of attitude over ability, but the best way to hear and see them is on the video to their debut single ‘Lights Out’, where they sound fantastic.

And perhaps the least likely song of the year was Chris Cornell’s track ‘Ground Zero’ produced by Timbaland. The former Soundgarden grunge singer has gone all retro-pop-soulful. It’s pretty good actually though god knows what his fan base will make of it.

Also check
Sex Vid – Nests
Rainbow Arabia – Omar K
Magistrates – Make This Work
Dan Black – Yours – catchy, quality alt-pop

c) Hip Hop

Top 10
Gotty Boi Chris – Bend Ova (Azz Up remix)
5th Ward Weebie ft. Lil Wayne – Bend It Ova
Lil Wayne – A Milli
Busta Rhymes – Don’t Touch Me
Gotty Boi Chris – Wiggle Low (remix)
David Banner – When You Hear What I Got to Say
Alfamega – Sittin Up High
Pitbull – Krazy
Maino – Hi Hater
Jay-Z – Jockin Jay-Z (Bladerunners Edit)

After last year’s drought, this year felt even worse for hip hop. Well, maybe unless you really love Autotune (but that’s a can of worms I really don’t want to open). There were a few attempts to reinvigorate the genre, but they felt half-hearted. Those included the continuation of ‘Trance-hop’ or even ‘Rave-hop’, exemplified by the Hood Headlinaz who sampled Robert Miles’ ‘Children’ and even ‘Born Slippy’. Slightly more interesting was Princess’ ‘Pretty Rave Girl’ which sampled an insane, banging euro-hard-house tune of the same name.

Elsewhere, Snoop Dogg’s ‘Sexual Seduction’ was a more dreamy, vibe-y type of hip hop pop song, and there was a bunch of tunes with a similar sort of vibe around, with highlights coming from artists such as Ball Greezy’s ‘Shone’, Manish’s ‘I Get Ham’ and AlfaMega’s ‘Sittin Up High’, but most of it wasn’t all that.

The irrepressible Lil Jon pushed out some unsubtle but entertaining poppy hip hop, courtesy of Play n Skillz ‘ 1 Mo Gin’ which liberally sampled Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’, and Pitbull’s ‘Krazy’ which sampled Frederico Fianchi’s electro anthem of last year, ‘Cream’ which was a relatively interesting genre clash. On the other hand, the Ying Yang Twinz, responsible for some of the great crunk anthems, came out with ‘Drop’ which was a painfully bad attempt at getting on board the hipster-electro bandwagon – the US equivalent of Lethal B’s horrible ‘Wearing My Rolex’ rip-off, ‘Keys to my Bentley’.

The only really thing worth getting excited about in hip hop was the new wave of New Orleans bounce, in particular the artist Gotty Boi Chris. NOLA Bounce is one of those strange regional genres where almost every song has the exact same beat, so you want to deal with it in small doses, but what a beat it is! And Gotty Boi Chris’s sensitively titled ‘Bend Ova (Azz Up remix)’ takes the template and creates something incendiary with it. It’s got a ton of old-school 80s hip hop, go-go and Miami bass samples in it, Gotty Boi Chris is a proper hype man. Quite jaw-dropping. He also came out with ‘Wiggle Low’ remix which follows a similar pattern but sounds almost restrained after his other track. Gottty Boi Chris makes self-proclaimed club music, but hasn’t had a proper release since 2006, this is the sort of thing that is begging to be signed up.

The man producing most of his music is called Took – there seems to be little information about him, but he’s a formidable talent. He also did a brilliant remix of T2 & Jodie Aysha’s ‘Heartbroken’, reinventing the pop-bassline tune as one of those SWV-esque Jeep Beat remixes, i.e. stripped-down beats-and-bass 90s r&b. Very clever and effective.

The other stand-out track from New Orleans this year is 5th Ward Weebie’s ‘Bend It Ova’. Are you detecting a theme here? Like the other tracks, this is super stripped-down club hip hop, relying predominantly on beats and bass and 808s, recalling classic hip hop from 1985 and 1986 before samples took over. The same applies to Jay Z’s fun if disposable ‘Jockin Jay-Z’, appropriating a Run DMC sample. Look out for the simple Bladerunners re-edit which cuts up the intro – Bladerunners have done some other excellent re-edits, particularly an instrumental cut-up of Eddie Grant’s ‘Electric Avenue’ that is ripe for dancefloor abuse.

Otherwise, I don’t need to tell you how brilliant Lil Wayne’s ‘A Milli’ was, and great to see a really quality commercial hit out there. Busta’s ‘Don’t Touch Me’ was a brilliant piece of old-school funk-sampled hip hop and easily the most dazzling and dextrous lyrical delivery of the year, and David Banner’s ‘When You Hear What I Got to Say’ showed what an extraordinarily versatile talent Banner is, bypassing his freaky club sounds for a sweet, soul sample and a thoughtful, protest lyric.

d) Dancehall & Soca

Top 10
Busy Signal – Up in her Belly
Charlie Blacks – Buddy Buddy
Mr Vegas – Daggering
Lady Saw – Grudge Mi (Unfinished Business)
Mr Vegas – Round of Applause (Round of Applause)
Sean Paul – Grip (Sand Fly)
Burro Banton – Cross Da Board (Hard Grind)
Busy Signal – Cool Baby (Freestyle)
TOK – Reverse (Colo Colo)
Tarrus Riley & Sizzla – Who’s Gonna Save Us

Yet again, no great themes or change in dancehall, and why bother when there are still loads of cracking, inventive tunes coming out. If forced to choose one from the pile, it would have to be Busy Signal’s ‘Up in her Belly’, which sampled an old Brazilian track by and if one was minded you could label it the start of ‘Samba-hall’ though the world doesn’t really need any more ridiculous new genres. It sounds as you’d imagine, a big energetic collision of Brazil and Jamaica, with an effective, repetitive lyric from Mr Signal.

In a similarly, stripped down percussive vein, was Mr Vegas’ fantastic ‘Round of Applause’, while Vegas also came up with the charmingly euphoric anthem, ‘Daggering’. In terms of feel-good tunes, this was only rivalled by Charlie Black’s ‘Buddy Buddy’. Lady Saw smashed it on the super minimal Unfinished Business riddim, which consisted of an old-school dancehall ‘Hey’ and a basic beat and bass, leaving her vocal to stand out. Also on the super-minimal front was Busy Signal’s ‘Cool Baby’, a slinky number showing how to produce a great track from just a simple two-note keyboard sound.

For hyped-up energetic bashment sounds, you could do a lot worse than Burron Banton’s ‘Cross Da Board’ on the Hard Grind riddim. Sean Paul did a great job on the weird bumping and bubbling electronics on the Sand Fly riddim. Tarrus Riley and Sizzla in contrast put out a great, laid-back hip-hop style tune in ‘Who’s Gonna Save Us’. And there continued to be some 90s-throwback tunes, the pick of which would be TOK’s ‘Reverse’.

There was the usual selection of novelty dancehall in the shape of Busy Signal’s take on the Katy Perry song, reinvented as ‘I Fucked Your Girl’ (and she liked it). Slightly more gentle was Elephant Man’s ‘No Tikkle’ on the Benny Hill riddim, which as you’d imagine is a cover version of the Benny Hill theme music. Triumphantly awful and hilarious all at the same time. But most bizarre was Elephant Man, who’s never shied away from cheesy 80s pop, faithfully reworking Culture Club’s ‘Karma Chameleon’ in the form of ‘Calm It Down’.

Also check
Double Joint Riddim – another great, super minimal instrumental.
Busy Signal – Tic Toc – it sounded like a great MIA instrumental, and she later got on the remix.
Money Tree Riddim – a great bumping retro-electro riddim, but no great vocals, so stick with the version.

Soca
Time constraints meant not listening to much Soca this year, though thankfully Shurwayne Winchester practically distilled a whole carnival into his glorious tune, ‘Road Jam’. And at a slower tempo was Alison Hinds’ excellent ‘Thundah’. However the easiest way to catch up on Soca is to get hold of the outstanding annual mixes from G13 Sound International. This year’s was ‘Home For Carnival 4’. Previous years are now downloadable for free on their website, and this is a very passionate home-grown operation which is well-worth supporting at homeforcarnival.blogspot.com. Go pick up a CD today.

e) Electro House

Top 10
Discodeine – Joystick
Jan Driver – Rat Alert
Kleep – Formula One
Kebacid – Falafellows
Control Voltage – The Bounce
Butch – Mushroom Man
The Hacker – 2980
Colombia 1 – Colombia 1
The Hacker – Mumu
Style of Eye – Ona

And 10 ‘Blog-house’ anthems
Don Rimini – Let Me Back Up (Crookers remix)
Tiga – Mind Dimension 2
Crookers – AC/DC bootleg
ZZT – The Worm (Erol Alkan extended rework)
Proxy – Raven
Don Rimini – Rave Hard
Crookers – Il Brutto (original)
MGMT – Kids (Soulwax remix)
Fake Blood – Mars
Zombie Nation – Forza

It almost feels like a pointless endeavour writing this section (and even what to call it), with the extraordinary glut of mp3 blogs covering this sound to the extent that it has become known as ‘blog-house’. Similarly the big name producers are now well-established and have been covered extensively here in previous years. They were a bit hit-and-miss this year but the hits were great and there were other interesting tracks around from relatively anonymous producers.

Some of the best tunes of the year were also the simplest, relying on one very simple, repetitive riff or motif, but accompanying it with killer drums. Kleep’s ‘Formula One’ was an outstanding example of this, and Butch’s ‘Mushroom Man’ cheekily sampled Super Mario Bros without sounding too ridiculous. The Hacker may be best known for working with Miss Kitten, but has been pumping out some amazing electro, tending towards techno. His big minimal tune was ‘Mumu’, a hard but funky bass groove that just bounces. And bounces. And bounces. Add on a sprinkling of weird squeakier sounds on top, and some big breakdowns, and you’re sorted. His tune ‘2980’ was also excellent, an older-school, oscillating electro-squelcher of a tune. Jan Driver’s ‘Rat Alert’ had yet another simple repetitive riff, but with a really funky, bumpy and skippy groove. And Patrice Baumel’s ‘Roar’ was a hugely original, minimal track with no kick drum, just lots of weird, whirring and buzzing sounds. Only for an adventurous DJ perhaps, but definitely one to listen at home and surprisingly funky.

Elsewhere there was a certain post-ZZT sound emerging, freaky records with a kind of crackle-bleep sound for want of a better description. This is a sound that is very hard to do well – the frequencies and sounds being used are so extreme that it’s easy to over-distort, and the editing on the tracks is always razor-sharp. Tracks like Oizo’s ‘Positif’, Style of Eye’s ‘Ona’ and the aforementioned ZZT tunes all stood out. Meanwhile Tiga’s ‘Mind Dimension 2’ was a beast of a tune, quite apart from the chantalong chorus, it consisted of lots of sick frequences somehow made funky, with various pauses for acidic squiggles and breakbeat interludes. Exactly what inventive, peak-time music ought to to sound like.

People like Crookers, Herve and Sinden, all outstanding and versatile producers (they also appear in other sections here), made some of the best tunes or remixes of the year, but on one or two occasions turned into parodies of themselves, making tunes which sounded the new ‘big beat’ (which I’m afraid is not a compliment). There is pressure on emerging producers to do lots of remixes, for exposure and to get paid, which is perfectly understandable, but it does risk the danger of quantity over quality.

Dissident was a new-ish electronic label which got people quite excited, helped by a policy of very limited pressings of their releases. The tunes were a mixed bag, but two definitely worth checking are Colombia #1’s ‘Colombia #1’ which was trance music in the literal sense, an incessant synth riff that sucked you in, punctuated with the occasional orchestral flourish and a robotic female voice in the background. And Control Voltage’s ‘The Bounce’ was proper scuzzy acidic techno house – sounds like the sort of thing you’d imagine Andy Weatherall playing in the early 90s at Sabresonic, great, weird, retro-warehouse music to lose yourself on the dancefloor to.

Finally, Discodeine came out with the genre-straddling ‘Joystick’, a gorgeous tune which was a little bt electro-house, a little bit disco, but the sort of tune where genre doesn’t matter, it just skips along with a pretty melodic synth line, and keeps building along the way.

f) House

Top 10
Sis – Trompeta
Duke Dumont – Hoy
DJ Sobrino – Ultimate Rhythm Tribal
Adele – Cold Shoulder (Basement Jaxx remix)
Grand High Priest – Mary Mary (original mix)
Basement Jaxx – War
Ali Renault – Our World Is…
Le Le – Breakfast
Sebastian – Momy
Voodoo Chilli – Get On Down

While the divisions of house music have long been blurred, this year saw a stronger return of house music distinct from the more electro-y styles detailed above. Duke Dumont released the long-awaited ‘Hoy’, which is most easily explained as the house equivalent of Panjabi MCs classic ‘Mundian Te Bach Ke’. There’s no Knight Rider sample, but it has the same unrivalled Eastern percussion energy that makes you go ‘What the fuck is this’ when you first hear it on the dancefloor. And the track doesn’t just use the same loops, but twists and turns throughout. It feels like a future classic. Duke Dumont also put out a few remixes (for more on which, see below) showing he is one of the UK’s standout versatile producers – let’s hope for more from him next year.

Sis’s ‘Trompeta’ was a deserved anthem, a very clever record sampling a track called ‘Balkan Beat Box’ from a few years ago. It contains one repetitive and hypnotic Balkan brass riff, while the drums and bassline drop in and out, then after a while a second and later third brass riffs are woven in over the original one.

Grand High Priest’s original mix of ‘High Priest’ (there were a few mislabelled mixes floating around) is an amazing US house groove that ought to be a ‘Funky UK House anthem’. It has the right skippy, broken drums, a sick one-note analogue bass riff, and snippets of an old Aretha Franklin vocal.

Basement Jaxx did a wonderful remix of Adele’s ‘Cold Shoulder’. Nothing complicated for them, but few others could produce such a quality uplifting house vocal remix with such strong production and attention to little details. A couple of low-key EPs emerged on their own label, the highlight of which was ‘War’, a moody tribal bass groove with a strong male, spoken vocal.

Le Le put out the most engaging novelty house track in ‘Breakfast’, a spiritual successor to the Detroit Grand Pubah’s ‘Sandwiches’, being a minimal house groove backing some comedy ghetto lover lyrics. And Herve put out one of his less frequent housier EPs as Voodoo Chilli, which contained the jacking Chi-town disco sounds of ‘Get On Down’.

And Kenny Dope, name-checked by most of the ‘Funky’ UK House producers, emerged with a low-key new house label called Ill Friction. It had some excellent releases, particularly on The Hillsiders’ ‘I Wanna’, (with a rather risque lyric) and Mass Destruction’s ‘Blackout’ (Terry Hunter Fire mix). Sebastian showed he remains the master of sick disco edits on ‘Momy’. And for traditional house music with some nice Latin breakdowns, check out Jean Claude Ades & Vincent Thomas’ ‘Shingaling’.

g) Funky/UK House

Top 10
Apple – Total Sickness
NB Funky – Riddim Box – minimal with a nasty bass, good beats and repetitive vocal. Simple and fresh.
Roska – Elevated Levels EP – all great tracks
DJ Spen – Gabryelle (Fatty remix) – better than Malice’s
DJ Naughty – Quicktime EP
Hard House Banton – Sirens
Seany B – Mr Seduction – featuring one of the best vocalists on the scene
DJ Perempay & Dee ft. Katie Pearl – In the Air (Bopstar’s wonky remix)
Mr Roach – Total Confusion – bumping funky tune sampling old hardcore tunes including LFO – one sample is a bit off-key sadly, but this is really fresh and has a great groove.
Donaeo – African Warrior Dub

And 10 early Anthems
Paleface & Kyla – Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz remix)
Malice – Gabryelle refix
G Fam feat. Princess – Frontline
Perempay – Buss It
Wookie – Gallium
Apple – Siegalizer
DJ Lil Silva – Funky Pulse
Tadow – Rising Sun
DJ NG – Tell Me

‘Funky’ aka UK House (it’s a new enough genre not to have a completely fixed name yet) is, to put it very simply, the natural evolution of 2-step and speed garage. Again to describe it in broad, simple terms, Funky draws together the tempo of house music and the bumpy drum patterns of soca and dancehall, making it way more, well… funky, than the bang bang of most 4/4 house music. From that basic template it adds on anything else it cares to – from badass basslines to sweet female vocals and anything in between.

Funky could also be seen as the South of England’s riposte to the North’s bassline scene that blew up last year. It showed a scene of people disaffected by the dancefloor-unfriendly Grime scene, who just wanted to dance and party again in the sort of way seen in that millennial Garage-2-step scene exemplified by Twice as Nice.

It’s still very early days for the scene, but there’s currently a tightly connected network of producers, and also some very talented singers. There are also a few big DJs including Marcus Nasty and Footloose who are the two biggest champions of the more sonically interesting tunes – their shows are currently required listening and in the case of the former has made pirate radio really worth listening to again.

There is a danger of many ‘Funky’ tunes sounding like either dreary US ‘soulful house’ tunes (a genre which even more confusingly used to be known as ‘garage’ in the US before the UK hijacked the name, but that’s another story…) or ‘broken beat’, another mostly forgotten micro-genre, which attracted some great producers but became rather a dirty word by being a bit too closely associated with Gilles Peterson and the whole ‘Jazzzzz… nice’ scene.

Currently mostly beloved by 18-year-old girls and men in their late-30s who like to use the word ‘nuum’ when talking about dance music, with the way things are going, Funky’s appeal will hopefully become much broader next year.

h) Breakbeats & Basslines

Top 10
Black Ghosts – Any Way (Fake Blood) remix
Kid Cudi – Day n Nite (Crookers remix)
Toddla T – Do U Know (Count & Sinden remix)
Zomby – Strange Fruit
Mr Figz – Rain remix
Mujava – Township Funk
Estelle – American Boy (TS7 remix)
Loungin Kollective – Riddim Come 4ward (Herve Fire Pon Dem version)
Machines Don’t Care – On a Roll Man
AC Slater – Jack Got Jacked (Jack Beats remix)

Bassline, hyped on these pages last year, failed to deliver this year, being too reliant on cheesy yet aggressive basslines. Meanwhile ‘Funky’ UK house is occasionally in danger of being too soft.and the most interesting music of the future will be producers who can combine the best of both.

Combining the best of both is what Crookers did in their amazing remix of Kid Cudi’s ‘Day N Nite’. It incorporated the best of two exciting but limited genres, Bassline and B-more, and showed what’s possible when raw materials are sculpted in the right way. It was also great to see a tune cross genres in a way not really seen since Azzido Da Bass’ ‘Doom’s Night’. Now signed to Ministry, its UK release will hopefully see it make a proper dent in the charts. Crookers other genius moment was in their remix of Don Rimini’s ‘Let Me Back Up’, another bassline monster with enormous breakdowns and a great use of vocal samples.

Meanwhile Zomby’s ‘Strange Fruit’ was another thrilling hybrid record, borrowing a little from ZZT’s high-pitched bleeps but mainly from good 2-step and dubstep. The whole sounded original and was perfectly executed. And Bristol elder statesman Rob Smith produced a wonderful rolling dub tune in ‘Trample’ on a white label as RSD.

It was impossible to listen to every bassline tune out there, even talented producers like DJ Q persisted in putting out overly-cheesy vocal tunes like ‘You Wot’. But the best of the bunch ironically appeared to be a remix of Estelle’s ‘American Boy’ by TS7. The furious basslines complemented the tune really well, and there were some nifty touches in switching the beat times. The lyrics still grated though. In a sign that bassline is best when balanced with lighter vocals, the other bassline highlight was Mr Figz remix of TLC’s ‘Rain’. The original’s verse is a weird but wonderful song, key-wise, and the thundering bass suited it perfectly, especially when the beats dropped out in the chorus for a real hands-in-the-air moment.

Herve, Sinden and Toddla T are three of the most exciting producers working in the breakbeat field, and so it was fitting that a remix by the first two of the third’s track (Do U Know) should be a killer track. It was perfect, bumping digi-ragga-house, and presaged the Machines Don’t Care project that all three would be involved in, as well as some other top producers. Highlights of the Machines Don’t Care album were ‘On a Roll Man’, more dancehall lyrics over a fat, analogue bassline, and ‘Drop It to the Floor’. Other highlights from Herve included his remix of ‘Riddim Come Forward’ which was a proper 90s breakbeat rave throwback tune, staying just on the right side of cheesy, with a ton of things going on the mix for a really thrilling track. Herve’s remix of bashment anthem ‘Bad Man Forward’ was amazing on the verse, but the chorus went a bit too OTT student big beat for comfort.

One problem with end-of-year round ups is that they have to be out in early December, and by the time next year has come around, it’s easy to forget the tunes that came out during December just afterwards. However the Fake Blood remix of Black Ghost’s ‘Any Way’ was so good that it was hard to stop listening to it. It’s a real kitchen sink of a record, starting with stuttery cut-up vocals, bringing in a fuzzy guitar line, then a b-more-eque breakbeat, before dropping into a big bass line. There are big breakdowns and even a brief hardcore breakbeat interlude. It could be a terrible mess, but it all gels together perfectly and is incredibly listenable throughout. Astonishing stuff. Fake Blood is a nom de plume for Theo Keating of Wise Guys fame. He released a hyped debut single, ‘Mars’ which sadly wasn’t nearly as thrilling.

There were some fun tunes which mixed bassline, house and 90s throwback rave breakbeats – one of the most effective was the Jack Beats remix of AC Slater’s ‘Jack Got Jacked’ – solid and unashamedly cheesy fun. This was much more interesting than most B-more tunes which stayed resolutely conservative to the point of tedium. Newcome DJ Tiga’s ‘Do Bad Thingz’ was great, using a twangy surf guitar sample and an almost Chris Isaak-esque vocal – and the beat bounced along so well you could just about forgive its overuse of the tired Lil’ Jon yelping samples. DJ Sega and Blaqstarr are supposedly the people to do interesting things with the B-more template – it’s too early to call it yet, though DJ Sega’s heavy metal remix of Puddle of Mudd was quite interesting, and he put together a great arrangement of the Swedish big-room house anthem ‘Be’.

Finally, the pop-grime phenomenon is too bizarre to talk about – I’ll just say two words, ‘Timmy Mallett’ – but however bad a rapper he is, Wiley’s ‘Wearing My Rolex’ is a bloody great pop tune.

i) Other styles (Bhangra, Disco, Soca, Africa etc)

Top 10
Tru Skool – Boliyan
Emanuel Jal – Warchild (Various Production remix)
Raphael Saadiq – 100 Yard Dash
Jamie Lidell – Figured Me Out
Mystery Jets – Two Doors Down (Duke Dumont reconstruction)
DJ Stin – Sahiban
Hercules & Love Affair – Athena
Elvis Presley – Crawfish (Pilooski Edit)
Deadly Avenger – We Took Vegas
Alborosie – Kingston Town (Uproot Andy remix)

It looked like a very promising year for Bhangra with the new album from Tigerstyle finally arriiving (it’s been heralded on these very pages since 2003…) and also a new album from Panjabi MC. Sadly they were both rather disappointing. Particularly bad was Panjabi MC’s ill-advised attempt to ‘do another Knight Rider’ by sampling the A-Team theme tune on ‘Panjabi Soldiers’ – the track’s an embarrassment. The Tigerstyle album had a few great tracks on it, such as ‘Maan Doabe Da’ and a variety of styles (including one of the better examples of ‘Bhangra Niche’ that is, Desi remixes of heavy bassline tracks, in Bol! Bol! Bol!). There was also a Sinden remix of Balle Shava – The combination of Tigerstyle, Sinden and Vybz Kartel is a bit of a dream team situation, and the track is great, if not quite the classic you’d hope for.

However, the outstanding Bhangra track of the year came from Tru Skool on the first track from his album ‘Raw as Folk’. ‘Boliyan’ is simple, slow, traditional dhol number with added sub-bass and some great singing – a wonderful track.

Jamie Lidell’s new album was disappointing, straying ever closer to Jamiroquai-isms, but contained one genius moment of 70s funk imitation in ‘Figured Me Out’, an overlooked feel-good pop masterpiece. And Raphael Saadiq returned, one of the first people to do the whole retro-funk sound that Mark Ronson has now made his own. Like Lidell, he had one really stand-out moment in ‘100 Yard Dash’, one of those very rare songs which you wish was just a little longer.

The strangely secretive duo, Various Production, are never ones to do things by convention, and this year three new mp3 singles popped into certain people’s inboxes with not a word about them. The highlight was an uncredited remix of Kenyan (via Sudan) Emmanuel Jal’s ‘Warchild’. They took his moving vocal and set it to an amazing soundtrack of slow, apocalyptic electronica. A very special record – if only they could bear to publicise themselves more.

Duke Dumont’s remix of the Mystery Jets’ ‘Two Doors Down’ was an unexpected pleasure, and hard to qualify in any particular genre. A sweet but epic, atmospheric house-tempo tune, it was unlike anything else around.

A guy called Uproot Andy from Brooklyn put out a pretty nifty skanking but also pretty hyped-up dubstep remix of Alborosie’s wonderful one-drop tune, ‘Kingston Town’, I suspect it may be a bootleg mash-up, but whatever, it sounds great.

Pilooski, the edit-master of ‘Begging’ fame, slipped out a minor masterpiece in his remix of Elvis Presley’s ‘Crawfish’, which, licensing issues permitting, deserves to be a whole lot bigger. The Deadly Avenger, one of the best ‘Big Beat’-associated survivors, had an unreleased album floating around with some nice soundtracky tunes on, particularly on the opener, ‘We Took Vegas’.

Finally the Belgian duo Aeroplane were heavily hyped for the future via their previous singles and remix work. Their remix of Friendly Fires – Paris, with a new vocal by Au Revoir Simone, reinvented the song into a blissed-out slightly cheesy 80s balearic number. Not really my bag, but it was a clever reinvention, they’re accomplished and worth watching.

Disco revival
Unexpected mixtapes can be such a pleasure, and so it was with Erol Alkan’s ‘Disco 3000′ mix. He put together nineteen stomping, funky disco cuts and demonstrated to a lot of previously unaware people how the genre has a lot more to it than Saturday Night Fever and afro wigs at office parties. The other problem Disco has faced previously is a ton of really dreary re-edits of ploddy early-80s disco from ageing clubbers and producers who tend to lurk on the Djhistory forum.

For anyone interested in finding out more – Disco 3000 is a great place to start, as well as Jeff Mills’ amazing ‘Choice’ compilation which has a great selection of the funkier end of disco. Re-edit labels that are generally reliable (i.e. most of the others aren’t) are Ambassador’s Reception, Members Only and the Soundstream EPs from edit masters Soundhack are also good.

Meanwhile for new tunes the year was bookended with the highlights of Hercules & Love Affair’s ‘Athena’ and Fan Death’s ‘Veronica’s Veil’. And club-wise one of the most enjoyable parties of the year was Todd Hart and Matthew Stone’s night ‘secret Dalston disco’ Come which combined fun music, a wonderful venue and a great crowd into something really special.

Africa
The likes of tastemakers the Fader (which alongside the UK’s ‘Stool Pigeon’ is about the only printed music magazine still worth reading), Radioclit and Dalston Oxfam blogger Todd Hart have all been championing African sounds, revealing the wealth of new music to be discovered. Kuduro has been a buzzy genre from the last two years, but this year DJ Mujava’s ‘Township Funk’ became one of 2008’s anthem, a tune which collided South African kwaito with early-90s Sheffield bleep techno. South Africa had lots more to offer, particularly from DJ Cleo’s label ‘Will of Steel’. Sweat X offer a more day-glo South Africa-meets-Shoreditch experience, while Sweat X’s vocalist Spoek has also done contributed to some more crunchy electronica with Jo’burg producer Sibot. Teba from Cape Town was a great vocalist, especially on the reggaeton-esque ‘F C K’.

Meanwhile there was hiplife – Ghana’s updating of high-life with hip hop – artists such as Kwaw Kese producing some wonderfully original tunes as well as the wonderfully named ‘Batman Samini’. And there were some great Coupe Decale tracks from the past couple of years, especially from more modern producers such as DJ Arafat and Bablee.
I have only just dipped my toe in the water and cannot claim to be any sort of expert, but if you want to get a flavour of some of the amazing tunes around, below is a beginner’s chart of some wonderful tunes from the last couple of years.

African 21st Century Primer Top 10
Teba – F C K
Kwaw Kese – Na Ya Tal
DJ Cleo – Sisi Ng’hamba Nawe ft Bleksem
Emmanuel Jal – War Child
Bablee – Sous Les Cocotiers
DJ Jacob – Atalaku
Batman Samini – Rain God
DJ Arafat – On Va Sauter
Bleksem – How Low Can You Go
DJ Znobia – Various tracks

Vocalists in need of tunes
There are a few really wonderful vocalists around at the moment who potentially deserve to be massive if they can find the right material. Clare Maguire has a massive, emotive voice, but the music on her demos is very ordinary. She has the right connections in Dan Stacey and artist Primary One, so hopefully this will develop. Tigs is a woman who has tried out a few bands in the past couple of years – the latest of which sounds like a terrible Sales Director’s idea of how to create ‘Shoreditch rock’. But she sings beautifully, with the soaring notes of Karen O being the most obvious reference point.

j) Albums

Top 6
Leila – Blood, Looms & Blooms
Buraka Som Sistema – Black Diamond
Marcus Nasty and Mak-10 – Rinse FM radio set
Twitch & RVNG – 60 minutes of Fear
The Gaslamp Killer – I Spit On Your Grave mix
Nick Catchdubs & Eric Ducker – Radio Friendly Unit Shifter mix

It didn’t feel like a great year for albums, and the best of them, Leila’s ‘Blood, Looms & Blooms’ felt criminally overlooked. A stunning return and almost as good as the lost classic, ‘Like Weater’, it was basically much more how you might have hoped the Portishead album would sound like. Despite some hype misgivings, Buraka Som Sistema, already a thrilling live act, came out with an extremely sold and listenable debut album.

Twitch, one of the stars of Optimo, mixed up a shamefully limited mix of punk and hardcore that was both educational but also surprisingly good to dance to and even funky in places. It covered both UK and US music from the early to mid-80s and was a revelation for the majority of people who aren’t familiar with this sort of music. A perfect primer for those who wouldn’t know where to start looking. The Gaslamp Killer came out with a stunning mix of beautifully sequenced old breaks – the sort of thing you could imagine DJ Shadow doing. And the dumbest but funnest and most original mixes of the year was ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’, doing for the early-90s indie scene what DJ Spinbad did for 80s pop.

Some respected artists whose Albums you will read about a lot elsewhere (and I didn’t have time to listen to)
Bon Iver
Vampire Weekend
Hot Chip
TV On the Radio
Late of the Pier
She & Him
Friendly Fires
Radioclit & Esau – The Very Best
Gang Gang Dance
MGMT
Of Montreal
Fleet Foxes

TOM WILSON © 2008

n.b. due to time constraints, this hasn’t been proofread properly, so please forgive any glaring typos. Equally, I may have forgotten a key record. Let me know.

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Posted by grlla

The Year in Music 2007

December 28, 2007

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover the Arctic Monkeys or Rihanna, but music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

Send comments, criticisms etc. to yearinmusic {at} grlla [dot] com

a) Introduction
b) Thirty tracks you HAVE to hear
c) Breakbeats/Garage/B-more etc.
d) Dancehall & Soca
e) Rock
f) Electro House
g) Hip Hop
h) Soca
i) Other styles
j) Albums & Mixtapes

a) Introduction
Editors working in book publishing have been plagued for years by the phrase ‘everyone has a book in them’, which has resulted in countless people churning out self-indulgent, meandering prose. For music in 2007, there seemed to be a new belief that ‘everyone has a remix in them’. The combination of easily available music-producing software for computers, and the distribution network of mp3 music blogs meant it became possible for everyone and their dog to remix the uber-track of the week… and how they did. Some of the most execrable, pointless music was put out which made you wonder at how they could think it was worth being heard beyond their bedroom headphones. As with many things on the internet, democracy and low barriers to entry are double-edged swords. It is wonderful that music creation is not restricted to a privileged few, but it does unfortunately result in an extraordinary amount of rubbish being foisted around.

The problem was exacerbated by what has always been the weak point of blogs – the mutual-ego-massaging. If you want your blog to receive attention and comments, you go to other blogs and say nice things about them in the expectation that they will reciprocate. The whole thing turns into a positive feedback loop where everybody does nothing but praise each other, and all critical faculties go out of the window.

And so it was that there were countless Justice/Klaxons/Justin Timberlake etc. etc. amateur remixes foisted upon us, with the blogs presenting them as by some wonderful new producer/remixer, when in fact it was some half-assed out-of-key mash-up. In a related fashion, the bottom fell out of B-more, with a ton of terrible ‘b-more remixes’ of any and every tune – basically slamming either the ‘Think’ or ‘Sing Sing’ breaks (the two classic drum breaks used in most b-more tunes) lazily underneath the original. There is still the occasional gem being put out, especially by the legendary DJ Technics, but it no longer felt the exciting genre it once did.

2007 also felt like the year when the wheels finally came off the Hollertronix/Diplo/laptop-mash-up/ADD/whatever you want to call it DJing style. It was partly because of the amount of people doing it so badly, both out in clubs, and in the interminable mixes available on the internet (though even some of the supposed ‘masters’ put in some pretty shoddy efforts). The internet has changed music in ways that we are still waking up to. It is easier than ever to be a ‘DJ’ – you download the latest hot tunes from mp3 blogs, load them into a cracked version of Ableton, fiddle around with a a couple of mash-ups that you’ve had the idea for, and hey presto, your mix is ready to send to friends and hopefully get posted on a blog. The problem is that, because they’re made on computers and mostly listened to people on computers or iPods, there is not much of an attention span, and the listening experience demands constant twists and turns. This is fine in context as long as its executed perfectly (and it rarely is), but it has been at the expense of a well-programmed, building groove of a DJ set that keeps people glued to the dancefloor. Effectively it felt like there were too many DJs in clubs who didn’t quite understand the difference between a bedroom DJ and a club DJ.

Given all this, plus the lacklustre nature of hip hop last year, and the tedium of a lot of the identikit ‘electro-mosh/blog house’ sound, there was an argument for looking back to look forward. Call it a fallow year, pausing to soak up new influences and create new things. And the internet proved exemplary in providing access to extremely rare and otherwise inaccessible music courtesy of niche blogs. These, in contrast to the ‘blog-house’ crowd, are serious labours of love, making fiendishly rare tunes available to the public. Whether your tastes lay in 60s French Ye Ye Girl Pop, 70s African Funk and Bollywood soundtracks, 80s Soca, 90s dancehall or 00s mixes from Optimo DJs JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, you were very well catered for. That said, the most notable reissued material was all the classic 2-step and speed garage tunes, which appear to be being soaked up by a new generation of producers ready to unleash a new wave of Garage/Bassline tunes.

Niche/Bassline house hit the headlines in the Autumn, courtesy of T2’s anthem-in-waiting ‘Heartbroken, though its just the extension of the Sheffield warpers and organ scene which evolved from 2-step (discussed here in 2005). Not much has changed since then i.e. most of it is still pretty cheesy and basically produced, and much of it sounds heavily influenced by a) the evil bassline tracks DJ Narrows put out in 2002 and b) computer game soundtracks – the fierce basslines go up and down in a way that reminds you of Nintendo soundtracks, not necessarily what you want on a dancefloor. But there are definitely more interesting producers getting involved which bodes well for 2008, and when you see the reaction on a dancefloor of the big tunes, you feel there’s a definite movement coming – and one which, unlike Grime events, girls actually want to attend.

Niche/Bassline Garage is still in a very early stage, fairly obvious when people can’t even decide what to call it, and so it’s hard to pick out the good tracks and interesting producers. DJ Q and Dexplicit are two of the biggest production names on the scene, but here are a few people to look out for next year. Riplash and Sus have done some great work, especially on the wonderful Adrenaline Riddim, which is a simple bassline but with a joyful middle eastern sample in it. It sounds like the sort of bassline tune you could imagine Basement Jaxx knocking out with their love of world music influences. Riplash and Sus appear to be proteges of the Agent X duo, who have been a major garage force for years. Maj-Funk has a warmer sound than most, and on the great remix of Ayk’s ‘Driven Away’, recall classic Garage producers, Groove Chronicles. Rekless has a solid debut EP out and a platform to broadcast his sound via Rinse FM. SKT is a young gun who put out a great bassline remix of ‘Jamrock’ a couple of years ago aged only 16, and more recently has done a bassline cover version of Robert Miles’s pop-trance anthem ‘Children’. This has the potential to be terrifyingly massive in the raves (and the charts) next year if the right label jumps on it. Talking of labels, Northern Line and Heatseeker are currently the most trustworthy ones to check out, otherwise it’s a case of wading through countless white labels and Myspace pages.

2007 did feel like another pretty great year for new rock bands, who you can expect to flourish in 2008. Cut Off Your Hands, Teenagersintokyo and Muscles all represented the new Antipodean scene, and Slow Club, Vampire Weekend and Late of the Pier all showed a lot of early promise.

There was of course a lot of talk about the ‘value’ of music, and changing business models, with the general consensus being that money is there to be made from live performances and merchandising rather than record sales. Of course this is a topic far too big to be discussed here, and it is all still evolving. The Radiohead and Prince experiments were fascinating, and obviously both very successful, but it must be remembered that it was the record companies who invested and built up these two acts over many, many years which ultimately provided them with the platform to do things independently. So it may be that labels in future investing in new bands demand a portion of longer-term future revenue, because otherwise if as soon as their act starts making serious money they piss off and do things by themselves, there’s not much point in it for the labels.

This year also saw the functionality of mp3 selling improve. There is an argument that one of the reasons that file-sharing has proliferated so much is that there has been such little provision for buying mp3s the way people want to. Passionate music fans (i.e. the ones who spend most money) will always want 320 bit-rate, DRM-free mp3s (if not lossless FLAC or AIFFs) so it is not that surprising that they went to Oink (the notorious, high-quality file-sharing server shut down this year) instead of iTunes. Bleep for most alternative music, and Beatport for dance music have made it much easier to get hold of tunes you want at a decent quality, and while file-sharing will always exist, there is a hope that it will settle down once good facilities are available for people to buy what they want, and people will support the artists more.

In conclusion, this might be a more negative introduction than usual, but ultimately it has still been a wonderful year for new tunes. Every tune in the following section is so thrilling and should hopefully remind you how great music can make you feel.

b) The 30 Tunes You HAVE To Hear
Charlean Dance – Mr DJ (Speaker Junk’s Tarantula remix)
Riplash & Sus – Adrenaline Riddim
Digitalism – Pogo
Modeselektor – Let Your Love Grow
P Diddy – Tell Me (Switch remix)
Deuce Popi – Do It Again
Toddla T – Sound Tape Killin’
Fulanito – Enciende
Cut Off Your Hands – Still Fond
Teenagersintokyo – Ended It Tonight
Puzique – Don’t Go
Vampire Weekend – A-Punk
Richard Swift – Kisses for the Misses
Voicemail – Get Down (2070)
Edu K – Gatas Gatas Gatas (Bootleg remix)
Radioslave – Screaming Hands (Josh Wink remix)
Cobra – A-A (Bad Dog)
Wideboys – Project Bassline (2006)
LA Priest – Engine (Erol Alkan rework)
Lil Mama – Lipgloss (Benja Styles remix)
Machel Montano – Jumbie (Road mix)
Fields – If You Fail, We All Fail (SebastiAn remix)
Tampa Tony – Can’t Jook Without Me
Nicole David – Road Block
Knife Machine – Robo Wars
Buju Banton – Flava (Rae)
Muscles – Ice Cream
Sex Vid – Firm Grasp
Burial – Archangel (Boy 8-Bit’s simple remix)
Unknown – Sabor Kolombia refix
Klaxons – Golden Skans (Surkin remix)

And 10 Anthems of 2007
Justice – D.A.N.C.E.
T2 – Heartbroken
Samim – Heater
Benga & Coki – Night
Sinden and the Count of Monte Cristal – Beeper
ZZT – Lower States of Consciousness
Ray Darwin – People’s Choice
Soulwax remixes of Phantom and Get Innocuous
M.I.A. – Paper Planes
Souljah Boy – Crank Dat

c) BREAKBEATS/GARAGE/B-MORE etc

Top 10
Wideboys – Project Bassline (2006)
Toddla T – Sound Tape Killin’
Riplash & Sus – Adrenaline Riddim
Burial – Archangel (Boy 8-bit remix)
Sinden & Count of Monte Cristal – Beeper
Dexplicit – Wakadoosa
Unknown – Dead Letter Drop #2
Tayo meets Baobinga – Choppa Riddim
DJ Technics – I Get Money/Computer Madness 2007
Base Club – Jump Up (CJ Reign Speed Garage Mix)

Also check
Tim Deluxe – Let the beats roll (Dub mix)
Dizzee Rascal – Flex (DJ Q remix)
Toddla T – Do U Know (Sinden & Count of Monte Cristal remix)
Broki – Brukeaton (Simbad remix)
Robin Thicke – Cocaine (Spruce Lee remix)
Dexplicit – Lose Control (Wideboys Booty Juice mix)
Skepta – Stage Show riddim
DJ Q – Dirty
DJ Blaqstarr – Superstarr
Seiji feat. MC Dolores – Todo Mundo
Dave Nada – I Put a Spell on You

And a few other good Bassline tunes to check…
Live O Productions – Parental Advisory
USF – It’s Over Now (Riplash & Sus remix)
DJ Rekless – Munch
T2 – Salsa
Dexplicit – Bassline Ecstasy
AYK – Driven Away (Maj remix)
SKT – Children Remix (a guilty pleasure…)

Wideboys ‘Project Bassline’ actually came out last year, but made a wider impression this year as the Niche/Bassline Garage scene began to expand from Sheffield to all around the country. It’s a wonderful tune, with a fairly raw-sounding production that works, mainly because it’s such an unashamed anthem, with Brazilian drums stolen from the Goodmen’s classic ‘Give It Up’ dropping into a badass speed garage bassline that tips a nod of the hat to Mr. Oizo’s ‘Flat Eric’. It’s pure party dancefloor fun, and a reminder that music really doesn’t have to be big or clever to be lethally effective.

Dexplicit’s ‘Wakadoosa’ and Skepta’s ‘Stage Show riddim’ showed that it is still possible to produce wicked, rowdy, grime instrumentals, but otherwise grime’s main contribution was in the stylish ‘Boy Betta Know’ T-shirts. That said, Durrty Goodz made an improbable comeback with his Axiom EP showing he’s a pretty decent MC, and someone called Frisco voiced ‘What a Cheek’, a quite startling Wiley production with a crazy time-change breakdown).

The mysterious Dead Letter Drop #2 was the sound of an all-night ‘old rave’ compressed into five minutes of furious breakbeat heaven. With dirty synth riffs, UR-style Amazon whooping, Sheffield bleeps and Beltram hoover snippets, it made for total dancefloor obliteration. About the only thing that came close to it was another mysterious track from the Institubes camp simply called ‘Zeus’, which was also outstanding.

Toddla T was brought up by some of Sheffield’s finest breakbeat pioneers, and its showing. While ‘Inna Di Dancehall’ was a lot of fun, ‘Sound Tape Killin’ was the real stand out. It started off like a four-four house track with an almost 80s feel to it, and then broke down into a massive, bumping dancehall beat with a tough dancehall lyric to go with it. Very original and designed for damage on the dancefloor.

On a similar wavelength to Toddla T was Tayo meets Baobinga’s Choppa riddim. It’s a butt-shaking dancehall skank of a tune, again with a garage/2-step feel and tempo as well. Vocal versions are being worked on, and this really deserves to be big next year.

With ‘Beeper’, Graeme Sinden and The Count of Monte Cristal (aka Josh Harvey/Herve and a bunch of other pseudonyms) made a club tune so catchy it was a travesty it didn’t nestle at the top of the pop charts alongside Rihanna. It’s beautifully produced, poppy speed garage that deserves to be relaunched when the bassline/niche scene blows up.

Benga & Coki’s ‘Night’ was a completely freaky dubstep tune that crossed over into the grime and bassline scene to become an anthem, and while it might not make much sense at home, seeing the reaction to a vocalled version of it in a club – people losing it to some crazy avant-garde-sounding piece of electronic music was pretty great.

Broken Beat lives! A rather mocked genre, perhaps due to its patronage by the chin-strokey Gilles Peterson crowd, Simbad’s remix of Broki’s ‘Brukeaton’ showed what it was capable, courtesy of a raunchy Puerto Rican female vocalist, and an equally dirty hoover bassline, with some tough, skippy drums. A lot of the Baile Funk crowd could learn a lot from this.

At the end of the year, Boy 8-Bit was one of the hot names to drop for 2008. He’s got a certain pedigree (his excellent computer game remix of Beck was featured back here in 2005). But the thing that stood out was a relatively straightforward beefed-up-drums remix of Burial’s ‘Archangel’. It made it into a semi-anthemic melodic 2-step number, the sort of style MJ Cole nailed on his remix of 3rd Core’s ‘Mindless and Broken’ back in 2001, and is the sort of thing that you can imagine causing carnage at one of those old Basement Jaxx block parties in a pub.

d) DANCEHALL

Top 10
Voicemail – Get Down On It (2070)
Ray Darwin – People’s Choice (I Need a Roof)
Beniton Da Menace – Shootout (Beautiful Girls)
Sean Paul – She Want It (Sour Diesel)
Cobra – A-A (Bad Dog)
Buju Banton – Flava (Rae riddim)
Lil Mama – Lip Gloss (Benja Styles remix)
Bounty Killer – The Highest (Dreaming)
TOK – No Man (Silver Screen)
Aidonia – Mi Clap It (Gangsta Gangsta)

Also Check
Cham – What You Think
Alborosie – Holy Mount Zion (Black Board)
Lutan Fyah – Up in your Face (Weed Seed)
Bugle – Exercise (What We Gonna Do)
Sean Paul ft. Leftside – Back It Up (? riddim)
Sizzla – Rapid (Battlefield)
Collie Buddz – Blind To You
Bugle – Doh (Warning)
Ward 21 – No Fren From Dem (MI6)
Aidonia – Empty (Dark Again/Rainstick)
Shaggy – Church Heathen
Buju Banton – Driver A (Taxi)
Mr Vegas – Hot Wuk (Soca Remix) & Lean With It
TOK – From Dem Dis (Tremor)
Kat Deluna & Elephant Man – Whine Up (a dancehall/europop guilty pleasure)
Machel Montano & Vybz – Hold You Tonight
Sean Paul – Life (Artillery)
Beenie Man – Real Love (Three Star)
Alborosie – Police Polizia

In many ways, far from the hype and overanalysis of ‘blog house’, dancehall was the most enjoyable genre of the year. There were no particular trends, just Jamaica keeping on pumping out amazing tunes. The production buzz was all about the modestly-monickered Stephen ‘the Genius’ McGregor, and when you hear his tunes and then realise he’s only 17, the title seems reasonable. Apart from rhythms like ‘Rainstick’, he created the wonderful 2070 rhythm, which managed to be the most original and fun of the year. Jamaica has never been shy of borrowing ideas, but it was still a pleasing shock to hear a rhythm with a 70s wah-wah funk guitar lick and a disco bassline. Playing along, the deejays borrowed big disco pop hits for their vocal melodies, and the pick was Voicemail singing the refrain Kool and the Gang’s ‘Get Down On It’ on his track.

While in the UK, nu-rave tended to mean punk-funk-indie-rock and scuzzy club nights rebranded as ‘warehosue raves’, Jamaica had a proper stab at rave, notably on the Battlefield rhythm (Sizzla’s Rapid), the EuroRave of the Madness rhythm (Elephant Man’s ‘Dance and Knock It’), though Sean Paul’s ‘Pick Up and Drop It was also popular) which even starts with a Daft Punk-esque vocoder, and the more dreamy Propa Ugu rhythm (Vybz’s ‘Love Boat’ and Toya’s ‘Propa Ugu’, a girl who sounded like an incognito Uffie, and even gloriously borrowing the chorus to Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’ – you could never accuse dancehall of being afraid of excess!). The Step Off Riddim also had a chunky rave feel to it, but none of the vocal cuts quite chimed with it.

Focusing on other individual tunes, Cobra’s ‘A-A’ (Bad Dog) was a super slow, skanking piece of menacing minimalism which stood right out, Sean Paul’s talents were shown on ‘She Want It’ (Sour Diesel), which bounced and bumped along in all the right places, Beniton Da Menace’s ‘Shootout’ (Beautiful Girl), which managed to transcend its novelty origins of recreating the music to ‘Stand By Me’. T.O.K.’s ‘No Man’ (Silver Screen) was a fast, hype bashment piece, made by the insanely, repetitive chorus. The only more energetic tracks were Aidonia’s ‘Mi Clap It’ (Gangsta Gangsta), and Elephant Man’s ‘So What’ (Swiss Bank), both enjoyably rowdy. The Dark Again rhythm was notable for being a tweaked dancehall recreation of Timbaland’s classic production for ‘Is That Your Chick’.

The extremely talented producers South Rakkas got signed to Diplo’s Mad Decent label. Their first release was impressive, but given the strength of their past output, a mini-album of effectively dancehall-mash-ups felt like a bit of a step backwards, though it made obvious commercial sense given their new exposure to the Diplo audience. And ironically, they’d already made their best tunes in that genre, which was only released on a hard-to-find Japan-only album release at the start of the year. These were Elephant Man’s amazing take on ‘Tainted Love’ and the beyond-ridiculous Bounty Killer version of ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’! South Rakkas ae still amazing producers, so hopefully they’ll come back stronger and more forward-looking next year.

And the production squad and label Daseca are marked for future success after they helped to propel Movado into the limelight, but also Bugle with his anthem ‘Exercise’ aka ‘What We Gonna Do’ which had a memorably, plaintive lyric, though the music behind it could have been stronger.

The two anthems of early 2007 were Buju Banton’s ‘Driver A’ and Shaggy’s ‘Church Heathen’, and while they’re established enough that it’s a pleasure to hear them in the right club, they didn’t date that well, and right now feel a little underwhelming.

If you have a taste for comedy dancehall covers, Wayne Marshall was your man, versioning Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ as ‘Police come and tried to take my weedbag, I said no, no, no (said it’s not crack, so give me it back, no, no, no etc. etc.’.

And finally, one of the most bizarre things to happen in dancehall was the discovery, to many musical purist’s horror, that breakthrough artist Alborosie, far from being a good Jamaican Rastafari, was in fact a white Italian. His tunes are wicked, so more power to him.

e) ROCK

Top 10
Digitalism – Pogo
Cut Off Your Hands – Still Fond
Teenagersintokyo – Ended It Tonight
Sex/Vid – Tania EP
Richard Swift – Kisses For the Misses
Teenagers – Homecoming
Muscles – Ice Cream
Slow Club – Me and You
The Long Blondes – I’m Coping
Vampire Weekend – A-Punk

Also check
Liars – Houseclouds
Foals – Astronauts and all
Feist – My Moon, My Man
The Blow – Parentheses
Hot Chip – My Piano
Grinderman – No Pussy Blues
Les Savy Fav – Patty Lee
Black Lips – Veni, Vidi, Vici/Oh Katrina
Bright Eyes – Lime Tree
Primary 1 – Hold Me Down/Outside
Late of the Pier – Broken
Whitey – Stay on the Outside

Digitalism’s ‘Pogo’ felt like a perfect piece of indie dancefloor pop – the bastard love child of Franz Ferdinand and New Order, with the disco drum beat of the former and the Hook-esque bass lines of the latter, and a soaring, sun-kissed chorus that you could so easily lose yourself to on the dancefloor.

We were really rather spoilt for glorious pop anthems, particularly with the triumvirate of Cut Off Your Hands’ ‘Still Fond’, Teenagersintokyo’s ‘Ended It Tonight’ and Vampire Weekend’s ‘A-Punk’. Cut Off Your Hands are young rockers from New Zealand with an amazing ear for a catchy tune, and an exhilarating live act. Based on ‘Still Fond’, which sounded like distilled adolescence in a 3 minute punk-pop tune, they will reach serious heights next year. ‘Ended It Tonight’ is like Blondie fronting a poppier, New Young Pony Club, while ‘A-Punk’ reminds you of the sort-of mid-80s US indie anthem that could have soundtracked a teen film like ‘Pretty in Pink’.

The Long Blondes had a quiet year, but managed to slip out, ‘Coping’, one of their best tracks to date, as a b-side. It was full of suspense, stripped down to a bassline, an understated kickdrum and cymbals, and the occasional sleazy organ stab. The whole thing was reminiscent of a more composed Gallon Drunk (the great early-90s garage/rockabilly band).

The Teenagers’ came up with one of the funniest tunes of the year, an OTT filthy ditty with its spoken-word French vocal and a gorgeous, guitar riff. Richard Swift showed a songwriting mastery, particularly on Kisses For the Misses’.

Muscles was another delightful product of the Antipodean musical renaissance. He had that maverick, lo-fi pop feel, reminiscent of early Badly Drawn Boy and Babybird if you replaced their guitars with synths, that only solo artists seem to get away with. ‘Ice Cream’ was a great, wonky pop tune.

Slow Club were a very cheery two-piece, and enjoyably lively live act, who wrote poppy songs that, the more you listened to them, sounded like a more indie Beautiful South (that’s meant as a compliment!).

Late of the Pier’s Bathroom Gurgle sounded like a Human League homage. More retro-poppy-indie. It’s good, but again I struggled to find it particularly loveable. More enjoyable was ‘Broken’, but they certainly don’t seem to lack in musical ambition.

To the Boy’s singles ‘The Model’ and ‘Type 1 – Type 2’ were very poppy in an almost retro-Buggles way. It didn’t really do it for me, but the songwriting is really impressive – if Girls Aloud wanted to go in an electro-indie-pop direction, these are the people who would write their songs.

Primary One is the second act on Phantasy Sound, a label to watch as it’s been started by Erol Alkan and long-time A&R whiz Dan Stacey. Primary One’s first single, Hold Me Down, shows he’s got a real craft for writing catchy pop songs, but personally I feel his voice lets him down. Given the right production polish (or maybe just experience) I’m sure this can be rectified (especially as he’s working with Epworth and Alkan), so look out for some killer pop next year.

Foals walked a fine line of being slightly irritating, over-intellectualised student indie, and coming out with great indie dancefloor hits like ‘Astronauts and All’ – it feels too early to call which way they’ll go. Talking of over-intellectualised – great praise was heaped on Battles ‘Atlas’. Unfortunately as soon as it was described to me as ‘math-rock’ I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. Dan Deacon was another of the feted artier rock acts, but ‘Crystal Cat’ was pretty storming, though the chorus vocal grated a little.

Towards the end of the year, Black Kids were the next hot rock band, but right now from what I’ve heard it’s hard to see what the fuss is all about (though I’ve said that before about what turned into a great band…). And teenagers Cajun Dance Party’s debut album will be a big affair – but don’t expect much more than polite but well-executed LDN pub rock.

And we saw the arrival, in a big way, of ‘LDN is a Victim’ rock (named after a so-so novelty track with a reasonable point to make, not quite as good as the enjoyable-for-a-few-listens ‘Thou Shalt Kill’), but it was unsurprising given the deserved success of Lily Allen and Jamie T last year. Everyone knows the names of Penate and Nash now and you can expect many, many more similar acts to follow in the next year, with varying degrees of talent and success.

f) ELECTRO HOUSE

Top 10
Charlene Dance – Mr DJ (Speaker Junk’s Tarantula Remix)
P Diddy & Christina Aguilera – Tell Me (Switch remix)
Puzique – Don’t Go
New Young Pony Club – The Bomb (Phones Edit)
Nine Inch Nails – Switch (Switch remix)
Tepr – Minuit Jacuzzi (data remix)
Klaxons – Golden Skans (Surkin remix)
The Knife Machine – Robo Machine Wars
Brick n Lace – Never Never (Switch mix)
Radioslave – Screaming Hands (Josh Wink remix)

And also 10 anthems
Justice – D.A.N.C.E. – What can you say? A modern classic, and the best gay gospel disco tune since the Joubert Singer’s ‘Stand on the Word’.
Samim – Heater – How to make minimal techno more fun? Add a Cumbia accordian sample and watch it take over around the world..
Federico Franchi – Cream – felt like a spiritual follow up to Tomas Andersson’s ‘Washing Up’ – simple, repetitive, anthemic electronic music.
Duke Dumont – Lean and Bounce – a cool, bass-heavy monster with that killer AV8 breakbeat breakdown – though you feel that for this very dedicated, professional producer, the best is very much yet to come.
ZZT – Lower State of Consciousness – the production values got those in the know into a froth, but it divided punters’ opinion as to whether it was very danceable.
LA Priest – Engine (Erol Alkan remix) – a clever, beautiful and almost melancholic tune that was cleverly re-edited to beef it up into a dancefloor banger by Erol Alkan.
Soulwax remixes of Phantom and Get Innocuous – Big tunes made bigger by the masters of knowing what really works on the dancefloor.
DJ Mehdi – Signatune (Bangalter Edit) – One of those frighteningly simple power chord loop things that only a master like Bangalter can handle)
Martin Bros – Stoopit – pretty funky for a house track. It slinks and bumps along beautifully, the cut-up vocal in an almost Todd Edwards style, and when that seriously heavy squiggly bass kicks in, it’s game over.
Mr Oizo – Patrick 122 – saxophone-led disco house re-edited in that distinctive, choppy Oizo style.

The strange thing about the emergence of music blogs, which are becoming an increasingly mainstream alternative to the print music press, is how much they have focused on a genre, which this year has been variously titled, Electro-House, Electro-mosh, Ed Banger house, and just to really get the point across, Blog-house. So much has been written about it that it almost feels redundant saying much about it here, especially when the dons of the scene: Justice, Switch and MSTRKRFT are nothing new to regular readers. But the scene has kept evolving gradually and produced some outstanding tunes – it’s just that the over-saturated coverage and over-enthusiastic fanboy-ness has made it rather easy to become complacent about it all.

Speaker Junk, aka Herve and Trevor Loveys, really pulled out all the stops on their Charlean Dance remix. It starts off as the best kind of sick acid-tinged rave tune with a call to ‘Don’t stop ravers’, and is quite killer enough, but then to your disbelief on the dancefloor, it breaks down into a massive bumping ragga-house breakdown with a dancehall vocal. It’s a tune with everything – jaw-droppingly good.

Switch had a busy year, and came up with some stone cold killers, if to be honest a few didn’t quite hit the mark. But who cares when you’re the sort of genius who can create such an extraordinary tune as the remix of P Diddy’s ‘Tell Me’. A bit like one of those really mind-blowing warped Basement Jaxx Nite Dubs – it’s a real journey of a record, twisting and turning with all sorts of surprises and breakdowns, but still maintaining a killer repetitive groove. He even manages to make an Aguilera acapella make sense. His other two highlights were an overlooked remix of Nine Inch Nails, which was simpler, and just revolved around a seriously big-ass dirty bass synth riff, plus a chop-up of Trent Reznor’s vocals which worked surprisingly well. And a mix of Brick n Lace (a Jamaican duo) was a weird but thrilling record sounding like it was made by aliens experimenting with rave synthesisers amidst more well-chosen vocal snippets. Finally his remix of Blaqstarr was pretty crazy, the first ever euro-kuduro-house track, with a fierce drum-pattern and a big, cheesy synth riff and auto-tuned vocal.

Dave Taylor (the man behind Switch), by presiding over his label Dubsided, also seemed to become a mentor to some of the UK’s best new producers. Speaker Junk have already been mentioned, and Josh Harvey aka Herve had a terrific year with some outrageously inventive tracks and remixes. Not all of them hit the mark, but the best were truly exceptional and pushed new ideas forward into house. He had a ton of aliases, and happily shifted from rave to garage to ghettotech to vocal house (and often seemed to try and get more than one of those into the same track). His Dead Soul Brothers project with Seba was overlooked in contrast to his more sampled club-friendly tracks, but has the potential to be one of his best creations.

Graeme Sinden, after being tipped here last year, also had a great year, with lots more remixes and tracks, lots more Djing, and a great radio show on Kiss. And then there were the Herve/Sinden collaborations as the Count of Monte Cristal & Sinden. Beeper was, like all great pop tunes, remarkably simple, but beautifully executed and with one of the best basslines of the year.

The latest Dubsided recruit is Duke Dumont, who became something of a blog-house pin-up (what a thought…), but is way more than that. Talking to him it soon became clear that he’s a real music-lover across the board, full of ideas, and very focused, and you feel he’s someone who will produce some great, innovative club music. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Puzique got tied in with the Blog-House/Joosteece crowd, but in fact ‘Don’t Go is an old-school Chicago jacking house record. In one sense it’s retro, but it’s so good and simple that it actually sounds timeless. Big, uplifting house music that anyone could play.

Surkin showed how noisy electro-rave music ought to be made with his amazing remix of the Klaxon’s ‘Golden Skans’. It was a proper kitchen-sink of a record, starting off with a good, jacking groove, throwing in a big riff, a vocal snippet, a computer game white noise sound. And then the sirens come in… and it’s game over. A properly bonkers and thrilling record.

It’s an old tradition for people writing about music to coin ever-more-ridiculous genre names, so I would like to throw ‘Miami Vice Techno’ into the ring. It refers to the flipside of the scary Justice/ZZT/Boys Noize sound, i.e. the more sunny, happy electro records, that have a slightly cheesy 80s Jan Hammer/Faltermeyer vibe to them. The stand-out records were dAta’s remix of Tepr’s ‘Minuit Jacuzzi’, a simple big cheesy riff that ran and ran, and Australian producer Miami Horror’s ‘Don’t Be On With Me’ which even had a Van Halen-esque guitar solo on it. They really stood out from the crowd and were a lot of fun.

Paul ‘Phones’ Epworth remixing NYPC’s ‘The Bomb’ was a nu-rave/’LDN is a Victim’ pairing if ever there was one. He took the original and turned it into an oddly emotional dancefloor number that builds and drops in all the right places, and also, don’t ask me why, works really well while you’re travelling.

And as for MSTRKRFT’s ‘Street Justice 07’ – you should always love groups who keep some of their best tracks for their b-sides, usually aimed firmly at the dancefloor. This is simple, oscillating electro-disco with perfectly placed vocal snippets. As they say, ‘just another killing on the dancefllor’.

The Italian duo Crookers became the first ‘post-Switch’ act, making some great tunes, though at times sounding almost strangely similar to Dave Taylor. Late in the year their bootleg remix of Timbaland’s ‘Way I Are’ was doing some deserved damage on the dancefloor.

Also check
MSTRKRFT – Street Justice (MSTRKRFT remix)
Speaker Junk – Foxxy (Switch remix) – Jimi Hendrix updated for the jacking generation
Make Model – The Was (Dead Soul Brothers Dub) – Serious end-of-night tune, switching from a relatively relaxed pretty melody and piano line, to a proper hands-in-the-air, anthemic aggro-electro riff.
Deadmau5 vs Jelo – The Reward is Cheese – big, simple stomper of a tune with some of the biggest breakdowns of the year, and some wonky noises to scare people.
Boys Noize – My Head (Para One remix) – More riotous, Para One business – snotty, punky, party music with a smile on its face.
Bart B-more – Killing It – a simple but brilliantly-executed sure-fire party-starter – a proper percussive work-out with liberal, unashamed usage of the main brass theme from ‘Kill Bill’ (aka Quincy Jone’s ‘Ironside’).
Dusty Kid – The Cat – simple but effective, bouncy arpeggiated fun.
Tiptronik – Home – another new Australian act, coming on in a very poppy, vocal MSTRKRFT style.
Justice – Stress – You know…
Simian Mobile Disco – System – pretty sick for a b-side.
Alan Braxe – Addicted – Braxe goes electro half-step and creates a bizarre eurorave skanker.
Trabant – The One (Para One remix) – a stylistic follow-up to Para One’s masterful 2006 remix of Vegastar.
Dragonette – I Get Around (Ratcliffe remix) – what you’d expect if half of Basement Jaxx woke up having listened to nothing but Todd Edwards and Akufen records the night before. Skippy, bleepy, and micro-cut-up. Wonderful, if just a bit too weird to really dance to.
Boys Noize – Lava Lava (Feadz Aval Aval mix) – Freaky, wonderful remix, with a ton of things going on, jittering and bumping all over the place.
Timbo – Way I Are (Crookers bootleg) – simple but effective house edit of the number one track, exploiting that big, weird, wobbly Timbaland synth riff.

g) HIP HOP

Top 10
Duece Poppi – Do It Again
Hurricane Chris – A Bay Bay
Warren G & Nate Dogg – Clownin’
Baby D – Bow His Azz Up
Tampa Tony – Can’t Jook Without Me
7 Aurelius featuring Ashanti – My Number Babe
UGK – International Player’s Anthem (feat. Outkast)
Dude & Nem – Watch My Feet
Amerie – Take Control
50 Cent – I Get Money (Instrumental)

Also check
Pitbull – Move, Shake, Drop
Busta Rhymes – Just Getting Warm
Timbaland – Miscommunication
Kierra Sheard – Yes (US Gospel Hip Hop with the drums from ATCQ’s Scenario!)
Various – Crank Dat Robocop/Roadrunner

Oh dear. In 2007, Nas’s words of last year, that ‘Hip Hop is Dead’ felt eerily prophetic. It was the worst year on record for a long time (if not ever). The golden age of commercial hip hop (i.e. Neptunes/Timbaland) has pretty much petered out, the faux-gangsterism of 50 Cent feels very tired, and the US record labels panicked and sat on albums, delaying them by months if not years, unsure of what to do with them. There was the occasional regional gem, but ‘independent’ hip hop overall is in a similarly woeful state.

On the positive side, we had Tampa Tony’s ‘Can’t Jook Without Me’ – a dynamite piece of uptempo club hip hop out of Florida, held together by big-ass drums (that suddenly menacingly go backwards on the chorus), and a siren riff. This is the sort of thing that someone in the UK really should have picked up on and released as a single. The other really stand-out track was Duece Poppi’s ‘Do It Again’ which had the sickest beat of the year from producer Nitti – sleazy, grimy minimal electronica which could have been a Grime instrumental from the glory days, or even the sort of thing you’d find on a label like Skam.

The strangely-named 7 Aurelius took r&b diva Ashanti and put her vocals over not much more than Kraftwerk’s proto-techno classic ‘Numbers’ on ‘My Number Babe’. Even though Richard X did something pretty similar with his classic Whitny Houston bootleg in 2002, it still sounded great and fresh.

Baby D (not to be confused with the UK rave act) put out possibly the rowdiest, hip hop song of the year with ‘Bow His Azz Up’. It was big, dumb punk music that made you feel you ought to be in the middle of a mosh pit and an awesome listen for the right mood.

Warren G and Nate Dogg, two West Coast rap survivors, put out a slinky slice of Summery laid-back G-funk that sadly didn’t seem to register in the UK. The sound might be a bit throwback hip hop, but it was good enough that it sounded pretty timeless.

After the tired faux-gangsterisms of 50 Cent, there was a definite argument for putting some fun back into hip hop, and Dude & Nem’s ‘Watch My Feet’ certainly did that by having a stupidly catchy chorus which switched up double-time from the verse into a Chicago (where this is from) Juke-style tempo of about 150bpm. It was unlike anything else around and while it has the potential to become a bit novelty and a bit overly cheerful, it was a shot in the arm for creativity in hip hop.

Pitbull continued to do his best to make super-dumb party hip hop and sounding like he’d been taking lessons from early-Soulwax in his sampling choices (this year included the B52’s Rock Lobster and Benni Bennassi’s Satisfaction, both as absurd but enjoyable as you might imagine).

Souljah Boy’s ‘Crank Dat’ was the big anthem, but apart from the guilty pleasure of shouting ‘Yuuuuuuh’ a lot, there wasn’t much to love about it. For big, no-brainer hip hop, Hurricane Chris’s ‘A Bay Bay’ had loads more charm, but didn’t seem to make much impression in the UK. ‘Crank Dat’ was fascinating more from a cultural viewpoint as it was part of a series of ‘Crank tunes’, mainly involving cartoon characters, made by regional hip hop acts. Most were predictably dire, especially ‘Crank Dat Hulk’ which is astonishingly bad car crash hip hop, but ‘Crank Dat Roadrunner’ and ‘Crank Dat Robocop’ were quite fun. As with all current hip hop fad tunes, there was a dance to go with it, and thousands of YouTube clips of people doing it at home.

Frustratingly, there were a few amazing instrumentals which were let down by their accompanying vocal. 50 Cent’s ‘I Get Money’ is so much better than I expected it to be – all robo synths and clattering drums. Equally unexpectedly, Usher’s new single ‘Dat Girl Right There’ has a fantastically freak alien synth beat. Usher’s voice doesn’t suit it, but the guest verse from Ludacris shows what could be made of this instrumental. The other is The Fixxxers’ ‘So Good’ – exceedingly cheery, Nintendo-hop but again the vocal, though catchy, doesn’t quite work.

h) SOCA 2007

Top 10
Machel Montano – Jumbie (road mix)
Nicole David – Road Block
Shurwayne Winchester – Open De Gate
Mr Vegas – Hot Wuk (Soca remix)
Fayann Lyons – Make a Stage
Destra & Naya George – Last Lap
Biggy Irie – Nah Going Home (road mix)
Machel Montano – Down De Road
Machel Montano – Higher Than High
El A Kru – Expose

Soca had another great year, with some really killer tunes. There were no great surprises – the usual suspects continue to rule the roost. It’s just a case of figuring out how to broaden the genre’s appeal beyond the traditional Carnival weekend. Also, what is with it with Soca and U2? Biggy Irie’s ‘Nah Going Home’ is the second tune in recent years to interpolate their melodies – this time it’s ‘With Or Without You’ in the chorus (to great success – only in the Caribbean!). The tune that won the Trinidad Road March competition was Machel Montano’s Jumbie (though it could easily have been ‘Last Lap’ or ‘Open De Gate’ ) and the Road mix of Jumbie stood out for its extra percussion adding to the overall energy and joyfulness.

i) OTHER STYLES

Top 10
Modeselektor – Let Your Love Grow
Edu K – Gatas Gatas Gatas (Bootleg remix)
Fulanito – Enciende
Fields – SebastiAn remix
DJ Empty – Meaningless 6
Polar Pair – Out of Sight
Santogold – You’ll Find a Way (Switch/Sinden remix)
Franz & Shape – 444 Days
Unknown – Sabor Kolombia refix
Calle 13 ft. Tego Calderon – Sin Exagerar

Also check
Mr Oizo – Trina 700 (Trina Kills Xtended Edit)
Various Production – Chief/Limbs
DJ Eli remixes of Cassie and Vans
M.I.A. – XR2 (Tigerstyle remix)
Smal – Chega de Roubo
Si Begg – Bangin
Sidney Looper – Phantom Drop

You wouldn’t expect the most beautiful track of the year to come from a production duo famed for their tough, electronic hip hop productions, but Modeselektor grew up in an astonishing way and, helped by vocalist Paul St Hilaire (aka Tikiman) delivered a heartbreaking classic of bumping electronica (and yes, I know that sounds oxymoronic!). Some chords just have the power to move you.

Edu K emerged as potentially the best thing to come out of the whole Carioca/Baile Funk scene – transcending the genre’s limitations and production limitations. His track ‘Zombie Rave’ was pretty killer, and last year’s Gotan Project remix was a revelation, but this year the personal favourite was his bootleg remix of ‘Gatas Gatas Gatas’ which chopped up an old Clash tune and sprinkled a bit of production magic on top to create one of the funkiest grooves of the year. I’m still not sure about the shout-y Brazilian rap style, but at least there was a quite catchy chorus.

The provenance of Carioca Funk is often hard to track down, so Bola de Fogo & Jonny Bravo’s ‘Sarra Sarra’ is may well be from before 2007, but it is definitely one of the best of the genre you’ll hear, helped by some great salsa piano riffs.

Fulanito’s ‘Enciende’ sounded like nothing else this year. Stomping, merengue hip-hop, straddling the old and new schools with a frantic Pitbull-style rap, and manic percussion and accordians. The sort of music that puts a huge smile on your face.

Reggaeton is another of those briefly fashionable ‘world genres’ which suffered from too many painfully bad tunes. Tego Calderon and Calle 13 are two acts who early on realised the limitations of relying on Reggaeton’s ‘Dem Bow’ beat and had the vision to expand their horizons. So it’s a real pleasure to hear them collaborate. ‘Sin Exagerar’ jumps around all over the place starting off with a good groove and a surf guitar riff in the background, then switches into more of a bumping digital dancehall rhythm, and then a more traditional swing in the chorus, complete with horn riffs. Even with so many ideas in the track, it holds together really well, and is a really enjoyable and original listen.

SebastiAn may be part of the Ed Banger electro house crowd, and have been famous this year for a crowd-pleasing cover version of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’, but his real strengths remain in slow, atmospheric electronic grooves, as seen in tracks like H.A.L. last year. This year, his highlight was a remix of an indie band called Fields (who I confess I’ve never listened to) which was wonderful, weird-out, aphex-twin-esque edit-y electro-funk. His only real competition in this field is another Frenchman, Jackson, who popped up briefly to deliver an epic remix of ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ and managed to give it an almost ‘screwed and chopped’ feel, with brief snippets of other Justice tunes. Incomparable to the original but almost as thrilling.

Fans of 90s house music will know of the style called ‘Wild Pitch’, pioneered by DJ Pierre, whereby tension was built by the gradual adding on of new elements into the mix throughout a track until there’s a frenzied wall of sound. The best way to describe ‘Meaningless 6’, on DJ Empty’s debut EP, is that it sounds like a Warp electronic artist making a Wild Pitch track. It’s quite percussive, but with lots of unusual noises gradually introduced. What really elevates it though is that amidst all these slightly unusual sounds is a hell of a good groove. Something quite different and rather special.

Polar Pair are a very underrated production duo based in Tel Aviv and ‘Out of Sight’ is their masterpiece to date – effectively the best tune Various Production never made. You get the perfectly-placed beats, the clinical funk clatter and the sultry but slightly evil female vocal, but also all sorts of other subtle touches, particularly some epic backwards brass stabs.

If only there was more music like the Switch/Sinden remix of Santogold’s ‘You’ll Find a Way’. The boys go downtempo, in a similar style to the hugely underrated ¥€$ Productions remix of Annie’s ‘Never Too Late’, with a slow, bumping groove and a ton of freaky sound effects, remixing Santogold who has been called the new M.I.A. (though, to be honest, Santogold’s got a better voice).

Kuduro figurehead act Buraka Som Sistema got their EP from 2006 relaunched for the UK market after signing to uber-buzz label, Modular, but an excellent new track, ‘D D D D DJ’ was circulated amongst a privileged few, which should see the light of day next year.

Given that people lost interest in Kuduro pretty quickly as 99% of it (apart from BSS) isn’t very good, the ‘fashionable’ new world genre seemed to become Cumbia, which is South American, mainly in Colombia and Argentina. This was helped by the traditional Cumbia accordian sample (from ‘La Cumbia Cienagura) that featured in Samim’s techno anthem ‘Heater’. As usual it’s hard to get hold of the new Cumbia tracks (a bunch of mixtapes didn’t reach me by my deadline) but there’s a Sabor Kolombia refix I heard that was brilliant – it’s a pitched up, bouncy accordian tune, which breaks down in the middle into an almost breakbeat techno rhythm, reminiscent of an old Frankie Bones record, before skipping back into the insanely happy Cumbia rhythms.

Mr Oizo – Trina 700 (Trina Kills Extended Edit) – After quietly killing off the Levi’s puppet, Oizo is now emerging as the dark horse of the French scene. This is absolutely beautiful, more sparse than most Ed Banger output, jerkily edit-tastic, and surprisingly funky.

Cassie – Me & U (Eli’s Freestyle mix)/The Pack – Vans (Eli refix) – The amount of horrible DIY electro remixes floating around the internet this year makes you wonder correspondingly how many shit punk bands there must have been in the 70s (there’s always a downside to low barriers to entry). In contrast, NYC veteran DJ Eli Escobar has been a revelation. These two remixes are simple, but perfectly executed, interesting and enjoyable. The Cassie remix is pretty self-explanatory, turning the track into that mid-80s style you might hear from early Miami Sound Machine, or the Latin Rascals playing on the radio. The Vans remix is even more straightforward, mainly just speeding it up to a house tempo, perking up the percussion, and introducing those crazy drums from Pitbull’s Bojangles near the end. He’s starting to get official remix work, and his progress in 2008 should be watched closely.

Franz & Shape – 444 Days – The stand-out track from their album, this is outstanding, slow and sleazy 80s-style electro, a bit like a tune you’d hear at some mid-80s New York party with Soft Cell and the first wave of ecstasy, but played at 33rpm instead of 45rpm. A really wonderful track and not quite like anything else around this year.

Smal – Chega de Roubo – Kuduro – another new ‘world genre’ claimed by the hip kids. As usual, there’s one group to get genuinely excited about in Buraka Som Sistema, a lot of drossy tracks to wade through, and the odd gem like this which is all crazy African Soca beats with gruff vocals and weird sound effects.

Various Production – Home (Edit) – Yes, the Various album bombed, because they’re pathologically shy and wouldn’t/couldn’t promote it, but they’re still mindblowingly good producers, as shown by this remix of Home that takes the mellow original and clothes it in a beautifully epic breakbeat soundscape. Destined to stay in the cult not crossover bracket, which is probably just the way they and their fans like it.

‘Zilla – Near Dark/Doomsday Dancehall/Ghost Train – Add Techstep into the middle of ‘Doomsday Dancehall’ and you’ve got the perfect description of these tracks. Nobody is making skanking drum & bass like this right now, and a good thing too, as it’s the sort of thing to give small children nightmares. Following the peerless ‘Aragami Style’ from last year, it looks like people are finally waking up to his sound (or have come out from behind their sofas) and they should be getting a proper release next year.

Apna Swarn – Haat – Another missed 2006 gem, this is the best dancefloor Desi track in ages. It’s nothing revolutionary, dhols, tumbis, gypsy accordians, lyrics etc. – but it’s just the way that they’re arranged and the superior production.

La Excelencia – La Lucha – You know how you have that dream of how Salsa ought to sound, instead of the dreadful poppy stuff that actually gets made? La Excelencia play that music you’re after, and La Lucha is their best track.

Sidney Looper – Phantom Drop – If you keep up with things, you’ll know that technology has reached the point where everyone and their dog has the facility to remix a tune, and distribute it around the internet. Which has meant that any hot new tune has ten billion shit remixes of it unfortunately. Here is the rare exception – Sidney Looper is an alter ego for Agent Lovelette who’s produced a couple of the best bootlegs of recent years. This takes Justice’s ‘Phantom’ by the scruff of it’s neck and speeds it up into a breakbeat Ghettotech party monster. Definitely F.U.N.

M.I.A. – XR2 (Tigerstyle remix)/Bird Flu (instrumental)/Paper Planes – Amazing instrumentals. Great design and branding. Still couldn’t really get excited about her vocals.

j) ALBUMS and MIXES

Top 10
Avalanches – Some People mix & Brains Teazer
Modeselektor – Happy Birthday
Cold War Kids – Robbers and Thieves
NYPC – Fantastic Playroom
Panda Bear – Person Pitch
Solid Steel – Now Listen Again
Bloc Party – A Weekend in the City
Dave Clarke – I Love Techno 2007
G13 Soundsystem – Carnival Rave 2007
DJ Ayres & Tittsworth – Ayres & Titties

Also check
Keb Darge and Cut Chemist present Lost and Found
Filastine – The Mud, the Blood & the Beer – a Fistfight with the Near East
Surgeon – This Is For You Shits (mix)
The Rub – Rub Up mix
Bobby Konders – 90s Hardcore Ragga Dancehall Mix
Spankrock – Fabricdead 33 1/3
Radioclit – Ghettopop 21 mix (Coupe Decale)
Calle 13 – Residente O Visitante
DJ Donna Summer – BBTCCCore
Toddla T – Ghettoblaster #1
Skream – Disco Specials on Rinse FM
Black Lips – Good Bad Not Evil
Sany Pitbull – DJ Mix (16.09.2007)
DJ B.Cause – Super Disco Hyphy
Various Artists – Ultimate Brazilian Breaks & Beats

And in 2008, look out for…
O Fracas – Fits and Starts
Muscles – Guns, Babes & Lemonade
Bumblebeez – Prince Umberto & The Sister Of Ill
Switch producing Tricky…

The most enjoyable album of the year seemed to slip past unnoticed most people, possibly as it was only available as a (free) download from the band’s website, and not very well publicised. The Avalanches quietly released an unofficial follow-up to their classic GiMix, called Some People. Over 45 minutes, they threw a ton of different styles into the mix, with their usual dazzlingly inventive mixing, and an emphasis on fun that saw them throw New Edition’s 80s kitsch pop hit, ‘Candy Girl’ into the mix alongside steel band cover versions of the Jackson 5, 80s Soca tunes, the Who, dancehall and seventies disco. It is utterly joyful to listen to, whether you’re a casual listen, or notice all the layering detail in the mixing, and deserves a much wider audience. They also put out a ‘teazer’ (sic) of another mixtape called ‘Brains’ which was more based on 80s Soca but also manages to contain hip hop shout-outs over Wham tunes. It’s only about 20 minutes long, but is also enormously fun.

It seems perverse in a year where everybody with a laptop appeared to put their half-assed first attempts at a Diplo/Soulwax mash-up mix on whichever music blog would let them amidst rampant self-publicising, that the one mix that shows everyone how it’s really done should have been virtually ignored. But that’s showbusiness. If you haven’t heard it yet, buy, beg, borrow or google a copy (I’m not sure if it’s still on their website, but you need to register first).

Cold War Kids – Robbers and Cowards – It’s not often that you get a rock album that is strong enough to transcend genres and appeal from everyone to young NME readers to their Mojo-reading Dads, but ‘Robbers and Cowards’ was that album. Classic rock and songwriting with some heartfelt, Springsteen-esque, blue-collar lyrics of American woes, and a singer with a stunning voice.

New Young Pony Club – Fantastic Playroom – This had the potential to be everything that’s bad about the Shoreditch/New Rave scene, but turned out to be a total triumph. From start to finish, great songs just keep on coming, with catchy choruses and weird, cool lyrics making it easily one of the year’s most enjoyable listens.

Panda Bear – Person Pitch – A really, rather special album that deserved to cross over much more than it did. It sounds like the Avalanches producing an album for Brian Wilson. It has some of the same dreamy, summery-sampled feel of ‘Since I Left You’ but with more laid-back and looped soundscapes as a backdrop to the gorgeously, melodic Beach Boy-esque vocals.

Bloc Party – A Weekend in the City – I really didn’t expect to like this so much, but it’s pretty much as good as stadium indie gets – big room music to mosh to, with great, well-crafted songs from start to finish, and just a lot more interesting than mainstream alternative rock has been for a while.

Burial – Untrue – For all the universal plaudits it received, you couldn’t help feeling there was something ultimately a bit naff about Burial. The sound of dad-step, it’s perfectly pleasant and listenable, if you like Guardian-friendly coffee-table versions of garage, but I can’t forgive it for inspiring the most godawful, pretentious hyperbole from so many music journalists.

Solid Steel – Now Listen Again – The Solid Steel gang of Jonathan Moore, Matt Black, Strictly Kev, PC and DK are now proper national treasures that we are in danger of taking for granted. Hardly anyone else who’s been around for so long could come up with something as brilliant as this – packed full of great tunes, impeccable programming and inspired mixing (plus mash-ups that actually work!).

Spankrock – Fabricdead 33.3 – Exceptions like Solid Steel aside, the tragedy of ‘official’ mixtapes has always been that licensing costs always restrict from people being to do exactly what they want. The solution, if you’re Spankrock’s DJs Devlin and Darko, is to release a bootleg companion version with all the extra bits that would have cost too much to include. Fabricdead is a glorious OTT kitchen-sink of a mix. Each DJ takes a half, and the second half is more consistently solid (the first half falls victim to trying to be too clever on occasion). It may not be as brilliant or as fun as the Avalanches mix, but it’s a hugely impressive, incredibly-layered mix that warrants repeated listening to catch all the little details lovinly inserted. Sadly there were only 1,000 copies put out, so this is another lost treasure in the making.

DJ Ayres & Tittsworth – Ayres & Titties Mix – Everything You Ever Wanted To Know (and need to know) About B-More But Were Afraid To Ask. There might have been a collapse in the B-more market this year, but this mixtape shows why people got excited in the first place via a great track selection and some tight, super-quick mixing to keep the interest levels up throughout.

Sany Pitbull – Mix 16.09.2007 – Sany Pitbull is one of the leading DJs in Brazil’s Carioca/Baile Funk scene. Despite the hype, it’s a genre I’ve always struggled with, mainly because of the vocals. This mix is fascinating more than anything, focusing mostly on instrumentals, and you imagine offering a glimpse of a straight-up Brazilian clubbing experience. It won’t be to everybody’s tastes – it’s rough as fuck – but there’s some pretty great and varied stuff in the mix, and overall it’s just got that punk rock/early hip hop block party raw energy. And hell the drums hit hard.

Elsewhere there were other impressive DJ mixes, where people went to town on their niche track selection, or on their imaginative track selection. Jason Forrest, aka DJ Donna Summer, created a mix that was much more fun than it deserved to be, consisting of most of the fastest and most hardcore dance genres. I can’t think of anyone else making Hardcore Euro Gabba mixes but throwing in Ghettotech, a bit of Drum & Bass, and the pop gem to vary the insane pace of it all. I want to call it something really stupid like ‘Dutch Gabba Kids meet Detroit Booty Beatmakers Uptown’. And amidst the madness there’s still light relief on hearing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ over bouncing gabba beats. It’s something that everybody should listen to once, just to remind you that music can still be shocking and exciting. And he ends up with an extraordinary sped-up breakbeat cut-up of a SebastiAn tune with added Indian percussion.

Techno showed that it’s not quite dead yet courtesy of two outstanding DJ mixes from veterans Dave Clarke and Surgeon. Dave Clarke’s ‘I Love Techno 2007’ mix is a masterclass in how heavy electronic music (though not distorted a la Joosteece) can be incredibly funky. Surgeon’s mix, the sweetly titled ‘This Is For You Shits’, is more than just a techno mix really, an incredibly dense mix of leftfield, electronic music, it’s fast, furious, a little scary and not always easy listening, but gloriously rhythmical, fresh and exciting.

Radioclit spent the year focusing on their production skills and slipped out a cheeky but very stylish-looking mixtape with their remixes on, as well as a new EP, ‘Divine Gosa’. But possibly the most exciting thing they put out was their podcast of African dance music, which seems to reflect one of the directions they are heading in, especially on their work with Esau Mwamwaya. Etienne and Johan – the ‘Clit’ – have always been ahead of the game in finding new music – they’re proper music lovers – and again it feels like although they’re already good, that they’ve only just begun and in the future are going to suddenly unleash something really mindblowing.

Skull Juice put out a couple of mixes. They’re another case where you feel that they’re not quite fully formed. Their mixes are always very impressive both in their mixing skills and track selection, but sometimes they fall into the aforementioned Spankrock trap of being too clever and trying to get in too many tracks at the same time, until the mix just gets too crowded. But you should expect really great things to come – they still stand out a mile from most of their immediate competition.

Dubstep has a reputation of being dour and dominated by nerdy guys, but Skream, the wunderkind responsible for last year’s anthem ‘Midnight Request Line’, did a good PR job on his Funk and Disco Sets on pirate station Rinse FM. Two hours of 70s and 80s disco and boogie, it showed a refreshing change from the frequent tunnel vision of dubstep, and he’s a lot funnier than you’d ever expect a dubstep DJ to be.

You’ve already read about Toddla Tom Bell’s productions – he also put out the Ghettoblaster #1 mixtape – a great showcase for his overall style, through some of his own tracks and a wide range of tunes, anchored only by a bumping, breakbeat feel to them. It stood out a mile from the awful, identikit ‘blog house’ DJ mixes.

The G13 Soundsystem came out with two more mixes of solid Soca action, Home For Carnival 3 and Carnival Rave 2007, following from their last year’s effort. Home For Carnival 3 is the more complete, with 70 minutes of the best sounds from all the Caribbean islands, seamlessly mixed, while Carnival Rave is a briefer, more frantic burst, and just has the edge for getting across the crazy Soca energy on a cold English evening.

The whole cut and paste aesthetic of music and hip hop could be said to be about being able to make good out of bad i.e. take that killer loop from a crap record, and make it into a hot tune. So on that basis San Franciscan DJ B.Cause managed to make good out of Hyphy, the Bay Area-based hip hop which failed to make good on its hype. On his excellent mixtape ‘Super Disco Hyphy’ he took a pile of of mellow, funky 80s & 90s Dubby Disco tunes, and put a load of hyphy acapellas over the top, creating one of the most original mix CDs of the year.

After the classic ‘Don’t Give Up’, expectations were high for the Noisettes’ debut album, What’s the Time Mr. Wolf. There are some great songs here, but you couldn’t help feeling that they’re still at their best live (and my gosh are they exciting live).

O Fracas’s ‘Fits and Starts’ – now due out next year on I Can Count – is an extremely strong debut album from one of the best, most talented, and most underrated UK rock bands around right now. It’s not quite a classic – the production didn’t always hit the right notes for me, but they’re songwriting is outstanding, and it’s better than many albums that others call ‘classic’ with has some wonderful tracks on it.

TOM WILSON © 2007

n.b. due to time constraints (aka having a life), there’s always stuff I’ve missed – so apologies for any glaring omissions.

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Posted by grlla

The Year in Music 2006

December 5, 2006

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover Gnarls Barkley or Lily Allen, but music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

a) Introduction
b) Twenty-Five tracks you HAVE to hear
c) Hip Hop
d) Dancehall & Soca
e) Electro House
f) Rock
g) B-more (Baltimore Club music)
h) Other styles
i) Grime
j) Reggaeton
k) Visuals
l) Albums, Mixes & Podcasts

INTRODUCTION
One of the revelations this year was UK DJ and producer Graeme Sinden. Taking on the baton from Diplo, he is one of those people who has a never-ending curiosity about music, regardless of genres, which makes for excellent DJ sets (taking in hip hop, dancehall, Reggaeton, House, Carioca Funk, B-more etc etc), but he’s now taking that approach to his productions and reshaping and advancing musical genres. This was best seen on his groundbreaking b-more remix to Rick Ross’s US hip hop anthem ‘Hustlin’. Baltimore house music has been a wonderfully exciting underground genre for years now, but the vast majority was raw as hell and mainly loops or DJ tools, useful only for an accomplished DJ. The Hustlin remix just took the execution and production to the next level, while losing none of the spirit or energy. He put out one of the best bootlegs of the year, cutting up Pharrell’s track ‘Can I Have It Like That’ and making it sound ten times better than before, with a fantastic, bumping groove. And an official remix of Mekon’s ‘Yes, Yes Y’All’ took the blueprint Carioca Funk horns and combined it with old-school electro synths to make one of the most bonkers and original tracks of the year. The UK is embarrassingly short of people pushing the whole gamut of dance music styles, 1Xtra is excellent for niche styles, but someone like Sinden (who now has a late night show on Kiss) in many ways reflects the spirit of John Peel in his genuine love of music and ability to break up boundaries and mess up heads. Diplo has the same ability in the US but is more behind the scenes at present, presumably concentrating on his label Mad Decent and his next album, although his Podcast series was outstanding and inspiring.

Following on from last year’s theme of technology, it was great to see amazing unsigned tracks turn up on the internet, straight from people’s home set-ups – showing how it’s not not only easier to have the technology to make tracks, but now you can get them distributed round the world too via MP3. Six of this year’s Twenty-Five tracks are by Amateur producers and are far ahead in terms of ideas and production than many artists with record deals. Hopefully they have great futures ahead of them.

Sadly Vinyl felt like an increasingly irrelevant format. Now that laptop DJing software programs like Ableton are becoming increasingly commonplace, few new wannabe DJs will see the point (or have the money) to shed out almost £1000 for a Technics set-up, followed by £7 for each single. If you look at the successful record shops in London like Phonica or Sounds of the Universe, it feels like they are catering for a relatively older audience, who grew up with vinyl, while the new generation are more used to swapping mp3s via Instant Message, quite possibly tracks that they’ve made themselves.

Neu Rave was the NME buzz phrase of choice and it was adopted broadly partly because it was associated with the Klaxons, the hype band of the year, and also… well Rave is just a great word and sentiment. The bands associated with it tended to be those that would have been called punk-funk last year – for anyone who’s seen or heard a proper late 80s rave, they might not understand the connection. Loosely translated it also pointed towards past hiccups such as Indie Dance, and worse, Big Beat aka bad dance music for students. Key producers, such as Paul Epworth, Justice, MSTRKRFT and Stuart Price, were brought in to remix indie guitar bands with varying degrees of success. History has shown that rock and dance are rarely happy bedfellows, but for all that, this is the sort of thing that encourages rock fans to expand their tastes and horizons towards dance music and beyond, so you can forgive the odd excruciating remix and hunt out the occasional gem.

Mp3 blogs continued to proliferate and there is now a more ambiguous attitude towards them. Do they damage sales of tracks, or help to promote them around the world? Do they let ordinary music fans access to hot tunes that they might have missed, or has their success become such that half the DJs in bars are playing all the same tunes because they haven’t bothered to look anywhere else for music? It’s early days yet, but expect the situation to evolve and the debate to increase.

TWENTY-FIVE TRACKS YOU HAVE TO HEAR
‘Zilla – Aragami Style
Twista – Hit the Floor
Young Jeezy ft. Akon – Soul Survivor (Obsession FX Dancehall remix)
Vegastar – Elle Blesse (Para One remix)
Sinden – Rick Ross Hustlin B-more remix
Jamelia – Something About You (Mr Oizo remix)
Emynd – Then He Kissed Me B-more remix
Shurwayne Winchester – Can’t Wait
DJ Technics – Shoulder Lean B-more remix
Hi Jack – Hijackin (Herve Fuck Fuck mix)
Ward 21 – New Gangsta Nation
Trae – Cadillac
Ellen Allien & Apparat – Way Out
O Fracas – Follow Sue
Ceephax – Hardcore Wick
Lil Keke feat. Paul Wall & UGK – Chunk Up the Deuce
Os Princesa – Massacre da Cena Electro
Agent Lovelette – I Don’t Know
Uffie – Pop the Glock (SebastiAn 7’ mix)
Diplo – Buy It, Use It (B-more remix)
John Eric – Bhangraton
MSTRKRFT – She’s Good For Business
Untitled Music Project – A Popular Musical Composition
Tony Matterhorn – Dutty Wine
Tampa Tony – Bobbahead

HIP HOP 10
Lil Keke, Paul Wall & UGK – Chunk Up the Deuce
Trae – Cadillac
Twista – Hit the Floor
Tampa Tony – Bobbahead
Pimp C – Knockin Doorz Down
Trae ft Z-ro – I Don’t Need
DJ Unk – Walk It Out (remix ft. Andre 3000 & Jim Jones)/ Back It Up
UKG – The Game Belongs to Me
Mims ft. Junior Reid & Baby Cham – This Is Why I’m Hot (remix)
Clipse – Trill

Check these too
K-Rab & Bhi – Bubblegum
Lil Rok Playaz – Grind & Hustle
Pitbull – Bojangles (Remix)/Hey Girl/ Get Freaky
Master P ft. Cutty Ranks & Kobra Khan – Twenty Inch
Mike Jones ft Pimp C & Bun B – Pourin’ Up
Nump – I Got Grapes
Chamillionaire – Ridin’ Dirty (UGK remix) / Weird Al – White & Nerdy
Rick Ross – Hustlin’
Yung Joc – It’s Going Down
T.I. – What You Know

It didn’t really feel like a great year for hip hop. Hyphy should have been named Hype-y – for all the buzz there was about it (especially painful was The Sunday Times ‘coolhunter’ writing about it six months too late), the good tunes were too few and far-between, though like many micro-scenes these days, doubtless it all made sense if you were actually hanging out in the Bay area. Producer of the year was Bangladesh. He was best known for Kelis’s beat for ‘Bossy’, but he came out with all sorts of weird takes on hip hop, and even produced a Carioca Funk-esque banger with Ayanna’s ‘Shake that Fatty’. Bangladesh was closely followed by Collipark, the man formerly known as DJ Smurf (perhaps not the best name to be taken seriously with?). Following last year’s amazing Whisper beat for the Ying Yang Twinz, he came out with the extraordinary ‘Hit the Floor’ for Twista, a house-tempo track with some of the weirdest alien synth noises around. At the end of the year Pitbull’s new album was primed to go, and looks set to propel him to serious heights. Pitbull will be massive because: a) he’s a good party rapper, and doesn’t whine on about tired, fake gangsterism b) he has some excellent and interesting beats in his tracks (check out the Rock Lobster-sampling ‘Hey You Girl’ as well as this year’s Bojangles with some of the best drums of the year c) he’s got a ton of energy on stage and sadly d) He’s white-looking enough to reassure the conservative elements of the music business, but being Cuban also garners the enormous Latino audience.

The few good beats included the almost painfully slow, and prettily melancholic ‘Chunk Up the Deuce’ with its sinister, screwed Paul Wall chorus, Trae’s ‘Cadillac’, another screwed-sounding track (the actual screwed version was practically stationary) with a hefty bass, it was a worthy follow-up to last year’s hip hop triumph, Paul Wall’s Sittin’ Sideways (Screwed version). There was a fair bit of talk about Snap music, Atlanta’s new thing where the music is slow, the dance is simple and you just snap your fingers on the 3-beat (supposedly the dance is easy so that people who’ve dressed up to the nines won’t sweat and spoil their gear), but most of the tracks were pretty boring minimal numbers, notable exceptions being Tampa Tony’s ‘Bobbahead’ and ‘Bubblegum’ by K-rab and Bhi. UKG, the legendary Houston duo put on hold during rapper Pimp C’s incarceration had a good year, with strong cameos on Chamillionaire’s wonderful anthem ‘Ridin’ Dirty’ and ‘Chunk Up the Deuce’ plus Pimp C’s excellent solo track, ‘Knockin’ Doorz’. They finished the year with the sublime, slinky and funky ‘The Game Belongs to Me’ which augurs well for their come-back album. The other impressive talent was DJ Unk came out with a big ol’ fast, rump-shaker of a strip club track with ‘Back It Up’, and the slower ‘Walk It Out’ which had a glorious cameo from Andre 3000 on the remix. Rick Ross came out with his big anthem ‘Hustlin’ but as usual most people in the UK paid no attention. And Young Leek’s ‘Jiggle It’ was the most (slightly annoyingly) catchy tune of the year, but somehow failed to set the world alight. Could this be something to do with him having the most ridiculous hip hop name ever? Towards the end of the year the Neptune-affiliated Clipse brought out ‘Trill’ which had an startlingly sinister rippling rave riff that really stood out.

Timbaland’s year consisted mostly of Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake, but his most interesting track slipped out at the end of the year through Snoop Dogg’s ‘Get a Light’. It was nothing startling, just vintage Timbaland, simply one repetitive drone of a riff, and crisp, restrained drums. Snoop does his usual thing and you even get Damian Marley in the background singing the chorus.

DANCEHALL 10
Tony Matterhorn – Dutty Wine (Smash)
Babycham – Ghetto Story (Eighty Five)
Ding Dong – Bad Man Forward, Bad Man, Pull Up
Akon – Soul Survivor (Dancehall remix with Bounty Killer, Buju Banton & Vybz Kartel)
TOK – Guns Pop Off (Bad Belly)
Ward 21 – New Gangsta Nation (Hi-Octane)
Beenie Man – Hands in the Air (Wipe Out)
Damian Marley ft Stephen Marley & Buju Banton – The Traffic Jam
Fire Links – Do You Thing (Synthetic)
Dr Evil – More Punanny (Galore)

Check these too
Future Troubles – Tom Drunk (Bug Out)
Buju Banton – Talk To Me (Man Fi Dead)
Mega Banton – My Sound (Real Rock)
Alozade – Screw Face (Capital P)
Alozade – Dads (Bullet)
Capleton – From Mi Heart (Wash Belly)
Cham – Rudeboy Pledge (Stage Show)
Fire Links – Goodas Fi Yuh (Score Board)

SOCA
Mista Vybe – Ting 4 Da Road
Shurwayne Winchester – Can’t Wait
Elvis White – Clear De Way
Destra Garcia – I Dare You
Bunji Garlin – Fire
G13 Soundsystem – Soca mix

As per usual, nothing revolutionary to report on the dancehall scene, just good tunes. ‘Dutty Wine’ was the big tune of the year, partly because of the combination of Tony Matterhorn’s lyric and the big energy of the Smash rhythm, but also because of the eye-opening dance for women that accompanied it. The shaking of heads and asses simultaneously got some practitioners in trouble, and there were a number of reported hospital visits from casualties of the dance. The other major anthem was Babycham’s Ghetto Story on Dave Kelly’s sweet, minimal Eighty-Five rhythm. It came out at the tail-end of 2005, but one of the big underground club anthems was a bootleg remix of Akon’s r&b track Soul Survivor. This remix turned it into a serious gun-chat badman monster of a tune, courtesy of ‘borrowed’ vocals from three of the biggest deejays. This neatly juxtaposed with the slightly sickly sweet falsetto chorus. A very smart track that caused major damage on the dancefloor. The Wipe Out riddim did exactly what it said on the tin, a typically Jamaican bonkers reworking of the old Surfari’s tune – Beenie Man had the best cut on it. And Dr Evil, a deejay pseudonym for well-respected production duo Leftside & Esco, was very funny (and dirty) on the strong Galore rhythm (Lady Saw’s ode to making the bed squeak was another fine cut). Ding Dong’s Badman Forward, Badman Pull Up was another huge dance tune in Jamaica, while Ward 21’s percussive and self-descriptive Hi Octane rhythm had two big tracks in their own ‘New Gangsta Nation’ and Bling Dawg’s ‘Put Yuh Gunz Up’. Buju Banton followed the retro trend that began last year and put out ‘Talk to Me’ on the Man Fi Dead riddim. At the end of the year, legendary producer Stephen ‘Lenky’ Marsden was primed to release his new Synthetic rhythm, and Fire Links track ‘Do You Thing’ was sounding particularly strong on it.

If you need one easy reason to love Soca, just look at the names of the artists. Elvis White and Shurwayne Winchester. The Horrors could learn something from them. There weren’t quite as many outstanding Soca tracks as last year in 2006, but the absolute pick of the bunch were Mista Vybe’s insanely fun and repetitive ‘Ting 4 Da Road’ which won the Trinidad RoadMarch, and Shurwayne Winchester’s equally effervescent ‘Can’t Wait’ Elvis White’s ‘Clear De Way’ was also very enjoyable and notable for briefly pinching the melody to Nena’s ’99 Red Balloons’. Carnival Queen Destra Garcia had the poppy but heartwarmingly cheerful and catchy ‘I Dare You’ primed for 2007. But if you wanted to be lazy, you could pick up a copy of G13 Soundsytem’s Soca mix, which had everything you needed to know about Soca, and more.

ELECTRO HOUSE 10
Vegastar – Elle Blesse (Para One remix)
Jamelia – Something About You (Mr Oizo remix)
Hi Jack – Hijackin (Herve Fuck Fuck mix)
Para One – Du-du-dunn
MSTRKRFT – She’s Good For Business
Uffie– Pop the Glock (Sebastian remix)
Ellen Allien & Apparat – Way Out
Simian Mobile Disco – Tits & Acid/Hustler
Radio Slave – Secret Base
Daft Punk – Prime Time Of Your Life (Para One Remix)

Check these too
MSTRKRFT – Community Revolution in Progress
Soulwax vs Robbie – Ravelight
Gregor Tresher – The Now People
Audion – Mouth to Mouth
Surkin – Radio Fireworks
Mr Oizo – Nazis (Justice remix)
Futureheads – ??? (Switch remix)
Bodyrox – Yeah Yeah (D Ramirez remix)
Franz Ferdinand (Justice Remix)
Epic Man – Sharpen the Knives
Daft Punk – The Brainwasher (Erol Alkan’s Horrorcore remix)

It was France’s year. Justice broke the dam in 2005, and in 2006 the rest flooded out. Ed Banger and Institubes were the key labels, and while Surkin, Feadz, and a revived Mr Oizo came out with some hot tracks, the year belonged to Para One and SebastiAn. The former has been tipped here before for his schizophrenic debut ep that had crunchy hip hop on one side and frenetic acid house on the other. 2006 began with his amazing jacking Chicago-y remix of Daft Punk’s ‘Prime Time of your Life’, continued with ‘Du-du-dunn’ the twisted e-anthemic lead to his album and reached an apotheosis with his overlooked remix to French indie band Vegastar’s track ‘Elle Blesse’. The latter was hard and really fucked-up house music, just the sort of thing to twist your brain on the dancefloor with as much energy as a great punk rock song.

SebastiAn explored slightly different and newer territory, slowing down his electronica and giving it to more of a hip hop breakbeat feel. His seven-inch track H.A.L. on Arcade Mode was a startlingly original, slow mechanical jam, while his take on Uffie’s ‘Pop the Glock’ was certainly no house track – it was a thrilling bumping, distorted, electronic groove, centred round a thumping great breakbeat. He then used Uffie’s vocal sparsely, like Garage legend Todd Edwards, cutting it up and making it another instrument in the overall mix. Finally, ‘Ross Ross Ross’ took epic seventies sweeping disco strings and crafted them through his editing skills into an almost disco big beat track that is much better than it sounds.

The other French highlight was Mr Oizo’s remix of Jamelia. It took the original and turned it into a wonderfully wonky electro-r&b tune, and showed off Oizo’s current love of edits. It ended up as a stunning track, the sort of thing that you might expect Basement Jaxx to have produced at their peak.

As predicted last year, MSTRKRFT had a good year with a very solid album and more consistently impressive remixes. The one track that really stood out was ‘She’s Good For Business’ which with its bubble-gum-y female chanted vocal and 80s riffs, was impossible not to fall for. The other killer track was a b-side, the also 80s-ish ‘Community Revolution in Progress’ with its refrain to ‘Move Your Hips’.

The Dubsided stable, consisting mainly of Dave Taylor (better known as Switch/Solid Groove), Herve aka Joshua Harvey, Jesse Rose, Trevor Lovey and Graeme Sinden put out consistently strong releases, mostly following their bass-heavy ‘fidget-house’ productions. It was hard to keep up with all the releases, but one of the stand-outs was Herve’s Fuck Fuck remix of Hi Jack’s ‘Hijackin’. Pure, innovative party music, it centres round a bouncy, energetic low-end riff, but then goes really bonkers when it brings in the classic JB’s synth riff and some b-moreish breakbeats. Packed full of ideas and perfectly-executed, it’s a dream of a track.

Soulwax, always clever bastards to do the unexpected, bestowed one of their best ever remixes on Robbie Williams of all people, Ravelight (the original was called Lovelight) was incendiary electro-house, with no recognisable trace of Robbie, and one of the year’s biggest breakdowns.

Simian Mobile Disco had a terrific year, and are perfectly placed to be major electro house production dons in 2007. James Ford, one half of them, was also set to become the new Paul Epworth i.e. the uber-ubiquitous indie producer, so this will just be the icing on the cake. They created two major dancefloor anthems in ‘Hustler’ with a great, kick-ass lyric, and a load of interesting ideas, riffs and breakdowns throughout the track to prevent you from getting bored for a second. And set for release very soon is the comically-named ‘Tits & Acid’ which is a killer jerky squelchathon of a house tune with a whopper of a breakdown.

Gregor Tresher’s ‘The Now People’ was one of those very simple but effective tracks, with a pretty high note melody and one of those lethally dry analogue basses in the classic ‘Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass’ mould. Radio Slave is an established producer and editor, but should be noted for the extremely large and catchy track ‘Secret Base’, yet another electro-house monster. Swedish house producer Steve Angello cornered the market in catchy, bouncy disco-electro, in the spirit of early Daft Punk. It was fun to dance to and so deservedly popular. His two big tracks were his remixes of Sebastian Ingrosso’s ‘Body Beat’ and mBG & SDS’s ‘New Jack’.

A man who took Daft Punk into unchartered waters was Erol Alkan. His Horrorcore remix of ‘The Brainwasher’ was possibly a bit too startling for some dancefloors, but had one of the most innovative drum patterns on a house track in 2006 ( seemingly inspired by proper old hardcore music), as well as a gigantic, filthy breakdown.

Elsewhere there was far too much writing about minimal house and disco-edits, showing that there are perhaps too many musical dinosaurs around. Minimal House may contain some clever sounds, and in the hands of the right DJ the odd track can be great (Erotic Discourse by Erotic Discourse, Gabriel Ananda’s ‘Doppelwhipper’ and Audion’s ‘Mouth to Mouth’ were amongst the biggest and best tracks of this kind). But overall it’s pretty dull, appealing to chin-strokers who care too much about the technical side of things (never a good look), people who’ve taken too many drugs, and people who are probably too old to still be going clubbing.

ROCK
Whitey – Wrap It Up
Untitled Music Project – A Popular Music Composition
O Fracas – Follow Sue
Leo Minor – Don’t Bring Me Down
No Dynamics – I’ve Got You on my Mind
CSS – Let’s Make Love (and Listen Death From Above)
Peter, Bjorn & John – Young Folk
The Horrors – Sheena Is a Parasite
The Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control/Your Mangled Heart/Are You That Somebody
Bromhead’s – What If’s & Maybes

Check these too
Services – Element of Danger (MSTRKRFT remix)
Arctic Monkeys – Still Take You Home
Klaxons – Not Over
Friendly Fires – Your Love

After last year’s renaissance, rock music felt a little underwhelming this year. While it was good to see many of the new bands from last year deservedly crossing over, it didn’t feel like they were really being replaced. The big buzz band of course have been the Klaxons, who have created their own scene in a way not really felt since Madchester days. Neu Rave is rather a misnomer, as most of the bands are more like UK takes of the US DFA punk-funk bands, but that said, anything that helps people get into Rave has to be a good thing, and it’s certainly heady, ridiculous and underground enough to be ripe for rediscovery. The Klaxons have been in the studio with Erol Alkan producing, which is an appetising prospect, but their singles to date haven’t really sounded anything very special. For now, their guitar take on Grace’s late 90s epic house hit ‘Not Over’ was fun and cleverly done, while the band Friendly Fires covered late 80s house classic ‘Your Love’ by Jamie Principle which was also good enough to stand out as a track in itself, rather just as a novelty cover version.

Leo Minor put out a limited, excellent and intriguing single, recalling the quirky popisms of Beck and Andre 3000, highlighted by ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ which pitted Neptune slinky-synths against a big 70s singalong-rock chorus.

Whitey returned with more sleaze-rock that also happened to be incredibly catchy and it could have been genetically modified in a laboratory to be tailored for an indie disco. The main ingredients though were a simple, incessant riff, stomping drum and a genius and cleverly under-used demonic bassline.

Bromhead’s Jacket were supposed to be the new Arctic Monkeys. They’re not quite, but they do have supercool lyrics, and a few very catchy tunes. And ‘What If’s and Maybe’s’ is a joyous and wonderful short-sharp slice of punk pop and better than most bands manage in their careers. The Arctic Monkeys don’t really belong in this column, but ‘Still Take You Home’ was such an excellent, sassy track that it deserves mentioning.

The Gossip had an amazing year – justifiably so when you first heard ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ in January. Proper Soul Punk music fronted by a disco diva, it stomped along, and the album was full of other great tracks. They rocked it live, and hearing their cover of Aaliyah’s ‘Are You that Somebody’ wasn’t quite as special as the first time you heard the White Stripes cover ‘Jolene’, but not at all far off. And CSS were a bit of Brazilian girl fun, the album was patchy, and the live show a bit silly after a few tracks, but ‘Let’s Make Love and Listen Death From Above’ was an irresistible slice of catchy disco-punk-funk magic.

The Horrors need hardly be mentioned, having an increasing amount of press notoriety, but strip that away and their extreme fashion styling and you have a really very fine Garage Rock band that would be feted in a Gallon Drunk or Blues Explosion category.

At the end of the year the ludicrously-named Untitled Musical Project were game for some hooky hardcore fun with their track ‘A Popular Music Composition’. A solid exercise in concise thrash heaven and a nice sideline in dark humour (viz. their track ‘Why isn’t Paul McCartney dead yet?’) look out for their debut single on the White Heat label.

Elsewhere the Guillemots spread their wings into the mainstream with their beautifully-crafted, epic tunes. Sweden’s Love Is All got a lot of hype and a deal with Parlophone, but it all sounded like uninspired twee indie pop. Of the Scandies, far better was Peter, Bjorn and John’s ‘Young Folk’, which was madly catchy and a future indie classic in the making. Louis XIV were a bit naff (and old) but had one killer, catchy ‘Strokes-covering-Jean Genie’ single in ‘Paper Doll’. And Jamie T became a pop star with a Top 20 single, though as is sometimes the case, part of his charm was curbed by the new polished production compared with his endearing, earlier ramshackle style.

B-MORE (BALTIMORE CLUB MUSIC) 10
Sinden – Hustlin’ (Sinden B-more remix)
Emynd – Then He Kissed Me (B-more remix)
Diplo – Shhake It Up (B-more remix)
DJ Technics – Shoulder Lean remix
Naught – Maneater (B-more remix)
Diplo – Touch It (B-more remix)
Baltimore Bass Connection – 50 Ways to Leave Yr Lover (B-more remix)
Rod Lee – Let’s Git It
Unruly Club Classics Vol.3 compilation
DJ Tameil – Robot Club Rock

A tiny, long-underground Club music genre finally started to build gradually and organically around the world in 2006. Various signs are present to explain its rise: the resuscitation and new activity of Unruly, one of the original record labels (until very recently, it was impossible to find the records unless you were in Baltimore: now you can buy mp3s online directly from the producers). Hot NYC club promoter Roxy aka Oxy Cottontail promoting parties in NYC (and getting it as she comes from Baltimore). A-ron aNYthing & Low Bee B-more mixtapes, the debut Spankrock album (not that they like being called B-more, which is fair enough, they’re much more than just that). Amanda Blank, a quality female rapper who will get LOTS of attention in 2007, because she’s really good with loads of sassy attitude (think a white NYC Neneh Cherry) and decent female rappers always excite geeky male music fans. Interest shown by production dons, the Neptunes (Chad Hugo’s b-more remix of ‘Can I Have It Like That’ and Pharrell’s b-more soundtrack for Louis Vuitton). The scene does still have limitations: current limited availability of records, the fact that most are club tools requiring fairly-skilled DJs to use properly. But this was the buzz underground club genre for 2006.

Diplo put out the fourth, fifth and sixth Hollertronix singles, which contained the occasional B-more gem. The overall highlight was a B-more remix of Busta Rhymes’ ‘Touch It’, best-known for sampling Daft Punk’s ‘Technologic’. The original was extremely popular but rather sluggish-sounding, but the remake devastating on the right dancefloor. On the flipside of the record was one of the most imaginative and bizarre mash-ups of the year – a B-more remix of Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’ with her vocal replaced with Macka Diamond’s ‘Yuh Nuh Ready’, one of 2005 biggest dance hall cuts. It was a crazy culture collision to raise a smile on the dancefloor. Diplo’s other masterstroke, released on the new Uppercuts label, was Shhake It Up, an excellently executed B-more rework of the Beatles’ ‘Twist & Shout’. The Beatles are still fairly sacred when it comes to remixes (mainly because of extremely litigious lawyers), so it’s always good to see people fucking around with Beatles tunes, but this was a no-brainer party tune, one of those tunes that turns a party completely loopy whenever it’s heard.

Two of the best b-more remixes came from relative amateur producers, who released their creations out on the internet. Naught took Nelly Furtado’s mega-pop hit ‘Maneater’ and rather than just lazily insert the right b-more drums underneath it, cut up the melody and her vocals to make it much more thought-out and an extremely effective dancefloor weapon. One of the historic B-more staple tracks is a version of the Motown classic ‘Mr Postman’, and producer Emynd showed the further potential for 60s soul tracks, putting the Crystal’s classic ‘Then He Kissed Me’ to a gloriously skippy and percolating beat that was irresistible.

The B-more highlight ironically came from an Englishman. There is a long musical tradition of the English plundering American musical styles and tweaking and improving them, and this is exactly what Graeme Sinden did on his remix of Rick Ross’s ‘Hustlin’. His skill is having a real love of the raw, ghetto genres like B-more, but also the vision to use his production skills to stretch them and up the ante on what’s possible with them. Here he played around, at certain points, flipping the timing of the vocal and turning the drums backwards, but never losing sight of achieving a maximum dancefloor impact.

Strangely Paul Simon had a bumper Baltimore year, with two different remixes of his tunes. The Spankrock affiliated BBC (Baltimore Bass Connection) released a great take on ’50 Ways to Lose a Lover’. They sped it right up, chopped up the chorus, and whacked a couple of killer drum breaks on top. The track has the most beautiful, melancholy guitar riff, which fortunately still sounded great at the faster tempo. His now rather helium lyric somehow worked, against the odds. Elswhere B-more pioneer Scottie B and King Tut put out a B-more remix of ‘You Can Call Me Al’. They wisely understood that with party tracks like this, less is more, so they didn’t mess around too much with chopping it up, but just focused on the drums. It’s a lot of fun.

Another B-more pioneer, DJ Technics returned in force at the end of the year with a pile of new remixes. They were all solid, this man knows his drums, and the most interesting, even if the execution wasn’t quite right, was a rework of Radiohead’s track’Everything in its Right Place’. His great moment though was with a remix of Young Dro’s ‘Shoulder Lean’. The original wasn’t all that (though a smash US hip hop hit) but this took the briefest of vocal snippets and some seriously snapping and kicking drums. It’s hard to explain B-more – as in essence it’s so simple (i.e. It’s all about those breakbeats) but in reality it’s extremely hard to get it right – often it’s hardest to make something simple (just look at the Zune compared to the iPod).

OTHER STYLES 10
‘Zilla – Aragami Style
Os Princesa – Massacre da Cena Electro
South Rakkas – Crack Whore riddim
Zero dB – Te Quiero
Sinden – Under Mi Sensi Remix
Mekon feat Roxanne Shante – Yes Yes Y’All (Sinden Baile Funk remix)
Agent Lovelette – I Don’t Know (T.I. & Cazals Bootleg)
Ceephax Acid Crew – Hardcore Wick
Buraka Son Sistema – Yah!
Ben Skull Juice – Fresh Cut n Pasted Mini Mix

Check these too
Stereotyp ft. Edu & Joyce Muniz – Funk Mundial 1
Jitset vs Test Icicles & Ruff Sqwad – Catch It (Cat Shit remix)
Bonde do Role – Melo do Tobaco (Jokers of the Scene remix)
Ayanna – Shake That Fatty
A&D Beethoven’s Fifth Gold Digger
Mike the 2600 King – Castlevania
Tigerstyle & Don Omar – Salio El Sol

In retrospect, one of the most ridiculous genres invented this year was Bhangraton, the merging of Bhangra and Reggaeton, but at the time it was a buzz thing on the Bhangra scene, especially in New York. A couple of great tracks did emerge, thankfully. Tigerstyle, long-feted on these pages (and yes, apparently the album REALLY will come out next next year) continued with their series of Reggaeton remixes, and did their big energy Tigerstyle thing on Don Omar’s ‘Salio El Sol’. Then there was the neither Asian or Latin-sounding John Eric, who came out with the obviously-named track ‘Bhangraton’. And it was a total stonker, a fairly stripped-down big tumbi (the classic Bhangra percussion) workout and an unknown Reggaeton vocal on top. It was a big party tune that deserved a lot more exposure.

‘Zilla is another favourite round these parts, for his amazing DJ mixes, but this year he showed he’s developing as an excellent producer as well. The essential track was ‘Aragami Style’, a kind of evil slice of tech-step dancehall. It was just how 2006 drum & bass ought to sound – it had the aggressiveness of tech-step but with a proper bumping rhythm and groove, in contrast to the rather dull bosh bosh bosh that passes for so much d&b nowadays. If that wasn’t enough, he has serious skills on breakdowns, knowing just how to drop the music and build tension like a Hitchcock soundtrack when he feels like it. This was a very wonderful piece of music.

Bonde do Role were one of the buzz underground groups of the year, an attempt at making the Baile Funk genre into more commercial pop music. The music was fun and dumb, and their concerts were packed full of energy as the three of them pogoed around the stage. But dig a little deeper and amongst their friends and colleagues there was even better music to be found. The stand out was a group called Os Princesa and their track ‘Massacre da Cena Electro’, a thumping great slice of evil funky breakbeat. Imagine vintage Chemical Brothers but a bit more evil, with a whopping great chainsaw sample popping up at opportune moments. It’s as yet unreleased, but they deserve a great future if they can keep this up.

It had been a while since we’ve heard anything from Ceephax Acid Crew, aka Tom Jenkinson (brother of Squarepusher). But ‘Hardcore Wick’ was a hell of a return – an exquisitely constructed of mental throwback hardcore drum & bass from about the 92-94 period. It’s perfect hedonism music: fast, dumb and funky. Probably a bit full-on for a lot of people, but the right crowd will go crazy for this.

Mash-ups (the genre formerly known as bootlegs) remained mostly dire, their creators failing to remember that a) they need to be in key and b) they either need to be clever and creative, or really dumb. One of the best bootlegs of the year was in the latter category, made by Agent Lovelette (also responsible for one of 2005’s high points with his Lil Kim/Diplo/Kraftwerk creation). ‘I Don’t Know’ took the vocal from Southern rapper T.I.’s US smash hit ‘What You Know About That’ and set it to a riff from a gloriously catchy indie guitar track by the Cazals called ‘Poor Innocent Boys’. Rock and rap are usually uneasy bedfellows but this just gelled perfectly, and was packed full of energy and a big poppy hook.

The other two mash-ups of note were A&D’s ‘Beethoven’s Fifth Gold Digger’, a track that couldn’t fail to make you gasp with amazement and then laugh out loud, setting Kanye’s vocal to the old 70s Disco version of Beethoven’s ‘big hit’. It has to be heard to be believed – they work unbelievably well together. Similarly bizarre and entertaining was the splendidly named Mike the 2600 King (nerd in-joke alert!) and his track ‘Castlevania’. It’s hard to know how to describe this other than Nintendo Booty music, appreciating how preposterous that sounds, but somehow he’s taken an old 8-bit soundtrack and set it to classic strip club lyrics (DJ Smurf’s ‘Pop that Pussy’). It’s proper dumb and fun but also highly clever and original.

The introduction to the 2005 Year in Music hoped that technology would inspire DJs to greater heights. Not that many really took up the baton, but unsurprisingly, the best new DJs of 2006 were amongst those who did. Ben and Alex are Skull Juice and produced a handful of mixes throughout the year, which got better and better. They showed a real love of music, never being limited by genres, and had no hesitation in editing or combining tracks to create the rich mix tapestry that technology now permits, and at a time when everyone can get hold of the same tracks so easily, are what make the modern DJ stand out. Watch out for them in 2007.

For those who like to keep ahead of the game in obscure World Ghetto music, Kuduro was the hot genre to drop, being a form of Angolan electronic breakbeat (yes, unfortunately it’s the sort of thing you might imagine being discussed on the Fast Show’s Jazz Club). The first group set to succeed are Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema, and with the early hype surrounding the genre, their track ‘Yah!’ did very well to live up to it. The music has hints of Baile Funk and Soca beats to it and skips along nicely. But just don’t expect it to change the world or anything – people can get rather overexcited about new trends. Talking of trends, there was also a brief excitement about Juke music from Chicago, which is their club equivalent of Baltimore house. It’s closer really to the Chicago Ghetto house sound, known through labels like Dance Mania and artists like DJ Deeon, so wasn’t really that radical. There were some fun tracks floating around, but they didn’t really have the same impact as B-more.

Elsewhere, Stereotyp put out the best Baile Funk record ever made by an Austrian (perhaps not that difficult), but it bounced along energetically with just the right amount of insane siren action to set off any party. Jitset showed that he has the potential to be a very important producer in 2007, with some broad and unusual influences and a love of really heavy bass (never a bad thing!). For now, check out his remix of the now disbanded Test-Icicles ‘Catch It’ which reimagines the track as a cinematic grime ballad with Ruff Sqwad and Statik on vocals.

And now for something completely different. It might sound ridiculous, but if you have the opportunity, you must go and see The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain play live. Seen at London’s Ronnie Scott’s just before it was refurbished, they are undoubtedly one of the most entertaining live draws around at the moment. It’s fairly impossible to describe, but try and imagine the spectacle of 7 men and women in black tie, playing genius arrangements of every type of music you can imagine on the Ukulele, while all taking it in turn to sing beautifully. It’s all set off with excellent deadpan Northern banter inbetween each song. Highlights included a genius reworking of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and an unexpectedly gorgeous ‘Ms Dynamite’, but expect to hear everything from ‘The Good, the Bad & the Ugly’ to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The recognition of the reworkings is all part of the fun, but this shouldn’t distract from the fact that the level of musicianship is outstanding and very creative.

GRIME
is dead, Funky House has won the battle and the smart MCs have forged more lucrative and acceptable careers acting in gritty UK inner-city dramas. Less flippantly, there wasn’t much to get excited about. The odd track on Wiley’s albums, 2nd Phaze and Tunnel Vision, were impressive, he is still an obviously outstanding producer and his MCing has improved (though he’ll never really have the voice for it). Recently signed to the wonderful Big Dada, it’ll be interesting to see what they get out of him. JME remains impressive and was the only one who bothered to set up a proper business infrastructure and brand with Boy Better Know. More power to him, he’s one of the few who deserves to be a success. Trim still has one of the best MC voices but didn’t appear to do much with it this year. And the Wifey riddim, a rather pretty slice of girly UK-r&b got vocalled by Sadie Ama as ‘Fallin’, which should be all over the radio in 2007. It’s much better than it ought to be and it’s sugar-coatedness is deceptively hard not to like. Scratchy’s ‘Shangooli’ riddim was strong and sounded like a slower Grime take on Andy C and Shimon’s classic ‘Body Rock’. And finally, there was a peculiar irony that such a dead-end musical genre posesses two of the country’s finest music journalists in the funny, knowledgeable and razor-sharp satirical John Prancehall and the dedicated, Barbie-fixated and very charming Chantelle Fiddy.

As for dubstep… apart from generally being overly-nerdy, navel-gazing, and worryingly male-dominated (apart from scene godmother Mary Anne Hobbs), the odd exciting track did emerge, especially Sarantis’s dancehall-influenced track featuring Warrior Queen, but you had to wade through lots of impressively-produced dull instrumental dross to get to it. In short, dubstep is urban prog-rock – and that’s Not a good thing.

REGGAETON 10
Tito El Bambino – Mia
Zion Y Lennox ft. Daddy Yankee – Me Haces Sentir
RDB ft. Elephant Man – Ishq Nagg (Reggaeton Remix)
John Eric – Bhangraton
Pitbull, NORE & Fat Joe – Mas Maiz
La Factoria – Dale
Wisin Y Yandel – Paleta
Don Omar – Ella Se Suelta
Calle 13 – Suave
Tego Calderon – Slo Mo
Wayne Marshall – Blazing Up (XXL riddim)

Reggaeton has been around for a few years now, and various claims have been made for how it’s going to take over Latin music altogether amongst others. Of course this is all conjecture, but one thing you could honestly say was that most of it wasn’t very good. Happily the quality improved drastically this year, offering the opportunity for a chart of the best tracks for those who might not know where to start. Some may find the oft-used ‘Dem Bow’ drum pattern over-repetitive, but the best tracks changed up the drums at points, and then of course there were the handful of Bhangraton tracks, which were all about the drums. La Factoria’s ‘Dale’ was one of a few Salsaton tracks, which is what it sounds like, Reggaeton but with Latin piano riffs. It’s not for everybody, but there’s enough talent and ideas around in the above tracks that it’s definitely a genre worth keeping an eye on. And for an interesting hybrid, try Wayne Marshall’s strong ‘Blazing Up’, which is on a new dancehall rhythm that borrows from Reggaeton (there’s a certain irony as Reggaeton is originally derived from a dancehall rhythm called the Dem Bow).

VISUALS
This article is about music, but visuals can often run alongside an appreciation of music, whether as a great music video or visuals in a club. The following is by no means exhaustive but just a few excellent things that were seen this year.

In NME speak, Saam could be said to be the unofficial Neu-Rave video director. Part of the wonderful gang that used to put on Fear of Music at the Montague Arms, and this year has done video promos for Simian Mobile Disco, the Klaxons, and followed Soulwax on tour. The promo for Simian’s ‘Hustler’, wonderfully described as ‘Shoreditch porn’, is a provocative guilty pleasure, consisting of… lots of attractive Shoreditch-esque girls in a room – the rest is left to your imagination.

Eon McKai (named after the legendary Punk figurehead Ian McKaye) became the poster-boy film director for ‘Alt-porn’ which is basically the Suicide Girls doing slightly kitsch, ironic porn flicks. The clips seen (for research purposes, obviously…) weren’t actually that special, but do see his excellent promo for Louis XIV’s ‘Paper Doll’, featuring three Suicide Girls getting dressed for a night out – another indie boy wet dream.

Sticking with indie Spanish director Marcel Fores produced one of the coolest short films you’ll ever see, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’. Nothing to do with the band, it’s the sort of thing the phrase ‘Young, Dumb and full of Come’ was invented for. It follows the complicated courtship of the School Slut and School Table-tennis champion, set to a soundtrack of great old Riot Grrl tracks and other Indie Garage music. It also benefits from a chase in an old-school US ambulance and a man wearing a giant panda head brandishing a gun. Not the easiest thing to explain really but truly essential viewing.

The Horrors are a commercial band and being heavily pushed by the NME, but frankly, if they weren’t they probably wouldn’t have been in the position to get a promo video from Chris Cunningham. The video for ‘Sheena is a Parasite’ keeps it, like the song, relatively simple, showing Samantha Morton showing herself, courtesy of some clever special effects, to be part woman, part squid, while the preposterous-looking band play on in the background. Very silly, but also very clever.

And finally, Lo-Rider’s ‘Skinny’ is an awful (though catchy) cheesy Benidorm-type tune, but noteworthy for a lovely, low-budget video with models a little different from the usual girls you get in trashy underwear music videos. It’s kind of like an Eric Prydz/Benny Bennassi video crossed with the Dove campaign for Real Beauty and all the more refreshing for it.

ALBUMS, MIXES & PODCASTS 10
Various Productions – Breezeblock mix/album
Low Bee – Clubshottas
Surgeon mix Live at the Glade Festival
Breezeblock – Old Skool Jungle Special
Rapid Ric – Whut It Dew 3
Ejitz – Old Skool Mix (re-release)
Mad Decent Podcast #10 – Back to the Bronx River Housing Project (Afrika Islam)
TV on the Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain
Coldcut Essential Mix
RadioClit podcasts

Check these too
Hot Chip – The Warning
Cold War Kids – Robbers & Cowards
Spankrock – YoYoYoYo
The Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control
Zero dB – Bleeps, Bongos & Basslines
Jean Ai Nipon & Orgasmic – Eurogirls
Soundhog 2006 XFM mix

Various Productions (later shortened to Various) just had that magical x-factor of cool. This was obviously helped by putting out some mysterious, excellent limited-edition seven-inches, with beautiful artwork. The album, when it came, was impressive, but if you want a really special listening experience you need to hear the 20-minute mix they did for Radio 1. It was like a showcase sampler for the album, mixed together, and just worked perfectly to show off the complex tapestry of their soundscapes. Through a combination of instrumentals and a few different vocalists, they made the most beautiful 21st Century cyber-ballads, swinging effortlessly from dubby techno to plucked string folk music.

Low Bee ran Hollertronix with Diplo, but his career hasn’t taken off in quite the same way. Which is a shame when you hear his mixtape Clubshottas which is a sublime distillation of just about everything that’s good about hip hop, dancehall and B-more Club music over the last couple of years, expertly programmed and mixed. It swiftly jumps around from style to style, and creates bootlegs that actually work (Vybz Kartel over a breakbeat with dialogue from Scarface in the background is killer!). It’s a really polished piece of work, with an excellent track selection and has really raised the bar for hip hop mixtapes.

Surgeon has been around for a while, and was always a bit of a techno prodigy, a white, rather spotty-looking English Jeff Mills. But techno has not been very ‘a la mode’ for a while so it’s easy to forget about people like this. His recorded mix at the Glade Festival brought him back to our attention with a bang. You could call it the Electronic equivalent of Low Bee’s mix, another inspired and open-minded gathering-together of outstanding tunes from a number of related but different genres. It’s easy to think of Techno as just being moody Bosh Bosh Bosh music, as that’s what a lot of it is, but the Techno here is funky, hard and rhythmical, as it was originally. But that’s only half the story, as he weaves in Dubstep tunes from Vex’d, dancehall from the Bug and other electronic oddities to paint a broad canvas. The mixing is smooth and creative. It’s the sort of thing that anyone who thinks they don’t like harder electronic music should try, as they might just surprise themselves. Proper machine funk.

Rapid Ric aka the Mixtape Mechanic put out the first Whut It Dew mixtape a couple of years ago, and it was one of the first big statements that announced the renaissance of Houston Hip Hop to the world. This is the third, and best, volume, packed full of great Southern hip hop you probably won’t hear anywhere else, all mixed up a storm.

Coldcut did a long-overdue 2 hour Essential Mix for Radio 1 at the start of the year. It was a very clever mix, and given that a big National broadcast like this is a major showcase opportunity, was a pretty dazzling Coldcut Greatest Hits. If it felt a tiny bit underwhelming, that’s only because they have been making outstanding radio mixes for so damn long now, that it’s hard not to take them for granted, and just expect them to do extraordinary things. Bootlegs or Mash-ups has become such a dirty word round these parts as the overall standard remains so low, but Coldcut are proper cut-and-paste pioneers, and know exactly how to work it. It was really fun seeing them mix all sorts of old and new styles together. Intricate wasn’t the half of it, and if you’re not familiar with their Solid Steel radio show, this mix will be a major revelation.

The Breezeblock broadcast a truly wonderful Old Skool Jungle Special with some of the best DJs mixing up classic after classic, the perfect introduction or reminder to why this music was once so wonderful and rhythmical. It was also noticeable for the frankly hilarious introduction by Mary Anne Hobbs, where she appeared to be doing her best impression of the woman in the M&S advertisements, saying seductively ‘this isn’t just a drum & bass mix, it’s the hardest, ruffest, tuffest, drum & bass mix you’ve ever heard, with organic cream on top’.

In a well-argued diatribe against the NME, Lily Allen this year finished by saying ‘There’s not enough Rave in Neu Rave!’ Similar sentiments are mentioned above, but the best answer to this is for everyone to listen to E-Jitz’s ‘Old Skool Mix’. It’s an exceptionally well-programmed 20-minute megamix of Rave classics And it’s one of those rare instances you can say a mix is too short. Compilations of Carioca Funk aren’t that rare any more, but the quality isn’t always that good. Jean Ai Nipon and Orgasmic did a good job of rectifying this by putting out ‘Euro Girls’, taking their favourite Carioca Funk tunes, remastering them, and sticking them out on double vinyl.

Podcasts came to the fore these year, and while there are probably some crackers that nobody knows about, you tended to drift to the people you knew you could count on. So some of the best clubs put out excellent mixes from their residents and guest DJs (Trash and Our Disco), RadioClit put out occasional excellent short mixes rounding up the latest good releases across all genres. And Diplo somehow found time to put together ten excellent and fascinating mixes, covering different themes depending on where he happened to be. New Orleans bounce, Carioca Funk, old-school NYC hip hop, and just extraordinary odds-and-sods tracks he’d dredged up like Aboriginal school-boy hip hop (which against all odds was fantastic).

The ever-reliable Soundhog put out another beautifully-crafted radio mash-up mix. The highlight was a jam of the percussion and groove from Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’, with an amazingly funky guitar lick last heard on a DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist funk mix, and the Kelis ‘Bossy’ vocal. It gelled together beautifully and the whole mix was extremely fun listening – he’s one of the very few people who makes listening to mash-ups pleasurable.

To be completely honest, events of this year meant there wasn’t enough time to listen to many artist albums, but the best of them will be all over the magazines anyway. Certainly the new albums from TV on the Radio, the Gossip, Spankrock and Hot Chip were at least very solid, with many excellent tracks. One of the outstanding albums, which isn’t actually released in the UK until Feb 2007 is by the Cold War Kids. It’s outstanding grown-up indie, and after just a couple of listens and seeing them play, half the tracks already sound like stadium anthems. The sort of epic, American songwriting that was last heard on Jeff Buckley’s classic ‘Grace’, it’s very strong and consistent (and the singer’s voice live is something to behold) – expect to hear a lot more about them next year.

n.b. In the interests of ‘having a life’, there’s always stuff missed out which there hasn’t been time to listen to. Apologies for any key admissions. And for time constraints, this hasn’t been proofread properly, so please forgive any glaring typos.

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Posted by grlla

The Year in Music 2005

December 5, 2006

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover Kaiser Chiefs or Gorillaz, but music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

a) Introduction
b) Hip Hop
c) Rock
d) House & Electro
e) Dancehall & Soca
f) Garage, Grime, Dubstep & Breakbeat
g) Other Genres (Desi, Bootlegs, Reggaeton, Favela Funk, B-More & Miscellaneous)
h) Mixtapes
i) Clubs and Gigs
j) The tunes

A) INTRODUCTION
Technology technology technology. It continues to feel ever more important to music, even after the reverberations of the iPod, widespread broadband access and Peer-to-Peer file-sharing.

One thing that technology has become very good at is nurturing virtual communities, whether by blogging, file-sharing, or people sharing information on message boards. But the big one for music this year was, perhaps surprisingly, MySpace, a Community website. Let’s not beat about the bush, MySpace is effectively a glorified internet dating site by another name, but has been hijacked by bands: a classic example of technology being used in ways other than it was originally intended.

The key to MySpace is that your profile page allows you to stream music or even put it up for download. So suddenly, any new band, without the money to press up a single or the tech-savvy to create a website, can have their own web page with information about the band and a couple of their songs which anyone in the world can hear for free.

The icing on the cake is that anyone belonging to MySpace who likes the band will add them as a ‘friend’, so you suddenly have a self-created mailing list of fans. The band can then write any news and send it to all of their ‘friends’. It has phenomenally simplified the marketing process for new bands.

One UK band put out 500 copies of their debut single but, in terms of furthering their career, had found their MySpace site much more useful – they’d even received offers to play gigs in Europe off the back of it. And it is a key tool for A&R people at record labels, saving them from sackfuls of demo tapes. The trick, of course, for bands now is marketing themselves so that labels come across their MySpace site. But for bands, fans and record labels alike, MySpace is a seismic shift and will become an increasingly important resource. Rupert Murdoch certainly thought so – he bought it halfway through the year.

The bigger media story in terms of ‘internet communities’ was of course the Arctic Monkeys using the internet to build a fanbase, and while they definitely did do this very well, it’s important to remember that it just accelerated the process of their success – they are the most outstanding anthem-writing commercial Rock band we’ve seen since Oasis emerged in 1994 – they were always going to be massive.

The other most important technological development of the year was YouSendIt and its variants (Rapidshare/MegaUpload etc). It works like this: you have an mp3 track you love and want your friends to hear. You go to the website, upload it onto their enormous servers, and they give you a website link which will let anyone download it for the next seven days. You send the link to your friends and bingo, they have the track.

The two major occasions for use became either people posting a link on an online bulletin board (generally specific music community ones) so that everyone who reads it can link and download the track and on mp3 blogs. Accordingly bulletin boards and mp3 blogs both became increasingly important musical resources for keeping up with new music.

Effectively YouSendIt was another way of propagating musical piracy, though its defenders argued that it was a way of sharing a single tune with friends that they ought to hear, and so almost acted as a form of viral marketing.

Whatever your moral feelings about the exploitations of new technology, the key fact is that both My Space and YouSendIt are key new methods for easy music distribution, meaning people have the opportunity to access and listen to more music than ever before.

And the final importance of technology lay in the increasing sophistication and affordability of music producing software. Ableton Live has radically changed the possibilities of DJing, and software like Reason and Logic has made it possible to record and edit music professionally on a home PC.

In summary, at one end it’s easier for people to make tunes, at the other there’s better distribution for people to hear them. It feels like a good time to love music.

B) HIP HOP
Houston steals Atlanta’s crown, things get minimal and will Hyphy be the next big thing?

Houston
And so for the third consecutive year, the primary focus of interesting hip hop remained in the South. However while the centre of last year’s action was Atlanta and Crunk, this year the hip hop heartland was Houston. The city tends to produce a more laid-back sound than the more club-oriented Crunk sound, and so it lent itself more to albums, though as ever mix-tapes remained enormously popular. Key Houston rappers right now are Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Chamillionaire, Bun B (half of godfathers of the scene, UGK) and Slim Thugg. The first two had huge hit debut albums in the US but this failed to translate to the UK.

The other sound that defines Houston is the ‘Screwed & Chopped’ sound, a form of remix applied to hip hop tracks and whole albums in a similar way to how reggae albums in the 70s would come with an accompanying ‘dub album’. A ‘Screwed’ track is essentially slowed right down, the sonic equivalent of wading through treacle, with vocals and drums being chopped up occasionally, and certain lyrical lines being repeated for emphasis. The process was pioneered by the late, legendary DJ Screw and is now kept alive primarily by local DJ Michael Watts.

Essential Houston mixtape was Rapid Ric’s ‘Whut It Dew 2’. While many mixtapes these days eschew mixing for just playing one track after the other and shouting out their name with a lot of reverb, Rapid Ric is a seriously tight mixer and cuts and scratches his way through a ton of tracks and exclusive freestyles. It came, of course, with a Screwed version.

The most vocal supporter of the general Houston scene was Matt Sonzala, who hosts an excellent radio show in Houston called ‘Damage Control’, which showcased a ton of tunes, and interviewed all the main players. Through the joys of technology you could download a whopping great mp3 of Sonzala’s two hour show and this was the perfect guide to the music throughout the year and remains a key source to the latest tunes and talent.

Minimalism in Hip Hop
Last year the Neptunes showed how masterful minimalism can be with Snoop Dogg’s ‘Drop it Like it’s Hot’, possibly the most original hip hop track of 2004. And while it’s been a gradual thing, the most noticeable new trend in hip hop this year has been the rise of minimalism.

The anthem was of course The Ying Yang Twinz’ ‘Wait (The Whisper Song)’ a song so reduced that even the vocals were whispered. The track’s producer, Michael Croom (aka ‘Mr Collipark’) then made another stunning piece of minimalism for David Banner, which added just an oh-so-slow siren to go over the beat and a keyboard that sounded like an alien talking. Then there was Juelz Santana of the NYC-based Dipset crew, who came out with ‘There It Go (Whistle)’ which, unsurprisingly, used an acapella whistle as its only hook on top of the beat. D4L released ‘Shake Dat Laffy Taffy’ (a Laffy Taffy is a sweet with a joke on the wrapper, though obviously it’s got another meaning here). This did actually have a keyboard riff, but it was only two notes, and the sort of thing you can imagine playing on the cheapest Casio keyboard. And Atlanta rapper Maceo released ‘Nextel Chirp’, which doesn’t compare minimally to ‘Wait’ but compared to your average hip hop track is reduced to drums and another very simple keyboard riff.

It was fantastic to see how all these tracks became at the very least regional club hits, considering how weird they sound. Minimalism in hip hop still feels like a new phenomenon, so expect to see more of this in 2006.

Hyphy
At the end of 2004, Houston was the buzz Hip Hop town, although it wasn’t immediately obvious why from the recorded output at that point. But it turned out that there was so much infrastructure and artists primed with loads of great new tunes that came out throughout the year. Now, at the end of 2005, the same buzz has been building about San Francisco and Bay Area hip hop, particularly the Hyphy sound, a type of high energy hip hop that is most easily explained as the West Coast answer to crunk.

Again there isn’t a great deal of outstanding music to back it up yet, though in the last month DJ Shadow has produced the amazing ‘3 Freaks’ for Keak Da Sneak and a new track by E-40 has been produced by Lil’ Jon, showing how Hyphy is being taken more seriously. And an infrastructure, courtesy of artists such as Keak Da Sneak, the Federation, Clyde Carson, the Team and E-40, is definitely there.

So every instinct suggests that Hyphy will be the regional hip hop sound of 2006 although, like Crunk before it, don’t expect much of a commercial inroad in the UK.

Given the local buzz, there was destined to be one mixtape that was a defining Hyphy showcase and that was Ross Hogg & B Cause’s ‘Slump & Grind – Bay Area Rap’, though at the end of the year DJ Mark Marcelo put out another strong contender with his ‘Ignant Mix’.

Before there was Crunk
Hip Hop Compilation of the year was the self-explanatory ‘Before There Was Crunk’. This showed off some wonderful mid-nineties fast Atlanta club tracks that never achieved international exposure, the sort of thing that would have been played in Southern Strip Clubs but would work equally well in any good club in the world. Particular highlights included Splack Pack’s ‘Scrub Da Ground’ and Clay D ‘That Booty In There’ (clearly a compilation for high-octane dancing, not title subtleties).

Essential Hip Hop Tracks

Paul Wall – Sittin Sideways (Screwed & Chopped)
While Houston fans who grew up with it might disagree, the Screwed & Chopped sound is very hit-and-miss. But the Screwed version here was just perfect and this was one of the most important singles of the year in any genre. An amazingly weird and wonderful piece of music – the heavy, heavy bass just sounded so right at that slowed down, syrupy speed.

Ying Yang Twinz – Wait (Whisper Song)
The track which saw the Ying Yang Twinz escape from Lil’ Jon’s large Southern shadow. Taking minimalism in club hip hop to a whole new level, this was so out-there it became a word-of-mouth underground anthem, appreciated by anyone who just likes innovative new music. The XXX-rated lyrics provoked a debate of their own.

Three 6 Mafia – Stay Fly
A slow-burner that finally turned into an anthem from these Southern stalwarts. Taking a Kanye-esque sped-up soul sample they created something much freakier than he ever would, especially with that brilliant stutter-chorus and th.

Trillville – Some Cut
Aka ‘the squeaky bed song’, one of those tracks that everyone remembered because of that immediately identifiable sound, but everything else in the track had all the qualitites necessary for a good Summer g-crunk anthem. (G-crunk is a made-up name for the sound of Dirty South tracks which use a kind of West Coast G-funk bassline).

Keak Da Sneak – 3 Freaks
A reputed but unconfirmed DJ Shadow production, this is the track that could light the fuse on the Bay Area’s Hyphy scene in 2006. A freaky, jerky, and fast hip hop track, it doesn’t really sound like any traditional form of hip hop, and is all the more thrilling for it, helped by Keak Da Sneak’s rasping rap flow.

David Banner – Take Your/Play/Certified
Of course it was too much to expect a complete, consistent hip hop album from David Banner, but you can’t complain too much when it contains three outstanding tracks like this, and all sounding completely different. ‘Take Your’ is a charmingly lazy g-crunk track which, until the hardcore lyrics sink in, sounds like a big pop radio track. ‘Play’ is Banner’s answer to the ‘Wait’ and is almost as good. ‘Certified’ is a stripped-down Southern track with acoustic guitar that Banner of all rappers handles best.

5th Ward Weebie – I’m Fuckin
It’s not just Atlanta and Houston, New Orleans has its talents too (and let’s hope they come back strong after the terrible events there this year). A bouncy, catchy hit that should have been (sabotaged by no record label support and a rather rude lyric), this was overlooked, a really joyous, well-produced, x-rated pop song.

Amerie – One Thing/ Talkin About
THE all-encompassing anthem. It’s easy to forget how few tracks are so perfect they appeal to underground and pop audiences alike. Rich Harrison, we salute you. ‘Talkin About’ was the other album highlight, obviously not as anthemic as ‘One Thing’ but still damn catchy and funky.

Missy – Can’t Stop
Producer Rich Harrison really cut loose here, knowing that if one person can rap over a really full-on track, it’s Missy. He took the horn riffs and Washington DC Go-Go drums that he loves so much and sped them up to create something hyperactive, insane and brilliantly infectious.

Lil’ Kim f. Bun B & Twista – We Don’t Give A Fuck
Forgetting the circus that was a woman squeezing in a reality show about her life just before she went to prison, this is a peach of a tune. Heavy drums, a synth line which sounded like the Sugarplum Fairy reimagined for the 21st Century, two well-chosen guests and a big sing-a-long chorus.

Lil Jon & David Banner – She’s Out of Control
A weird no-info white label affair, the two greatest Dirty South producers matched together produced a really full-on but very hook-y, almost-pop song. Not essential, but a fine piece of music that shouldn’t have sunk into oblivion.

B.G. – Same Ole Shit/Where Da At/Ride With That
While so much attention was lavished on the South, it felt like he was the most underrated rapper there – even Devin gets more love. All three of these tracks from his album were outstanding and he’s got a great voice and flow. This man really needs a much wider audience.

Maceo – Nextel Chirp
Tipped to be one of the next big things from the new wave of Atlanta talent, it was great to see the weird minimalism of this track become a regional club hit, helped by the gangster subject-matter of the lyrics and some seriously thumping drums, plus those unusual synth sounds that sounded so right.

Ying Yang Twinz feat. Mike Jones – Badd
Unfairly overlooked with all the fuss of ‘Wait’, this was a bouncy, kitchen-sink of a record, with skippy drums, a high-pitched bleep line, a slow siren and string stab on the chorus and a fantastic sitar sample, with Ying Yang and Mike Jones chattering chirpily over the top. An unusual and immensely enjoyable record.

Bavu Blakes – Who Knows
A fascinating Houston prospect and unlike anything else coming from there, ‘Who Knows’ is played entirely with live instrumentation, and along with his intelligent and articulate rap, is just the sort of thing to appeal to the Roots, Common, and Mos Def audience. Definitely watch out for what he does next.

Chamillionaire – You Gotta Love Me
Houston star-in-waiting came up with this gorgeous track on a mixtape which got away with the whole Kanye-sped-up-soul-sample thing which could seem so tired now. But this was an exercise in how quality rapping and the right sample and production can overcome anything. Let’s see if he can follow compatriots Mike Jones and Paul Wall next year now they’ve opened the commercial floodgates.

K-Otix – George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People (Kanye Golddigger)
A great track on many levels, not least through the way K-Otix so successfully used technology to get it distributed around the world via the internet. Following that post-Katrina Kanye remark. K-Otix took the ‘Gold Digger’ instrumental and composed a rap about what was really going on in New Orleans. Great lyrics, an impassioned delivery and let’s not forget one of the instrumentals of the year.

Bossman – Untouchable
Set to release an album with Virgin in 2006, this is a hugely enjoyable no-frills throwback song, propelled by little more than a wicked Biggie Smalls chorus, big drums and an old-school ‘Champ’-esque organ riff. Simple but solid fun.

Rich Boy – Get to Poppin
As with Renaissance painters, this is said to be prouced by ‘the studio of Timbaland’ and it certainly has his sound. The musical background sounds like one of those wonderful spectral Bulgarian folk singers, but in fact is a slowed-down Mexican singer. Rich Boy’s rap lets the side down a little but the instrumental was one of the most innovative and emotive of the year.

Juelz Santana – There It Go
Another stunning minimal cut that stood out for its inventive use of acapella whistling. Apart from that, the whole thing was held together by tough but understated drums and Juelz’s flow. It doesn’t really make that much sense at home, but is the sort of innovative but banging track that will excite you on the dancefloor

Da Backwudz – I Don’t Like the Look
A very weird and wonderful track which samples the Oompa Loompa song from the original Charlie & the Chocolate Factory film. A great brass stab and an almost operatic Oompa refrain of ‘I Don’t Like the Look of It’ for the chorus, this was inventive and entertaining hip hop that just played it straight enough to avoid the novelty trap.

C) ROCK
The new guitar renaissance.

We have heard over the last few years how, to paraphrase LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, people have been selling their turntables and buying guitars. But for all the NME hype, it’s only this year that we’ve really seen a renaissance of new indie UK guitar bands.

This was helped by the solid infrastructure currently in place, courtesy of some fantastic guitar-based clubs and a bunch of home-grown indie record labels who are discovering so much new talent. The likes of Marquis Cha Cha, Moshi Moshi, Angular, Fantastic Plastic, What’s Your Rupture, Shit Sandwich and Transgressive have been focusing on small-run limited 7 inches, often packaged with loving care, and helping rock fans to become passionate about new bands again.

In London, Trash was more important a club than ever (as well as being enormous fun), and it felt like a number of bands and clubs were, at least spiritually, ‘inspired by’ the club. This is unsurprising when you consider how many of the people who go are in bands or are serious music fans, and the care with which the ‘Trash community’ has been nurtured. Erol Alkan’s policy of playing ‘dance music that rocks’ has covered so many genres over the years, but the amount of tracks by new guitar bands played this year demonstrated rock’s importance right now. And Erol is perfectly complemented by Rory Philips played future underground rock in the second room. Trash also managed to have a large number of the most exciting new bands playing live in very intimate surroundings.

The other key complement to Trash is the weekly Artrocker band nights. Week after week, Tom and Paul Artrocker put on two new bands in a tiny basement bar in Highbury. It can sometimes be hit-and-miss but it’s a key resource: you’ll be pushed to find a decent rock band of the last couple of years that didn’t start off playing one of their nights. And it’s absolutely free. The Artrockers remain intensely passionate and bullshit-free about what they do, and London is lucky to have them.

Leeds and Sheffield (the so-called New Yorkshire scene) have been the main geographical focus of rock this year, especially after the explosive rise, for once deservedly so, of the Arctic Monkeys. But while these towns are also the home of the excellent O Fracas and The Long Blondes, there are great bands coming from all over the country so, as always, don’t believe the hype.

The opposing trend was a string of bands who could be termed ‘grown-up indie’, recalling some of the more serious of the mid-80s bands like R.E.M. and Talking Heads. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah led the pack, helped by the buzz from their self-released album. It contained some strong tunes, if you like that sort of thing, and a singer that sounded like David Byrne. Hot on their heels were the Spinto Band with a wonderful radio song in ‘Brown Bag’ that recalls late-80s band They Might Be Giants and their quirky, grown-up pop music. And in New York, Blood on the Wall came out with ‘Awesomer’, a fairly Pixies-influenced album that lacked consistency but had a number of extremely good tracks. However the one ‘grown-up’ band that really stood out were Arcade Fire, with a very strong album, and an impressively intense, passionate live show which was thrilling to behold.

Continuing the ‘grown-up’ theme, 2005 saw the spread of a loose ‘New Folk’ movement, led by the increasing success of Devendra Banheart. He put out another strong album, ‘Cripple Crow’, though it didn’t quite stand up to last year’s ‘Rejoincing In The Hands’ which is starting to feel like a modern classic. The other most talked-about artists in the movement were Sufjan Stevens, whose album ‘Illinoise’ got many plaudits, Cocorosie and Joanna Newsom.

There is no great secret any more about LCD Soundsystem, so it hardly needs mentioning that they succeeded in pulling off an album that successfully bore the weight of its hype, full of loads of terrific tunes. Ditto Bloc Party.

Essential Rock Tracks And Bands

O Fracas – What Jim Hears/Zeroes & Ones
A wonderful discovery, a Franz Ferdinand-esque angular anthem from a buch of 19-year-olds in Leeds. It’s the b-side as well and the a-side is almost as good. And they have more strong tunes waiting in the wings. They’re strong live – expect big things next year.

Dan Sartain – P.C.B. 98
From his debut album, Dan Sartain vs the Serpientes, this is the best stripped-down classic rock n roll song you’ll hear this year. Effortlessly cool and catchy, it’s a timeless gem that deserves to be a hit single.

The Noisettes – Don’t Give Up
An immediate, jump-up-and-down bluesy rock anthem that is getting a proper release early in 2006. We’re talking pounding blues-rock (think of the sound of the most up-beat White Stripes songs) fronted by a stunning black female singer with an electrifying voice. They’re also outstanding live so if the album’s half as good as this single they are going to be a very serious proposition. This song induced mass-pogoing on the Trash dancefloor.

New Young Pony Club – Jerk Me, The Get-Go, Tight Fit
One of the most inspired band names of 2005, NYPC were responsible for two excellent and sought-after, limited 7-inch singles this year. The early-80s New York Punk Funk sound has become a cliché, especially when it’s been so often badly bastardised, but NYPC really manage to make something of ESG basslines, sassy ice-cool-pop Debbie Harry vocals, and synth lines. Listen to these three tracks and you’ll yearn to know what they’re going to come up with next.

The Long Blondes – At the Movies and Various
Yet another very exciting Great British Pop-Rock Band hailing, as is the current custom, from Sheffield, and in many ways recalling the arch intelligence of Pulp. They may not have a Jarvis, but singer Kate is pretty much a female equivalent, always immaculately dressed and posessing an ice-cool voice that perfectly complements their lyrics of relationships in small-town England. They have a penchant for long song names such as ‘Misappropriation By Any Other Name’ and ‘Separated By Motorways’, yet aren’t ashamed to embrace pop and catchy hooks. Expect them to reach giddy stratospheres in 2006.

Scout Niblett – Kidnapped by Neptune
Outstanding title track to her second album, stunningly produced by Steve Albini, reminiscent of early PJ Harvey. Simple, powerful, stripped-down rock, but with lots of ‘shoop shoops’ for good measure.

Patrick Wolf – Tristan
Patrick Wolf is like a more wonky Jeff Buckley with a predilection for fiddling about with keyboards and obscure string instruments. His whole album was impressive but this was the perfect single to choose, pack-jam full of emotion and energy.

The Panthers – Thank Me With Your Hands (MSTRKRFT remix)
Please excuse the lack of information about The Panthers, but the MSTRKRFT remix was what made this track so special, a rare moment of dance-friendly but also very listenable punk-funk gelling together perfectly.

Bobby Marie – BB Gun
A beautiful oddity but much more entertaining and accessible than these things usually are, this was a catchy but warped psychobilly tune from the duo of DJ Harvey and Thomas Bullock of Rub n Tug. There’s a great, overenthusiastic vocal, but the dub is equally special, with cow and horse sounds echoing around the music.

Hot Chip – Over & Over
Heavily hyped for success now they’re with a major label, this opening salvo is a wonderfully infectious wonky track that just manages to stay on the rails and sound like a catchy pop song. They’re now signed to DFA in the US and are working with them in a much-anticipated collaboration.

Sons & Daughters – Dance Me In
A thumping, energetic anthem which is due for release soon with an Optimo remix. It’s a bit like Arcade Fire writing a pogo-ing song for the dancefloor.

Jamie T – So Lonely Was the Ballad
Like early Badly Drawn Boy in its lo-fi shambolic charm, but Jamie T’s questionable patois (that he somehow just gets away with) tells of suburban teenage tales that is definitely aiming for the Streets market. Expect to hear a lot more from him in 2006.

Elle Milano – Swearing’s For Art Students
Beyond all the hype of ‘internet marketing’, journalists seem to forget to mention a particular reason for the Arctic Monkeys’ success is that they are wonderful songwriters with a craft for catchy, hooky tunes. Elle Milano have yet to show the same propensity for anthem-writing, but their demos do show that same craft for well-crafted, hooky pop tunes and the sort of rock energy that will appeal to teenage Monkeys’ fans. Their debut single is expected to be ‘Swearing’s for Art Students’, and along with ‘Sunshine in Happyland’, they already have two pretty perfect pop songs to hand.

Tom Vek – Nothing But Green Lights
Another soloist who received huge hype for his small-label debut release and has been subsequently snapped up by a major. This track showed what the fuss was about, a very 2005 pop song with a big unforgettable bassline and a sullen, half-spoken, half-sung vocal.

Clor – Magic Touch
Lazily labelled as ‘the UK LCD Soundsystem’ on their debut album, this was the stand-out track, again straddling the dancing/home-listening punk-funk divide perfectly with a slick vocal and solid hooks.

Duchess Says – Rabies (Baby’s got the)
A new Canadian band with no information as yet on them, but this debut release is a dirty, catchy, art-punky number that bodes well for the future.

The Rakes – Retreat
A perfect pop song for geezers, and both musically and lyrically razor-sharp. Its chorus of ‘Walk Home, Come Down, Retreat, To Sleep, Wake Up, Go Out, Again, Repeat’ felt like a pretty good summation of the year.

Panico – Transpiralo
Outstandingly tight Chilean rockers write an angular punk/funk killer for the dancefloor.

White Rose Movement – Love is a Number
Amazingly polished, this was the ghost of Joy Division (especially the bassline) making a pop song for 2005.

Rinocerose – Bitch
Imagine AC/DC writing a pop song with Discovery-era Daft Punk and you’re just about there. So catchy and unashamedly out there it felt, unfairly, like a guilty pleasure, though there was also an Optimo mix if you really needed to keep credibilty.

Also look out for Buen Chico, who had a Supergrass feel in their first few, simple poppy rock tracks. And of course a big ton of other bands that I didn’t have time to listen to.

D) ELECTRO, HOUSE & TECHNO
Switch and Justice stand out as consistently outstanding producers, while Trentemoller is the choice of the underground.

Dave Taylor, responsible for Switch and Solid Groove amongst other aliases, had a terrific year with his productions and remixes. His overlooked production from the Wall of Sound dancehall project, ‘Love Guide’ ft Ms Thing, was hammered by Diplo this year, a warped dancehall bomb. There was the outstanding Solid Groove remix of Sunship’s ‘Almighty Father’, which sounded really out there, especially in the dub version, coming off like slinky electronic dancehall 2-step. And then there was ‘A Bit Patchy’. An exquisite example of the best ideas being the simplest, it reinvented the iconic Apache break, incorporating it into one of the most warped basslines of the year to create one of the great dancefloor anthems of the year that all sorts of DJs could play. He also recorded a number of so-called ‘fidget-house’ tracks, particularly the aptly-named ‘This Is Sick’, but it was hard to get as excited about these as his more break-oriented productions.

Justice, two french guys, with Daft Punk associations (they share a manager in Pedro Winter), were the outstanding new Production finds of the year. Following on from their debut remix last year, Justice vs Simian’s ‘Never Be Alone’, they remixed their way through the year making electro-house that often felt influenced by rock as much as anything else (unsurprisingly they remixed rock bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Mystery Jets). Their mix of DFA 1979’s ‘Blood on the Dancefloor’ was their outstanding moment – it really felt like a new form of electronic/rock hybrid. Their debut single, ‘Waters of Nazareth’ was eagerly awaited and didn’t disappoint, boasting an enormous, filthy distorted synth/guitar riff, live drums and a big organ line, the sort of tune that causes eruptions on the right dancefloor. Bring on the album.

One of the strongest and most mysterious house cuts of the year was the Hothandz EP, just titled, ‘Hothandz Volume One’. It stomped along with a strong kick drum, repetitive punk-funk bassline, and a gravelly spoken word vocal. But then out of nowhere came the most insane racket of a riff this side of hell that inexplicably makes perfect sense and even worked as a groove. It was lifted from an obscure early-80s German track by Grauzone called Eisbear and the vocal comes from another track, but whatever, taken as a whole this was a roof-raiser perfect for the more alternative rock/electro dancefloors.

Probably the most enjoyable and widespread track of the year was Les Visiteur’s ‘Snoop’s Acid Drop’, which achieved that tricky feat of being played by DJs in all sorts of genres. Reworking 2004’s mighty ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’ into a house track is a bit of a no-brainer, but it was done much better than you’d ever expect, and turned out to be the work of established German producer Boris Dluglosch. The drums and Snoops’ vocal doubled up and stuttered, and then halfway through it turned into an acidic workout. Whether you’re a house or hip hop fan or just like to sing along to that long, drawn-out ‘Snooooooooop’, there was something for everyone.

The buzz underground electro producer of the year was Trentemoller, taking over from Matthew Jonson who held that unofficial title in 2004. Helped by a muffled male vocal, his outstanding remix was Yoshimoto’s ‘Du What You Du’, which built slowly and strongly with breakdowns, was full of delightfully weird noises, and even at times used a New Order-esque bassline. A very exciting and original track.

DFA 1979 are a two-piece rock band from Toronto, but they probably had the finest selection of dance remixes provided to them this year, via Erol Alkan, Jesper Dahlback, Justice and Alan Braxe. They don’t automatically seem like a band ripe for remixing, but the results have been very impressive, and make more sense as one half of them, Jesse Keeler, with Al-P from Girls Are Short, has a separate dance project, MSTRKRFT. Under this guise, they made some pretty tasty remixes, particularly on The Panther’s ‘Thank Me With Your Hands’ and The Kills’ ‘No Wow’. A single, ‘Easy Love’, is due early in 2006 with an album to follow, and it deserves to do very well, sounding like the poppy, commercial end of Daft Punk, with a vocoder vocal.

French label Kitsuné had another strong year with two solid compilations fielding a number of outstanding singles. Benjamin Theves came out with one of the most infectious house tracks with ‘Texas’, which didn’t do anything especially radical, but just had all the right ingredients for a club anthem, though the scratching at the end was a particularly nice touch. Simian Mobile Disco’s ‘The Count’ kept things fairly minimal but funky with a number of squiggly and squelchy riffs and Digitalism’s ‘Zdarlight’ was an understated stomp-funk anthem.

Best simple hi-energy arpeggio house track of the year (if you’ve no idea what I mean, think Donna Summer ‘I Feel Love’ synth riffs) was Funky Transport’s ‘Different (Sweet Light remix)’ – again nothing new, but impeccably done.

Chaton & Hopen’s ‘Life Is Wonders’ was a track that snuck out unnoticed on Geneva’s excellent Mental Groove record empire, on their limited imprint. Trance is a bastardised term, which tends to make us think of dodgy white dreadlocked girls in parachute pants, waving glowsticks and gurning, but this was trance music in a more literal sense – it was unearthly and disorienting and just had some sort of repetitive enveloping quality. It went on for ages but there was always some strange new noise to keep things interesting, whether it was an extra acidic squiggle or percussion to collide with the general swirls of noise going on. Compared to so many electronic records where a producer may have one good idea or sound and just loops it for most of the record, there was so much more thoughtfulness about this track in changing it around to stave off boredom. It was a truly uncredited highlight of the year.

Noze’s ‘Kitchen’ was another of those amiable oddities that makes you glad people with the imagination to do this are still out there. It had a perfectly serviceable minimal electro backing to it, but it’s a smash for its stand-out absurd lyric which duels a female chorus that almost sounds like a nursery rhyme against what sounds like an obscene drunk, incoherent tramp. It’s hard to explain properly, but it’s the sort of thing that stands out and entertains on the dancefloor.

Alan Braxe, another Daft Punk associate, had another almost effortlessly impressive year with his cohort Fred Falke, casually and infrequently throwing out sensational remixes. There was also a glorious anthem, Discopolis by Lifelike/Kris Menace, on their label, Vulture. The Braxe picks this year were Annie’s Heartbeat, which he transformed into an enormously powerful feel-good ecstasy anthem, and DFA 1979’s Black History Month, which was especially novel for fusing a big metal guitar riff with another of his uplifiting 80s synth choruses that gelled perfectly with the vocal.

Stuart Price aka Les Rhythmes Digitales, continued to demonstrate his outstanding production skills, and ability to create big anthemic 80s Power Chords when remixing tracks, particularly on Royksopp’s ‘What Else Is There’. His more exciting moment was the Thin White Duke remix of Juliet’s ‘Ride the Pain’ which had some of the best, almost military, drums of the year and made up for some of the other less exciting remixes he did.

It’s always good to be surprised, and Dominik Eulberg definitely did this with his 12-minute remix of DJ Hell’s ‘Follow You’. A track of that length is always in danger of serious self-indulgence, but Eulberg put so many different freaky sounds and effects in, and kept on switching the track up, that you were never bored. It had an element of glitchiness, but was tough and percussive enough to hold its own on a broader-minded dancefloor. It’s the sort of epic track you can imagine an experienced electro DJ like Damian Lazarus playing towards the end of the night and everyone going buck wild to.

Two wonderful tracks that went hand in hand this year were ‘W.O.T.S’ by W.O.T.S. and an Unknown track by Sun. They both took iconic pop tunes and, taking the smallest sample chop out of them, then looped it ad infinitum over slamming drums. The whole effect was to smile at the recognition you were dancing to Abba or Michael Jackson respectively, though they were only just recognisable, and realise how despite there being a ton of awful house remixes and bootlegs, it is still possible to be creative and create something subtle but still lethal on the dancefloor.

Soul Jazz released a compilation of Acid Tracks and while it was beautifully done, it didn’t really mean much unless you’d been there – most of them just haven’t dated that well. However Nathan Fake came along to show that Acid house is still relevant with his outstanding B-side ‘Undoing the Laces’, making use of modern technology to create possibly the funkiest acid track ever recorded.

Basement Jaxx started up a new label, Stop! Records, which had the usual ramshackle assortment of oddities and the odd gem. Although it was spoilt by an unfortunate vocal, ‘It’s Up to You’ by Eric Miller was interesting by being a sped-up to house tempo cut-up of The Lady of Rage’s G-Funk anthem ‘Afro Puffs’. The extra tempo turned it into a perfect Grime instrumental.

Maverick house producer Maurice Fulton, responsible with his wife for some great tracks as Mu, released a couple of oddball singles as Syklops, the pick of which was ‘The Fly’, which combined clattering live drums with weird bleeps and some heavy analogue bass farts.

There were a number of other omnipresent anthems this year, listed in brief below– anyone who’s spent an evening in a quality electro-house music club this year will have heard most of them.

Tomas Andersson – Washing Up (Tiga Remix)
Huge electro anthem with that enormous, incessant, buzzing riff, and the clever occasional drumbreak pinched from Snoop’s ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’.

Run Jeremy – Windowlicker re-edit
An astonishingly well-executed reworking of the Aphex classic that subtly tweaks it to turn it into a familiar dancefloor bomb. Much loved by many DJs and deservedly so.

Soulwax – E-Talking (Nite version) & Krack (Nite version)
The two stand-out tracks from the Nite Versions album, ‘E-Talking’ had a lethal, dirty guitar riff, and one of the best breakdowns of the year courtesy of LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang, while ‘Krack’ was more subtle, its rather sinister keyboard riff gradually building until, after another enormous breakdown, it was suddenly unstoppable.

Roman Flugel – Geht’s Noch
Created by one half of Alter Ego, this wasn’t exactly the next ‘Rocker’, but with a nagging siren-esque sound bubbling through the track and lots of other weird, chunky electro sounds, it was familiar enough by the end of the year to create hands-in-the-air club moments.

Franz Ferdinand – Do U Wanna (Erol Alkan remix)
Cunning stripdown of the catchy but cheesy original, just taking a couple of really brutal guitar riffs and looping them until they worm their way into your brain and down into your dancing shoes.

Sweet Light – Abusator
A bit of a monster instrumental, subtle as a jack hammer and not dissimilar to Vitalic’s classic ‘LA Rocks’. But when it’s this effective on the dancefloor you can’t really grumble about appropriation.

MANDY vs Booka Shade – ‘Body Language’
One of those mellow 80s Metro Area tracks that are so popular but still seem rather humdrum, the sort of thing gastroclubbers (i.e. ageing ravers) like. It’s not a bad tune, the melody’s attractive and it worked well with an acapella, but on its own it’s rather yawnsome. Either way it was one of the biggest tunes of its kind of the year.

Lindstrom – I Feel Space
Lindstrom and Prins Thomas were the other two hype underground electro producers of the year, but unfortunately everything said above about ‘Body Language’ applies here too. Just don’t get me started on Theo Parrish.

E) DANCEHALL & SOCA
The return of Roots as a force to balance Bashment, and a great year for Soca

At the beginning of the year there was talk that 2005 would see a return to rootsier reggae, switching from the harder bashment sound, and although a flood didn’t materialise, there was a definite trickle of outstanding Roots tunes that will probably increase in 2006, especially following the success of ‘Jamrock’. Meanwhile back in bashment land, there were some outstanding rhythms as always, but no big trends and it felt like a relatively muted year, perhaps because of the Roots shift. It also felt like Soca had one of its strongest years for a long time in 2005. It may not be the subtlest of musical genres, but its energy is exactly what makes dance music so exciting. The best tunes had loads of charm and some killer drum patterns to keep you moving.

Roots
‘Jamrock’ was of course the undeniable ubiquitous anthem, but there were other equally strong tracks that ought to have had more success. The next biggest track was probably I Wayne’s ‘Can’t Satisfy Her’, which was more of an upbeat party track with a neat vocal. Less well-known was his more conscious cut, ‘Living In Love’ which has a gorgeous melody and vocal. The other outstanding cut on this level was Richie Spice’s ‘Youths Are So Cold’, a big sing-a-long conscious cut with a big bassline.

One outstanding track which stood out for its quality but also for not sounding like anything else was Turbulence’s ‘Notorious’.This is getting a proper single release in 2006 to lead off a new Reggae compilation from XL which promises to be a great album, spreading this music to a new audience.

As a further indication of changing times, hot producer Donovan Bennett aka Don Corleone made more Roots productions this year, his biggest being the Season rhythm, itself a reworking of his earlier Drop Leaf rhythm. Probably the biggest cut was the pretty yet mournful ‘Never Gonna Be the Same’ by Sean Paul.

The other biggest track of the year was Gyptian’s ‘Serious Times’, but despite constant trying to this writer’s ears it still sounds rather drippy and dull, lacking the charm of the tracks above.

Bashment
Dancehall remains the only musical genre somehow gets away with the most utterly ridiculous experimentation, possibly because it is always sincere. This year saw the usual Elephant Man adoption of 80s pop song melodies for his chorus (notably ‘I Will Survive’ on ‘Willie Bounce’). And Bounty Killer’s great track of the year was ‘Stand Firm Pt.2’ on one the most preposterous but still enjoyable rhythms of the year – basically a barn-dance guitar riff with rough and tough Ragga drums. Equally absurd was the Oh My Swing rhythm which was basically an uplifting black gospel instrumental, not the first thing you expect to hear hardcore Jamaican deejays like Assassin chatting over on his standout cut, ‘Some Gal’.

The Bomb A Drop rhythm flipped the script yet again and sounded like a Jamaican version of a cheesy Ibiza house tune, being a house-tempo track with straight four-four drums. It was an acquired taste, but Lady Saw gave it her all on ‘Mi Nah Sleep’. The other house-tempo rhythm was Applause, although this ran on the three beat drum pattern. Sizzla’s ‘Run Out Pon Dem’ was the track to check.

Some straighter and successful experimentation produced the Military Rhythm, which relied on thunderous military tattoo drums to underpin it. Vybz with ‘4 Star’ and Sean Paul with ‘Got Them Weak’ were the highlights. The Assault Rifle rhythm was a reworking of the astonishing Neptunes instrumental for Busta’s ‘Light Your Ass on Fire’ but with more ruffneck dancehall drums. Vybz pipped the post here with ‘Crime Minister, one of the most exciting tracks of the year for those who could handle its brutal minimalism.

One of the best reworked rhythms was the Giggy rhythm (formerly known as Bogle Resurrection) and Leftside & Esko’s hit ‘Yuh Belly Nuh Bang’. Premier-league producer Dave Kelly came up with the big, minimal Bad Gal rhythm, with many highlights but Cobra’s ‘A Who’ just taking pole position. 316 was not one of the big rhythms but it was solid and catchy and Beenie Man’s lyric made his cut ‘Fi Wah’ on it a great tune.

There was much talk outside dancehall circles about the new rhythm from the Florida-based South Rakkas crew, who have gained a reputation for building what you could call Ragga-Rave instrumentals. This was a fair description of the Bionic Ras rhythm which was reminiscent of Basement Jaxx’s ‘Fly Life’. Sizzla’s ‘Spring Break’ was the track to hear. It was exciting and forward-thinking but it didn’t really catch on as the beat just wasn’t very dance-friendly.

After all this time the great Energy God, Elephant Man, still manages to pull out a couple of crackers every year. In 2005 he shone on ‘Dancing Forever’ on the Move rhythm, one of the simplest but most poundingly effective rhythms of the year, and the gloriously silly ‘Willie Bounce’, one of the hits of the Notting Hill Carnival. It’s hard to imagine anyone else borrowing the choral melody to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive for the main melody and pulling it off, and while it’s a bit of a shock the first time, the drums and general mayhem of the track meant you couldn’t help but dance.

At the end of the year, the Concubine rhythm, with its Eastern minimalism, showed one possible way forward for bashment in 2006. Dancehall is adept at absorbing influences and so it wouldn’t be too surprising if it follows hip hop’s lead and strips things down next year.

Soca
The biggest track of Notting Hill Carnival 2005 was deservedly Sherwayne Winchester with ‘Dead or Alive’, the biggest energy track of the year. It had knock-out percussion and was just one of those perfect, go-bananas tracks to spice up a sun-kissed day. Almost as good was Iwer George’s ‘Ease the Tension’, another high energy number with fantastic drums and an easily memorable lyric. Iwer George came good again with ‘Water’, which wasn’t particularly big or clever, but had a great feel-good chorus, and brings back wonderful memories of Notting Hill Carnival 2005 with people on the floats throwing water into the crowd.

Machel Montano’s ‘Madder than Dat’ more than lived up to its title, being everything you want from a totally bonkers and grin-inducing Soca track, not just lyrically but with excitingly skittery drums. Maximus Dan gave a typically commanding lyrical delivery on ‘Never’, the highlight of the Stinging Neckle rhythm, a mid-tempo stomper.

Alison Hinds’ ‘Roll It’ was an interesting slow Soca track, sonically borrowing Lil’ Jon’s trademark synth sound but sounding unmistakably Caribbean. With a great vocal performance and some emotive chords it was an unexpected winner. Bunji Garlin had two excellent tracks, the Trinidad Carnival anthem ‘Right Now’ and ‘Whatever’ on the Lava Slide rhythm, which sped along and managed to effectively make use of the sound of an accordian on top of the usual bouncy drums and keyboards.

Somewhat depressingly and predictably the official ‘big tune’ was Jamesy P’s ‘Nookie’, a plodding year-old tune whose main recommendation was that it was slow, simple to dance to, and salacious in subject-matter, all the right ingredients for that Benidorm crossover market.

F) GARAGE, GRIME, DUBSTEP & BREAKBEAT

After all the hype of last year, the Grime scene failed to explode and it was unfortunately ironic that the only Grime MCs to make any commercal dent in the charts did so by making, well, pretty much anything except Grime records. This is not meant to criticise the artists, but highlight how critics don’t always don’t get it right and in this case tripped over their own hyperbole. It’s true that the scene was held back by the impossibilty of putting on Grime events (Vice editor Andy Capper made an excellent point that when white kids mosh at a concert it’s a positive sign of enthusiasm, when black kids do it, it’s a riot), but overall it felt like there weren’t enough strong tunes – Grime is still unhealthily over-balanced in focus on the MCs.

So there was no musical revolution, but there was still some excellent music to be found, and of course the raw, uncontainable energy of the pirate stations. Leading DJ Logan Sama was poached by Kiss from seminal pirate station Rinse FM halfway through the year and one of the most exciting experiences of the year was hearing his last show on Rinse. Loads of the Roll Deep MCs turned up and caused chaos with their hyper energy levels and constant Rewinds. It was also a chance to hear how good Jamaican deejays sound on Grime instrumentals as Logan Sama played exclusive dubplates from Vybz Kartel and all the year’s big tracks.

All the big records seemed to come early in the year, perhaps because the rest of the year was spent promoting and working on existing projects and new ones for 2006. It certainly feels that top producers such as Danny Weed, Target and Terror Danjah have been quiet of late.

The best tunes were the ones where producers thought outside the box and made music that didn’t sound like you expected Grime to, but showed a willingness to experiment. And so we had Danny Weed’s ‘Shank Rhythm’ aka ‘When I’m Ere’ which was made of Middle-Eastern sounding pipe-organ sounds, and Imp Batch’s Gype rhythm, which used flute noises that you’d expect to hear on the sort of Easy Listening record your gran might like, chopped up and fitted over skippy drums that fitted a Grime tempo. Both these records were originals, outstanding tracks of the year in any genre. They also benefitted from excellent remixes, the Shank rhythm remixed by Wiley into a more electrifying, modern and alien tune that was pumped up enough for the dancefloor, while the Gype rhythm was edited in a more stuttery, cut-up way that also sounded great as an alternative once you’d become familiar with the ridiculous original.

There wasn’t really much change in the MCs, the same names are still around, and they just continue to hone their craft. The most exciting at present are Trim, who has by far the most thrilling voice, JME, who is the most lyrically eloquent, Bruza, who has the most marketable personality with his ‘cheeky cockney’ image, and Riko, but until they release more tracks its hard to tell what they’re really capable of.

The other biggest tune was Wiley’s ‘Colder’ which used the sort of big atmospheric orchestral strings that make for a seriously scary movie and added on his trademark bleeps and beats. This always incited some serious lyrics from MCs on the pirates. In the Autumn a new Wiley cut emerged called ‘Tunnel Vision 2’ which showed he can still put out the most brilliantly insane instrumentals with mental rave noises and unexpected time switches. Hopefully now the Roll Deep album is done and dusted we’ll get some more of these next year. Newcomer Mizz Beats emerged as the hot producer to watch next year with her very spooky and understated cut, ‘Saw It Coming’, on the second Run the Road compilation.

Dizzee Rascal, the man who broke Grime onto the commercial scene, quietly slipped out one single to follow his disappointing second album. The new single ‘Off 2 Work’ was absolutely thrilling, tearing along at a furious pace. It was very sparse, consisting of tiny snippets of live instruments, including a wicked James Brown-style horn stab. Dizzee has struck out on his own and abandoned the Grime scene, yet he’s still a little too marginal to be featured in the more general press, so it felt this didn’t really get much coverage, but if anyone else had made it, it would have been easily considered one of the most exciting Grime instrumentals of the year.

The most entertaining general events on the Grime scene in 2005 included the Young Guns Crew coming out with the Countdown Riddim which, yes really, sampled the musical theme to the legendary Channel 4 gameshow. Key Grime journalist Chantelle Fiddy was about to send it to Richard Whitely when he died, an act that now lies somewhere between poignancy and preposterousness. Ruff Squad re-edited Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’ and MCed over it to show that nothing is sacred. It recalled the old Spinal Tap quote of there being a fine line between clever and stupid. And producer turned MC Jammer made a ludicrous video of his single ‘Merkle Man’ inventing himself as a bizarre purple dreadlocked super-hero. He remains an outstanding producer but a questionable MC with an overenthusiasm for rewinds.

Dubstep spent the first half of the year still stuck in the doldrums, a scene full of technically impressive producers but lacking excitement in their instrumental productions. Then things picked up as newer producers like Skream, Digital Mystikz and Loefah really started to focus on the dubbier side of things (previously dubstep was a bit of a misnomer), taking out snares so that while the tracks were still at about 140bpm they felt more slow and skanking as if they were half-speed. These type of tunes are coming to be known as half-step.

Dubstep is fairly contextual music in that because of the extraordinary sub-basses in many tracks, unless you really crank up a decent home hi-fi, you just won’t hear how it’s meant to sound. It is proper Soundsystem music. The current place to really appreciate it is at DMZ, a monthly night at Mass in Brixton, feeling the bass reverberate through your body. Forward at Plastic People, the original home of Dubstep, is also still worth checking. The year’s anthem was Skream’s ‘Request Line’ but he had stronger tracks, showcased on an outstanding mix of his productions that was put out on the internet.

If Dubstep occasionally borders on prog rock, then Bassline House is punk rock. A niche scene centred vaguely round Sheffield, it kept the flame alive for the four-four beats of Speed Garage, the new tunes being divided into either ‘Organ Tunes’ (happy female-friendly tunes) or ‘Warpers’ (evil Van Helden-esque basslines). The productions aren’t particularly sophisticated, often even resorting to the sped-up helium female vocal, but it’s good-fun energy club music – the sort of thing that reminds you the whole point of punk rock: i.e. naïve enthusiasm and energy are often far preferable to overwrought proficiency.

The one Bassline House track which stood out was Cheeky ft Caz’s ‘Some Kind of Fool’. It came out on the Sunship Productions lable, and so came with a good pedigree, Ceri Evans of Sunship having always been one of the outstanding 4/4 and 2-step producers. On the face of it there was nothing that unusual about it, it’s a female vocal 4/4 garage cut, but it just had great production with a stomping bass and crisp skippy drums, a strong vocal and the bottom line: a no-brainer, smile-inducing tune.

On the more traditional Garage tip, the outstanding remix was veteran producer Sticky’s bootleg of Amerie’s ‘1 Thing’. He wisely knew that to handle a classic like that, it was best to keep it simple, so he just pitched and chopped it up a little, tweaked the drums and added a big old sub-bass. Beautiful stuff.

The Pirate radio stations have always been one of the best indicators of the way music is moving, keeping up with the cutting-edge. So it was interesting that the general trend this year was to revert to Speed Garage and 2-Step classics from 2000-2. It is less surprising than it might first seem, Grime has remained a largely cliquey and self-contained East London scene with few tunes emerging, but most importantly, it is such an aggressive scene, musically and culturally, that there is a marginally small female audience. Coupled with the desire for music with a groove, 4/4 seems like it will remain the more popular underground sound for now. The bigger question is whether 2006 will see a rejuvenation for the original Garage producers, like Sunship, Wookie and MJ Cole. Certainly Agent X are around, producing an entertaining energy recently in ‘Scream and Shout’ which recalls Basement Jaxx’s classic ‘Jump and Shout’.

At the end of the year, the key producers looked set to be Scandalous Unlimited with the release of their new mixtape ‘Eye of the Tiger Vol.1’ which featured a number of new instrumentals from them and vocals from most of the key Grime MCs. Scandalous have always been interesting producers, having released a brilliant and bonkers 2-step bootleg of Kelis’s ‘Milkshake’ in 2004 and 4×4 tracks like ‘Watford Weather’ so it will be interesting to see if they can connect the disparate elements of the Garage scene together.

On the breakbeat side of things, the Stanton Warriors re-emerged on another new label and put out a couple of singles to preview their album due out in early 2006. It’s been so long since they were the hottest production property since Basement Jaxx, so while they’ll always have a core Breaks audience, especially in Australia where they go so wild, it’ll be interesting to see how they do. Their sound doesn’t feel as new as it once did, but they remain outstanding producers and have some big collaborations ready to go. The most enjoyable was single ‘Pop Ya Cork’ which had an enjoyable ‘booty lyric’ from Twista. The track doesn’t really do much, but with it’s female chorus, bell rings and other little features it’s a real grower.

G) OTHER GENRES

Bhangra
Maybe they just slipped past unnoticed, but it felt like there was a disappointing lack of good Bhangra tracks this year – even the so-called big tunes, like ‘Tharti Hilde’ by Angraz Ali, were uninspiring.

Unsurprisingly it was left to Tigerstyle to come good as always with some great bootlegs and remixes, but apart from them, the only exciting new talent was another Glaswegian duo who could be classified as Tigerstyle protogés . Let’s hope that some new talent emerges next year.

Tigerstyle’s big track this year was ‘The Girl From Pakistan’, their reworking of the Steps dancehall rhythm, which came out in 2004, but was best-known for being used by Sean Paul for his comeback single, ‘We Be Burning’, this year. They added Bhupi Gill and Elephant Man vocals, beefed up the track with big bhangra percussion and instrumentation, and turned it into a monster of a track. Their remix of ‘Mi Nuh Dun’ was large too, but its drum stomp ironed out the groove of the original, so while it would cause chaos on a dancefloor., the original remained the best.

In an exciting and unexpected cross-fertilisation, Reggaeton label Machete Records got Tigerstyle to remix two tracks, Baby Rank’s ‘Tiburon’ and Wisin Y Yandel’s ‘Rakata’. The former was a big uncompromising stomper of a track, not the most outstanding track of the year but still impressive. ‘Rakata’ was more subtle but there was something slightly disorienting listening to it – the Latin and Indian elements are both so strong and the cultural combination doesn’t quite work.

After all these bootlegs and remixes, Tigerstyle showed they can also write tracks with their production on singer Bikram Singh’s ‘Mein Jana Punjab’. This was a laidback track, showing they can do more than just dancefloor bombs, and had an appealingly slinky Indian groove to it.

But Bhangra track of the year goes to Northern Lights for ‘Wrong Number’, with vocals by Fauji Rajpuri. This had a hell of a slinky yet powerful groove that challenged you not to move your hips to it. And it succeeded in fusing a modern production sensibility with more traditional Bhangra instrumentation in a way we rarely see. While so many Desi producers persist in bad garage and hip-hop rip-offs, ‘Wrong Number’ was a classic example of looking back in order to move forward.

Bootlegs
The bootleg scene remains fairly settled, the people who were just in for the short-haul have moved on, leaving a hardcore long-termers and the odd new entrant. There is still a ton of dross, but there are still a few gems and even some creativity shown.

Agent Lovelette showed that Diplo’s Rhythm, Kraftwerk and Lil Kim marry together well, Kim’s energetic and sassy vocal complementing the combined instrumentals stunningly. This was the sort of outstanding bootleg that sounded like it ought to be an original and there’s no higher compliment than that.

Following last year’s essential Alicia Keys Reggae bootleg, someone had the idea to do the same to Destiny’s Child’s ‘Lose Your Breath’, completely reinventing it as a sultry Summer Lover’s Reggae track. And like Agent Lovelette, if we weren’t so overfamiliar with Destiny’s Child, you’d swear this was the original.

The best party bootleg was PTA with ‘One For The Devil’ which paired Amerie’s ‘1 Thing’ with an instrumental of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy For the Devil’. It’s a pretty basic A+B pairing, but it works perfectly in key and sounds fantastic.

This was closely followed by another Agent Lovelette creation, 1-2 beat, which fused WhoMadeWho’s much-better-than-it-ought-to-be cover of ‘Flat Beat’ with Ciara’s vocal for ‘1-2 Step’, a nice clash of genres but sonically perfectly suited.

Simplest but one of the cleverest was Dopplebanger with ‘Can I Kick It Like That’ which paired Pharrell’s vocal from ‘Can I Have It Like That’ with the classic Tribe Called Quest tune. The Pharrell track was a weird one – it’s a great instrumental but the vocal didn’t seem to work with it, and Gwen Stefani’s choral refrain was really irritating. But his vocal sounds much better over the Tribe Called Quest instrumental and then the pay-off of course comes in the chorus when the answer to his question ‘Can I Have It Like That’ is of course ‘Yes You Can’.

New York-based club The Rub put out a second album of bootlegs subtly called, ‘It’s the Motherfuckin’ Remix Vol.2′. It’s a little bit like a hip hop Soulwax radio show, pack-jammed with so many mash-ups it’s hard to keep track of them all, and some more successful than others. As with Soulwax, hearing this as an album at home isn’t really the right environment, but heard in a club it makes perfect sense.

Finally, Woodside Natives dropped the acapella of Twista’s ‘Overnight Celebrity over DJ Zinc’s classic breakbeeat garage ‘138 Trek’. It’s always great to be reminded of how good that track is, but it always sounded better with a rap on top of it, and this was probably the best to date.

It wasn’t technically a bootleg, more a series of re-edits, but Optimo’s JD Twitch put out an album and an EP as the charmingly-named Betty Botox. Twitch is a very clever man, but some of the tracks weren’t the easiest of listening if you weren’t familiar with the originals. However a couple of tracks on the Kraut EP, in particular the self-explanatory ‘Can Can’ were fun and funky dance groovers. And Rub n Tug produced an amazing re-edit of Chicago’s cover of Traffic’s ‘I’m a Man’, with a gloriously-extended drum-break in the middle to really rouse people on the dancefloor.

Reggaeton
For anyone who doesn’t get Reggaeton, which is still a lot of music fans, numbed by the apparent constancy of the one plodding drum beat, you should watch ‘The Chosen Ones – El Documental’, an excellent DVD documentary of Reggaeton’s origins in Puerto Rico, full of fantastic footage of the parties and interviews with all the main artists.

2005 was the year Daddy Yankee hit big with his international pop smash ‘Gasolina’, not really the best advertisement for the genre, though admittedly fairly representative. Generally it felt like a year of consolidation for the genre, with last year’s big tunes from stars like Don Omar, Tego Calderon and Daddy Yankee cementing themselves on the audience’s consciousness. These included Don Omar’s rather good ‘Dale Don Dale’, and tracks like ‘Dile’, ‘Miralos’, ‘Quimica’, Ivy Queen’s ‘Papi Te Quiero’, Tego’s ‘Al Natural’ and Baby Ranks enjoyable speed-switching ‘Mayor Que Yo’. ‘Reggaeton Latino’ was a big anthem, and of the myriad bootleg remixes of hip hop tracks, Ashanti’s ‘Only You’ stood out from the pack.

As written last year, Tego Calderon remains the most exciting and broad-minded artist, his forthcoming album ‘The Underdog’ is supposed to move away from Reggaeton in places, adopting more of a straight hip hop feel. But he came out with one of the outstanding Reggaeton tracks this year with ‘Se Van’, which showed so much more creativity in drum patterns and general song structure than most Reggaeton tracks.

Towards the end of the year, it was hard not to be pulverised into submission by Daddy Yankee’s ‘Rompe’, which used the classic pop technique of repetition to worm its way into your consciousness. To be fair its also a pretty well-produced track, but this is set to be an unavoidable guilty pleasure.

The important thing to remember is that, however you feel about Reggaeton, you shouldn’t underestimate its future global impact. This is going to increasingly be the sound of young urban Hispanics, (particularly as that repetitive drum pattern is irresistible for girls to dance to), who are now the biggest racial minority in the US, even before you consider South America. Reggaeton is going to get bigger and bigger. And hopefully, better and better.

B-More House
Baltimore House, a form of hip hop-influenced breakbeat house, is still a very marginal genre, but it’s been showing signs of wanting to break-out over the past couple of years. This was seen more than ever in 2005, helped by the efforts of Hollertronix DJ duo Diplo and Low Budget, who have long been playing tracks out, new Big Dada signing Spankrock, and club promoter Roxy Cottontail, who dragged the sound and DJs out of its heartland and introduced it to New York. There’s also a new mixtape out from Aaron LaCrate and Scotty B, who are connected to a whole heap of New York music, fashion and clubbing events, being part of the very hot aNYthing clothes label.

Diplo put out the first major label b-more remix with his excellent take on Gwen Stefani’s ‘Hollaback Girl’, but the main music-makers remain the same – DJ Technics and Rod Lee. They put out far too many tracks to know where to begin, and its not a musical genre known for subtlety, but Rod Lee’s remix of Lil’ Jon’s ‘What U Gonna Do’ stood out. Meanwhile DJ Technics kept up his CD mix series which demonstrates his extraordinary mixing skills, steaming through a ton of tunes at high speed.

Ultimately it’s still hard to know how far B-more really can go – it’s not radio music, and it’s only just club music: the repetition of the records make them effectively Club Tools only for the more experienced DJ. However when those breakbeats slam in, this is still one of the most exciting and under-appreciated styles of music around.

Baile (Favela) Funk
It still feels like a struggle to have real enthusiasm for this music – for all the press and blog hype, this remains primarily a cultural phenomenon. Unless you’ve experienced the music in attending one of the extraordinary Funk balls in the heart of the Rio favelas, there’s not much to get excited about it as a stand-alone sound. And even if you haven’t experienced it, reading about the culture is extraordinary in itself, from the way the parties run to accounts of the underground ‘proibidao’ tracks where artists are paid for writing songs which glorify local gangsters.

A few compilations came out, the best of which was DJ Sujinho’s ‘I Love Baile Funk’ – it came closest to making the music sound good,. Diplo put out a second mixtape which was most noticeable for featuring MC Saquinho’s ‘Montagem the Smith’ which samples the guitar riff of ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ by The Smiths (yes, the 80s indie band) in a genius juxtaposition of styles.

If there’s one thing that you can say about the genre is the Funk producers’ imaginative attitude to sampling. They often create wicked-sounding loops of music from popular tunes that you can’t imagine North American and European producers considering (or legally being able to use), for example the Smiths track, ‘Oh Jessie’ by Madonna, the Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ (both on Diplo mixtapes) and most audaciously, a track from Riverdance (the sample’s cut up and it sounds much better than you’d ever expect).

But overall, out of context shouty-Brazilian rappers just don’t seem that thrilling in the UK. Do the right thing, make that trip over and see it first-hand. (And for the best visual taster, Diplo’s ‘Percao’ video, a cut-up of his own video footage from Rio, is seriously essential viewing.).

Miscellaneous
Jamie Lidell put out a wonderful album, ‘Multiply’, that was only a few tracks short of being a classic. An unexpected shift from the techno producer, it took a more traditional songwriting approach and made full use of his stunning soul-man voice. Many tracks were homages to certain soul legends, including Sly Stone, George Clinton, Marvin Gaye and general Motown sounds. But it was the first single, ‘When I Come Back Around’ that was on constant rotation throughout the year, sounding like, to paraphrase Derrick May, George Clinton and the Aphex Twin stuck in an elevator. It was a big P-funk jam of a song, with a cutting-edge electronic production sensibility, and of course a great tune.

Sebastian Tellier finally released ‘La Ritournelle’ after a long legal wrangle over which record label had the rights to it. And for their money the winning label got a four minute intro of sweeping, melancholy strings and piano (and surprisingly funky drums) that melted the most hardened hearts, after which Tellier’s sweet if slightly comedy-European-sounding vocal and a groovy little bassline came in. Without wishing to denigrate it, it’s one of those tracks that will be a mainstay of Chill-out compilations and BBC soundtracks for years to come. Meaning that it’s a bit of a future classic, and you can see why it was fought over.

Maverick producer Daedelus, who operates in the broader, more experimental regions of instrumental independent hip hop, unleashed his greatest work to date in the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ album. It worked in the tradition of great producer-led albums with a variety of vocal contributions from rappers like MF Doom and TTC, but also beautiful female singing from Laura Darling. Each track had three times more ideas in it than most producers and often moved in ways you weren’t expecting, but it was always hugely listenable and never felt wilfully experimental, not an easy thing to pull off. In a fair world this would be one of those ubiquitous Royksopp-esque coffee-table albums.

Beatfanatic, one of the key artists on Sweden’s G.A.M.M. label, beloved by Gilles Peterson, put out one really killer single, but perhaps because of licensing problems (it was a re-edit), it sadly never got past white label status. The track was ‘Amanhanga’ and it’s a seriously large slice of uptempo Brazilian dancefloor action.

Brazil’s DJ Nuts came out of nowhere with his wonderful ‘Cultura Copia’ mixtape. It’s most easily explained as a Latin ‘Brainfreeze’, weaving about 40 essential Brazilian tracks into one 80 minute whole.

DJ Tron and Johann from Stacs of Stamina, who host and DJ the excellent Radio Clit internet mixes, coined the term Eurocrunk this year to describe artists like them who have a love for Crunk but are using that influence with others to create a new, mutant form of crunchy, electronic hip hop beats. In further genre cross-fertilisation they Screwed & Chopped the Roll Deep album, to varying effect, though ‘Bus Stop’ was a really outstanding track.

Perhaps the forefathers of the nascent Eurocrunk movement would be Modeselektor, who released a strong debut album this year, with stand-out tracks such as ‘Dancing Box’, which produced amazing jerky sounds by intricately chopping up rappers TTC’s vocals in the chorus. Stacs of Stamina came out with a terrific single, ‘Roll’, with some great rapping and a dark and dirty minimal bass beat. The other stand-out Eurocrunk producer, Para One, released his second EP on Institubes, which continued from his first in having one side of crunchy hip hop beats, and another of Daft Punk-style raw electro house music. He remains one to watch.

On the broken beat side of things, it was a disappointment that the Bugz in Da Attic ‘Hecho en Casa’ album project remained unfinished following the two tantalising singles from 2004. But Seiji made up for it with two magnificent remixes. The first was UK dancehall singer Tubby T’s ‘Ready She Ready’ and as you might expect it was turned into a big bass-wobbler of a track, supporting Tubby T’s gorgeous vocal. Basement Jaxx’s ‘Do Your Thing’ has become such an anthem that it takes a brave person to remix it, but Seiji took the bull by the horns and completely reinvented it. Until you hear it, it’s hard to imagine it as an acid breakbeat track, but that’s what he turned it into and it sounds very fine for it.

One unexpected broken beat treat came on the mysterious ‘Rebtuz Presents Vol. 3’. Nadav Ravid turned in a stunning remix of the old Yazoo tune, ‘Don’t Go’. Alison Moyet’s vocal is so strong that it would be dangerous to do too much with it, so he just added a badass bassline and clattering broken drums to create another scintillating single.

Tayo, the stalwart breakbeat DJ, stepped up his production this year, showcasing some excellent electronic dub tracks that move away from his previous clubbier output and look like they ought to form part of a very solid album in the future.

DJ Zinc came up with one of the most extraordinary musical achievements of the year with his Minimix for Annie Mac’s Radio show. (Every week she asks a DJ to produce a 5 minute mix for her, with free range to do whatever they want.) Zinc really did throw in everything except the kitchen sink, creating a history of the past 9 or so years of Jungle, throwing snippets of about 85 tracks in his allotted time. It’s not something you really need to hear more than once, but it was an astonishing feat and a good reminder of many drum & bass highlights that you might have forgotten about.

One niche scene which picked up one or two column inches but was largely ignored was 8-bit music. These are tunes made to sound like they’ve come from the soundtrack of an old 8-bit computer game (think the Commodore 64 era). Admittedly a lot of it is pretty unlistenable but seek and you found the joys that were Saskrotch and an amazing remix of Beck’s ‘Girl’. Saskrotch was a one-man wonder, putting out an album of ‘Nintendo Breakz’ where he took old Nintendo soundtracks and laid on thunderously fast breakcore drums on top. There was also a fantastic and insane mix of him doing this live. It wasn’t the easiest of listening and got pretty extreme at times, but it just had an appealing raw dumbness to it. The best of the Nintendo tracks was ‘Kage’ which was surprisingly funky. Meanwhile, a remix of ‘Girl’ (retitled ‘Bit Rate Variation in B Flat) from Beck’s last album showed that, combined with a good melody and vocal, 8-bit is perfectly capable of making sweet, sweet music. This was a properly overlooked little gem.

The Vector Warrior put out another of his intriguingly mysterious tunes via the internet, which pitted a haunting string section against a staccato Autechre-style beat workout. Give this person a proper studio and you wonder what he’d be capable of.

This isn’t really the place to discuss M.I.A. anymore – there are quite enough other people who do that now, especially on the internet, but suffice it to say that she came out with a very strong debut album that felt a little crushed under the weight of the expectation, but was packed full of outstanding productions.

H) MIXTAPES
Reinventing the Wheels of Steel.

DJing has entered a new age with the advent of the Ableton Live software, which allows an astonishing amount of creativity in changing tunes, from stretching to sampling and looping. It means that there’s an enormous potential for mixtape DJing to become an art, an extension of the classic cut-and-paste methodology, with a mix album being carefully crafted out of different bits of records to create a tapestry that is as much dependent on the DJ’s creativity as the original artists. The key problem on the larger stage is that the more tracks that are used, the more complicated sample clearance becomes, though with more and more people putting out mixes free on the internet it’s still possible.

Of course there are the pioneers: think Coldcut’s 70 Minutes of Madness, DJ Q-Bert’s still-astonishing Demolition Pumpkin Squeeze Musik, and the Avalanches’ Gi Mix. But as the technology has become more widely available, we ought to see a take-up in experimentation. 2 Many DJs aka Soulwax more recently redefined the mix album with their mash-ups and unsurprisingly Optimo have pushed the boat out with the various mixes they make for their website, as well as their commercially-released mixes this year. But the undiscovered person who is really making waves, and leading the way in what is and ought to be achievable with DJing, is Dylan Richards aka ‘Zilla.

He first came to light doing a guest mix on Coldcut’s massively influential Solid Steel radio show. His hour mix contained about a hundred tracks, many of them being just small snippets overlaid together and looped-up. He has a penchant for crunchy Warp-style instrumentals and hip hop and delights in combining the two.

2005 saw the arrival of his epic ‘Grinted Teeth and Brawlsville’ mix, pitting two really aggressive musical genres, hardcore electronica and crunk acapellas, against each other. They are not obvious bedfellows yet he made the combination sound totally thrilling and correct. It’s brutal music in places, but works as a showcase for a ton of electronic tunes that you wouldn’t normally get to hear woven together, as well as showing how vocals can work in unexpected ways. One of the most adventurous albums of the year.

‘Zilla also put out a ‘Radio version’ of the WarpVision mix he did with Buddy Peace last year, which has a ton of less aggressive electronic music and more commercial hip hop vocals. It’s an outstanding piece of work and also incredibly listenable, and is a good warm-up for ‘Grinted’.

And an intriguing snippet arrived at the end of the year, again sounding like nothing else around, hip hop beats permeated with a ton of classic early Drum & Bass samples and riffs. This man is one of the great unrecognised talents of the moment.

DJ Shadow put out another limited and (relatively) low-key mixtape, ‘Funky Skunk’. It was a funny one – there were some great tracks on it, ranging from Dirty South tracks to obscure 60s funk, often with acapellas over the former over instrumentals of the latter, and obviously fantastic mixing and blending, but somehow it just wasn’t a classic listen, something that you’d go back to again and again. Perhaps we expect too much from him nowadays. However it’s something you definitely need to hear at least once, if just for one of the opening funk guitar riffs with Lil’ Jon shouting over it, and his blend of Common’s ‘The Corner’ with Crime Mob’s ‘Knuck if you Buck’ acapella.

If you’re not using technology or insane DJ skills to craft a mixtape, then the next best thing is to release a mixtape of music that hardly anyone has or listens to. This is what Diplo has tried to do on his mixtapes, undeniably succeeding with his Favela Strikes Back cd. And with club partner Low Budget he released the T5 Soul Sessions mix which cleverly fused a load of little-known alternative early 80s club tracks, i.e. not the ones that have become played-out in the last few years. Diplo also recorded a mix for Fabric which, with the usual commercial limitations, was a curate’s egg of a mix, and some great mixes for UK Radio stations which showcased the extraordinary musical diversity he possesses, covering hip hop, dancehall, alternative rock, quirky electro house music, putting together genres you’ll rarely hear back-to-back. It’s scrappy stuff, but if you’re behind on what’s been going on in the year, his two-hour BBC Radio 6 mix is a very solid primer. Diplo remains a magnet who attracts the best and broadest beats around and is still a key figure to watch (and hear).

Soulwax kicked off 2005 with a dazzling two-hour mix for BBC’s Essential Selection, which succeeded in showcasing many of the year’s biggest tunes month’s before they were officially released. There was lots of electro-house from the usual suspects, but also all sorts of the quirkier tunes that the Dewaele brothers are so adept at squirrelling out, and towards the end a cut-up hip hop section, bootlegging a number of beats and acapellas against each other. Another perfect 2005 primer for the short-of-time.

Erol Alkan released a mix for Bugged Out, with one cd showing the sound of his sets there and another of offbeat chilled-out music for home listening. Erol’s sets for Bugged Out and other clubs continued to define most of what was good about electro, house and techno this year, and while a cd can’t recreate the extraordinary atmosphere you get in the second room of The End when he plays, it was a great snapshot of what he does and a reminder of good times.

Optimo released a mix on the excellent How to Kill the DJ series which showed why their Glasgow club night continues to be so highly regarded, as it effortlessly zig-zagged through a multitude of musical styles (it also had a second chilled-out cd like Erol’s), and then later a mix for Eskimo called Psyche Out which was a bit more trance-y (in the literal sense).

Disco D is a New York-based producer who started out on the niche Ghetto-tech scene but has since expanded to produce a track for 50 Cent and create the excellent Gunshot dancehall rhythm which gets a full release next year. He’s also an impressive DJ and came out this year with ‘Funk Flava 2005’, a mix of various different 130-150bpm breakbeat genres, taking in B-more house, baile funk, ghetto-tech and booty bass. This was a smart move – by spreading it out, he could just take the cream of the crop from each genre and keep the quality up. He also employed various hip hop DJ tricks to keep things interesting.

I) CLUBS & GIGS
This section is obviously very incomplete as there are far too many clubs and gigs going on for one person to cover them all, even just in a single city. The below were chosen to go as being some of the most exceptional events but of course there were many others.

Our Disco
Or to give it it’s full title, ‘And Did We Mention Our Disco?’. Den, Glyn, Nadia and Rory have been putting on this club for almost three years now, and it still feels impressively fresh. This is helped by the excellent venue they have in Plastic People, an intimate, modern club with one of the best sound systems in London. More importantly though, their musical policy is enormously eclectic, educated and most of all, great fun. Rory has a frighteningly accurate foresight into the more leftfield guitar bands months before anyone else, Nadia is an electro-house fiend, while Den and Glyn seem to have an ‘anything-goes’ attitude, helped by their use of laptops and Ableton that allows them to drop in samples, loop tracks and add in acapellas at will. The end result is moments where even the most seasoned clubber goes ‘What the hell is that’ as they bounce around the dancefloor.

They draw in a mixed, clued-up party crowd, who look cool but don’t act it. And musically there’s something for everyone – the casual punter will find lots of tracks that are great to dance to, the knowledgeable music bore will hear brand new tracks and appreciate the mixing tricks.

The organisers knew each other originally from Trash (where Rory also DJs) and the two clubs feel like kindred spirits to an extent: they both have really passionate people playing the best music to people who appreciate it. It’s a shame there aren’t more places like this, their other closest affiliates are Optimo in Glasgow and the DFA mob in NYC. Our Disco aren’t as well-known as these two organisations, but this deserves to change.

The general theme of quality clubs this year seemed to be a DIY enthusiasm – clubs run by music fans rather than in-it-for-the-money professional promoters, and, running on from that, excitingly eclectic musical policies. Our Disco and Trash have this, but even more so did the New Cross-based Fear of Music night and Adventures Close to Home in Camden.

Fear Of Music
Fear of Music was always going to be special because of its venue, The Montague Arms, one of London’s greatest pubs. Formerly owned by a taxidermist, it’s one of those treasure-trove places where the walls are crammed full of strange objects, ranging from animal heads to rowing boats and pirate flags. To add to the unique atmosphere the staff are all 70 if they’re a day. Ian, Wil, Leaf, Laurie and Saam ran the monthly night with a refreshingly down-to-earth passion, putting on live bands on the tiny Montague stage and DJing a mixture of electro, indie rock and rave classics which incited a busy, sweaty dancefloor. Over the past two years, they’ve had acts such as Clor, Lady Sovereign, Ladyfuzz and DFA 1979 playing live, and the likes of Rory Phillips, Soul Jazz and the Gucci Soundsystem as guest DJs. The crowd were a great mixture of people, presumably a number of nearby Goldsmiths’ students, everyone looking great, and behaving like an unpretentious crowd having a drunken party in a pub, which is what it was. Ian and Wil are off travelling so the night finishes at the end of the year, but Leaf and Laurie will be starting up a new, similar night next year. Let’s hope they can continue that mixture of cool people, underground party music and being served beer by your grandmother standing next to a stuffed animal head.

Adventures Close to Home
Another monthly night, spiritually similar to Fear of Music, but held in the Camden Barfly, which has a separate upstairs room for the two live bands they had every month, while DJs play downstairs. ACTH founders Choaf and Ill Will showed spot-on A&R skills throughout the year in booking bands, always seeming to book the people that a few months later were the buzz bands of the moment. Just recently they’ve had Larrikin Love, Panico, Plan B and Jamie Lidell, while they’ve got The Rakes playing their Christmas party. The DJing policy is similarly open-minded and veered from the latest guitar bands, electro and small doses of pretty much else you can think of. With such outstanding line-ups, the live bands felt the main focus, but once they’d finished the clued-up Camden crowd would drift downstairs and dance the rest of the night away. A great place to see the best new bands in an intimate setting.

Inside Out
Basement Jaxx, or rather Felix Buxton (Simon Ratcliffe rarely made an appearance) and Graeme Sinden put on a new club, Inside Out, at the Jamm pub in Brixton. It was unsurprisingly great fun, although didn’t feel quite as special as their previous clubs, partly because some of the house music played felt a bit pedestrian, and at 2.30 it turned into a slightly dull Jungle rinse-out. Graeme Sinden was a great find though, playing the sort of warm-up sets you’d expect to hear from Diplo. You’d hear the latest hip hop, dancehall, reggaeton, grime and anything else he felt like, while he occasionally dropped unreleased sonic bombs from his friend, Dave Taylor, better known as Switch and Solid Groove.

Trash
See the Rock section.

Live Gigs
One of the perennial problems of electronic music played live is the lack of showmanship. And the fact that it’s much more fun watching someone play an instrument that they can walk around with. Jamie Lidell solved both these problems with his outstandingly exciting live shows this year by being a showman, and making himself the instrument.

Usually wearing a wonderfully eccentric outfit, he built up the soundtrack with his own voice and liberal use of a sampler (and keyboards to sometimes bulk things up). He’d begin by beat boxing into the mic and looping that up to create a drum track, then hum a melody or two, sample and loop, add effects as necessary and then sing lyrics with his spine-tingling voice over the top. It meant that every show was slightly different and it was impossible not to be dazzled by the creativity of it.

He was also fortunate to be able to call on so much strong material from his album, ‘Multiply’, this year, although the songs played live often bore only the most skeletal of resemblances to the recorded versions. And the whole thing was set off by some great video visuals projected by his long-term collaborator, Pablo Fiasco. There is truly nobody else around like Lidell, and this is one of the great shows on earth right now.

Lil’ Jon came over from Atlanta for his first ever UK gig in January and while crunk just doesn’t have any of the same resonance as in the US where it’s best-selling chart music, he showed what a good hip hop show ought to be like. The concert went on for ages, with the great man passing bottles of tequila around the crowd, bringing his impressive protégé, Pitbull, along with him and generally hyping the crowd for hours with his preposterous but wonderful trademark yelps and growls.

Arcade Fire at the Astoria was quite sensational, a display of a really powerful, theatrical live performance, the perfect complement to their wonderful music. Panico came over from Paris for the first time, and were one of the tightest outfits around, only loosened by their lead-singer who prances around like a court jester and sings like a loon. They’re one of those bands at the moment who sound so good live but mostly can’t quite recreate it on record. And O Fracas and The Long Blondes played short sets confirming that a) they’re good live bets and b) they’re going to be massive.

The world of camp Norwegian metallers Turbonegro is a weird and wonderful one and you don’t have to be familiar with their music to enjoy the extraordinary performance that is their live show. You have to love any band that inspires such devotion it has a worldwide fanclub (the Turbojugend) who sport denim jackets with their regional chapter on the back. Turbonegro all look amazing, have a bunch of ridiculously catchy songs with absurd choruses to sing along to, and a lead singer who is a born showman with terrific inter-song banter. Ultimately, musically and lyrically, it’s tongue-in-cheek metal, but this band are everything that The Darkness ought to be, and pure rock n roll entertainment.
Gigs that were regrettably missed but are particularly worthy of note, are the Noisettes, Coachwhips and Les Georges Leningrad at Trash which were described as ‘literally riotous’, Soulwax Nite Versions and of course any Arctic Monkeys shows.

J) THE TUNES
As with last year, The ‘Nick Hornby High Fidelity heaven’ that the i-Pod has created means it feels ever more appropriate to finish with a gratuitously large list of tunes of the year. So with what feels like admirable restraint here are fifteen big tunes that deservedly made big waves, thirty that didn’t but should have, and two lists of albums.

The Anthems
Amerie – 1 Thing
Damian Marley – Welcome to Jamrock
LCD – Daft Punk is Playing in my House
Switch – A Bit Patchy
Ying Yang Twinz – Wait (Whisper Song)
Les Visiteurs – Snoop’s Acid Drop
Sebastian Tellier – La Ritournelle
Elephant Man – Willie Bounce
Three Six Mafia – Stay Fly
Sherwayne Winchester – Dead or Alive
Danny Weed – Shank Riddim (Wiley Remix)
Tomas Andersson – Washing Machine (Tiga Remix)
Arctic Monkeys – Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor
Skream – Request Line
Annie – Heartbeat (Alan Braxe remix)

Thirty Tracks You Need to Hear
O Fracas – What Jim Hears
Scout Niblett – Kidnapped by Neptune
The Noisettes – Don’t Give Up
NYPC – Jerk Me/The Get Go
The Long Blondes – At the Movies
Dan Sartain – PCB ’98
Patrick Wolf – Tristan
Jamie Lidell – When I Come Back Around
DFA 1979 – Black History Month (Braxe/Falke remix)
Benjamin Theves – Texas
Justice – Waters of Nazareth
Nathan Fake – Undoing the Laces
Chaton & Hopen – Life Is Wonders
Hothandz – Hothandz Volume 1
Sunship – Almighty Father (Switch remix)
Missy Elliott – Can’t Stop
Paul Wall – Sittin Sideways (S&C)
GA Girls – Georgia Girls
5th Ward Weebie – I’m Fuckin
Trillville – Some Cut
Imp Batch – Gype Riddim
Northern Lights – Wrong Number
Vybz Kartel – Crime Minister
Macka Diamond – Mi Nuh Dun
Richie Spice – Youths Are So Cold
I Wayne – Living in Love
Iwer George – Ease the Tension
Beat Fanatic – Amanhanga
Dizzee Rascal – Off 2 Work
Yoshimoto – Du What U Du (Trentemoller Remix)

Ten Essential Albums
Zilla – Reasonable Radio/Grinted Teeth & Brawlsville Mixes
Scout Niblett – Kidnapped by Neptune
Coachwhips – Peanut Butter & Jelly Live from the Ginger Minge
Daedelus – Exquisite Corpse
Last Logan Sama Rinse FM set
Optimo – How to Kill the DJ Vol.2 (+ Psyche Out and website mixes)
DJ Nuts – Cultura Copia
Damage Control Radio – Various
LCD Soundsystem – LCD Soundsystem
Arcade Fire – Funeral

Ten Quality Albums to hear
Diplo – Favela Strikes Back/XFM/6 Mix/Fabric/T5 Soul Sessions etc
Radio Soulwax – Essential Mix 2.1.05
DJ Shadow – Funky Skunk
Patrick Wolf – Wind Beneath the Wires
Jamie Lidell – Multiply
Skream – August 2005 Mix
Disco D – Funk Flava 2005 (Mix booty/baile/ghetto/b-more album)
DJ Sujinho – I Love Baile Funk
Various Artists – Before there was Crunk
Dan Sartain – Dan Sartain vs The Serpientes

N.B. As stated at the start of this piece, there is far too much music out there to be able to catch everything. Please forgive any obvious omissions.

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Posted by grlla

The Year in Music 2004

December 5, 2006

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover Franz Ferdinand or Kelis, but music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

a) Introduction
b) Diplo & Erol Alkan
c) Hip Hop
d) Ragga
e) Garage/Grime
f) House & Electro
g) Rock
h) Other Genres (Desi, Bootlegs, Soca, Reggaeton, Favela Funk)
i) Miscellaneous
j) The tunes

a) Introduction
It was a year of overflow. Technology and the increasing prevalence of broadband connections at home meant we had more access to music than ever. On one hand this was a source of great excitement, but the flipside was that there was just too much music to wade through – it became impossible for even the most diehard to feel confident they had a grip on every genre as in the past.

This was why the role of the DJ was potentially more important than ever, either in a club, on the radio, or through mixtapes, in showcasing the tracks that had slid through the cracks. The two individuals who kick off this piece did more than anyone else to do this, and their particular achievement was to do it in so many different genres and connect the dots between them. They seemed to delight in celebrating eclecticism – and with the tragic early passing of John Peel this felt particularly appropriate. Other DJs like Bobby & Nihal or Logan Sama focused specifically on their chosen genres, but given that the Desi and Grime scenes were so specialist, it was fantastic to have them sifting through and selecting the best tunes as they were not normally things you’d find in your local HMV.

The other major shift, obviously connected, was the i-pod effect. The issue was partly forced by the continued lack of strong albums (especially as ever in hip hop), encouraging people to make compilations (made much easier with mp3 players). This meant more of a focus on individual tracks rather than artists. Most of the best long-players of the year accordingly were mixtapes rather than artist albums, and unfortunately almost all were not commercial releases, but were either found as locally-pressed CDs in specialist shops or as downloads from the internet.

Strangely for all the possibilities of access, it often felt as though scenes were becoming ever more insular and closed-off, and much of what was written about them came from insiders who tended to be blindly enthusiastic to their merits. The collapse of so many music magazines (mostly because, not to put too fine a point on it, they’d become crap) meant there was a lack of a more outside objective criticism. FACT (which I write for, so may be biased towards) made great headway in establishing good underground music journalism, but we also really need a magazine that’s more frequent and has space for longer interview features.

b) Diplo and Erol Alkan – people of the year
Diplo was the great success story of the year, combining his own material with some stunningly imaginative DJing sets, as well as gaining a great reputation for the Hollertronix parties he promoted with partner Low Budget in Philly, New York and increasingly all over the world (China just recently!). His DJing combines the on-point Dirty South sound with dancehall, any other up-and-coming hip hop anthems, indie rock, electro, eighties pop, Bhangra, Baile funk, B-more house and his own hip-hop flavoured Soulwax-style bootlegs. He had an impressively prolific year and the scope of his achievements put most others to shame. Mix-wise, his ninety-minute mix for the Solid Steel radio show was an extension of a mix he’d done taking in certain DJ Shadow tracks and their samples, but with very much a Diplo flavour to it – and was the perfect introduction to his sound.

He found time to visit Brazil and investigate the burgeoning Baile Funk scene, and created a mixtape, Favelas on Stun, from the best tracks he found. It’s still a very raw sound, reminiscent of early Miami Bass and breakbeat, but with very shouty Brazilians on top, but there’s also the occasional bootleg gem: the final track is a cool breakbeat version of ‘Bitter Sweet Melody’ and another uses The Clash’s ‘Rock the Casbah’ instrumental as a backing track with a sixties funk track as a bridge.

Next came AEIOU pt. 2, a seriously deep beat-diggers excursion with his friend Tripledoubl, taking in all sorts of obscure funk, psyche rock, rare samples, and converting it into a creative and listenable whole. And then there was ‘Piracy Funds Terrorism’, a collaboration with woman of the moment, M.I.A. This took various acapellas from her forthcoming album and put them over various hip hop and dancehall instrumentals to create a street-style mixtape. But the killer came at the end of the year with ‘Live at 3D’. This was a mix seemingly done for a friend, and so had no particular thematic agenda, just an opportunity to selfishly play his favourite tunes. And it resulted in a stunning, genre-destroying mix taking in hardcore up-to-the-minute dancehall, grime, alternative rock amongst the hip hop, all beautifully mixed together. If you were looking for a short summation of great music in 2004, this was the thing to listen to.

With all this it’s easy to forget he also released his debut album, ‘Florida’, as well as DJing constantly all over the world. ‘Florida’ wasn’t the masterpiece that was hoped for, but it was an impressive debut, and contained some very wonderful tracks. ‘Diplo Rhythm’, his monster electro dancehall track, kicked hard, and ‘Into the Sun’, with an uncredited Martina Topley-Bird vocal, was one of the most haunting tracks of the year, her voice offset perfectly by the crisp Diplo breakbeat and freaky-sounding backwards psyche-rock samples.

It’s extraordinary to think that Erol Alkan has been running Trash for eight years, a lifetime in clubbing terms – for doing this and maintaining its standards he practically deserves to be considered a national treasure. In the last few years he has forged a separate DJing identity from Trash (which while so much more, is at heart an indie club) to play more of the electronic music he appears equally passionate about. Attending a Bugged Out! Event at the End this year, where he plays in the Lounge area, was a real revelation. The main room had Slam on, who ten years ago were one of the great DJ combos in the UK, but their pounding four-to-the-floor just didn’t stand up nearly as well any more. The Alkan set was dazzlingly inventive and so much more rhythmical, taking in electro house, techno, rock, breakbeat and his own re-edits. But above all, it was great to dance to and FUN, a quality which certain DJs seem to sometimes forget about. He was also, as ever, full of surprises – he even managed to reinvent dear old ‘Tainted Love’ by laying a hardcore Ghetto Bass tune with a typically lewd lyric over the instrumental, turning it into a hard, dirty, bumping electro bass tune.

Together, Diplo and Erol supplied almost all the exciting new music you needed to hear this year, an extraordinary feat considering the range available, and you felt they were really helping to push things forward.

c) Hip Hop – heading down South
Following on from last year, the Dirty South completely ran things this year for interesting and innovative hip hop. The East and West coast threw up the odd great moment, but overall there wasn’t much to write home about. West Coast anthem-that-should-have-been was 213’s ‘Another Summer’. This was the reunion of Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, and Warren G, and had a startling, summer-soaked, almost drumless production from Kanye West, the smoothest lyrical flow from Snoop, and a stunning sung female soul chorus. This somehow slipped through the net but is truly a future classic. Of course on the East coast the big tune was Terror Squad’s ‘Lean Back’, produced by Scott Storch, which fully deserved its enormous reception everywhere, even if you’re sick of it now. And let’s not forget Jay-Z’s perfect rock-rap fusion in ’99 Problems’.

Following the extraordinary success of Usher’s ‘Yeah’ with its Lil’ Jon street production, the Dirty South sound, better known now as Crunk music, became a lot more commercially viable. However with its aggressive nature, hardcore beats and the simple fact that Southern rappers don’t come to the UK to promote (though look for Lil’ Jon and company at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2005), it’s still failed to make a real mark in the UK beyond the hardcore Hip Hop clubs. In contrast, Lil’ Jon is now an ENORMOUS pop star in the US, though concurrently has rather descended into self-parody. He still managed to crank out some excellent productions for others this year – especially the Ying Yang Twins’ ‘Saltshaker where the Twinz’ exhortation to ‘Shake it like a Salt Shaker’ is accompanied by a filthy bowel-rumbling analogue bassline. Petey Pablo’s ‘Freek-a-Leek’ was a nice twist on the crunk sound, adding a west-coast wah-wah guitar line to the mix to make it more female-friendly. Sadly, on his own album, the only really outstanding track was the Jamaican remix of ‘What You Gon’ Do’. The music was really pummelling beats and synth stabs, while Elephant Man and Lady Saw rode the rhythm in sensational fashion. The combination of Dirty South and Dancehall, two of the most exciting things around, could have been a mistake but was absolutely perfect here.

David Banner, the other star producer alongside Jon, had a quieter year, but the track ‘Ooh Ahh’ from his album that came out at the start of the year packs the same aggressively emotional punch that Bonecrusher achieved last year with ‘Never Scared’. And well, you can’t really go wrong with a repeated chorus of ‘Ooh, Ahh, Damn Motherfucker’. Another outstanding track that was criminally slept-on. Banner also produced ‘Rubber Band Man’ for T.I., a tune with an astonishingly catchy chorus which in a more just world would now be making a respectable impression in our charts. T.I.’s brand new album has one awesome cut, ‘What They Do’ which has a stunning smoky sax sample that sounds like it ought to be on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack. The jittery Southern beats and hi-hats combined to make another properly fresh-sounding tune.

The other effect of last year’s Southern success was that this year, a lot of the long-serving, under-achieving MCs got hooked up with decent producers and got to make some great tracks. Trick Daddy was the perfect example of this. Lil’ Jon did ‘Let’s Go’ for him which was a fun energy track but bordered on the farcical. Far better was ‘Fucking Around’ which pounded along on a cool fast tempo, and stood out from the pack style-wise.

One of those weird, very Southern tracks that was irresistible but hard to track down information on was Juvenile’s ‘Nolia Clap’, which was very slow and spartan production-wise, containing a skeletal groove, but just slunk along effortlessly. If you wanted to hear a hardcore Deep South tune, beats bass and a gratuitous use of high-pitched whistles, this was the best example.

Ciara heralded the ‘bubblecrunk’ sound i.e. Dirty South production made palatable for the female r&b audience. It could have been awful, but she got some terrific tracks from ultra-hot producer Jazze-Pha, the highlight by far of which was ‘Oh’, a slow, sweeping and brooding tune, packed full of emotion and cool, and another charmingly ridiculous verse from Ludacris.

The ultimate expression of the South sound came out as a white label and on various mixtapes, a dream collaboration between Lil’ Jon and Miami Bass (the key influence on the Dirty South) godfather Luke Skyywalker. It’s wise to be wary of these sorts of pairings, but it’s a pretty hot track, fast brooding electro with a lyric best explained by the title ‘Head Tonight’. It’s easy to forget that in certain Southern towns somewhat improbably it’s the popular strip clubs where you’ll hear the latest hot tunes broken, so Crunk has a certain commercial excuse if nothing else for its frequent filthiness.

The other really outstanding and original East Coast cut still couldn’t quite escape from the South – it was called ‘Crunk Music’, and this Jim Jones (of the Dipset mob) track was a suitable monster of a track with a bonecrushingly-heavy rave riff.

TTC slipped out an excellent album to general indifference – people seem to struggle with the fact that they’re French. Their track ‘Catalogue’ elicited the sort of reaction on first listen when you touch a live wire and get a shock – it was electrifyingly exciting punk electro hip hop. In fact, if it wasn’t for the language barrier, it’s exactly the sort of thing that would fit perfectly into the Grime scene, and pisses over most of the productions there. A pure energy song.

The Neptunes and Timbaland had relatively quiet years but aren’t quite done yet and snuck out a couple of classics under the radar. Jadakiss’s album failed to set the world alight after considerable US anticipation, but the people who’ve ignored it have missed out on ‘Hot Sauce to Go’, a sick, funky track with a wonderfully rubbery bassline that is by no means an obvious-sounding Neptunes production, barring the giveaway Pharrell falsetto chorus. However their big tune which showed they can still flip the script was the insane, tongue-clicking minimalism of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’. Meanwhile Timbaland put his all into Beenie Man’s ‘All Girls’ Party’, featuring another of those killer Raje Shwari-sung Desi hooks. He produced much of Brandy’s new album, the pick of which was ‘Sadiddy’, a dancefloor cut with Brandy’s awesomely weird but beautifully emotive voice. And finally, Jacki O’s ‘Slow Down’ was another of his minimal masterpieces he does so well, with occasional crazy sound effects (it’s hard to imagine anyone else making Tarzan yodels a key part of a hip hop track).

Finally, the outstanding hip hop album of the year that most people completely slept on was Devin the Dude’s ‘To the X-Treme’. It’s almost embarrassing now how ignored he is when he is such an extraordinary hip hop talent. Devin has a gloriously slack party-stoner-dude persona and just lazily kicks back and puts down song after song of charmingly languorous hip hop lying somewhere between a Southern and West-Coast funk sound. Please will someone bring him over to the UK and promote him – he is probably the most underrated hip hop talent in the world right now.

d) Ragga – All about the rhythms
Dancehall had yet another year of solid performance – it’s strange that it should seem boring when it’s thrown up a number of great rhythms and tunes, consistent quality is just so unusual. There’s a slight feeling of pressure to perform as following the success of Sean Paul, and Nina Sky’s smash hit rework of the Coolie Dance rhythm, producers are suddenly aware that one of their tunes could hit big. This has perhaps resulted in more tracks with simpler dance-friendly beats like Coolie Dance. But overall, energy, innovation and excitement levels remain high.

Blackout and Scoobay were probably the two most popular rhythms in Jamaica this year, with their three beat stomps, and in the former’s case, one of those ridiculous Elephant Man crowd-pleasing sing-song versions, where he mutilated the choral melody to ‘Staying Alive’.
But probably the biggest dancehall tune of the year was Vybz Kartel’s ‘Picture This’ with it’s subtly filthy lyric. Seeing the reaction to this at Carnival said it all.

It’s been a badly-kept secret for over a year that Vybz Kartel is the Jamaican most deserving of Sean Paul-style success, and he really reinforced this during 2004 with a constant string of hits, resulting in an Autumn re-release of 2003’s debut album with the new singles added on. Less popular than ‘Picture This’ but equally infectious was ‘Badda Dan Dem’ on the Kasablanca rhythm. Apart from a low-down synth line in the chorus, this was almost entirely run by some of the toughest, funkiest percussion of the year in any genre, and a fearsomely sussed-sounding Vybz vocal. He also teamed up with Beenie Man for the big cut on Scoobay with the cheeky ‘Breast Specialist’.

The Red Alert rhythm was one of the more adventurous to appear, and Predator’s ‘Mad Sick’ was a standout cut with a delirious lyric. Musically it’s almost like a ragga-rave tune, hoover bass sounds over skippy dancehall beats, large dollops of energy and danceability, and not nearly as scary as The Bug. Also original was the Dancehall Rock rhythm – a fast rhythm that appropriately did sound like a fusing of these two components. It was mainly propelled by a frantic, jerky bassline, occasionally throwing in a wonderfully OTT Van Halen-esque guitar riff. There were a number of strong cuts on this – you could pick at will.

Another exciting rhythm was Ching Chong, especially Canadian Deejay Kardinal Offishall’s take on it, ‘Empty Barrel’. It was a masterclass in the power of ‘less is more’ – most of the time the track ran on a stripped beat and a nagging high one-note riff, but then sirens and orchestral stabs would punctuate it on occasion and occasionally the music broke down completely, in the sort of way a DJ will cut the music to hype people up for the anticipation of when it comes back in.

Of the other particularly strong rhythms, the Chrome rhythm was a sparse Eastern synth-led rhythm with Elephant Man’s ‘Jiggy’ just pipping Capleton to the post for best cut. Summer Bounce was a simple incessant rhythm that nagged its way into your head, with a weird squeaky keyboard and thumping bass. This was pure dancefloor tackle and Elephant Man’s eponymous cut was the one to have. Both of these could easily have been basic Grime instrumentals (one was used as a bootleg with Garage MC Lady Stush) demonstrating the debt Grime owes to Dancehall.

From a purely cultural perspective, the most startling rhythm was Junko (presumably named after the extraordinary Japanese girl who took the Jamaicans on at their own game and was crowned Dancehall Queen in 2002 in Trinidad, having learnt her craft at home by watching videos). The Junko rhythm was a reworking of Wiley’s classic ‘Igloo’ but with a thumping bumpy 4/4 coolie dance-esque beat. One can only wonder where this came from, but it shows how technology and musical access means that it’s possible to borrow influences so quickly and was a good reminder of Jamaica’s dazzling ability to assimilate as many different styles into its music, a key reason why it deserves to be cherished.

Unsurprisingly the Eastern influence remained on a few strong rhythms, particularly Aollo Aollo and China Claw. Viagra Dose aka Strip Tease had a cool funky 303 acid riff and an oriental snakecharmer flute-style sound propelling it along – Bounty Killer’s cut ‘Beauty Queen’ was the one you needed. And the Kopa rhythm was another simple but effective percussion-led rhythm in a Coolie Dance style, and unsurprisingly has been versed by Nina Sky for their next single, which may be poppy but is still pretty lethal on the dancefloor.

e) Grime – is wot it seems to be called
Grime is one of those peculiar musical genres that most people still haven’t heard of, although they might have glanced at an article about it in The Guardian. Weirdly its main fans appear to be either sixteen-year-old black kids from East London or thirty-something white middle-class music journalists. It’s effectively the mutant strain of Garage/2-Step that is known only by most through Mercury Prize-winner Dizzee Rascal, but it has been evolving at an extraordinary rate throughout the year and nobody’s quite sure where it’s heading.

Journalists have attempted to over-intellectualise it but the Grime scene in its current state is effectively a UK take on the 8-Mile MC battling contests. The producers have taken a backseat to the new generation of MCs, who appear on Pirate radio and at Raves, spitting derogatory rhymes in patois slang (borrowed liberally from US and Jamaica) about their competition. It’s aggressive, raw and dumb – in short perfect rebel teen music. And applying its newness, it exploits 21st Century technology to the max, the music is circulated round the internet or watched on satellite via Channel U (it’s almost impossible to emphasise the importance of U’s promotion of the scene) , tunes can be made with software on Playstations, and the mixtapes sold now come with DVDs showing recent MC battles.

Running the risk of descending into pretentious twaddle, musical svengali Tony Wilson once espoused a theory that teenage revolutions run in thirteen-year cycles. The Beatles in 1963, Sex Pistols in 1976 and Rave and Acid House in 1989. The next one was due in 2002 and there was some disappointment when nothing obvious emerged (though Malcolm McLaren suggested that this time it would happen through computers not music). But for a slice of idle speculation, 2002 was definitely when the foundations for Grime were first sown (e.g. Dizzee’s ‘I Love You’ on white label.

Reports of Grime raves make it sound scary but wonderfully exciting. You get a stage packed full of MCs, aggressively clashing and sometimes even moshing or shoving each other around, the sort of behaviour more associated with Punk gigs. The hot MCs right now (e.g. Riko and Trim) are focusing on fairly thuggish flows. The crowds unsurprisingly tend to be mostly hooded teenage blokes, and frequently the gigs descend into chaos as either the MCs and/or the crowd get so wound up a proper spat kicks off, and security are sent in. Accordingly there aren’t many promoters at the moment prepared to take the risk of putting on these gigs.

At the moment the scene is still tiny, and almost exclusively East London-based (though South London crew, Essentials, are starting to do big things), but the fairly fanciful suggestion here is that given the right svengali management figure and suitable media manipulation, Grime could turn into a multi-cultural Urban punk rock-style phenomenon and the perfect reaction to most current supposedly Underground music which is about as threatening as a field of flowers.

Most of what’s been written about the Grime scene has been by insiders or passionate fans – it’s very insular, so it’s been hard to get an objective appraisal. There’s been much about how avant-garde and exciting the music is, but this rather misses the point. There’s certainly some fantastic ideas being thrown about by certain producers, but at present it’s incredibly raw and unsculpted – the producers are learning on the trot, and will eventually hit their stride, but as long as there’s some beats and bass for the MCs to ride over, that’s all that matters – it’s all about the vocal energy and MC personalities.

As the above hopefully makes clear, Grime is actually much more interesting culturally than musically at the moment, but there are still some musical gems to look out for. Wiley, musical godfather of the scene, remains a dazzlingly talented and inventive producer, though its unfortunate he still insists on MCing as well – he’s awful and his album this year suffered as a result. There have been outstanding new instrumental rhythms from him recently, pick of the bunch is ‘Colder’, a demented cello riff sounding like it belongs to a Hitchcock soundtrack set against rave bleeps and sparse drums, with the odd gunshot chucked in for extra menace. If there’s one vaguely general theme to the best Grime tracks right now it’s a certain sweeping cinematic feel to the otherwise patchwork welding of hip hop, dancehall and garage influences.

The outstanding instrumental of the year from the Grime scene though came from Jammer and his track ‘Destruction V.I.P’. It was the best sort of new music – innovative, energetic and uncategorisable. It fused explosive stuttering and sizzling hi-hats alongside 60s cinematic brass stabs and surf guitar riffs to create a big ball of energy track. You haven’t heard anything quite like it – truly jaw-dropping.

The first ‘official’ Grime compilation is out in January called ‘Run the Road’ and it impressively rounds up most of the best and/or hype tracks of 2004, though sadly, allegedly due to financial wranglings, leading producer Terror Danjah removed his gunman anthem ‘Cock Back’.

Danjah has been an important producer in realising that the Grime scene needed some female vocals and softer tunes to get more girls back to the raves – however punk rock it is, you don’t want to spend the whole night with only blokes. His tunes for the Aftershock label, mainly with sisters Shola and Sadie Ama, fused sweet lyrics with freaky dark Grime rhythms to impressive and original effect. ‘With U’ (Shola) and ‘So Sure’ (Sadie and Kano) really stood out, the former sounding more like freaky future US r&b, and the latter being unusually light on drums and bass, relying on a seesawing high-pitched synth riff.

A&R people pricked their ears up no end to this, finally seeing a commercial element to the hype that has surrounded Grime, and you’ll soon hear ‘Gully’ with scenester Crazy Titch and Keisha from the Sugababes doing the chorus (getting her some ‘street’ credibility – though you’re actually supposed to say Road not Street now). ‘Gully’ is a reasonable template for tracks for the hot MCs in 2005, catchy and better-produced than much of the raw-to-the-bone 2004 grime rhythms (Alias who did this is one of the hot producers at the moment), but for all the heavy basslines, the tune is poppy and actually pretty cheesy.

Apart from ‘Run the Road’, the easiest way to hear Grime was either on key pirate station Rinse FM, especially on the sets of outstanding DJ Logan Sama, or through the unofficial compilation CD/DVD packs from Lord of the Decks or Sidewinder. 2005 is supposed to see more label mixtape showcases, following the outstanding one from another top producer, DJ Target’s Aim High Vols 1 & 2.

It would take too long to cover all the potential star MCs, producers and tunes, but to provide a quick list of the hottest talent and best tunes to hunt down:

Producers: Wiley, Terror Danjah, Danny Weed, DJ Target, Da’Vinche and Skepta
MCs: Riko, Kano, Taliban Trim, Crazy Titch, Dirty Goodz, Tinchy Stryder, Bruza
Tracks: Trim – Boogey Man, Big E D – Frontline (Da’Vinche remix), Target & Riko – Chosen One, Ruff Squad – Anna

And lastly, the Forward riddim aka Pow! hardly needs to be mentioned as by the time you read this it will probably be nestling in the Top 20 (though check the outstanding new remix with Pitbull), but it summed up most of Grime’s potential – any song that clubs in Essex ban because of the riots on the dancefloor that break out when it’s played has to be alright.

f) House & Electro – wot does it mean?
House is now at a stage where if a club says they play ‘House music’, it could mean practically anything. A bugbear of the year were clubs which advertised themselves as playing ‘Funky House’, which translated as the most unimaginative, ploddy and unfunky Ibiza-style disco-house. Hard House was the sound of the silent majority, with numerous packed-out club events, yet an almost total lack of media coverage and consequently more underground than most. Similarly when people refer to electro it’s far removed from it’s original meaning.

Electropop, for want of a better name, continued to throw up most of the most interesting house music but there were a lot of weak, lazy releases coming out. The odd outstanding track appeared, Mylo’s ‘Drop the Pressure’ and Tiga’s ‘Pleasure From the Bass’ were the two big tunes, but Zongamin’s single ‘Hotel 17’ was pretty special too. Jesper Dahlback continued to shine as a producer, and his funky electro remix of Panash’s ‘Jack 2 Jack’ with its ‘bounce cheque bounce cheque’ refrain always hit hard on the dancefloor. And Steve Bug’s Pokerflat imprint was one of the really reliable imprints for squalid, funky house and techno music.

Of course, Alter Ego’s ‘Rocker’ was one of those special tracks that gradually grew throughout the year, and achieved popularity with a number of DJs from different scenes. By the end of the year it had become a proper, thoroughly deserved anthem.

One track that didn’t fulfil its potential was the Optimo remix of James White’s ‘Contort Yourself’. Originally an early-80s post-punk no-wave tune, this outstanding remix reinvented it as, to splice a couple of faddish genres together, an electro-punk-funk-house tune. It was as good as this sounds (and considerably less ridiculous!), with a lethally hip-shaking bassline, and it was another of the truly original and exciting records of the year.

Hype new producer of the year was Mathew Jonson. Hailing from Canada, he released a flurry of singles, which didn’t always completely justify the praise heaped upon him. However ‘Behind the Mirror’ was an outstanding electro-tech-house track for want of a better description. That perhaps sounds bland, but the combination of evil sub-hoover-bass and electro chords and clipped beats turned it into more than the sum of its parts.

One track which was technically released last year but caused most impact in 2004 was Justice vs Simian’s ‘Never Alone’. The screechy one-line vocal was simple but effective, and the music was on the very funky side of electro. The chords on the breakdown were absolutely heart-melting and really sealed its success.

On more conventional house, the only real tracks of interest are from the established and long-championed producers.

Tony Senghore had a very quiet year, yet still slipped out possibly his best production to date, a bootleg remix of the Black Eyed Peas track ‘Hey Mama’. It’s a house tune but the beat bumps to give it an almost-ragga feel and a lot more rhythm and groove than most house tracks. There’s also a Van-Helden-esque speed-garage bass line, and the lyric works well. There’s so much energy overall, and it deserves to be massive. Senghore is still an outstandingly original talent, but he’s been around for so long now without making it big, that one wonders if he just can’t be bothered to play the game – he certainly deserves much more fame.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Stanton Warriors slipped out ‘Adventures in Success’, with a raucous tune with a hooky spoken-word lyric from one of the Rogers Sisters. It was a solid party tune rather a special tune with their usual almost-too-perfect production, and deserved much more exposure.

Basement Jaxx had a quiet year apart from a couple of remixes – one of these was one to get excited about and as per usual it was the dub where they like to go off on one, usually to the listener’s benefit. The track was N.E.R.D.’s ‘She Likes to Move’ and they manage to make the 4/4 beat just jack, while they do their usual kitchen sink approach of chucking in a ton of weird noises and vocal samples into the mix. This was a hard one to find, only appearing on a US promo, but is well worth tracking down.

One track that really cranked up the fun levels was Jeremy Sylvester’s ‘Whine Ya Bumper’, an outstanding slice of Soca-inflected house. It might sound cheeky to say it sounds like something Basement Jaxx might have done three years ago, but that’s actually quite a compliment. The drum patterns were much more soca-based rather than the plodding 4/4 that has become so boring, it had a rousing vocal call, and just had that electric Caribbean energy that set it apart from the rest.

g) Rock – there’s life in the old dog yet
Now that a number of people who got tired of dance music and have drifted back into the rock scene, it feels like we’re starting to see more healthy creativity in rock, and for all the impressiveness of hip hop production, it’s important not to forget that there is still no buzz like a really sweaty full-on rock gig with deafening bass, guitars and drums. The NME is not in an especially healthy state at present so the good stuff is not immediately apparent.

TV on the Radio busted out of Brooklyn with an impressive debut album – and the first two tracks were absolutely killer. Opener ‘The Wrong Way’ had disgustingly dirty, fuzzy guitars, distorted drums, saxophone parps, and sussed scatty vocals. On one hand it was great garage rock, but with so much more imagination, and even more thrillingly, incredibly funky too. ‘Staring at the Sun’ was the BIG tune, a slow melancholy guitar anthem. But then at the end of the year, a new EP came out with a title track, ‘New Health Rock’ that made you look up and take notice even more. It’s one of the funkiest, upbeat rock songs you’ve ever heard, and almost impossible not to move your feet to the drums. Startlingly original-sounding, in comparison the many so-called punk-funk bands had about as much rhythm as Cliff Richard.

The Black Keys put out another solid album of catchy blues tracks in ‘Rubber Factory’, but with the dazzling array of other offerings, and no particular progression from last year’s outstanding ‘Thickfreakness’ it was, perhaps unfairly, hard to get seriously excited about it, though it was a consistently enjoyable listen.

It’s great to be shown that amazing things can still be created from so little, and Devendra Banheart reminded us what is possible from the humble acoustic guitar, a good voice, and some great tunes on his album ‘Rejoicing in the Hands’. Sounding like some twisted marriage of Jack White and Marc Bolan, this was a great album to sit back and relax to.

At the other end of the scale, for cheap, dumb, disposable punk rock thrills, it was hard to beat The Bronx’s eponymous debut. Opening track ‘Heart Attack American’ encapsulated it all, screaming vocals, simple pounding drums, and demonic guitar riffs, but crucially, a great hook and a very catchy tune. Seemingly passed over by the press, it felt like the spirit of The Ramones really lived on here. Similarly, an honourable mention must go to best-label-name-in-the-world Shit Sandwich for keeping up the Punk Rock spirit, and producing a stunning single from The Tyrades. They possess one of the most extraordinary female vocalists you’ve heard for a while, think Ari-Up from X-Ray Spex.

The LCD Soundsystem album is FINALLY almost upon us, and taster single ‘Movement’ was another short guitar-blasting treat – one can’t envy them the weight of anticipation on it now from eager fans, but for the majority of people who haven’t been exposed to them, a treat is definitely in store.

And much fuss was made about a few singles from Bloc Party (an album is due early 2005). Expect big things.

h) Other Genres

Desi/Bhangra
Tigerstyle continued their gradual ascent on the Desi scene, with the second volume of their mixtapes, showcasing various hip hop tunes remixed to give them more of a Desi Bhangra feel, as well as a few excellent original tunes, particularly with the female vocal-stylings of ‘Jhumka’. Late on in the year, their remix of ‘Lean Back’ was their best yet, subtly twisting the original into their own vision and showcasing their outstanding production skills. It was followed by the news that they had finally resolved the legal battle with their former record label, so hopefully we’ll hear a lot more of them in 2005.

The rest of the Desi scene was pretty hit and miss, but the self-explanatorily-titled ‘Desi Hip Hop’ album threw up a few nice cuts, in particular DJ Stin’s opening cut, ‘Akh Teri’, a really weird but extremely infectious acidic hip hop groove. Producer Mentor put out a pretty smart official Desi remix of Timbaland’s ‘Cop That Shit’ making him one to watch, although his more recent collaboration with Hardkaur on ‘Party in Bombay’ was rather disappointing.

One mysterious white label that hopefully heralds healthy new talent was ‘Aaja’ by Taz and Timmy Vegas, a genius reworking of Westbam’s classic ‘Alarm Clock’, earlier ripped off wholesale by Andy Weatherall for his remix of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Glider’. This time it has extra Indian percussion added which picks up the groove more and a vocal, and taken as a whole, it’s an absolute stunner.

Bootlegs
The Bootleg scene has shrunk to a hardcore of devotees, and it’s not hard to see why. Apart from the lack of quality, the surprise and excitement is no longer present – initially it was still unexpected and exciting to hear a vocal pitted against a different instrumental, but it’s been done so often the surprise has worn off. For all that, the occasional great tune still appears. The big ones this year have included the marriage of Tiga’s Hot in Herre vocal with the Incredible Bongo Bands’ ‘Bongo Rock’ which confuses and delights in equal measure on almost any dancefloor, and a surprisingly funky cut combines an alternate mix of Windowlicker with Jackson’s remix of M83 with Khia’s ‘My Neck’ acapella bunged on to give extra sleaze factor, and an excuse to call it ‘Pussylicker’.

John Marr’s Toxic Rhythm was an irresistable energy track. Taking Britney’s glorious Toxic instrumental as a basis, it added more frantic drums, and a gruff, hyped-up dancehall MC vocalist chatting over the top, and so reinvented the track as a should-have-been Carnival anthem.

The real hype bootleg of the year, which eventually got an official release as a b-side, was the Columbus remix of Alicia Keys ‘You Don’t Know My Name’. It adheres to the golden rule of the best bootlegs in that it sounds like it should be the original version. Using the rhythm from Beres Hammond’s ‘Come Down Father’ as a backing track, it transforms the track into a sweet uplifting Summer reggae tune.

And having said at the start that I would not cover Kelis and Franz Ferdinand, I have to mention them briefly in connection with Thriftshop XL’s self-explanatory bootleg, ‘Take Me Out for a Milkshake’. This came out right at the start of the year, before they had become THE two inescapable anthems of the year – otherwise it would have seemed like a joke. It’s still strictly novelty but because there’s some creativity in the composition, it’s one of those guilty pleasures that you shouldn’t like but can’t help yourself.

Soca
Soca remains a much-maligned genre, adored for two days by anybody following a truck round Carnival and then forgotten by fickle listeners. But it has received a bigger boost than usual this year by the release of ‘Lif Up Ya Leg an Trample’, an excellent modern Soca compilation from the Honest Jons label with typically beautiful packaging. And it’s important not to forget Soca Gold 2004, the perennial faithful compilation with many of the popular tunes of the year.

There were also the cuts that are audaciously cheesy that somehow only in the Caribbean they can carry off. Certainly if it wasn’t so gloriously uplifting and possessing those frantic leg-twitching drums, Destra Garcia’s ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ would not stand a chance of getting away with using chord elements from Aha’s ‘Take On Me’! On the artist front, Dawg E Slaughter was revealed as a star for the biggest energy levels with ‘Bounce’ and ‘Trample’, while Maximus Dan followed close behind, especially on ‘Be Humble’ on the Dougla rhythm.

Reggaeton
Reggaeton was a buzz-word in New York this Summer, but many people didn’t seem to know what it meant. It’s effectively a form of Puerto Rican Hip Hop, and due to the large New York Hispanic community, seems to be really blowing up. There’s not a lot to really be excited about musically though, the main drawback is that almost all the tracks operate on exactly the same drum pattern, which isn’t even a particularly exciting one. You can imagine making perfect sense if you stumbled across it at a street party in Spanish Harlem, but otherwise you’re not missing much. The exception is the real Reggaeton megastar, Tego Calderon, who’s been described as the Puerto Rican 50 Cent, but is actually more politically conscious than ‘Fiddy’. Tego also supplied perhaps the most succinct explanation for Reggaeton’s success in Puerto Rico and ethnic New York, saying ‘It’s in Spanish and it’s easy to dance to’. He has two albums out, and the first ‘Aballarde’ is better. Some of the tracks use the standard Reggaeton beat but there are enough variations in between to prevent it from grating. And ‘Loiza’ is a professional exercise in the power of percussion, proper devastating Latin rhythm – a very special track.

Baile (Favela) funk
Another hype musical genre that music nerds got into a froth about and the rest of the world carried on happy in their ignorance, this is the sound of the Funk balls in the Favelas of Brazil. The parties are a phenomenon in themselves, big hang-outs for local gangs, the centrepiece of the evening often has two gangs forming lines with a small no-mans land in-between them. Occasionally brave or foolhardy members will go in the middle and try and fight off the resultant attacks on them from the other side.

The music was discussed earlier in connection with Diplo’s mix. It’s on a similar plane with Grime in some ways – the productions are raw and have a long way to go to compete with the best of what’s on offer around the world, but the enthusiasm and creativity are right up there, and of course it’s another musical genre fascinating from a cultural point of view. If you want to hear more, the easiest way is via the compilation from the ever-reliable Mr Bongo, though Diplo’s mix, while harder to track down, is stronger.

i) Miscellaneous
For all the excitement that Favela Funk produced in certain quarters, it seemed that people overlooked some Latin-styled music with similar energy closer to home. The Bugz in Da Attic collective are best-known for being head honchos of the broken beat scene, which in the past have sounded a bit jazz-noodly. But this year they produced two absolute stormers in Afronaut’s ‘Golpe Tuyo Calinda’ and ‘Carnival’. These arose from a visit to Puerto Rico where they recorded local musicians’ vocals and percussion, took the recordings back to London and reworked them, adding some serious bass, beats and other weird sounds. ‘Carnival’ is pretty self-explanatory, proper feel-good, modern-day Samba magic. ‘Golpe Tuyo Calinda’ is more original and even more exciting, using an almost early-90s-sounding Sheffield-bleep sound and a really rubbery sub-bass alongside the more traditional rhythms. For all the cultural interest of Favela Funk, if you were looking for innovative, Latin energy tracks, these were the ones to check. An album, ‘Hecho en Casa’, from the Puerto Rican sessions, follows in 2005 and will hopefully result in more coverage.

M.I.A. was a hype name to drop throughout the year, mainly because of the astonishment caused when her debut ‘Galang’ dropped at the start of the year in tantalisingly limited quantities. When people discovered she was an old flatmate of Justine Frischmann of Elastica, unsurprisingly tongues started wagging and she was launched into the music gossip stratosphere. Concentrating on the music there was the aforementioned ‘Piracy Funds Terrorism’ mixtape with Diplo and a double A-sided single, ‘Fire Fire/Sunshowers’ which was solid if not as exciting as her debut. Obviously anticipation is high for the album due in 2005, especially with Richard X and Diplo handling production duties alongside her original team. It’s got the potential to be a winner though and judging from the latest sampler, a proper crossover success.

DJ /rupture came out with a strong debut album, but unfortunately for him, the focus remained more on his outstanding DJing. He produced a new mix, the ‘Post-Election Mix’ which after Diplo’s ‘3D mix’ was the most exciting genre-welding of the year. It kicked off with Beyoncé’s ‘Baby Boy’ but after a minute this was chucked into a Magimix blender and distorted snippets ran alongside into a ferocious drum & bass workout. Rupture is another US DJ who has seen the possibilities in Grime, and ran hip hop acapellas over Grime instrumentals in the mix. This was a wonderful example of what a mixtape should be about.

Two future DJ stars that emerged this year were ‘Zilla and Kool DJ Tron. ‘Zilla has produced a couple of stunning mixes using about a hundred tracks in an hour, weaving loops from one track over another and particularly enjoying using hip hop acapellas over unlikely electronic tracks like Autechre. Etienne Tron with co-conspirator Johann produced the wonderfully absurd Radio Clit, a series of mixes with banter from them covering many bases but again showing imagination, it was the only place you’d hear Whitey and Dizzee Rascal laid on top of each other in a mix, and they were happy to chuck in Guns & Roses, Dirty South tunes, Britney Spears and many other surprises.

Teedra Moses was a new soul diva that deserves to be mentioned for ‘Be Your Girl’, the first track on her debut album called ‘Complex Simplicity’ . It was traditional soul fare, but she’s got a stunning voice and on this track, the beats and haunting piano riff were reminiscent of a vintage DJ Spinna production from the golden period of independent hip hop.

Max Sedgley was covered in last year’s review, but the single’s full release and accompanying fanfare was this year. However I don’t think there’s really anything else I can add about its genius.

A lot of fuss in hip hop and Gilles Peterson-friendly circles was made about the Swedish production collective involved in the GAMM label, and they pumped out a lot of singles this year, but while there were some obvious crowd-pleasing moments, it generally sounded like tired retro cut-up beat excursions.

And finally, Bjork managed to reinvent her musical style yet again and produced an almost entirely acapella album, ‘Medulla’, with the editing help of Pro-Tools and various producers. Many people found it hard to stomach, but after a few listens, it emerged as another essential listen and a thrilling demonstration of what is possible by combining old and new technologies.

j) Tunes
The ‘Nick Hornby High Fidelity heaven’ that the i-Pod has created means it feels ever more appropriate to finish with a gratuitously large list of tunes of the year. So with what feels like admirable restraint here are ten big tunes that deservedly made big waves, twenty-five that didn’t but should have, and ten ‘albums’, which in fact are mostly mixtapes.

The 10 Big Tunes
Lethal B – Pow! aka The Forward Riddim
Elephant Man – Bun Bad Mind
Alter Ego – Rocker
M.I.A. – Galang Galang
Terror Squad – Lean Back
Max Sedgley – Happy
Mylo – Drop the Pressure
Vybz Kartel – Picture Me and You
Snoop Dogg – Drop It Like It’s Hot
Alicia Keys – You Don’t Know My Name (Columbus remix)

Twenty-Five Tracks You Need to Hear (in no order)
213 – Another Summer
David Banner – Ooh Ahh
Jadakiss – Hot Sauce to Go
Vybz Kartel – Badda Dan Dem
Mathew Jonson – Behind the Mirror
TV on the Radio – New Health Rock
Afronaut – Golpe Tuyo Calinda
Tigerstyle – Punjabi’s Lean Back
James White – Contort Yourself (Optimo remix)
Diplo – Into the Sun
Taz and Timmy Vegas – Aaja
Ciara – Oh
Tego Calderon – Loiza
Petey Pablo – What You Know About It
John Marr – Toxic rhythm
Lil Jon – What You Gon Do (JA remix)
Devin the Dude – Freak
Predator – Mad Sick
Jammer – Destruction V.I.P.
Justice vs Simian – Never Be Alone
Dawg E Slaughter – Bounce
DJ Stin – Akh Teri
TTC – Catalogue
Brandy – Sadiddy
Jim Jones – Crunk Music

Ten Albums
Diplo – Live at 3D
DJ Rupture Post-Election mix
Various Solid Steel Mixes
Logan Sama Sidewinder Bonus Mix CD
Southern Smoke – Various Volumes
Devin the Dude – To The Xtreme
Bjork – Medulla
Black Keys – Rubber Factory
Vybz Kartel – Up to Di Time
Devendra Banheart – Rejoicing in the Hands

NB As was stated at the start of this piece, there is far too much music out there to be able to catch everything, and somehow drum & bass was completely overlooked this year, hopefully mainly because there wasn’t enough of interest overall going on (most tech-step still sounds so boring), but doubtless there were a few killer tunes buried somewhere which will have been missed. DJ Bailey and the Inperspective label were meant to be the talents to check.

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Posted by grlla

The Year in Music 2003

December 5, 2006

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover 50 Cents or the Strokes, but new music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

Contents
a) Hip Hop – the rise of the Dirty Dirty South
b) Ragga – the Eastern influence prevails
c) House – hanging in there but running out of steam?
d) Garage – Dizzee with disbelief
e) Bhangra – exciting but still finding its feet
f) Rock – we see the punk but where’s the funk?
g) Bootlegs – that joke isn’t funny any more
h) Miscellaneous stuff
i) Clubs – absentee note
j) Top 20 Tracks of the Year and Top Five Albums

Hip Hop: the Rise of the Dirty Dirty South
There has been some terrific hip hop produced this year across the board, but most of the freshest sounds came from the South, which managed to perfect its unique take on the genre. It was slower than what you were used to, making liberal use of skittery, hissing hi-hats in the percussion, in an almost slowed-down electro fashion, and the sort of bass that could almost be labelled a WMD. This was usually coupled with lyrics that more often or not concern pimping or partying. Whatever, there were three real anthems of the year that brought it out into the open, Bonecrusher’s ‘Never Scared’ with possibly the most passionate vocal delivery of the year, David Banner’s ‘Like a Pimp’, with Lil’ Flip’s lethal laidback drawl, and the King of Crunk himself, Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boyz ‘Get Low’. Lil Jon’s production was the heaviest around, also showcased stunningly on the Young Bloodz’ ‘Damn’, which used completely out-there sci-fi synths and beats and had a deliriously brilliant rhyme from Ludacris on the remix. The important thing to remember about this sound is that it’s meant to be party music, not avant-garde electronica. For all that it sounds like a cross between the two, the key was just not to take it too seriously, as there was much about it, both lyrically and musically, that was gloriously preposterous.

In more standard hip hop, Missy Elliott on her best form later created her own version of Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’, the fizzy, filthy ‘Put it in your Mouth’, a hilarious and no-holds-barred ode to cunnilingus complete with eye-popping sound effects! The heavily-hyped Joe Buddens used the same horn-fuelled recipe as Beyonce with his track ‘Pump It Up’, but his album didn’t quite deliver the promise of his classic, gritty debut, ‘Focus’. The other big trend was for handclaps, probably appropriated from Jamaica and the Diwali rhythm, but you found them on a hell of a lot of hip hop tracks, generally successfully. Most interesting and fresh hip hop track was probably the Young Gunz’ Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop’, a minimal 80s throwback track that you wouldn’t have expected to hail from Jay-Z’s camp. It was later beefed up in a remix with the most extraordinary sub-bass that just lurked throughout the track like a nuclear submarine.

Other enjoyable and interesting tracks included Juelz Santana’s ‘Dipset’, which bulldozed its way into your consciousness with its grinding groove and constant repetition of the title in the chorus. Lil Mo’s second single with Fabolous, ‘4 Ever’, was a big disappointment but was rescued by a little-known remix by Midi Mafia who replaced Fabolous with Babycham and injected a huge dollop of devastating synth spurts and handclaps to turn it into a massive dancefloor track. And while the Rawkus independent reign may be over, they’re still capable of some great singles, particularly with Talib Kweli’s ‘Get By’ which deserved to be much bigger, produced by Kanye West, the man who was much feted this year for his Jay-Z collaborations. The Outkast album had people divided about which was better, but there were undeniably many great moments throughout both.

The Neptunes kept doing what they do, with more commercial and same-y collaborations than before, but occasionally spitting out something that completely blew you away and redefined the standards. This year the three stunners were Busta Rhymes ‘Light Your Ass on Fire with it’s mad electro-hop feel, the startling energy and percussion of Kardinal Offishall’s ‘Belly Dancer’ and their sci-fi-rave-funk music for the Nike basketball advert which was bootlegged as a 50 Cent remix. Timbaland had a quieter year, with Lil Kim’s ‘The Jump Off’ being his club tune of the year, if not up to his usual radical standards. His most notable tune was surprisingly the very wonderful and warped pop song, Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’. For the future, his work with Indian singer Raje Shwari hinted that he could come up with some devastating Bhangra/Hip Hop tunes for her next year.

Independent hip hop was pretty dull and up itself in the most, althoughof course there were occasional flashes of brilliance such as in Diverse’s album ‘One A.M’ which dealt in wicked black funk rock samples and great rhymes, Danger Mouse and Jemini’s simple, skippy and catchy album ‘Ghetto Pop Life’ and the brilliant production experimentation and variety of Omid’s ‘Monolith’. Big Dada continued to be the most reliable label for innovation and entertainment with a slew of strong releases. Daedelus demonstrated he is definitely a producer to watch and I wouldn’t be surprised if he produces an absolute classic in a year or two. This year, his best was his instrumental album, ‘Reworking the Weather’ which sounded like an excellent approximation of how you’d like the next Avalanches album to sound. And Sixtoo similarly looks set for big things with his forthcoming Ninja Tune releases, following his solid album, Antagonist Survival Kit.

Finally, Diplo was one of the most tantalising new talents this year, in that he built a big buzz with so little, and whetted the appetite for his debut album next year. He took a whole load of influences to create something new, but the two main focus points were Dirty South hip hop and the frantic Miami Bass sound. He was capable of switching between the two speeds, but always maintaining those banging beats, sizzling hi-hats and badass basslines. From an instrumental point of view, a lazy but not entirely unfair comparison would be to call him a Southern DJ Shadow, in that they’re both making genuinely exciting instrumental hip hop and have an overwhelming passion for hip hop. His first single for Big Dada took in a Dancehall singer as well to really shake things up. A new single, ‘Epistemology Suite’, has just quietly slipped out and first listens suggest he’s maintaining his high standards. Otherwise the only thing we really heard from him were DJ sets which were always exciting and genre-defying, weaving in ragga, bhangra and b-more house into it all. The Hollertronix parties and mix-CD he put out with partner Low Budget became increasingly popular and spread his reputation further. But from a purely musical point of view on the basis of what I’ve heard so far, after LCD Soundsystem, his is the album I’m looking forward to most in 2004.

Ragga – the Eastern influence prevails
After years of Jamaica producing some of the most exciting music around to a largely disinterested music press, Sean Paul finally managed to make people take notice and hit number one around the world. And ‘Get Busy’ was a great tune, a brilliant tweaking of last year’s hot Diwali rhythm. People woke up and realised that there was all this sexy Jamaican music in place ready to be discovered. For all that, nobody has really followed Sean Paul into the charts, Vybz Kartel is currently the most likely candidate if he finds the right label, and Elephant Man has been making inroads by guesting on some of the more hardcore Southern hip hop tracks that suit his fierce energy. The guest thing was a convenient way for the Jamaican artists to get broader exposure while the original artists could gain credibility, though this was pushed a bit far when Kardinal Offishall guested on a Texas record.

As for the music, it was another fantastic year for rhythms, the fear that the music might be watered-down to capitalise on Sean Paul’s success has been completely unfounded. There was a significant Bhangra influence, particularly on the wonderful Coolie Dance rhythm, which even had proper Indian chanting on the version, the Egyptian, popular for Vybz’s ‘Sweet to the Belly’, the Sign rhythm, and the hooky Hype On rhythm. The Hindu Storm rhythm was a wonderful track, but somehow none of the vocals ever quite worked to finish it off properly.

Of the non-Eastern rhythms, many of the best pursued the weird digital, electronic sound that has been around for a couple of years now, but is still effective when employed imaginatively. The 20 Cent rhythm, especially Lexxus’s ‘We Have di Gyal’ cut was a great example of this and the Ice rhythm was another one that sounded best in instrumental form. For a more rootsy digital sound it was hard not to love Natural Black’s ‘Different This Time’ on the Battlefield rhythm. And then there was the lethally simple and energetic Forensic riddim, which demonstrated the power of a simple pounding beat and not much else. The Lime Cay rhythm at the end of the year was one of those great slower rhythms that appear now and again that sounded unlike anything else, just from a collision of unlikely sounds including something pinched from the X-Files music, galloping horses and water splashes. There were of course many more fine rhythms throughout the year, but I’m going to stick there with just mentioning the absolute highlights.

Two soca records that really stood out from the pack were Maximus Dan’s ‘Danger’, a slow four-four number, with an irresistible combination of sirens, gunshots, digital high-pierced shrieks and Maximus’s energetic lyric. The big party record had to be the Buhlups rhythm which sampled the I Dream of Genie soundtrack, especially on KMC’s insane cut ‘Big Bad Dog’ with the barking, screaming and madness you’d expect from a Soca track with that title.

House – hanging in there but running out of steam?
Admittedly I was out of the loop club-wise, being in Australia all year, so maybe I missed something, and I certainly hope there were more good electro-pop singles on the Bodyrockers tip than I heard out here, but the majority of the house music I heard was unimaginative and just dull. After so many years, the constant looping of one idea over a whole records just doesn’t seem enough anymore. So thank god for people who got it right. The French continue to casually slip out perfectly realised tracks, this year Lacqueur was a new discovery with a beautiful and melancholy electro-house track, ‘Behind’. The David Guetta remix of Cassius’s ‘The Sound of Violence’ and Pepe Braddock’s remix of The Gotan Project had just the right ‘machine funk’ sound, the harder-edged house sound with the right level of energy and just a jacking groove that makes you move. And moving across the channel, Ewan Pearson had another excellent year of remixing, especially his glitch-funk take on Playgroup’s ‘Make it Happen’. Jacques Le Cont did a couple more of his Thin White Duke remixes (although for Madonna, it became a Thin White Duck) and they demonstrated his mastery of his craft, but the originals just weren’t strong enough for him to match the peaks of last year’s Felix Da Housecat remix. A real gem of a tune, ‘Defend It’ was hidden on an album by Savas Pascalidis, aka Scott Herren, best known for his glitch-hop work as Prefuse 73, which sounded like a more twisted but equally funky update of Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’.

With bootleg culture seeping into the mainstream, it wasn’t so unexpected that there were suddenly a ton of house remixes of hip hop tunes. Equally unexpected was that most of them were execrable, though Swag’s double-header of Busta’s ‘Dangerous’ and Clipse’s ‘Grindin’ bucked the trend and showed what was possible. ‘Dangerous’ had a slight broken-beat feel to it but with spacey electronic squiggles, whilst ‘Grindin’ was a wicked mid-tempo number with a skanking Ragga beat. Meanwhile DJ Cam summed up his record perfectly as ‘House Music with a Hip Hop attitude’, the track being ‘I’m a Rasta’, stripped down, thumping, bumping ghetto house music, with hip hop and reggae vocal samples making for a killer tune. The other track in this style that really worked was I:Cube’s ‘Can You Deal With That’ with vocals from an on-form RZA. It’s a stripped-down, jerky, jacking tech-house track and the cocky lyrics really made it.

Freeform Five only managed to slip out one very limited single this year, a teaser for their album next year. The A-side, ‘Electromagnetic’ was a very 80s but unmisssably Freeform, warped pop tune, fun and very ‘now’ but the killer dance track was tucked away at the back. ‘Have it Your Way (Freeform-reform dub) was kick-ass pounding, exciting house music, with a good tune, a cool vocal hook, lots of effects and interesting noises and above all, effort, all put into it. The new Basement Jaxx album revealed a slight switch away from house music, fingers on the pulse still, they appear to have anticipated the tiring of the genre. That said, their collaboration with Siouxie Sioux summed up pretty perfectly what electroclash should be about, punk energy a la ‘Where’s Your Head At’ and a totally sussed, sassy ice-cool vocal. And it’s a natural to sit next to the Freeform Five track.

Luke Slater produced a winner of a remix by overhauling an old rave track, Egyptian Empire’s ‘The Horn Track’. This was the only record that succeeded in combining two of my favourite things, an electro-house riff and Eastern instrumentation. Add a big fat Amen breakbeat in the middle and you have a wildly original track and total dancefloor annhilation.

As predicted last year, acid house was a buzz phrase, but not much new was actually done with it, although DK7’s ‘The Difference’ was a pretty decent acid house tune (although I wasn’t wild for the vocal). Otherwise, for general house music, the odd solid tune came from the same old usual suspects, the Classic and MFF stables, DJ Vitamin D and the Swedish trio (SenghoreVenetjoki/Lidbo). It was good to see Senghore finally noticed after all these years as he got some high-profile remixes, but it wasn’t his best year for his own tunes. And although it’s now probably overplayed, I shouldn’t forget DJ Sneak’s joyful funky anthem, ‘Fix My Sink’.

While it may be an unpleasant truth to some, the future of house appears to lie much more in the hard house and acid trance sound. It’s not something I’m familiar with and suspect the majority of it is horrible, but it’s what the ‘silent majority’ i.e. not the bulk of the London music press, go to clubs for these days as it offers much more of a hedonistic thrill to those who are too young to remember or give a shit about the original acid house ethos.

Garage – Dizzee with disbelief
After raving about Dizzee Rascal last year, I expected to be exhorting his album this year. And there’s a certain irony that I’m one of the few people who isn’t. Thanks to him winning the Mercury Prize he’s become bigger than anybody expected, but the real surprise is that the album was such a disappointment. It sounded very half-baked, the sounds just didn’t work in half the tracks, and too much of his MCing was repetitive and inane, which isn’t necessarily a criticism, but it just lacked the spirit that he’d shown before. There are still some wonderful tracks on the album but overall it was very patchy and bizarrely, his best track of the year, ‘Vexed’, was relegated to B-side status.

Meanwhile, his now ex-cohort, Wiley, continued to casually chuck out white label singles, some of which were very special and ploughed their own musical furrow. ‘Blizzard’ sounded like an Oriental Ragga instrumental, but with the unmistakable Wiley synth sounds. It was begging to have the right vocal, either Jamaican or a female singer (Martine Topley-Bird for example), to make into a complete and jaw-dropping track. ‘Pulse Eskimo’ was closer to The Aphex Twin than your average Garage record, an insanely manic and evil track at a frantic bpm rate. It was also known as the Gunshot riddim which is an apt description of the speed at which the beats come out. Along with Dizzee’s ‘I Luv U’ it’s probably the best definition of Punk Garage. And just recently Wiley’s ‘Ground Zero’ emerged, a delicately sombre piece with weird alien-sounding noises and percussion that darted all over the place. Three very special singles, it’ll be fascinating to see what he does next year with his album, although the fear is that he’ll MC on it, not his strong point.

Otherwise Garage as a genre continued as I wrote about it last year i.e. remaining interesting and underground. It’s just sad that this is partly because of continued trouble and violence breaking out at the big Raves, that the casual fans who enjoyed the quality commercial sounds have been scared away. Thanks to the buzz behind the Roll Deep Crew, the focus is on East London, and the other big hype act was the N.A.S.T.Y Crew, although having just lost their main producer, Jammer, it remains to be seen what will happen to them. The Forward/Croydon crew continued ploughing their path, and the odd gem crops up from them, although on the whole, they’re still tarred with the damning ‘Intelligent’ brush, i.e. technically stunning but rather dull.

Bhangra – exciting but still finding its feet
I know technically speaking Panjabi MC’s ‘Mundian te Bach Ke’ came out properly this year, but everybody was very familiar with it from last year, so I won’t mention it further. For me the year in Bhangra was all about Tigerstyle, the Glaswegian Bhangra band who are one of the most exciting propositions for 2004. Their single ‘Mele Vich Vajda Dhol’ was technically released late last year but I’m cheekily including it here as it was my ‘Mundian te Bach Ke’ this year, a madly energetic, Bhangra dance track, though with a little less of the hip hop influence. More recently, they’ve released a mixtape showcasing their productions. It is half original compositions and half their remixes of various big hip hop tunes. The hip hop remixes are all absolutely stunning, with highlights of ‘In da Club’ and ‘Light Your Ass on Fire’. Their own tunes are patchier but all show promise and one, ‘Put Jattan de Shakeen’ is a skanking bhangra stunner. I really hope they manage to develop and deliver the goods next year with what I know they’re capable of. My other big tune of the year was Kulwinder Dhillon’s ‘Kacherian Ch Mele’, another more traditional track that was perfect for the dancefloor. But elsewhere, a lot of Bhangra just went over my head, I couldn’t deal with the production, or the cheesy sounds and vocals and the best representation of the genre’s potential was shown on the second CD of the Panjabi Hit Squad’s mix-album, ‘Desi Beats Vol.1’, released on Def Jam. On the whole though, the energy and rhythms of Bhangra still make me see it as the genre to watch and be most excited about for the future.

Rock – we see the punk but where’s the funk?
DJs and dance music were ‘out’, rock bands were very much ‘in’, to the continued relief of the NME. And to be honest, it’s not surprising as many ‘headline’ DJs are so damn boring and old, not leaving enough room for new talent to emerge. And DJs seem to be in every bar you go into these days playing the same boring music at a low volume that no one really pays attention to – you might as well put on a CD, which to an extent has slightly killed the whole DJ mystique. Playing a guitar just seems sexier again and going to a live gig is more exciting than many clubs.

Punk/Funk was the buzz word to discuss, but most of it sounded like painfully bad experimental rock, and their idea of funk seemed… misplaced. Without wishing to state the obvious, LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Give It Up, appearing at the end of last year, was exactly what Punk/Funk SHOULD sound like. DFA the label/production team kept on doing what they do, becoming total style mag darlings in the process. Apart from their production work and label releases, perhaps the best overview of what they do was their very enjoyable mix-CD for Paris fashion boutique Colette, which mixed DFA tunes with others on their wavelength, past and present. They also finally sorted out The Rapture album, ‘Echoes’, which came out to very mixed reviews, and I couldn’t get very excited about myslef. A solitary LCD Soundsystem single, ‘Tribulations’, mysteriously emerged from the internet (new single ‘Yeah’ arrived just too late for my deadline), right up to the excellent standards of the previous two, whetting the appetite even more for that debut album.

My most enjoyable rock album this year was the Black Keys ‘ThicknessFreakness’. It’s not radical stuff, but then most rock isn’t. But for a really raw, grungey-blues sound with a stunning gravelly vocalist, and consistently well-crafted hooky tunes, they were the boys. And they really blew me away live, no frills, just real passion and energy injected into the songs. A guitar/drums two-piece, the White Stripes were the obvious comparison point, and it’s not a bad one, although I could never really get into the Stripes’ albums (including the new one), contrasting with their brilliance when playing live. More ridiculous, but still better than most albums I heard, was Bob Log III’s ‘Log Bomb’. More frantic, punky-blues than the Black Keys, and that shambolically loose feel that you can only really get when you’re completely in control, Bob Log has some mean riffs, and his own ridiculous anthem in ‘Boob Scotch’. Another person it’s crucial to see live, he is a one-man band/cabaret act and always wears a visored-helmet with a microphone inside to sing through to preserve his anonymity.

New York’s Ghost Exits put out an EP that hinted at punky/funky possibilities, with a slight Happy Mondays sensibility and more of a groove than most. It felt like a work in progress with one really strong track and the others possessing interesting ideas, but they’re worth watching. The same was true of the Moving Units, although they were more angular-rock than funk. The first track on their EP, ‘Between Us and Them’ was a great tune so they’re another name to keep an eye on. Aidan Smith was anointed ‘the new Badly Drawn Boy’, helpfully being on the behatted one’s record label and true to form released two lo-fi EPs of very sweet tunes, the highlight being the daft but endearing love ditty, ‘Song to Delia Smith’. Whitey put out a couple of interesting singles of dirty electronic grunge rock, that like LCD could fit equally into a rock or club setting, and there was just a somehow convincing enough buzz about them to persuade me they’re capable of doing great things next year.

Best new record label name by a mile was the exquisitely titled Shit Sandwich Records. A small Chicago operation putting out some great stripped-down rock and roll seven-inches and cool silk screen-printed sleeves, the snotty punk attitude reminding me of early Sub Pop. And Norah who runs the operation was a star sorting out copies to Australia for me. And they have a real talent in the Fuses, who separately put out another great single, ‘Jazz Makes Me Nervous’. Other newish bands that received column inches included the 22-20s, Stellastarr*, Erase Errata (and most bands on New York’s Troubleman Unlimited label), Kaito, The Futureheads, Scout Niblett, The Rocks and The Hells though to be honest, I haven’t heard enough of them to deliver a proper verdict.

The best rock pop bubblegum tune of the year was The Fountains of Wayne’s ‘Stacy’s Mom’ which was cemented by the genius video, endearingly visualising the 13-year-old narrator’s crush on an older woman. The Darkness went from music industry in-joke to nation-conquerers in twelve months. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs put out a solid debut album if you could listen to it without being suffocated by the press hype. And the other ‘big new band’, Jet became the Stones to Oasis’s Beatles. They wrote undeniably catchy songs and were a powerful force live, or good to hear on the radio but I found the album a bit hard to listen to in full, just too polished-sounding.

Bootlegs – that joke isn’t funny anymore
There was less of a bootleg buzz this year after last year’s saturation point, and the collapse of the website rendezvous, Boom Selection (which recently restarted in a more casual capacity). The main problem was that bootlegs began to become so ubiquitous that it was almost more of a novelty to hear the originals, so the whole point of a bootleg became rather irrelevant. They were still churned out though, and again the vast majority were terrible. There were also a glut of more commercial ones, where the accapella of one current hip hop tune was shoved on top of another, which missed the point of ‘proper bootlegging’ (if there is such a thing) where one track recontextualises the other. These tracks were mildly entertaining for about one listen in a club setting and that was it. Possibly the bootleg apex came with Mr Dibb’s ‘Uh Oh, Bollywood’ which married Lumidee’s vocal to the Jamaican Bollywood rhythm. Meaning it had the vocal of a hip hop track that ripped off a dancehall track over a dancehall instrumental that ripped off a hip hop track. Pop was really eating itself there.

The more established bootleggers from last year, like Soundhog and Go Home Productions, to whom it was all slightly old hat showed their boredom by mashing three or four tracks together into one. This could be clever, but didn’t really make for particularly good listening – there was just too much going on and even with their technical skills it got messy. Nuffwish, creators of the seminal Reggae Angie Stone bootleg last year, put out two more Jamaican-tinged singles. The second one wasn’t much cop, but the third had quality skanking versions of Missy Elliott and Blu Cantrell and while not classic like the first one, was very much worth hearing. And the wonderfully-named Red Astaire put out a simple but non-obvious and entertaining bootleg with ‘Follow Me’, taking a D’Angelo soulful vocal and putting it over a latin-lite bossa tune, which bopped along nicely.

But the really impressive new talent was Smash, although he did a few bootlegs and then sensibly vanished to make some original music. Not all the bootlegs were particularly exciting, although they were always executed perfectly, unlike so many other people, but the surprise hit was an unlikely combination of Soundgarden and Joni Mitchell. The result was a hauntingly melancholy grunge rock ballad with the chord changes of the song suiting the vocal so beautifully you’d have sworn the two tracks were meant for each other, showing that the the genre still occasionally twitches with life.

Miscellaneous stuff
Well there’s not much I haven’t covered that I wanted to, but there are a couple of tracks that stood out from the pack in other genres. Firstly was Rhythm and Sound’s ‘Mash Down Babylon’. Part of the Basic Channel empire, Rhythm and Sound singles slipped out so smoothly and with classic Underground Resistance style press secrecy, that they generally didn’t get the press they deserved. Pretty much doing their own thing, it’s rootsy reggae vocals, but underpinned by heavily dubby skanking digital techno music. Most of their singles have been excellent, but ‘Mash Down Babylon’ just had sounds and vocals that gave you that crucial ‘shiver down the spine’ sensation to elevate it to the top.

Max Sedgley’s ‘Happy’ was a complete party monster of a track, that’s now been picked up for UK release and so should become much better known next year. It’s the blaxploitation dancefloor track you’ve always dreamed about, starting off pretty big, and then just getting bigger and bigger right the way through it. Propelled by a brass section that was hornier than Hugh Hefner on heat, it was irresistibly funky, and showed that the older genres still have some life in them yet.

The Junior Boys were heralded by those supposedly in the know as a wonderful fusion of cool influences, but I’m afraid to say the end result on their debut EP was jerky, glitchy microhouse that as ever was technically impressive but I found hard to love.

I have to confess I listened to very little drum and bass this year, but did very much enjoy what was generally perceived the big tune of the year, Jonny L’s ‘Let’s Roll’, which combined a nagging riff, fierce rolling drums and a genius use of a George W Bush speech as a vocal sample.

Clubs – absentee note
I’m afraid to say that I found it hard to get excited about the Sydney Club Scene this year, and not having been in London, there’s not much I can say about clubs this year.

Top 20 Tracks of the Year (in no order)
Kardinal Offishall – Belly Dancer
LCD Soundsystem – Tribulations
Tigerstyle – Mele Vich Vajda Dhol
Busta Rhymes ft. Pharell – Light Your Ass on Fire
Wiley – Pulse Eskimo aka Gunshot Riddim
Black Keys – Have Love, Will Travel
Basement Jaxx ft Siouxie Sioux – Kish Kash
Maximus Dan – Danger
Missy Elliott – Put it in Your Mouth (Crazy in Love Remix)
Bonecrusher – Never Scared
Lil Jon & the East Side Boys – Get Low (Remix)
Young Gunz – Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Remix)
Pickney – Mi Love (Forensic)
Elephant Man – Fuck You Sign (Sign)
Cassius – Sound of Violence (David Guetta Mix)
Egyptian Empire – The Horn Track (Luke Slater’s Khufu Mix)
Rhythm & Sound – Mash Down Babylon
Max Sedgley – Happy
Bob Log III – Boob Scotch
Dizzee Rascal – Vexed

Top 5 albums of the Year (in no order)
Black Keys – ThickFreakness
Hollertronix – Mixtape
Basement Jaxx – Kish Kash
Tigerstyle – Mixtape
Outkast – Speakerboxx/The Love Below

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Posted by grlla

The Year in Music 2002

December 4, 2006

As always, this is an annual review of interesting and exceptional new music during the year. It doesn’t cover The Streets or Eminem, but music you might have missed and shouldn’t have.

CONTENTS
a) Top 10 tracks of the year
b) House – Acid Boompty Boomp anyone?
c) Electro – Rotters vs Gigolos
d) Bodyrockers – Club of the year
e) Bootlegs – What the f$%k is going on?
f) 2-Step – Garage goes back underground
g) Ragga – Dancehall threatens to cross over
h) Hip Hop – No surprises but the quality continues
i) Clubs – Does size matter?
j) Rock – The New Rock Revolution saves the NME

a) Top 10 Tracks of the Year (in no order)
L.A. Rocks – Vitalic
I Love U – Dizzee Rascal
Nothin’ – N.O.R.E.
Losing My Edge – LCD Soundsystem
Pump Up – Sizzla
Silver Screen, Shower Scene (Thin White Duke Remix) – Felix da Housecat
Supafine – Daluq
Mundian Te Bach Ne – Punjabi MC
Wish I didn’t Miss You (bootleg) – Angie Stone vs The African Bros.
4 My People – Missy Elliott (Jaxx Remix)

(special mentions to Love Story and It Just Won’t Do for quality commercial house anthems of the year, Hot in Herre, Work It, So Addictive and Oops for great pop hip hop anthems) and Oops (Soundhog bootleg) – Tweet vs Jimi Entley for a stunning bootleg).

b) House – acid boompty boomp anyone?
The sound of Derrick Carter, still one of the best DJs in the world, that jacking, funky house music which he likes to call ‘boompty boomp’, really came to the fore this year, propelled partly by acclaim for his album and a number of great releases on his and Luke Solomon’s label, Classic. And 2003 looked set to produce a bone fide chart hit in DJ Sneak’s infectious Wash My Sink, an anthem of the scene. Eddie Amador produced some great singles on his Mochico label, dirty, raw house music for sweaty basements, all beats and wailing vocals. Another new talent was DJ Vitamin D, whose self-explanatory That Latin Track never quite reached its commercial potential, but also released some great tracks as The Floorfillerz, which consisted of more basic jacking tunes.

The real revolution was the Electroclash effect, when people realised that house music was getting a little… polite again, and needed an injection of something. And so some of the best house music this year was infused with techno, electro and acidic influences. Basement Jaxx were again ahead of the game, and their two brilliant ‘Jaxx Acid Dub’ remixes for Missy Elliott and Justin Timberlake showed their ability to keep absorbing the influences around them. But the track that epitomised the harder sound was the monstrous, dancefloor-destroyer LA Rocks by Vitalic, house music made by heavy metal fans.

The Swedish trio, Tony Senghore, Martin Venetjoki, and Hakan Lidbo continued to blaze the underground – they remain the best kept secrets in house music – soon one of them will surely produce an outrageous smash hit. Senghore’s triumphs were in This Is It, a truly twisted and original track that sounded like Basement Jaxx throwing their equipment around the studio, and What It Is, a proper song with a stunning vocalist but the usual Senghore warped creativity. If he develops more vocal tracks like this for an album, it’l be something really special. Anu Pillai’s Freeform Five project threw up some impressive unofficial remixes, a lot of people were shocked to find that the brilliant track they’d just heard was actually Natalie Imbruglia. His own single, Perspex Sex, was a disappointment, a case of overambition, although Ewan Pearson’s remix was one of the house highlights of the year. Freeform Five recently signed a new deal with Ultimate Dilemma, home to Zero 7, and as long as they keep their excesses in check, are capable of making an excellent crossover album.

Microhouse was much-discussed, but not actually heard much on the dancefloor, unless you were a very brave DJ or playing in an experimental club. I have to confess that I found a lot of it, well, boring. Germany ruled the roost, particularly through Michael Mayer’s Kompakt label, and the highlight of their year was Justus Kohncke’s 2 After 909, which transcended the genre to be subtle, smart and funky all at the same time. The one track that was the real floor filler, and probably the Microhouse tune best known by the public, is Akufen’s Deck the House, an irresistible chopping-up of sounds that sounded something like if Daft Punk were messing around in that area.

Finally, there were some silly but incredibly effective on the dancefloor house bootleg/remixes, for some reason mostly coming from Italy, the best of which had to be a genius reworking of Duran Duran’s Girls on Film, which surprised and entertained in equal measure wherever it was played.

c) Electro – Rotters vs Gigolos
People have been talking about an electro revival since the mid nineties, but this was the year it really kicked off. The more authentic end was primarily nurtured by Andy Weatherall and his associates, through his Haywire parties and the Rotters’ Golf Club label. The general sense was that the sound was getting harder and grimier throughout the year. The Radioactive Man aka Keith Tenniswood produced some filthy bass-heavy dancefloor monsters, and Tim Wright, producer of two excellent electro/2step hybrids for Novamute, was set to release more for Rotters in the future. The Detroit Ghetto Bass sound continued, ploughing its own furrow so it now seems beyond fashion, and was co-opted into the more general electro sets, preferably via instrumentals, as cries of ‘Mothafuckin’ Hos Git on the Floor’ can become wearing repeated ad infinitum. On a lighter level, A1 People emerged as excellent producers, the highlight of their album being the single Evel Knievel, which oozed funk and energy. And Carl Finlow was seen by many as the electro producer of the year, releasing a flurry of singles for almost as many labels.

The less ‘authentic’ electro sound was of course ‘electroclash’, which it seemed could sound like house, techno, electro, or all three if if felt like. And it was a refreshingly international new scene, with the main centres being Berlin, London and New York. DJ Hell’s International Deejay Gigolo’s label perhaps was the unofficial public face of it all, and Miss Kittin the overriding personality, with her breathy teutonic announcements. Tiga & Zyntherius’ Sunglasses at Night, and Fischerspooner’s Emerge were the anthems we all knew, and the compilations that summed everything up were City Rockers’ Futurism and Gigolo’s American Gigolo. But many other tunes popped out of the underground throughout Europe (With respect, America seemed more interested in the fashion/performance element ahead of the music). An end-of-night musical highlight was Jacques Le Cont’s (of LRD fame and currently working with Madonna) remix of seminal tune Silver Screen, Shower Scene. Kicking off with sweeping strings, it kicked into life with mechanical squiggles before an incredible New Order-esque bassline came in to finish things off.

d) 21st Century Bodyrockers – club of the year
This was one of those very special club nights, where the venue, the music and the people all gel together perfectly. The DJs were brilliant, and not the same tired faces who’ve come to dominate clubland. Erol Alkan showed he is a brillant and versatile DJ. Soulwax never failed to erupt the dancefloor with new tricks up their sleeves amongst their established classics. FC Kahuna and Damien Lazarus played quality sets throughout and the guests were always well-chosen and fresh e.g. Ellen Allien of the fast-rising Bpitch Control label and Tom Dinsdale, who as half of the Audio Bullies had a Top 20 hit in early 2003.

The crowd was brilliant – predominantly a mixture of the beautiful and not-so-beautiful revelling in distorted 80s fashion, but with no official dress code, there was no pressure to dress up, and freaks and squares happily rubbed shoulders, creating a hedonistic but relaxed atmosphere. The venue, Cynthia’s Robotic Bar, a long, thin playground made entirely of corrugated metal sheeting sealed the package, the perfect place for a club glorifying in futuristic electronic music. As the electronic displays throughout the club spelt it out, this was AcidHousePunkRock.

e) Bootlegs – what the f$%k is going on?
Bootlegs were really a hype thing last year, the highlights the Freelance Hellraiser’s seminal fusion of Christina Aguilera and The Strokes, and Girls On Top mixing of Kraftwerk with Whitney Houston. The scene carried on this year, fuelled by the extraordinary boomselection website, the encyclopaedia of all things bootleg-related, with links to most new tracks, and espousing the punk/diy ethos of the scene. The site’s creator, the_dr, went out in appropriately explosive style, releasing a triple CD of mp3s featuring 10 hours of other people’s bootlegs, many of which he didn’t have permission to use. The CDs created a lot of press attention, it emerged that the_dr was sixteen, writing content in between his GCSEs, and by the end of the year, the whole thing was over, presumably he had either got fed up or run off to a desert island with the CD proceeds. A great rock n’ roll swindle – Malcolm McLaren would have been proud.

The success of Boom Selection meant that in the punk rock tradition, everybody thought they’d have a go. And inevitably most of them were TERRIBLE. Luckily, it proved to be a fad for most people and by the end of the year the scene had gone back underground again. Bootleg releases or ‘Bastard Pop’ as it became otherwise known, lessened thankfully, and most of the best releases were only to be found as mp3s on the internet. An exception to this was Nuffwish’s excellent white label of Angie Stone married to a dub tune by the African brothers, which turned the track into a sun-soaked reggae lament.

Another bizarre situation was the Sugababe’s release of We Don’t Give a Damn About our Electric Friends. Arch-bootlegger Richard X had released a 500 copy only 7-inch including a bootleg Adina Howard’s Freak Like You over Tubeway Army’s Are Friends Electric on the other in late 2002. Some genius A&R person had the idea of the Sugababes effectively doing a cover version of the bootleg, replacing Howard’s vocals with their own. The result was a Number One hit and a lot of bootleg fans going, ‘What the f$%k is going on’.

There are still very few exceptional bootlegs, but two current stars are Soundhog and GoHomeProductions. Soundhog’s bootleg of Tweet’s Oops stands way out from the crowd. The vocal sits so well with the instrumental making it sound like it was meant to be an epic string-drenched torch song, rather than a pop hip hop tune and the music used was from a 7-inch release of 500 copies only which hardly anyone had heard and turned out to be a secret release by Portishead. GoHomeProductions tended to do sillier bootlegs, but some of them were either inspired and/or entertaining and always technically creative. His best straight track was Beyonce’s Work It Out vocal over a cut-up of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady, but funniest and most inspired was J Lo’s Jenny From the Block over Sir Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmas Time. You wouldn’t think it works but it does, beautifully.

The final element in the genre, heavily plugged by Boom Selection, was the club night Bastard. This is covered in the Clubs section below.

f) 2-Step Goes Back Underground
2-Step or Garage stayed true to its underground roots and while there were some great pop tunes thrown up, it continued to morph and evolve faster than the mainstream could keep up with. Controversy continued to follow So Solid, with the Home Secretary criticising their lyrics, but the copycat groups that were supposed to follow in their wake didn’t really come through commercially. Perhaps major labels were afraid of the controversy, perhaps they found garage crews less easy to mould than Pop Idols, perhaps the talent just wasn’t there. It’s most likely a combination of all three.

Once crew that did come through on the underground were the Roll Deep Crew, with Wiley releasing a flurry of white labels, hand-delivered to shops, full of twisted violin riffs and stark, uncomfortable beats. The Roll Deep member ‘most likely to’ was Dizzee Rascal whose single, I Love You, was had the dirtiest bass of the year (with some stiff competition) and the rawest lyrics. Punk Garage is probably the best description – it really didn’t sound like anything else. He delivers every line with passion and stands out from almost every other MC around right now. He is due to drop an album later this year and as long as he’s not a one trick pony, it should be one of the most exciting releases of this year.

The dubplate.net collective, comprising many exceptional producers, and the Forward club night didn’t quite live up to their promise. There is no doubt that Forward is an exciting club night, one of the few places to hear the outstanding sounds of Oris Jay, Horsepower Productions and Zed Bias, to name a few. There were some incredible singles released, e.g., the Ms Dynamite tune, Ramp, produced by Menta, Oris Jay’s Said the Spider, and Horsepower Production’s devastating electro-2-step remix of Elephant Man’s Log On. But by the end of the year, and exemplified by the Horsepower Productions album, there was a feeling that things had gone a bit too far, and the sound was becoming a bit too ‘grown-up’, or worse, the adjective that did so much damage to drum & bass, ‘intelligent’. The production was always stunning, but tunes were starting to lack the energy that makes Garage so exciting. Daluq’s Supafine was one that bucked the trend, with drums and a bass that just made you want to get up and dance straightaway.

Listening to the Pirate stations late in the year after a break was a wake-up call. The sound was predominantly sparse, bass-heavy, electro-tinged instrumentals, and sounded very fresh and unusual, especially compared with the more female-friendly vocal tunes of a year ago. It’s a dark sound, and obviously in part designed for the ease of MCs to spit their lyrics over. Unfortunately there still don’t seem to be many great MCs around, but the overall effect was of a scene going in the right direction, and well exemplified by Dom Perignon & Dynamite’s anthem Hungry Tiger.

g) Ragga – dancehall threatens to cross over
Ragga continued as it has for the last few years, producing tunes to match most of the best hip hop for production ingenuity with the ever-energetic deliveries of the top frontmen. However this year, more people started to take notice, and it even appeared in the ‘style barometer’ of magazines like The Face. The tune that kickstarted things was of course Sean Paul’s Gimme the Light, on The Buzz rhythm. Buzz was very versatile and also supplied a more underground hit in Sizzla’s electrifying track Pump Up. The other factor, almost the Jamaican version of the bootlegging phenomenon, was ragga versions of big hip hop tunes. The biggest of these was the Bollywood rhythm, effectively the instrumental of Truth Hurts’ So Addictive with ragga vocals added.

Sean Paul was subsequently adopted by the hip hop community, originally by everyone’s favourite producers, The Neptunes. He started off by appearing on a remix of Clipse’s incredible track Grindin’ and on a track on Beenie Man’s album, then did a remix swap with Busta Rhymes, and finished the year with his own major label album. Beenie Man seemed to finally crack the pop market after a long time trying, so Sean may have a while to go before his reputation is cemented.

Big rhythms of the year included Stephen Lenky’s smash Diwali (best known for its handclaps and in Bounty Killer’s hit Sufferah), Diesel (Elephant Man’s Passa Passa), The Return with it’s twisted Eastern violin line. Sly & Robbie’s Tabla rhythm preceded the hip hop vogue for Eastern influences. There were no new voices of note, but Capleton, Bounty, Elephant, Harry Toddler, and Merciless amongst others continued to spit out blistering performances at will. If you were to be really harsh, you could argue that there hasn’t been much evolution in style over the last few years, but like hip hop, when there continue to be releases of such a high standard, who’s complaining.

h) Hip Hop – no surprises but the quality continues
There were no shocks, not a lot changed stylistically, there were just some wonderful records released during the year. A few good productions from fresh talent, but the big tunes came from the same big guns, The Neptunes and Timbaland. Truth Hurts’ So Addictive was a gorgeous song, and a huge smash. Foxy Brown released the glorious Stylin’, which bounced along magnificently but was never commercially available because of record label problems. The same was the case for Joe Budden’s Focus. Brandy’s What About Us was one of those tracks where the instrumental sounds like it belongs on an underground techno label, with her r&b vocal a perfect complement.

Timbaland had the edge in surprises, incorporating early-90s evil rave hoover noises into his sonic arsenal and employing them to deadly effect on the extraordinary Cuttin’ It from Pastor Troy and Ain’t It Funky on Missy’s album. Another pleasant surprise was Ms Jade’s Ching Ching Ching, a beautiful but mournful tune largely composed of Timbaland and Nelly Furtado scatting. And Tweet’s Oops was another example of how Timbaland can make smash chart hits out of very weird sounds. Apart from the jaw-dropping beats and minimalism of Clipse’s Grindin’, The Neptunes’ stunning singles were the more obvious pop tunes, quintessentially with Nelly’s Hot in Herre, although N.O.R.E’s Nothin’, a more underground hit also crossed over into the Top 10. Most infamous tune of the year was undoubtedly Khia’s ‘My Neck, My Back’, the title being the start of the chorus which continues ‘Lick my pussy and my crack’.

The two other surprise highlights were seeing Punjabi MC’s hit Mundian Te Bach Ke eradicate dancefloors everywhere, with its traditional Punjabi rhythms, percussions and vocals with the ‘Knight Rider’ bassline and MC Pitman, a genius character of a moody, sarcastic rapping miner, who took the piss out of everything and everyone to do with hip hop culture (e.g. You had a threesome with the Krankies and they said you were crap) and mumbled his lines over big tunes of the year to create ridiculous reworkings. His simple trick was that he was genuinely funny. Pitman Says and Witness the Pitness were ‘helped’ by Pharaoh Monche and Roots Manuva respectively. It Takes Tea (aka It Takes Two) is due to follow imminently.

i) Clubs – Does size matter?
The great media theme this year was the death of superclubs, Cream closing, the Ministry of Sound in trouble, and a return to smaller, more underground clubs. One theory was that clubbing is just no longer as fresh as it was ten years ago, and an increasing number of people are content to just go to a bar with the manager’s mate spinning a few records. The successful small clubs not only had good DJs, but an attitude and the desire to try something different, inspiring people to make the effort to come.

Bastard was a joy of a club, a night devoted to bootlegs or bastard pop. It was full of the bootleg Punk Rock/DIY spirit and anarchic attitude with people being packed in like sardines into perhaps the smallest and sweatiest bar/club ever. Dodgy mixing, power cuts, raw bootlegs probably created that afternoon on a laptop, and on one occasion a man throwing slices of bread around the room, which gradually got trampled into the beer-soaked floor were the sorts of thing you might expect to find on a typical night. Bodyrockers had a Scottish cousin in spirit in Edinburgh’s Optimo that defied the logic that Sunday Clubs had to be chilled out. The resident DJs played an inspired mix of styles, and often used laptops and equipment to rework and remix tracks on the spot.

Such was the success of Bodyrockers and the electroclash concept, that it wasn’t long before rival clubs sprang up. The most infamous of these is Nag Nag Nag, now officially the club to be seen at. Unfortunately it’s in danger of succumbing to its own hype, journalists are writing about it constantly, there’s a scorchingly high celebrity count, and so there is an inevitability of a surplus of scene whores turning up and spoiling the party. But it was always more a New York style club in terms of its focus on outrageous dressing-up before music and in that sense is a revival of Leigh Bowery’s infamous Taboo night in the mid-80s, so there’s a chance the regulars will just feed off the attention and be inspired to new levels of audacity and outrage.

Rooty returned via three one-off parties during the year. They were excellent as always, and as usual a testing-ground for new Basement Jaxx tracks. Felix Buxton continued to be a thrilling DJ, ahead of the pack in discovering tunes, dropping the Punjabi MC track six months before it officially broke, Tayo showed he’s an excellent house DJ in addition to the Breaks he’s best known for, and Frank Tope remains one of the most underrated House DJs around.

(There are obviously millions of clubs all around the world, but sadly there’s not enough time to go to them all, so by necessity my club coverage is restricted mostly to key London nights).

j) Rock – The New Rock Revolution saves the NME
After 2001’s arrival of The White Stripes and The Strokes, the first two genuinely exciting rock bands for a while, this year saw a flurry of bands following in their wake, hoping for some of the magic to rub off. The NME, which had been floundering with the splintering of alternative music, not knowing how to cover rock, dance, hip hop under its banner when all those genres had specific journals of their own, jumped on what they soon officially termed ‘The New Rock Revolution’.

Twelve months later, the paper is back in the running and has become a bit too influential, having foisted some arguably dodgy bands on the unsuspecting public. So for better or for worse, we became acquainted with The Von Bondies, The Libertines, the Datsuns, Coral while The Vines capitalised on their promise of last year, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were anointed the great hopes for 2003 on the basis of two singles of minimalist angular rock and the bolshy sassiness and wild fashion creations of frontwoman Karen O. Genius novelty single of the year was Liam Lynch’s United States of Whatever, just a cool, dumb guitar riff with a dumb, cool lyric that finishes almost as soon as it’s started.

Queens of the Stone Age released another outstanding album, showcasing more of Mark Lanegan’s voice which is improving with age – he currently sounds like he’s got a direct line to Lucifer. Coldplay produced an album with some beautiful songs, and Chris Martin’s voice is undeniably great, although befitting their commercial status, the production was a bit staid.

But by far the most interesting developments in rock were heard in clubs as much as on the radio, and were the fruits of the scorchingly hot production duo, the DFA (Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy), released in the UK by Trevor Jackson’s Output label. The Rapture’s House of Jealous Lovers and LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge were highlights of many a dancefloor, but rock-y enough to hear at home. Losing My Edge also had some of the best lyrics of the year, somehow getting away with being too clever for its own good. Fingers crossed the albums, due this year, can maintain the quality.

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December 4, 2006

An archive for my writing about what’s gone on in the past year in music.

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