2007 that was (by Tim)

Well, as Tim said, it's already happened with Dario G's "Sunchyme":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY2OFztWiuY

a thread they'll speak of ages to come! amazing work here tim, can't thank you enough...

that said, no love for pilooski's edit of beggin'?!

the lex described a song as space battle techno in friday's guardian!

Stereotyp – "Keepin’ Me (Fauna Flash Remix)" -

Obsessed with this! UB-sessed! Sort of a less baroque "Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ewan’s Objects In Space remix)."

Still, it'd never occur to me to call it minimal (house) in any significant way. An interesting genre question - does the addition of soulful diva voices automatically negate the "minimal" and make the track something else, e.g. Euro house or deep house?

Ha ha Kevin I almost posted that for you on the Dixon thread, but thought it might be too stiff/euro given you liked the first 1/2 of the Dixon set more than the second. It also reminds me a lot of that Martin Buttrich remix of Tracey Thorn.

Both tunes are "minimal" insofar as they sound a bit like Kompakt or Mobilee tributes to early-to-mid nineties Basic Channel house records (see "I'm Your Brother" - billed to Round One - and especially "Find A Way" billed to Round Two).

They're mostly artier and less diva but some similar records from the last few years along these lines:

1) Rodney Hunter - Wanna Groove? (Christian Prommer Remix) - Prommer's a member of Fauna Flash
2) Sebo K ft. Prosumer - Moved
3) Hell ft. Billie Ray Martin - Je Regrette Everything (Superpitcher Remix)

But most of all (though not European or minimal), Armand Van Helden's "Conscience", one of the greatest and most undersung vocal anthems of the last ten years.

Ugh, I love that Je Regrette remix.

Dumb question, Tim, but is there any chance you might be able to pack all these songs into one convenient download spot...

the lex described a song as space battle techno in friday's guardian!

yeah it was son of raw 'a black man in space'. not very battle-y, maybe it could be playing in the cantina. one of my favourites this year so far too. pepe bradock's new one was mentioned in the same feature!

lex thieving, who'd have thunk

oh yeah and it was petridis mentioning the bradock! xp

The Lex has been saying he coined 'space battle techno' last year.

Hey Tim, have you heard Ewan Pearson's mix for Allez Allez?

I'd been trying to place where I'd heard that BtWS mix of Midlake, and it's on here, along with Hatchback, Kate Bush, Can, Vangelis... It's Ewan Pearson does balearic, kind of. Anyway, it's LUSH.

x-post Well it'd be pretty easy to debunk that theory. I like these memes until they become concrete and all of a sudden everything must be space battle techno. Or the actual amount of stuff that sounds like that is overstated.

i more prefer space exploration techno, like "ginger" by speedy j

I prefer techno!

yes me too. but sometimes i like to add adjectives onto words in order to describe them more specifically.

"welcome to Ronan's techno shop, may i help you?"

"have you got any kind of... dark, moody.. kinda.. techno?"

"we've got techno son, if you want something moody try the hair salon next door, nora's always complaining about something. good afternoon!"

xpost

Space exploration techno would still sound, well, "spacey", though wouldn't it? What I like about space battle techno as a description is it doesn't evoke any of those psychedelic signifiers. It conjures up cold precision, hard vacuum, trillion-year-old dying suns, galaxy-spanning civilisational conflicts! That sort of thing. Not sure how many records live up to this, though.

(This reminds me that I must read the new Iain M Banks.)

There's no sound in space so only silent records count as space battle techno.

haha@tracer....

I do like adjectives to describe things indeed, I just have some reservations about shoehorning stuff into them I guess.

It's not a trend surely? I've never been to a night where they play stuff that sounds like "Then & Before" and "Seven" and "In The Trees" (insert remix credits as required) for more than a track or two at a time. Mind you I haven't been out that much in the last six months!

If we're gonna talk etymology, credit to Vahid: I think he started a thread asking about "deep space techno" or something along those lines, mentioning some of the Carl Craig mixes and Villalobos's remix of "Cell Phone's Dead" (which is less "battle" and more "the engine's broken and our spaceship is gliding through an asteroid belt very slowly").

I would have thought it goes without saying that "space battle techno" is a pretty ridiculous sub-genre term for any context other than a music message board - I kind of enjoy using ridiculous terminology.
And abstract situation descriptions like that never catch on. There's a reason that dance music likes words like "minimal", "deep", "funky", "bouncy", "intelligent". "Haircut house" and ""hairdresser house" are the closest perhaps, and even then such titles tend to be functionalist and perjorative (I like the notion, though, that there is house for while you're having your hair cut and house for when you've had it cut and want to show it off - presumably Kompakt et. al. are pre-haircut house?).

Ned I don't have any server space and even if there was a free server I could load everything too I'd be seriously disinclined given how slow my computer is. On the other hand I could make a page which contains all the links in a row.

No need, just curious! Thanks much.

What was going to be the third part of my Balearic wrap-up mutated into this article for Idolator on Mungolian Jet Set. To make it up to you all, here is the Mungolian Jet Set remix of Mari Boine's "It Ain't Necessarily Evil":

http://www.zshare.net/audio/956047512a0bd2/

Don't think I'm likely to add to this any more. Here's a gratuitous extra - Tinchy Strider's "Wonder":

http://www.zshare.net/audio/7280022f21f8f3/

tim please do this again

thanks,
max

wow. yes, please do.

I'll just syndicate from Facebook again.

Aeroplane ft. Kathy Diamond - Whispers

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18731000adb8e0fb/

Aeroplane basically have the same set of ideas with every track (set up low-slung disco beats with burbling italo synth-riffs, add some oddly melancholy bass and Nile Rogers guitar scratching, dig up a few more atmospheric synth-sweeps, keep layering things until everything gets ridiculously anthemic and bittersweet, stir and serve) but it's such a good strategy that it transcends its own cynicism - like, what, now that they've stumbled across the perfect blueprint they're supposed to do something different?

"Whispers" is marginally distinct owing to the wonderfully unruffled vocals of Kathy Diamond, whose tightly controlled performance, rather like Gwen Stefani's "Cool", reminds me of the Baroness in The Sound of Music, first winning and then graciously sacrificing the Captain who really was totally unworthy of her anyway.

Miley Cyrus - See You Again

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18729610b0dcb403/

One of those great pop songs that seems to get better and better as it goes along, until you realise that Miley was just holding herself in reserve and lulling you into a false sense of complacency.

The convoluted musings of "See You Again" start off rather general (as in "I can't wait to see you again" means she really wants to see this guy) and then becomes super-specific - she embarrassed herself last time she saw him and won't make that mistake again. The line "the next time we hang out I will redeem myself, my heart can't rest 'till then!" is then the moment where it all starts to seem a bit creepy and stalkerish, but in a, well, c'mon this is MILEY kind of way, so you can't really hold her slightly scary fixation against her.

Absolute best moment: the final chorus, where Miley sounds like she's run right off a cliff without looking down, Coyote style, and then the muscular kick-drum arrives, all guns blazing, to say she's gonna blow this school to pieces.

Solange - I Decided (Part Two)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187517286ea7ccde/

Ms Younger Knowles tries very hard to be that space-age jetpacked superwoman you used to know by the name of Imani Coppola, except actually most of her new stuff sounds a bit like Amerie's first two albums. This is a good thing!

Still rather typically I end up liking "I Decided Pt 2" most of all her work (give or take "Sandcastle Disco", possibly to be posted here later).

The toe-tapping jazz-ballet patter of “I Decided Pt. 1” is fine but rather arch, sounding a bit like an off-Broadway paean to Motown, and largely relying on Solange's brilliantly declamatory vocals to make it work. On “I Decided Pt. 2”, a straight-to-the-point remix of its predecessor by erstwhile commercial house merchants the Freemasons, she unabashedly embraces streamlined pop form, her sassy performance somehow finding a new urgency amidst the very anonymity of song’s sugary, Phil Spector meets glam strut arrangement. Call it “generic”, but here the term is a compliment: any hint of eccentricity would just be a blemish marring the song’s perfectly proportioned, irresistibly svelte figure.

Crazy Cousinz - Bongo Jam

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187474684ab384d6/

There's so many reasons why UK "funky house" has been my raison d'etre this year (and it's nice to have one again), but one big reason is that these guys are unafraid of serving up cheeseburgers with extra cheese. Accordingly, "Bongo Jam" is to tribal percussion as 10CC's "Dreadlock Holiday" is to reggae.

Basically it's impossible to overstate the greatness of this track, though less as a peerless example of funky house than as a superlative pop song – perhaps it’s the “Sweet Like Chocolate” of funky house? Yes, the groove is killer: the supple bongo percussion, those marvellous “woooh!” sounds, the maracas, the faux-menace of those moaning backing vocals. But really, this is all about that vocal: “Sometimes I wake up early in the morning, to play my con-con-congo"... You mean you don't?
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Shy Child - Cause & Effect

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18930532c87ab611/

It was eight years ago, but I remember it like yesterday: at some birthday drinks at an unassuming pub, the hoary pub band pulling out all the chestnuts (“Brown Eyed Girl” etc.) and running them through with a grim protestant workmanship that further drained already desiccated “classics”. So far so typical, but then right at the end, the previously uninspired drummer struck up a 4X4 beat, a hitherto unheard keyboardist started unleashing trancey chords, and to my dawning horror and delight, the band launched into a live rendition of Chicane ft. Bryan Adams’ “Don’t Give Up”.

Which was awful, but if it had been GREAT it might have sounded a bit like “Cause and Effect”.

I’m already very positively disposed to Shy Child’s love of rhythm and maximalist synthesizer pyrotechnics; here, both are exploited to a ridiculous extent, with the track morphing from DJ Sammy-style atmospheric arpeggios through acid house bleeping and finally settling into the woozy warp speed churn of goa trance, sort of. Where "Don't Give Up" seemed to achieve its yearning soar a little too easily (soaring being the natural state of trance-pop), “Cause and Effect” benefits from the friction between the music's effortless lift-off and the singer’s yelpy but grounded call and response chanting. It's probably the best rock song and the best trance song I've heard this year, and as a side-benefit shows up just how myopic the usual conceptions of "dance-rock" can be - almost the first thought that ran through my head was "why hasn't someone tried this before?"

Lil Wayne - A Milli

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18978220a976b7b1/

It’s pretty much impossible to write about Lil’ Wayne at this stage without seeming like a newjack, but maybe I should just own the newjack status on this one and make like every other rock critic trying not to be exposed as a hip hop fraud (the weird “oh, you!” thing about being in Australia is that whenever I’ve ever tried to talk to other Oz people about Lil’ Wayne they’ve looked at me all leery and suspicious, if not blank and uncomprehending; meanwhile in the US he’s been overexposed since like forever).

More generally I just don’t trust myself to get across why I love something like “A Milli”, largely because I’m not good at writing about hip hop lyrics. Mostly what I like about Weezy – apart from the obvious stuff like his way with a simile, his repertoire of vocal effects and accents and so on – is just that he likes a corny one-liner as much as I do. But don’t ask me to try to express it better, ‘cos it looks so weak written down. I can’t explain why “It ain’t trickin’ if you got it, but you like a bitch with no ass, you ain’t got shit” makes me laugh.

“A Milli”, like my other favourite Weezy track “Donks” (from the Lil’ Weezyana mixtape) is self-consciously hyper-minimal and repetitive, in this case literally sounding like a skipping cd as it stutters over a deep screwed vocal reciting “A milli a milli a milli a milli a mi a mi a milli a milli a milli a milli a mi am am a milli…” All the better to give the impression of an endless now: no narrative, no point really, just an endless succession of silly jokes and dubious rhymes over a beat you could listen to forever. But there is some variation in “A Milli” after all: the most delicate yet desultory snare shots, intermittently ratatatting like a gangsta’s boo-boom chik punchline signal.

Hercules & Love Affair – Blind (Club Mix)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/189320740f9d08e3/

Rather predictably I love the Hercules & Love Affair album (especially the brilliant first three tracks), and even more predictably I think the use of Anthony’s voice on several tracks is inspired, making for the most histrionic, unstable dance-pop since The Associates’ “Party Fears Two”. But Anthony’s key track – lead single “Blind” – strikes me as a bit underwhelming in its original form, edging back from the icy primitive house-pop of H&LA at their best and into a vaguely flaccid, churning take on disco-revivalism that peaked years and years and years ago on the Playgroup album, the excellent horn contributions notwithstanding.

Luckily H&LA saw fit to make this brilliant, none-more-epic “club mix”: and truly, this does demolish the dancefloor more thoroughly, but that’s only half the story. Around a relentless house pulse (think Nitro Deluxe’s “Let’s Get Brutal” but more, ahem, brutal; Master C & J’s “Dub Love” is even closer actually) floats a succession of ever more creepy effects, from eerie keyboards to poltergeist-like horns trapped in dub housing, to distant baleful dance-off stomping, to eerie buzzsaw whines that make me flash on Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration album. In and throughout all of this, Anthony’s astonishingly solitary, blasted performance, a guilt-wracked quiver of the unfulfilment that literalises all the longing and emptiness secretly beating in the heart of all diva house.

Jordin Sparks ft Chris Brown - No Air

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18978844f0cd537c/

Oddly for an American Idol winner, on her own material Jordin usually performs most strongly when she realises that her baby-Mariah voice actually works best prosecuting baby-Janet material (see for example current single “One Step At A Time”): fluttery and almost ostentatiously pretty, with Jordin’s voice never resting on a single note for more than a moment – with Janet this is done to obscure her vocal limitations, with Jordin it’s a choice.

“No Air” is a bit risky therefore, with Jordin lingering lugubriously over heartbroken notes and phrases like she’s been shot in the chest. But death-fixated pop songs are the exception to every rule, and this suicide note is simply gorgeous, a deep pool of intoxicating emotion perfect for every wallower. Chris Brown also does fantastic, understated work, his gentle, yearning delivery providing a trace paper outline of a hidden mountain of regret.

If the song is devastated, the arrangement is utopian, all twinkling starlight tinkles and the most graceful stuttering kickdrum. The chorus, when the two get wrapped up in suffocating clouds of cumulus synthesiser is probably the largest moment in pop this year, like two giant space babies finding each other in a Hollywood remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey redone as a romance. And we haven’t gotten to the fabulous artificial strings in the last two minutes, then that absolutely desolate, almost discordant harmonised moan, and then the stadium drums come in, and, oh… words fail, truly they do.

Tosh - Action

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1893309652a27e87/

After peaking with an intense obsession circa 2003, my engagement with dancehall has waned only to the point that I hear enough to suspect I’m missing a lot of amazing stuff. “Action” is one of those charming uptempo girly numbers that even dancehall skeptics can’t deny (he says – underwhelmed responses below plz); if you squint it’s like the chorus of Beenie Man and Miss Ting’s “Dude” expanded into a whole song, which is a fantastic idea really. Tosh is sweet and lighthearted, but nonetheless knows what she wants and is having none of yr prevarication – “G’wan wit ya bag a mout’, an ya bag a talk!” she starts off as if she’s already seen right through you. That kind of thing is like catnip for me. It helps that “Action” has such an awesome arrangement, a retro yet vaguely Oriental pots’n’pants percussive groove, and an irresistible sense of rising joy. I play this a lot in the morning.

Donaeo - African Warrior

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1887844919b1cc52/

Donaeo was responsible for one of grime’s earliest and still most purely fun anthems, 2002’s “Bounce”, a fabulously sillytrack that managed to mock menace and still sound kinda menacing in spite of itself. In 2005 he made “Bark”, a slightly tuffer but still cheeky number that has one of Danny Weed’s best production efforts (there was stuff in between but I’m giving you the abridged version). Now he’s jumped on the UK funky bandwagon, initially with the vocally smooth, rhythmically rude “Devil In A Blue Dress” – abandoning rapping for a yearnin’, bustin’ R&B performance over rippling syncopated kickdrums.

The even-better follow-up “African Warrior” splits the difference between “Bark and “Devil In A Blue Dress”, and things are now sounding rather aggressive. There’s also a lot of R Kelly aping going on here, from the double entendre lyrics (“I’m an African warrior, rolling with my stick in my hand” – needless to say I misheard this the first time through) to the hoarse vocals for the chorus, to the lilting singjay quasi-rap interludes. The groove is absolutely cavernous, a surround-sound explosion of spiralling tribal drums reminiscent of Lenky’s dancehall riddim Dreamweaver (e.g. Elephant Man's "Blessed", Chico's "Thick & Thin"), and an evil speaker-tearing bassline straight from Sticky’s “Booo”.

T2 & Addictive - Gonna Be Mine

http://www.zshare.net/audio/194487493c836937/

Have to admit to not following UK’s bassline scene very closely this year, especially after UK funky house became my drug of choice some time in May or so. This was my favourite track of the ones I’ve heard, which is not that surprising since it was probably the scene’s biggest 2008 hit aside from the underwhelming “What’s It Gonna Be” by Platinum & H20. Otherwise what I said on facebook re bassline last year still stands:

"Bassline is kind of like the return of speed garage – the bumpy sped-up four-to-the-floor version of garage which immediately preceded 2-step. The big difference is that Bassline is harder and nastier, with all the remaining New York garage-style organic sensuousness purged in favour of a cold, metallic sound that can often seem surprisingly close to electro-house: stiff house percussion, razor-sharp synth riffs and enormous, glinting basslines. Otherwise, the raw ingredients that made speed garage such potent dance and pop music remain present: gratuitously catchy vocals, including lots of fabulous post-Todd Edwards cut-up monstrosities, a restless magpie approach to sonic source material, and a great line in awesomely profane pop songs."

“Gonna Be Mine” is particularly notable for its sweet (if strident) diva vocal and slashing beats that sound like Freddie Krueger and Edward Scissorhands playing clapping games. The human vocals on the one hand and sickly music on the other make for predictably enjoyable vibe of so-wrong-it’s-right buzzy intensity, sort of like when you have a legitimate reason to take wonderful painkillers, and the pain and the bliss are duking it out in your body.

Jennifer Hudson - Spotlight

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18822591c51aebdc/

Unlike most of my friends, I enjoyed Dream Girls on the first run through, and liked it much much more the second time. "Spotlight" wasn't in the film, and if it had been would have stuck out rather like "You Must Love Me" did in Evita, but nevertheless this continues Hudson's performance essentially; you can hear her substantial chest quiver as she injects heartbreaking melodrama into oddly expositional lyrics like "is this relationship fulfilling your needs as well as mine?"

But if "Spotlight" can feel set-piece-ish lyrically, this rococo vibe is counterbalanced by the utter simplicity of the music, calm piano ripples and sighing strings formally rotating round one of those oh-so-oh-eight steady 4X4 beats, here signifying... resilience, persistence, a refusal to be bowed down, and other emotions perfect for the blackened stage and the lone star illuminated by a single... well, you get the picture.

Leave it to Hudson to find a theatrical core in Stargate's otherwise utilitarian production style, but when she launches into the stratosphere for the ridiculously soppy middle-eight any ambivalence I might have felt gets swept aside by the brute force of her emotional manipulation. You oughta show her some deference.

The Veronicas – Untouched

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18979489640c32b3/

First The Veronicas raised insouciance to an artform. Now they’ve become like gamblers who don’t know when/how to quit while they’re ahead, and are rapidly descending into full-blown self-parody – the video for new single “Take Me On The Floor” is like if Bladerunner had been set in the aisles of Supre. “Untouched” caught them at their best: from their robotically identical haircuts (predictably, one of them has now gone totally yuck to distinguish herself) to the utterly blank performances to the kinda ridiculous but still compelling warp-speed spoken word verses to a chorus that is to my mind formally perfect (we’re talking ABBA level here).

It’s worth quoting the chorus in full: “I feel so untouched and/I miss you so much that/I just can’t resist you/it’s not enough to say that I miss you/I feel so untouched right/now need you so much, some/how I can’t forget you/been going crazy since the moment I met you.” Okay, so that scans rather like standard-issue pop-lyrics, but the way it all hangs together, the sheer pedantry of its internal rhyming, reminds me of one of those ridiculously elaborate borders that medieval illuminators would draw on the borders of pages in copied out religious texts (think The Name of the Rose) – a perfectly balanced, perfectly dovetailing pattern of exquisite detail that bespeaks immense, practised skill.

I don’t really want The Veronicas to become full-blown electro-pop, ‘cuz their personalities aren’t strong enough to demarcate them from the rest of the “Sex Shooter”-style sexy sexy mersh electro-house-pop that is so persistently popular in Australia (this is my issue with “Take Me On The Floor”, which admittedly is very earworm-ish). “Untouched” achieves the perfect balance, decorating its future-rock electro-churn with slashing, rococo string riffs straight from “Papa Don’t Preach”. The purified sound of 1987, and totally irresistible.

Flo Rida - In The Ayer

http://www.zshare.net/audio/18821384a948741a/

Of the three big Flo Rida singles, this is my favourite because it's the most purely jock jam-ish. Its straight poppin electro beats and awesomely earwormish chanted chorus (“Oh hot damn! This is my jam! Keep me partyin' to the A-M! Y'all don't understan! Make me throw my hands in the a-yer a-a-yer a-a-a…”) seem purpose-built for soundtracking greatest moments in sports montages. I must admit that jock jam rap is more of an amateur hobby than professional going concern than mine, so there were probably better examples of the form this year, but nonetheless this touches that place in my heart I thought was reserved for Trick Daddy's "Take It To The House" 4 eva.

Young Jeezy - Put On

http://www.zshare.net/audio/196897551a2c2718/

Every year needs at least one high-octane end-of-the-world dirgathon rap track that makes you feel impossibly small and puny. Last year I guess it was the big DJ Khaled track which I didn’t actually go for all that much (of course the year before we had T.I.’s “What You Know” obv) so I’m pleased that 2008 has offered up the massive “Put On” which I can enjoy with uncompromised masochistic fervour.

Not much terribly surprising to this (as if surprise is really what you want from a grinding tectonic plate of a rap anthem): Young Jeezy’s typically on the down low, muttering about life in the hard lanes, Luda’s Vegas-ready punchline extroversion, Wayne stumbling about stoned, Trae and Rick Ross both rapping through gritted teeth, Kanye contributing a kinda overrated but still fun autotune devotional interlude (now used to more high profile effect on his own “Love Lockdown”) worthy of ‘serious cat’ lolcat photos. But what a groove: the tinkling dystopian synth arpeggios, the playground-in-hell recorder loops, the dazzling faux-fanfares, and just… the sheer largesse, the bloodied but unbowed implacability of it all.

Alphabeat - Fascination

http://www.zshare.net/audio/187585316795d3fb/

Normally I’d be rather suspicious of a song like this. I mean… it’s rather INDIE, isn’t it? The almost inhuman chirpiness of it, the tweeness of the band and especially the boy/girl singers (both of whom may be oddly cute, but nonetheless in an almost criminal twee manner), the “LOOK AT MOI” grandiosity of the verses, the “DO YOU SEE” explosiveness of the choruses, and the “LOOK AT MOI DO YOU SEE” ridiculousness of the middle eight leading back into that chorus.

I know all of the above, and yet it simply cannot dampen my enjoyment of this song, which reminds me of a hungover drive from Melbourne to Geelong one Sunday afternoon six years ago with three equally hungover friends and a tape of greatest hits of Huey Lewis and the News for company. And I love this like I love Huey Lewis, or Pat Benatar, or mid-eighties Phil Collins: this stuff is simply Beyond Good & Evil, indeed beyond the master/slave dichotomies that suspicious music fans like myself spend so much time constructing to show how X is good because Y is bad. It simply is.

Taylor Swift - Love Story

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5myu87

My two biggest non-2008 obsessions this year have been Fela Kuti and Taylor Swift. Fela, of course, invented afro-beat. Taylor meanwhile is the latest young star of mainstream country, her 2006 eponymous debut album one of the best pop albums of this decade – certainly as a collection of confessional pop only Ashlee Simpson’s ‘I Am Me’ (and, perhaps, Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Breakaway) comes close.

Those suspicious of mainstream country tend to think that an example of greatness in this arena would require some fundamental undermining, subversion or, at least, transcendence of the style’s modus operandi. Taylor does none of this: her first album is glowing, maximalist studio-perfected country-pop, every inch of the stereo speaker filled with glowing guitars, hokey mandolins, gratuitous violin refrains. Taylor’s voice is just twangy enough to be clearly of its genre without seemed confined by it. Most difficult to pin down is Taylor’s songwriting, which manages to combine the generic with the idiosyncratic in ways that are just endlessly loveable (most famously, her first single “Tim McGraw” is a sweet curse laid on an ex-boyfriend to always think of her when he even thinks of country singer Tim McGraw, let alone hears ‘their song’). Rather than break with tradition, Taylor finds new and interesting ways to say things within that tradition; if you’ve never quite “got” with mainstream country I can’t think of a better gateway drug. Plus, she’s definitely one of the best lyricists in pop right now.

“Love Story”, as you might expect from a forthcoming second album arriving on the back of an ever-expanding public profile, is much more internationalist in feel. Oh, there’s a twangy mandolin throughout, but this is more than matched by the burnished sheen of the almost new wavey guitar and the unexpectedly subtle slow burn of the chorus. The tale of fantastic (in both senses) young love is also much more in line with the expectations of broader pop audiences – whereas Taylor’s first album was filled with the typically country concerns of failed romances, “what does he see in her?” pining, and one of my favourites, “Mary’s Song (Oh My My)” which covers about eighty years of a proudly domestic long term relationship like an ad campaign for life insurance.

Taylor’s capacity for astonishingly on-point specificity is largely jettisoned as she paints more a widescreen, mythological tale of love found, lost and regained, but even if the eventual marriage proposal has an air of broad brush strokes about it (I liked this denouement in “Mary’s Song” just a little more), Taylor finds space to inject the mythic with her own sensibility. “You were Romeo/I was a Scarlet Letter”, she sighs, encapsulating the imagined and then real disapproval of her father and a broader conservative community at her shameful seduction (“Romeo” gets off scot free, of course). It’s rare for pop to find a way to express the intimacy of love while simultaneously painting in the landscape of the outside world, and most songs ultimately plump for one or the other. But Taylor learns as much from ‘Romeo & Juliet’ as you could hope for from an adolescent, and in “Love Story” each world traces the outline of the other, throwing the contours of the other into relief - abandonment is even harder to bear in the face of the whole world's "I told you so..."

In an odd way, I’m reminded of Vanessa Carlton, who at her best combined that earnest literateness with giggly youth and a deadly grip on a good hook – “Love Story” is a companion piece to “White Houses” in my head at least. Taylor is typically funnier or nastier or more voluptuously morose than Vanessa, but the distance is smaller than usual here: “Love Story” sacrifices such shadings for the sake of providing proof that she can deliver an anthem “straight”, without a tear or a chuckle. It’s not all of what I want from her, but it’s as much as I could ask from a wistful, heart-pumping pop song.

Pussycat Dolls - I Hate This Part

http://www.sendspace.com/file/x5hld3

I recently described Nicole Scherzinger – lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls – as a pop Trojan Horse. Ostensibly, Nicole’s songs (and really, almost all Pussycat Dolls songs are basically Nicole songs with the other Dolls providing indistinguishable backing vocals) are straightforward cookie-cutter robot (R&B) pop. And she's not really made any attempt to disprove this (her failed solo career aside - which produced at least a few fabulous and underrated singles most people never heard - check "Superhero"), although she's perhaps contractually obliged not to run down her fellow Dolls in interviews in an effort to distinguish herself. Apparently the new PCD album includes each member singing lead at least once, and on a bonus disc songs written by each Doll. This strikes me as a recipe for disaster but I’m oddly curious to hear the results.

You’ll understand the “Trojan Horse” bit if you actually listen to the better PCD singles, in particular “Buttons”, which you’d think would be one of the group’s more generic efforts. But Nicole is just so ON as a singer and performer and persona, she more often than not can take what are fairly good cookie-cutter R&B tracks and push them over the line with the inventiveness, the precision and the sheer personality of her vocals. On “Buttons”, she stakes out the verses with a declamatory flair, her vocals sounding at once resonant and distant, as if she’s singing down a long, echoey tunnel (it’s a bit Wizard of Oz: her voice an ominous and frightening effect emanating from a large video screen while the real Nicole presumably sings a bit more humbly behind a curtain).

The first single from the second PCD album, “When I Grow Up” struck me as kinda grimly authoritarian, but new single “I Hate This Part” is excellent. Jumping on the increasingly crowded Ne-Yo bandwagon (in style at least: I don’t know who wrote it, but it’s definitely of a piece with “Closer”), nonetheless it’s an unusual and charming mixture of fragile piano ballad wailer and pumping 4X4 pop stormer. This is a great showcase of Nicole’s ability to carry a dramatic song with precise but totally distinct and emotionally charged phrasing (whereas of course the glorified back-ups are not just anonymous but completely inaudible) – switching from firm to frail to strident to resigned with unusual agility and grace. I love, too, how the lyrics short-circuit the generic and specific – the details about driving in a car with your lover listening to the radio because there’s nothing left to say to one another ring totally true.

The music is ace as well: the moody cloud-of-wasps of bassline, the fragile piano, the swarming strings, the way the extra beats in the chorus stuttering around the 4/4 kick imply a sort of collapse or disintegration. But most of all, I love the disarming frankness of its bittersweet conclusion: “I hate this part right here” Nicole admits as she plunges the knife into a moribund relationship, delivering the chorus in a breathy, emphysemic whisper by the end. ABBA were the masters of this sort of ambivalent, self-reflective, pathos-laden pop. It’s rare to hear it being reproduced so effectively today.

Air France - No Excuses

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2paenz

I have a lamentable weakness for a certain brand of twee, tearjerker dance-pop (or sample-pop) that manages to short-circuit the distance between the rave and the bedsit: Saint Etienne’s “He’s On The Phone”, The Avalanches’ “A Different Feeling”, Omni Trio’s “Thru The Vibe”, Amira’s “My Desire (Dreem Teem Mix)” – this is all “LOL Tim” music. Softcore, you know the score.

Air France have released their two-EPs-to-date on The Tough Alliance’s label Sincerely Yours, which already bodes well; TTA have pretty much made “twee, tearjerker dance-pop (or sample-pop) that manages to short-circuit the distance between the rave and the bedsit” their raison d’etre, and made a lot of my favourite music last year. Air France and The Tough Alliance don’t really sound that much like each other, though they do both sound a lot like Saint Etienne. Maybe it’s just that they start to break Saint Etienne down into their component parts, with TTA taking “He’s On The Phone”, “Pale Movie” and “You’re In A Bad Way” (the Pet Shop Boys influence, basically) and Air France taking “Railway Jam”, “London Belongs To Me” and “Avenue” (the A. R. Kane influence perhaps?). So a lot of Air France’s songs are dreamy, exquisite textured, melancholy sample-scapes but aren’t terribly anthemic.

“No Excuses” is where the two sides come back together again: just about the fizziest, trembliest, most joyful thing I've heard this year, all smeary piano and cascading strings and flutes that sound like rave riffs, and cherubs sighing “nah nah nah”, and cheesy handclap percussion, all swirling around in endless layers of fairy floss like ambient happy hardcore.

So many moments to love here: the breakdown of wibbling tinkerbells, the singer sighing “No…” and a ragtag chorus of children shouting “No!” in response, the glorious false ending, like stumbling across an empty field the day after the circus has left town, only to find the entire troupe hiding in the tall grass, waiting to surprise you. I simply have no resistance to this sort of thing; but why would you want to be able to resist this?

The-Dream ft. Rihanna - Livin' A Lie

http://www.zshare.net/audio/1974513803ec0a51/

As with fellow ghost-writer/rival/hypothetical love interest (slash fiction writers get on it) Ne-Yo, The-Dream is more central to the beating heart of US Pop 2008 than many people realize. It’s not so much that his fingerprints are over so much great material of recent times (most notably Rihanna’s “Umbrella”), although there’s that too; what I’m getting at is a certain pop sensibility that just seems oh-so-current.

For one thing, both artists have in their own work made “generic” (as in, clearly of its genre, rather than plain) male-sung R&B a viable career proposition in a non-JT, non-Usher context. In doing so both draw heavily on the mid-90s, a time before staccato post-Timbaland beats and the like crucially remapped R&B’s formal co-ordinates across hip hop lines (I’d propose Tevin Campbell as a touchstone for Ne-Yo and Jodeci as the alter at which The-Dream worships). Back then the R&B club number, the slow jam and the ballad were all much closer to each other, such that many tracks kinda fell into a winning interzone drawing elements from all three. It’s R&B qua R&B, and it’s a unified sound: you wouldn’t and couldn’t love the beat but hate the singer or vice versa. You simply had to buy the whole package, for the mood it conveyed.

In other words (not to belabor the point but) The-Dream and Ne-Yo are not just singer-songwriters in fact but also in feel: on their best work there’s a sense of everything coming together perfectly, lyrics, tune, performance production. For The-Dream in particular, this gives him the opportunity to bring together disparate strands (Bobby Valentino-style suffocating wispiness, R Kelly intensity neurorisis and sex-addiction, Chris Brown winsomeness and directness) into a glorious constellation.

“Livin’ A Lie” most likely isn’t even my favourite song on The-Dream’s debut album ‘Love/Hate’, although that’s probably just a reflection of its absurd strength – how do you choose between the shiny R Kelly bounce of “Shawty Is Da Shit”, the flawless Prince revivalism of “Fast Car”, the bitter dirge “Nikki”, the apocalyptic “She Needs My Love”, the irresistible glide of “Playin’ in her Hair”, the sumptuous coital sludge of “Purple Kisses”, the sci-fi club joint “Ditch That”, the architectural magnificence of “Luv Songs” or the tearjerker ballad “Mama”???

But “Livin’ A Lie” is the one I expect my sceptical readers may actually stoop to checking out. And really you should: it’s the perfect R&B power-ballad anthem for these uncertain times, a megalith of brooding 4X4 pulse, messy “are we? aren’t we?” secretive post-break-up stolen kisses (to be honest though I’m not quite sure what is preventing The-Dream and Rihanna from just getting together again – it seems like just pride and their reputation amongst their friends), and an unstoppable chorus wherein the two symmetrical viewpoints combine in a bittersweet flash of self-insight.

The other thing Ne-Yo and The-Dream have in common is an industrious protestant work ethic absent from pop for two decades: Ne-Yo’s pumped out three solo albums in three years, and The-Dream is set to release his follow-up ‘Love vs. Money’ imminently. Hype!

Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream

http://www.zshare.net/audio/192052261b6fe561/

I didn’t want to like this: I disapprove of Australian pop supergroups, and the idea of an Oz pop supergroup trying to jump on the Balearic bandwagon seemed purpose-built to make me wake up one morning and hate myself circa six months ago. Like when you realize that once you actually wanted Mark Latham to be PM.

I was too hasty. For one thing I’ve got nothing against The Sleepy Jackson (who provide Empire of the Sun’s singer) and I actively like Pnau (who provide it’s, um, instrumentalist I suppose). And sometimes Australians get Balearic right: after all, we are responsible for Flash and the Pan and The Avalanches, and I have a half-baked notion of inserting Wendy Matthews into Balearic DJ set lists. More recently and prosaically, Cut Copy’s So Cosmic mix (which this rather resembles in condensed form) was really very pretty.

As is “Walking on a Dream”, or at least it will be until it becomes a modest hit on JJJ (perhaps it is already?) on the basis of sounding vaguely like MGMT. The sheer sleekness of those glittering endless autobahn synth chords, the cynical but nonetheless undeniable lift of the ghostly falsetto chorus. The general lightness of touch. More than Balearic, what this reminds me of is primo Thin White Duke remixes (think “Mr. Brightside” – though not nearly as good as that behemoth to be fair) – a smoothness so smooth it slides right past your defences.

Luomo - Gets Along Fine

http://www.sendspace.com/file/czgnaa

Luomo (aka Sasu Rapitti aka Vladislav Delay aka Uusitalo aka etc.) has the distinction of making not one but two of my absolute favourite albums ever, 2000’s luxuriantly deep dub-house album ‘Vocalcity’ and 2003’s spangly and lustrous epic dance-pop collection ‘The Present Lover’. I was disappointed by 2006’s ‘Paper Tigers’, not because it’s a bad album, but because (largely reiterating the charms of ‘The Present Lover’) it failed to turn my life upside down like its predecessors had – an unfair standard perhaps, but it’s Luomo’s fault for raising my expectations so.

Happily, this year’s ‘Convivial’ is a return to form: if ever so slightly beneath the peaks formed by those first two albums, it’s close enough to tear me up at times (I’m kinda corny like that). The secret of ‘Convivial’ is how Luomo carefully extends that trademark quivering, vulnerable embodied emotionalism (like the thrill that runs up and down your body when someone to whom you’re painfully attracted accidentally brushes your arm) into new sonic territory. Partly it’s gorgeous songs – see the brooding Depeche Mode meets Junior Boys goth-balladry of “Love You All”, or the impossibly kaleidoscopic swirl of “Slow Dying Places”, which is like Mouse on Mars falling in love while on an E honeymoon.

Possibly my favourite track here is “Gets Along Fire”. On the one hand it’s classic Luomo, riding a familiar, trademarkable wistful bass riff and liberally sprinkling cut-up male diva vocals, now celebratory now bittersweet. On the other, it’s quite unlike anything else the guy has done, its chorus irrupting in an astonishing combination of bleeping synthesiser and pseudo-African percussion – someone on I Love Music suggested that it actually sounds like coupe de cale (Ivory Coast dance music sonically halfway between kuduro, and, um, UK funky house I guess?), which I can totally hear.

I have a bad habit of turning it up so loudly that those assailing drums start to hurt my ears. It’s simultaneously the most aggressive and purely joyous Luomo production to date, the muscular assault of its universalist affection like an embrace so fierce it crushes. The marvel, and perhaps the necessity of the Luomo project, is bound up in the shock of physical intimacy; pleasurable, overwhelming, and at times a little scary. “Am I really feeling this?” “Is it you who is making me feel this way?” Yes, and yes.

Scarface- High Powered

http://www.sendspace.com/file/knabw7

Am I growing more aggressive as I get old? Maybe it’s just that hip hop generally has been a bit harder of late: my favourite rap album of the year is Young Jeezy’s vergin’-on-apocalyptic ‘The Recession’, and perhaps my favourite rap track is Scarface’s gritty “High Powered”. Or, not really. “High Powered” is gritty in the same sense that pirates are scary. Scarface has that awesome, won’t-take-your-shit thick flow that’s unimpressed by just about everything, which is lucky because his fixation with fake-ass drug dealers (specifically snitches, roaches, anyone who passes themselves off as bigger entrepreneurs than they are; on his excellent new album ‘Emeritus’ – awesome title btw – he also spends a lot of time talking about being sued) needs that kind of blunt laconic swagger-not-swagger (not-swagger because, well, Scarface doesn’t need to impress anyone) – Scarface is so good at this that “High Powered” positively drips gravitas.

Musically “High Powered” is only gritty in the sense that “This Is Why I’m Hot” or “Grindin” or The Game’s “One Blood” are – parading its screechy screwfaced minimalism (ooh those sudden floods of bottomless bass) front and centre, but ultimately too tuneful and too widescreen and too, um, Jamaican not to end up sounding a bit pop. The way the rhythm breaks into a dancehall beat at the end of each verse is one of those simple but devastating effects that makes me mourn all over again the crappiness of local urban clubs (they never seem to play stuff like this) – it's total bust an ominous move on the dancefloor business.

Plus that awesome reggae chorus vocal “Beep beep goes the sound of my celluleeuuurr” – so dank and lugrubrious! (the title track to this album is another highlight, but the whole thing is great – check it!)

Animal Collective - My Girls

http://www.sendspace.com/file/g2f3jr

Seeing Animal Collective live in Berlin last year was something of a minor revelation, like witnessing a band/artist/etc. stumble onto a wonderful new twist in their aesthetic in real time. I really liked the group’s 2007 album ‘Strawberry Jam’ (and even more so bandmember Panda Bear’s solo release ‘Person Pitch’, one of my top two albums from last year), but as much for what it hinted at as what it was: gleaming through the crevices of those slightly angsty, ridiculously over-stuffed technicolour indie rock songs was a more utopian vision of blissed-out dance-rock, somewhere between the ethnodelic indie that Gang Gang Dance have since made their own, the swooning neo-Balearic of Studio, and the dreamlike sampladelic ambient-techno-pop of Primal Scream’s Orb-produced “Higher Than The Sun”. ‘Person Pitch’ was already inching into this territory, but was so blissed-out as to be positively supine: cross-referencing that sound with the dense and energetic approach of ‘Strawberry Jam’ seemed like the way to go.

This is what Animal Collective did when I saw them, especially during their encore: the combination of starsailing widescreen techno-pop and the trippy light show made it the best fusion of live rock with the feel (as opposed to merely sound) of dance music that I can remember. “My Girls”, the first song to leak from the band’s next album ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’, excellently captures the sound and the feel of the best bits of that live show. Organ arpeggios, atmospheric keyboard swirls, Panda Bear’s very familiar multitracked Beach Boys-aping declamatory vocal style… None of these things in and of themselves suggest a massive stylistic shift; what’s changed is how these things all come together in a manner that is unabashedly pretty, and unabashedly pop. The slightly reverent intro soon gives way to a brisk (albeit unpredictable) quasi-tribal percussive groove, all woodblocks and what sounds like rolling timpanis, as Panda Bear’s chanting slowly coalesces into an implausible hook: “I don’t mean to seem like I care material things like my social stats/I just want four walls and a door besides, for my girls!” (punctuated at times by an excellent falsetto “woah!!!!”). The actual lyrics are typical of Panda Bear, triangulating the space between earnestness, mundanity and weed-derived epiphany, and I’m not sure how or why it works so well.

In the final minute of this gorgeous song, the steady quasi-disco pulse (not to mention the marvellous handclaps, awesome backwards-filtered strings, those organ arpeggios suddenly resembling italo-house keyboards) leads the song into a too-brief climax that, like Air France’s “No Excuses”, somehow evokes euphoric rave-pop. And then (rather like Booka Shade’s trancey electro-house anthem “In White Rooms”, my favourite track of 2006), it ends abruptly, as if to remind you gently and sympathetically that no one can ever actually feel this good for more than about a minute at a time.