SEAL ON PSYCHEDELICS

10 // Shabazz Palaces // Black Up

   Hip hop prides itself on being “real” while constantly being overtaken by fakers who rap about things that aren’t real. Money, bitches? No one is relating to that. In the weird internet era where everything melts together perhaps it’s not weird that the most experimental hip hop album to come out this year also manages to be one of the realest ones. Shabazz Palaces are not newcomers to music (see Digable Planets) therefore there is no surprise that their debut album Black Up is the most accomplished hip hop release of the year. For what it lacks in down to earth samples, it backs it up with rhymes about social realism, racism and love that isn’t defined by sex and bitches. Admittedly most of it’s appeal comes from how weird it is, but weird hasn’t been this real in quite a while.

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9 // Oneohtrix Point Never // Replica

   Good album cover can attract a listener, that what happened to me when it came to Daniel Lopatin’s AKA Oneohtrix Point Never’s new album Replica. A rather quick follow up to the last year’s acclaimed Returnal, Replica is a whole different universe. it flows like an ambient album but also manages to be anything but it. Built from samples of 80’s adverts it manages to transcend the notion that ambient has to be free flowing and disregard any patterns. Returnal is very dada, very repetitive but also very rewarding. Throughout 10 tracks OPN samples, squaks, voices, blips and blops, sad pianos and by the end you realise that he made the best ambient record of the year that is also a social statement on the repetitiveness of consumerism. Well played.

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8 // Kuedo // Severant

   In 2011 we got many electronic albums that are not concerned with making you dance, it was more about channelling emotions through cold machines. Kuedo did that and he did that well. Severant sounds softer and warmer than any soul records released this year. I don’t think there was ever a review that didn’t mention how much influence does Severant take from Vangelis’ certain soundtrack. It’s not lazy journalism, it’s just the first thought that comes to mind half a minute in the album. While it can’t be considered overly original, it is unique in the present day and sometimes it’s better to take things from the past than try to invent new ones. Just like Blade Runner’s soundtrack Severant is standing peerless among the rest of vacant electronic music and does it with admirable pride, old can be new again.

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7 // Bjork // Biophilia

   In a sense Biophilia is the album of the year. It’s unlike everything else this year, it’s one of the best if not the best Bjork has ever released and, I mean, she built her own insane instruments for it. Then again, on a wider scale it’s easy to say that it is just a bland version of Hidden by These New Puritans. It’s easy to complain about how Biophilia lacks hooks or memorable songs which makes me thing. What makes music memorable? Is it the repeated choruses which Biophilia has. Is it the wordplay? Bjork spends all her time crafting cosmic opera about life that is impossible to relate to but not silly enough to just call it self indulgence. Biophilia looks towards the future, all the best albums are misunderstood at first, Bjork knows that. Biophilia is a landmark that people will remember and start appreciating in the future, regretfully there’s not enough to remember now to make it the best album of now.

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6 // Tune-Yards // WHOKILL

   When children are misbehaving it’s up to their mother to scold them. Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus is the motherly figure to 2011’s indiesphere. While all the boys are too busy looking cool with frowns on their faces it takes someone special to deliver some words that would change everything. That is exactly what her second album WHOKILL did. Coming out of nowhere like a slap to the face WHOKILL deals in immense amount of pure energy and joy. While most of it’s lyrics deals with violence and abuse that is the only way to channel the energy that this album offers. It’s not about clever dance routines or fancy moves, it’s about flailing uncontrollably. Hipstersphere needed album as fun as this, WHOKILL came and delivered the most fun we had all year.

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5 // Tyler The Creator // Goblin

   The funny feeling when people were expecting some sort of morbid art house album that was filled with nothing but a bunch of Yonkers. Cmon, if you listened to anything from Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All before Yonkers then you knew what to expect from Goblin. Some self-hate, a lot of hate towards the others but most of all, Tyler, The Creator fucking around for over an hour. If that’s what you expected then you are not a bandwagon jumping whore and you are not disappointed with Goblin. It’s not much different than his debut album Bastard, it’s a lot less serious though. From the sheer ridiculous nature of Bitch Suck Dick, Tron Cat or Transylvania, heartbreak on She and Her to the half serious social statements on Sandwiches and Golden. It’s increasingly difficult to take all his offensive slurs seriously with every passing song and that is this album’s main charm. Despite all the heaviness there’s a certain light-heartedness to it. It’s all part of Tyler’s plan. On Bastard he introduced the concept of him visiting a psychiatrist Dr.TC. There are 3 sessions and Goblin is the transitional second one, it’s next year’s 3rd LP Wolf that will make him or break him. Goblin is great for what it is, either it’s a start of a new era where bling is no longer the focus of hip hop or just a bunch of kids that gave hip hop a massive kick in the balls. One of the album’s best tracks Radicals opens with a lines “Random Disclaimer: Hey, don’t do anything I say in this song, okay? It’s fucking fiction. if anything happens don’t fucking blame me white America, fuck Bill O’Reilly” and it sums up the album down to a tee.

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4 // The Horrors // Skying

   Ever since the long gone days of My Bloody Valentine haven’t we seen a musical evolution that would be close to anything that The Horrors have underwent in the last 5 years. Emerging as skinny goths playing The Cramps covers just to redevelop themselves into a credible and artful shoegaze band on their second LP Primary Colours. What do you do when you go from the most hated to the most promising? Deliver on the promise and Skying is one big package. It sacrifices the Joy Division influenced melodies from the precious album towards something that is quintessentially 90’s British. The influences range from Happy Mondays’ madchester to Suede’s alternative rock mixed with a lot of reverb and psychedelia that is so in these days. Luckily nowhere on Skying does the band sound like they’re sacrificing their creativity to deliver something that would please the masses and they got their reward, a career highlight and a record that elevated them into the radio and higher reaches of the UK charts. The Horrors are not creating new styles, they come across as massive lovers of going through old vinyls in old record stores, their music is a mix of many influences that they put together masterfully. While The Horrors are not reinventing the wheel here they are making it run smoother than it ever did before.

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3 // Wild Beasts // Smother

   For a band as unique and uncompromising as Wild Beasts they sure have a lot of pathways to choose from. It wasn’t that hard to predict that they would deliver an album as smooth and soft as Smother even way back when the playful and energetic Limbo Panto came out. Even now it’s possible to see them embarking onto an ambient pop path or delivering an ever smoother soul/r&b record. But that is the future, Smother is an album that is all about his moment. The lyrics here deal with love in a really intimate way without coming across as tacky or forced. Smother is the definition of a sexy album but it has to offer much more than that. Just like Two Dancers before it, Smother has the creeping sense of longing and sadness because of the understanding that the moment is just that, a moment. No matter how great it is, it will pass and the only way to relive it will be through the memories. Musically Smother is light as a memory, going through ears, gently caressing them. All the instruments are in the own little worlds that are coming together, they’re not fighting to get on top of eachother and sound louder than one another, production is sleek and well accomplished, carrying the sophisticated theme of the album. At no point does it sound like Wild Beasts are trying to force us to listen to them. They are playing the hard to get, being seductive and Smother is just too hard to resist.

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2 // The Weeknd // House Of Balloons

   The strongest fear is the one that you’re not anticipating. The best parties are the ones that you’re invited to at the last second. The biggest heartbreak is the one that hits without a warning. The Weeknd has combined everything that is dark about happiness and delivered the best album of the year that no one was expecting. House Of Balloons came out in March and mere 8 months later Abel Tesfaye is singing on Drake’s record, selling out shows and reportedly gets offered millions for a contract that he turns down. The dude has a nice voice, the production is amazing but in the end it all comes down to the atmosphere of House Of Balloons. No other r&b record in a long time and maybe ever has managed to sound this off the rails, this morbid and miserable while indulging itself fully in the dark and depressing lifestyle that it displays. Abel deals with things like money, drugs, alcohol, heartbreak, unfaithfulness, depression, loveless sex, loneliness and death. Despite all the dark subject, on House Of Balloons he makes it sound acceptable, there’s no feeling that those things are wrong or immoral. The only thing that is creeping into mind is the dread that makes you realise that all those things are inescapable. The heartbreaks repeat themselves, the parties end before you pass out and it the smoky corridors among drugged up girls is House Of Balloons, a celebration of the terrifying lifestyle that we’re all part of without knowing it.

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1 // James Blake // James Blake

   To say that James Blake’s debut album is a delivery on a promise that he showcased in earlier stages of his career would be inaccurate. This is the guy that releases new music at such speeds that make Burial look like a grandad. 2010 was a great year for him and for his fans because every few months we got a new reason to get excited. All his releases were unique: The Bells Sketch was prime example of post-dubstep that’s exploding all over London, CMYK was his love letter to American r&b and soul and Klavierwerke was the moment when he shown us that can be up there with the best when it comes to experimental electronic music. It was easy to expect that these were all promises that were going to be fulfilled on his first LP but James Blake moves at an enormous speed. Not as much as a proper LP, more like a collection of stream-of-mind recordings, James Blake is just another release that promises. It’s different from everything else he has done, it’s much more singer songwriter oriented. He explored this territory in the follow up EP Enough Thunder that was his first and so far only proper singer-behind-a-piano effort. Is that enough? If it’s not then only the other week he released another EP Love What Happened here where he completely changes his sound every 4 minutes starting with a mixture of The Bells Sketch and CMYK, following with a mixture of Pan/Order and Klavierwerke and then ending the year with Curbside which stutters and rolls along with a Quasimoto sample that sounds just as fitting as it sounds out of tune with the rest of the music, his most uncompromising tune yet. So is it fair to see James Blake as anything resembling a full length album? The only reason it is an album is because it is long enough but it undergoes many transformations that would be considered an enemy to a critically acclaimed album. Opening with a closest you’ll get to a slow jam from Blake - Untrue we turn to ambient ballad The Wilhelm Scream. I Never Learnt To Share is a repetitive piano ballad that goes into a full on brain melting dubstep overdrive before turning into Lindisfarne - a song of two halves, an acapella and a folk track. Limit To Your Love needs no introduction but it is the point where the album marks a shift. From now on James Blake goes back and forth between a cut up Antony Hegarty with short piano tracks that sounds like skits and someone completely different, he starts sounding like, for a lack of a better word, himself. In merely a year he managed to establish a sound that is unmistakeably his own. The cut up vocals and pianos backed by stuttering all-over-the-place beats. Measurements closes the album with an almost embarrassingly bare 4 minutes of piano gospel. It feel like at least one third of the album is just silence, Blake is confident enough to keep people wanting more and that’s not just the months between releases, it’s also the space between separate bars and chords. James Blake is not cohesive but that’s what makes it so good. Blake has established himself as the chameleon of electronic music, changing and reinventing himself every few months. Many artists need years to do that but on James Blake he reinvents himself every few minutes. This isn’t an LP that delivers on early promises, instead just like his every other release it’s a promise and a delivery, a short story that opens, evolves and closes in our ears. So what is different from last year? Nothing at all. The electronic world is still James Blake’s personal playground and he makes everyone else look safe, unsophisticated and plain boring. James Blake is only the prologue in his story but it already feels like a life changing epic.