SEAL ON PSYCHEDELICS

20 // Mirrorring // Foreign Body

   Tiny Vipers and Grouper aren’t necessarily the two acts that you would line next to eachother when it comes to their sound but on their collaborative album Foreign Body they do their best to meet in the middle. Check out the deliberate misspell in their name which makes sure that the listener understands that these two are setting out to work in perfect equilibrium. Mirrorring aims for symmetry and in exchange it offers six tracks that delve into acoustic guitar driven ambiance. Most collaborative albums will either find the artists focusing on what they do on their own or try to do something completely different just for the sake of it. Foreign Body is great because while both artists are working together, they’re also exploring their solo sounds and taking them further. Grouper’s ambiance is the perfect harmony for Tiny Vipers’ acoustic songs and vice versa. Foreign Body is both a collaboration and two solo albums, always in perfect harmony.

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19 // Holly Herndon // Movement

   I saw approximately three pictures of Holly Herndon. She also has a Twitter account on which she comes across as a really nice person. That is reassuring as her debut album Movement is the sound of humanity fading out against the vast landscape filled with futuristic technology. While she offers a couple of minimal techno gems (Movement, Fade), it’s the almost anti-organic parts (Terminal, Breathe) that make Movement stand out as the best album of the year that is made entirely of custom manufactured cells created by one of the best artificial intellects going. Movement is striking in its starkness (the silent interludes in Breathe make pauses in James Blake’s music come across as a blink of an eye) but it’s also an claim for the rights of laptop music being taken as a serious art. Holly Herndon is the advocate of robot rights and with the sounds on Movement it’s tempting to join the AI revolution with her.

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18 // The xx // Coexist

   With every passing day you and we get older, more cynical and less naive. That’s the case with everything that’s living except The xx debut album which managed to capture the sound of the precise second you realise you’re in love in a capsule and keep it in there. Forever young, forever sweet. Coexist happens within the same time period, we may have aged but those three years may as well be three minutes to The xx. However on Coexist the capsule has been broken and the world is suddenly bleak. The xx have upset some by not changing things too much on Coexist but better than any other record this year, Coexist captures the moment when teenage naivety turns into adult cynicism, love into ruitine, dreams into reality. It didn’t rely on the breakaway talents of Jamie xx and instead shut itself away from new experiences. There are many more fish in the water but Coexist is at that stage where it couldn’t care less. We’ve been there.

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17 // Converge // All We Love We Leave Behind

   With maturity comes understanding and understanding where you are as a person, no matter what age, is essential to living your life to the fullest. Converge are at that point in their life where all the anger should’ve faded out but their new record All We Love We Leave Behind is still angry and among their best too. Simple ears will tell you that Converge haven’t really evolved since they hit their peak on the classic Jane Doe but while their new album still has that all destroying energy, it also deals emotions with more, for a lack of a better word, subtlety. This is less of a relentless carpet bombing and much of a meticulously precise hit filled with the power of a hundred bombs. It’s violent and essential just as pretty much everything Converge have done this century but it’s also a new page for a group of legends who were at risk of being too old for the hardcore kids. All We Love We Leave Behind is the definition of grace in conflict.

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16 // Chairlift // Something

   Chairlift didn’t have an easy start so the fact that we are now celebrating them as one of 2012 essential pop acts speaks volumes about how far they’ve come since being one of those “that band of an iPod advert”. Something is a huge improvement, a creative leap from their sketchy indie pop debut Does You Inspire You. On Something they’re taking the ideas from 80s synthpop but distilling them to the point where they feel like formless apparitions, twisting not according to some preset pop structures but rather their own sense of hooks. Hooks is the name of every good major label pop album and Something really dwarfs every other pop record of 2012 when it comes to simple yet brilliantly sweet songs. Around half of the songs here are instant hits while the rest delve into the more obscure dream pop of 80s, referencing Cocteau Twins and not sounding like something that should come out on a major label. Something is a victory and a proof that major label pop is not a swear word.

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15 // Dirty Projectors // Swing Lo Magellan

   What do people mean when they say that certain bands or artists sound intelligent? We don’t get it but tell you what, Dave Longstreth and his cohorts in Dirty Projectors love showing off their songwriting muscle. They spent their still young career conveying pop songs in the forms of complex polyrhythms, sometimes overly expressive guitar mastery and borderline pretentious concepts. But wait. Swing Lo Magellan skips all that and instead stands as the first Dirty Projectors album that is front to back simple and honest without the need to put on an intellectual front to impress. It’s a challenge to write an album about being in love and being happy when you’re one of the most acclaimed young songwriters but on here Longstreth doesn’t try to be someone else but rather convert everything that Dirty Projectors have defined on their recent Rise Above and Bitte Orca LPs into simple love songs that strike with their immediate honesty. Love at first sound.

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14 // Lotus Plaza // Spooky Action At A Distance

   Here at Seal On Psychedelics we have a special shrine for worshiping Deerhunter. But while a lot of the Deerhunter attention falls on the shoulders of Bradford Cox, undeniably one of the most interesting rock frontmen of the modern day, he has lost his once seemingly everlasting knack for beauty doused in almost impenetrable myth of complex rock figure. Lockett Pundt, Deerhunter’s guitar player comes from the other side of the spectrum. He started out with hazy The Floodlight Collective that neglects the need of a frontman altogether. But his second studio album Spooky Action At A Distance is where he takes the torch from Cox when it comes to simple, beautiful melodies. At ten songs long, Pundt doesn’t waste a single minute on something that isn’t perfect in its simplicity. The dream state of sound is still here but these are the best kind of songs from the same place that gave us Fluorescent Grey and Microcastle. Sometimes simplicity can be embarrassing but the glorious sound of rock basics should make most of overblown rock albums released this year sound stupid and tuneless.

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13 // TNGHT // TNGHT EP

   Canada’s Lunice and Scotland’s Hudson Mohawke may have a massive ocean between them but on their collaboration TNGHT they feel like two peas in a pod, a long lost brothers that fulfill each other’s sound. TNGHT EP is quick and to the point. The music they deal with is much of the same. While they both make dance music, neither of them would deny that it’s steeped up in hip hop. On here they fully embrace the sounds found in trap music, but they don’t deliver some slowed down codeine jams or bumping moments to be rapped over. They go on a full on assault that leaves very little space to breathe, let alone sneak a word or two in. TNGHT EP is crammed with sounds, from babies cooing, cars crashing to pistols clicking and bubbles popping. It’s experimental but the main selling point of this is just how fun they make all of this sound. The duo have recorded TNGHT EP while having drinks in the studio and ended up with a perfect sound that’s criminally intoxicated on fun.

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12 // Burial // Kindred EP

   A lot of young artists and producers use animosity as a tool of promotion. Burial doesn’t and if you listen to the ambiance on his records you’ll start doubting whether he actually exists. His music is a perfect balance of night, city and solitude in dance. On his new brilliant Kindred EP he goes a step further than ever before. He makes his own music sound anxious and uneasy. The man deals with UK garage rhythms and repetition but on here he layers the sounds to the point where one track goes through many shifts. What once was just an implication of a lone travel is now a soundtrack to it. The title track is classic Burial, but one that changes and feels totally unrestricted by dance music’s repetitive rhythms. The two tracks that follows, Loner and Ashtray Warp are the true masterpieces on here, using simple keyboard melodies not to be another meaningless layer of malody but to induce a feeling of pure anxiousness. Burial has long been world’s most accurate painter of night’s darkest moments but now he gives his non existent self some real emotion.

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11 // Actress // R.I.P.

   R.I.P. has very little of what makes an album if we’re thinking about full length record with a narrative, something that flows from start to finish. Instead Darren Cunningham takes these tracks as a chance to put listener into the shoes of different characters for at least a couple of minutes. R.I.P., Actress’ third record follows from where the other two left off but it feels like it’s been made by a producer who still has a lot to offer. More so than ever before in fact. It’s less dance music that is expected, even by the standard’s of the man who made Splazsh. Instead Actress explores every possible depth of dance music. We’re not talking about ambient pads to make you sound spacey, we’re talking about IDM percussion, psychedelic samples, ambient interludes and many more things that may alienate people who will treat R.I.P. simply as a dance LP. This works better as a compilation of future standards from a man that is set to prove that is not a one trick pony but, at least on R.I.P., a fifteen one.