The Null Device Blog

The tradition continues.  It’s Eric’s ludicrously-specific best/worst/other list.  I make up a few arbitrary categories, then assign winners (or losers) to them.

Best Awkward British Hip Hop
Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – Angles
Edging out The Streets this year (who continues his sad slide into irrelevance), comes LeSac vs. Pip.  Lo-fi bip-hop meets a form of rapping that has more to do with spoken word performance than classical MC’ing.  A few mis-steps, but a generally solid and always entertaining album.

Best Obliquely Politcal Album
Thievery Corporation – Radio Retaliation
It’s hard to really explain why an album of low-key musig, blending lounge, dub, reggae, indian and brazillian music woudl be considered “political” but…well, it is.  A few lyrics about “beating Babylon back”, some militaristic cover art, a common theme of oppressed peoples…well, there you have it.  It doesn’t quite live up to the heights of some of their previous albums, but, hey, it’s TCorp, it’s going to be good.  Their increased love of straightup reggae also ensures that anyone attending a T-corp live show will receive a contact buzz from the copious amount of ganja being smoked by 30-something hipsters in the audience.

It’s Good But… Award
Bitter:Sweet – Drama
It’s a fine album, full of jet-set pop music that sounds like it should be the theme to a Bond film.  But a lot of the album sounds an awful lot like their previous releases.   Enjoyable, but one wonders how much longer they can keep this up.

Best Band Promoted by an Apple Ad
Chairlift – Does You Inspire You
Oh, it’s fantastically twee, probably so much that it’d send the kids from Bis into insulin shock.  And yet many of the songs on the album (including the iPod ad-promoted “Bruises”) is appallingly catchy.  Once you start humming it, little short of a drillpress to the right temple will dislodge it from your brain.

Showing The Kids How It’s Done Award
Meat Beat Manifesto – Autoimmune
After a medical hiatus (which inspired the album title) and a few previous albums that were interesting in a head-scratching way, Jack Dangers comes slamming back with an album of his trademark style of chaotic breakbeat dub.  This time, though, he throws in influences from elsewhere, including  the dubstep genre he helped inspire.  A track like “Solid Waste” deserves to be up there in the MBM pantheon with “Radio Babylon” and “Prime Audio Soup.”

Still Funny, But Better Versions Exist
Flight of the Conchords – Flight of the Conchords
Given the clamor for this album after the first season of the show ended, it’s a bit surprising that they didn’t just release the soundtrack to the TV series.   Maybe there was a licensing thing.  At any rate, most of the major songs from the show are covered, including slightly extended versions of “Inner City Pressure” , a more acoustic version of “Hiphopopotamus vs Rhymenocerous”, and a version of “Bowie” that cribs from 80’s Bowie instead of stopping after the “Scary Monsters”-era sound.  The first one works well- sounding even more like Pet Shop Boys than the TV version did.  The acoustic “HvR” doesn’t work well for me, and the “Bowie” changes are a tradeoff – the intro feels rushed and less Bowie-like but the “Let’s Dance” ending redeems it with the line “phasers on funky.”

Best Album From Beyond the Grave
Gaudi + Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Dub Qawwali Remixed
Last year, Gaudi released an album of dub versions of qawwali tracks by the late, legendary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.  his year, it got the remix treatment from the likes of Pinch,  Cheb I Sabbah, and Bombay Dub Orchestra.  Not quite as cool as the originals, but still very cool.

Better Than the Original Award
Imogen Heap – Hide and Seek V2
What was originally a hanuting, digitally-harmonized ballad gets re-orchestrated as a solo vocal track with a shruti-box-like drone.  And its even more haunting and otherworldly.

Balle Balle Award
Jazzy B – Rambo
I’d probably like it even more if I knew Panajbi and could understand what all the “skit” tracks were all about.  Nonetheless, Jazzy B continues to fuse bhangra and hip hop better than most of his contemporaries.  It has a lot of the appeal of british club music but…with dhols.

TV Sampling To Bach Ke (Beware of the TV Sampling) Award
Panjabi MC – Indian Timing
An awfully long time in the making, PMC comes back with a solid album of desi-hop.  More of a bollywood twist gets added this time around, which is pretty cool, although he cannot seem to shake the desire to sample 80’s TV themes for his backing music.  It worked fine on “Mundian To Bach Ke”, pretty well on “Jugni” but on this album’s “A-Team (Panjabi Soldiers)” it’s just silly.  It’s a little disheartening, but the rest of the album thankfully stays away from such gimickry.  20 tracks is a bit long though  Yes, it’s 7 years of material, but geez, man, edit!

Trying Too Hard At You Award
Junkie XL – Booming Back At You
JXL tries to do hard-edged dance music again, and it only sort of works.  He’s got that overcompressed, high-energy sound, but it seems to lack any real passion.  Sure, the cover of “Cities In Dust” is decent, but overall the whole thing feels like he went through the Justice/SMD checklist and made sure to hit all the major points.  Yelly, slightly off-key vocalists?  Yep.  Sidechained basslines?  Check.  Kickdrums that overwhelm the mix?  Yep.  Lofi distortion on just about everything?  Uh huh.  Lack of hooks?  Sigh.

Ok, I Was Late to the Party Award
The Presets – Apocalypso
I sort of ignored this album when it first came out, as The Presets earlier material didn’t do too much for me.  And the clips I heard didn’t do too much for me either.  And the fact that Pitchfork was having some sort of self-indulgent wankfest about it didn’t help.  However, after hearing “My People” on a club system, I suddenly understood why everyone liked it.  The production is sort of odd – it reminds me a lot of some of the rave tracks from the early 90’s, but with better mastering – but they aren’t short of hooks mixed in with their in-your-face-ish synths and minimal mechanical beats.

Better On Paper Award
Juno Reactor – Gods and Monsters
In concept, a Juno Reactor album with more of a pop structure, multiple vocalists, and a sort of thematic unity sounds like a fabulous idea.  Unfortunately it comes of kind of cold.   A few decent tracks, and “Las Vegas Future Past” has a nice, epic feel to it, but overall it rather falls flat.  He’s at his best when he’s got armies of drummers at his command, which he eschewed this time out.

Most Brilliant I’m Likely To Never Need To Listen To Again
Portishead – Third
The most anticipated release of the year.  It’s stunning, in its own way – Gibbons’ fragile voice swoops and soars against layers of dissonant guitars and machine-gun percussion (as in the leadoff single, “Machine Gun”) and it’s cool – few musicians could make that sort of thing work in a pop context.  “White Horses” is haunting, and “Rip” is a great track, but, damn…it’s just so damn brilliant I don’t have any desire to listen to it again.  I suppose I will, but the weather needs to be right (bleak, rainy, windswept) and I have to be in the kind of mood where I want to do nothing other than listen to a Portishead album.

Tech Tech Tech Award
Morgan Geist – Double Night Time
I knew him primarily from his work on Erlend Oye’s solo album, but Geist’s own work is surprisingly engaging.  It’s blippy electropop that doesn’t fall into the trap of sounding like a bad synthpop track from 1981.  There’s a modern sensibility mixed in with the chirpy synths and wobbly basses.

Best Album to Defeat the Sophomore Slump By Moving Its Influences Slightly West
Niyaz – Nine Heavens
After their debut album fused electronic textures, courtesy of ambient uber-producer Carmen Rizzo, with persian poetry and melody courstesy of Azam Ali, it seemed like they had a niche that would be hard to step out of.   While they still have much of the same sound, they’ve moved their sonic center away from Persia to Turkey, and toned down the ambient electronics a bit in favor of traditional instrumentation.   They even included a bonus acoustic versions, which aren’t always strictly acoustic, but are still pretty spiffy.

Stupid Fun Award
Pendulum – In Silico
Drum-n-Bass tries to rock, and for the most part, succeeds.  It’s fun.  Not especially deep, but it’s great for rolling down the windows, cranking up the radio and driving too fast.

Best Germano-Latin Covers Album
Senor Coconut Y Su Cojunto – Around the World
Uwe Schmidt is still trading on the “latin covers” idea – I guess it pays for all his other projects.  After a great album of kraftwerk covers, a mediocre album of 80’s pop covers,  and a neat but somewhat obscure album of YMO covers, he comes back with more pop covers, and this time it’s better.  “Around The World” is the title track, covering the Daft Punk french house stomper, and is probably the highlight of the album.  A south-american twist to Trio’s “Da Da Da” is livened up by  a vocal from the original lead singer.  It’s party music, plain and simple.

Reissue Repackage Repackage
The Smiths – The Sound of the Smiths
Really?  ANOTHER best of from The Smiths?  This makes it, what, 5 of these?  Sure, this is remastered, and that’s cool and all given how muddy some of the originals were, but…I think I already have 6 versions of “How Soon Is Now.”  The 2CD version is kind of hilarious, too, given how much Morrissey reputedly hates the NY Vocal Mix of “This Charming Man.”  Maybe Johnny picked that one.  The rarities on disc 2 are nice, but it seems to me that the kind of people who want that sort of thing likely already have it.

Best Album In Search of a Genre
Transglobal Underground – Moonshout
Dancehall Egyptian Bhangra-pop?  Electro-arabic reggae?  Seriously, I want to be these guys.

Best Oh-So-Dreamy Dreampop Album
Halou – Halou
After 12 years in the business, a contract with Nettwerk, and a number of albums, Halou comes back with possibly their strongest album to date as an indie release.  It has a twinge of the old 4AD sound to it, no doubt in part because Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie was involved on a few tracks.  It’s a nice balance of jangly, dreamy guitar-pop and indie-electronics.

Local (or, at least, people I know) Mentions That Deserve to Be Supported
Iris – Hydra
The Dark Clan – The Vampire Wore White
Sensuous Enemy – Fragments
German Art Students – Pompeii
Chester Fantastico – The World’s Greatest Boner

Vaporware Awards
Null Device – As-Yet Untilted EP
CTRLSHFT – Full-length
Sex Falafel – Sex Falafel

08 was a pretty decent year for music, overall.