I asked a friend, and I can’t remember which one, who this was. “Oh, this is Nine Inch Nails” she said. Huh, I thought. I vowed to remember the name.

And then I promptly forgot about it for about a year.

Luckily, by the time I got to college, “Pretty Hate Machine” was pretty omnipresent, and I rapidly accumulated NIN singles , remixes and imports, and bootlegs (including the occasionally-hilarious “Purest Feeling” demos); I was going to NIN shows and wearing Head Like a Hole tshirts.

Trent was, like me, a scrawny little nerd who liked synthesizers, had a lot of welled-up teenage angst, and wore a lot of black. I could associate. I could get behind it.

20-odd years have gone by, and Trent Reznor is a muscle-y Oscar-winner who married a Filipino supermodel and still likes synthesizers. Yeah, okay, so maybe Trent and I have drifted apart a bit. He still writes sort of whiny lyrics, though.

Last year, Pretty Hate Machine got a remaster and re-release. The remaster is nice. Very clean, adds a lot of clarity and depth to the mix without changing much of it.

So, now that I can hear everything clearly, how has the intervening two decades treated PHM?

“Head Like a Hole” gets off to a good start, although the drum machines have a bit of that late-80′s “sampled drum machine” flair to them, although that seems to be making a bit of a comeback itself, so while maybe that SP-series grittiness isn’t exactly timeless, it’s at least “retro-cool”. The instrumental hooks are strong, particularly that bass synth riff. It doesn’t sound like much of what’s going on in music today, but it also doesn’t sound like what was going on in pop music back in 1989, either. Where it starts to break down a bit is in the chorus – it’s recorded fine, but the guitar sound chosen is very much the late-80′s “roll-off-all-the-low-end”, solid-state rectifier sound. It fits in with the song, sure, not taking up too much sonic space, but it immediately marks the track as being produced in the late 80′s.

After a brief sample-loop interlude, which has since been aped by every neophyte electro band ever since at some point (“yeah! Gunshots as snare drums! Nobody’s thought of that before!”), we get “Terrible Lie.” In a lot of ways, this one track presaged much of what NIN was going to do over the next decade. Teen-angsty, almost balladic lyrics making some stab at religion, lots of loud/quiet contrast, an infectious but dissonant hook that doesn’t come in until near the end – this is basically the model for many of NIN’s subsequent singles. This one works fairly well, although the lyrics seem even more goofily overwrought now than they did in the 90′s.

“Down In It” was a single that, when it came out, I really liked. “Hey! A nerdy white boy doing hip hop!” I thought. Now, I think “oooh, a nerdy white boy doing hip hop.” While the attempt is admirable, this particular flavor of industrial hip hop had already been executed better (although when I first heard the song, I didn’t know it) by contemporaries like Meat Beat Manifesto, and the song is a pretty direct crib of Skinny Puppy’s “Dig It.” It’s not.bad, exactly.but at this point Trent wasn’t really Chuck D and The Bomb Squad, so it comes off a little stilted and, dare I say it, quaint. I think it’s the bassline, primarily – there’s the urge to add “in West Philadelphia, born and raised.” to the lyrics.

“Sanctified” doesn’t get off to a much more auspicious start. The sampled slap-bass didn’t sound great in 1989, and doesn’t sound better now. The programming of the percussion is surprisingly detailed, though, and the whole song makes really nice use of stereo pan. There’s a lot of fiddly sonic programming going on here, unfortunately overshadowed by that insistent slap-bass loop.

“Something I Can Never Have” is teenage therapy-poetry of the most overwrought sort. I admit to writing stuff like this on the back of my 10th grade chemistry notebook. It’s silly now, but man, when I was 18, Trent was speaking to my deepest soul – and he dropped the f-bomb so you knew it was really edgy and tormented. There’s not a huge amount of complexity to this song, but what there is is quite well-executed. The piano samples are a little clangy, but basically if you added a few Christian overtones to this song it’d be a chart-topping Evanescence track now. I expected this one to age poorly, but conversely it’s sort of surprised me.

We get back into a strange area with “Kinda I Want To.” The bassline is very late 80′s, and sounds a lot like the infamous “LatelyBass” preset from the TX81Z. But then again, that late 80′s FM sound is drifting in and out of vogue again, so while this doesn’t sound current, again we get this sort of retro thing going on. We also get a snatch of an alternate “Down In It” that amps up the aggression. And we get a lot of knob-twirly tweaking of effects – the lead line gets the ever-living crap ring-modulated out of it. In the end we get a song that didn’t resemble much of what was going on in late 80′s music (Skinny Puppy and company notwithstanding) and while imitators have come along since then, they’ve sort of vanished since. NIN basically stands alone in that regard.

When it came out as a single, I liked “Sin” enough to design a font honoring it. After 20 years, it’s really not emblematic of Trent’s best work, but it basically serves as the template for a lot of the more popular “industrial rock” of the next decade or so. The chugging, percussive bass, the buzzsaw guitars, the slightly off-putting vinyl-scratch samples, the frenetic dance drums.it draws a lot from EBM and a squeezes it in with some noisy alt-rock. By 1995 it seemed like there were a dozen bands on pop radio doing stuff like this.

“That’s What I Get” takes us back into more familiar territory, with the cold digital percussive synth (PPG Wave, I think?) and the now-familiar detuned hook lead. Chuggy FM bass, woozy synth strings, effectron-style shifting echoes.basically, this sounds like a song off of Skinny Puppy’s “Too Dark Park” with all the distortion effects turned off. Another case where we didn’t really hear another track like this again but it clearly influenced things for a while.

The regrettable slap bass sample resurfaces on “The Only Time” and while it’s not as irritating as on Sanctified, probably because it seems to be layered with something punchier. The squashed snare drum now reminds me of the similar snare from NIN’s later mega-hit “Closer”, and “The Only Time” structurally sets the template for that track – in fact the detuned hook isn’t too far off from the one that closes “Closer.” Huh.

Everything wraps up with “Ringfinger.” I remember at first not being impressed with this track, then being really impressed and then settling back into a sort of mild appreciation tempered by the fact that every DJ I heard kept playing the demo “Twist” to show how cool they were. This one is well-programmed, but I can’t shake the fact that a lot of sounds on it scream early 90′s. Sure, this was one of the first songs to use some of them, but a cadre of imitators in the interim have fixed the track to a certain period. Structurally the song is pretty decent – a nice buildup/breakdown sequence, to a final climax that caps off the album (with a similar riff to the one from “Kinda.” There’s a lot of little fiddly bits going on in the background that I hadn’t really noticed until doing some closer listening on it, and that helps the song a lot.

The remaster adds the B-side cover of “Get Down Make Love” to the album, which unfortunately doesn’t add much. It’s a decent enough cover, but it feels tacked on to the album (because, well, it is). It sounds like what you’d expect NIN covering Queen to sound like – noisy, distorted, dancy, with lots of little weird sounds thrown in. The chunkier guitars in the chorus are a bit of a switch up, and demonstrate that maybe his subsequent material is going to have a little more heft (which it did, but we didn’t know that at the time).

Overall, one thing I don’t think I’d really noticed about Pretty Hate Machine at the time, was just how melodic and “poppy” it was. It was abrasive and scary in 1989 but it had a very solid pop/rock structure at the core of every song. There are very clear vocal melodies and hooks, the lack of which had really prevented “industrial” music from crossing over into the mainstream until that point. It bridged a lot of worlds. A lot of the sounds sound sort of dated now, but that’s always a downside of being on the bleeding edge – once everyone else catches on it becomes a cliché of the era or the genre, like the Alpha-Juno “Hoover” sound for rave or the dubstep wobble. Pretty Hate Machine, on further review, may never sound as fresh and exciting as it did to me in 1990, and certainly years in now I can recognize the spectre of Trent’s influences looming over the album much more strongly than I ever did then, but I can also recognize just how important and influential this album actually was to subsequent artists. Certainly, it influenced me strongly for years.

The other day

If this works, I may write a few more of these.

“Violator” was, at least to my mind,  really Depeche Mode at the height of their powers.  It was before the rock-n-roll excess and substance abuse tore the band apart in the mid 90’s, but after they had shed some of the boyish new-wave affectations of their earlier years.  Martin Gore’s songwriting was mature, admittedly drawing from his usual slightly-but-not-overtly-naughty well of religious and sexual imagery, but lacking the more dated cold war references or hamfisted political commentary.  While arguably Dave Gahan’s voice has improved in the intervening decades, it was really around this album that he found his voice for the material – he lacked the icyness (or boyishness) of his earlier works.  And when it came to sound design and production Wilder was at the top of his game, and the Wilder/Flood combination was near perfect.  Even the graphic design fit – their simmering relationship with Anton Corbijn was bearing fruit in more ways than just arty videos.

In short, it was a good time to be Depeche Mode.

So did this make a timeless album?  Well, mostly.  Some of the tracks hold up as well now as they did then.  A few tracks don’t.  And in some ways, the album was a victim of its own success – a track like “Personal Jesus” was so iconic and, frankly, popular, that legions of imitators have sort of dulled its shine.

The opener, “World in My Eyes” has several strong hooks, starting with the modular-synth bassline right out of the gate.  A straight-up dance drum pattern drives the song, particularly notable for its snare, a weird sort of choked electronic burp that manages to not be distracting while still being interesting.  Also interesting is the fact that overall, much of the track is pretty dry in terms of reverb and other effects.  In an era of pop records leaning heavily on lush processing, this comes across almost as dry as a hip-hop track.

Looking back, the track has aged fairly well on its own, but lives somewhat in the shadow of its own remixes and remakes.  20 years of remixes and some truly astounding live arrangements have left the original sounding a little empty by comparison.

“Sweetest Perfection” doesn’t fare as well over the long haul.  It’s still an interesting track, and has a few modulations of stereo pan  and reverb levels help give the track a sort of uneasy, funhouse-mirror feel.  Unfortunately both Martin Gore’s knife-like vibrato and two decades of angular electronic music have undermined the bits of the track that are actually interesting.

“Personal Jesus” is one of the more notable tracks on the album.  Partially because it’s been nearly omnipresent in dance clubs for 20 years, and partially because it just has a very strong (and very insistent) hook.  Up until this point in their career, dM had dabbled a bit with guitar-based rock, but never really formed a song around it.  Here, we get a sort-of-unfunky blues riff right up front and center.  The lyrics are pretty minimal and almost meaningless in many ways.  Interestingly, they’re processed with a slapback-y reverb that’s mixed very high, rendering the vocals almost unintelligible on anything other than a large, widely-spaced system – listening to the song on headphones garbles things a bit – reinforcing the idea that this is a big-room dance track through and through.  The drums sound enormous, but on closer inspection, actually aren’t mixed as high as one might think – the clever mix of a standard snare sample with Wilder’s samples of roadies jumping on flight cases in a stairwell gives this illusion of hundreds of drummers without actually needing to layer dozens of samples.  Clever, and while found-sound was sort of de rigeur for the time, it was still pretty novel, even by today’s standards.

Historically, this song basically became the template for a lot of electronic dance music to follow, particularly in the more radio friendly side of “electronic.”  The pattern of “looped rock riff”  and minimal repetitive vocals with a hefty dance beat and an extended outtro has dominated dance music for decades.  Norman Cook’s career is basically variations on this theme.  I don’t know if Mode was the first to do this (I rather doubt it) but they certainly were the biggest.

“Halo” in a lot of ways pairs with “World In My Eyes” – it has a lot of the same production styles and even opens with a similar bass sound and riff.  It lacks some of the hookish-ness of “Eyes” but builds up to a nice crescendo, with sampled strings that have aged surprisingly well.  It’s a bit overly awash in bombast, with big piano stabs punctuating important lyrics, and that’s a bit silly, but that’s sort of the point of the song.  Interestingly, Alan Wilder recently explained that one of the underlying drum loops is John Bonham’s classic “When The Levee Breaks” beat, and if you know what to listen for, sure enough, it’s there, but at the same time it’s cleverly processed and gated in such a way to not be an obvious classic loop – in a track like Bjork’s “Army of Me” it’s entirely the opposite – so it both borrows the muscular sound of the Zeppelin drummer without actually announcing “hey, look, we’re sampling Led Zeppelin!”

“Waiting For the Night” is the one that surprised me.  I had expected this one to sound more dated than any, but it surprisingly has held up better than a lot of the rest of the album.  Part of it is the sheer Spartan-ness of the arrangement – it’s basically the looped modular line for most of the song, with a big pedal bass, and a few effects floating in and out.  There’s not even a monster hook, but there is some very clever vocal processing going on.  Gahan’s lead voice is washed with a good bit of lush processing, setting it back into the mix, and then Gore’s countermelody and harmonies are brought in much drier and more up-front, inverting the standard mix-rules and giving the song a very unsettling feel.  Also, an intimate, almost claustrophobic song such as this following immediately on the heels of a big room track like “Halo” just amplifies the effect.  The weird and clearly artificial pitch-shifting during the runout of the song presages in some ways the modern love of weird, inhuman vocal effects, from the abuse of autotune to The Knife’s fondness for formant and pitch shifting.  These probably weren’t related, but the use of such effects in 1991 helps keep the track sounding modern.

Then we hit the biggie.  “Enjoy The Silence.”  I’ve touted this one as the perfect electronic pop song for a long time, and it still holds.  Parts of it, particularly in the area of drum programming and processing, sound a bit dated.  Still, what fascinates me is that despite it being a pop song, the underpinnings of it are clearly very much tied to the house and dance scenes of the era.  That bit of it is understated, but there’s a basic 4-on-the-floor analog kick, punctuated with a splatty snare on the 2 and 4; a basic disco beat.  The weird processed percussion loop running through the song is at its core a mangled version of the standard dance-music conga riff.  While those features peg the song as a 1991 dance classic, it’s really not until the sampled horns come in that there’s a smack in the face of “oh, right, early 90’s.”  It’s still got a great hook, and you can still dance to it.  Interestingly, even the recent mixes by Timo Maas and Richard X and other “superstar DJ” types have kept the core of the track pretty much intact, only updating a few drum sounds.  It’s a testament to the staying power of a good arrangement.

“Policy of Truth” is similar in that regard.  The song itself is a basic dance-pop track, with a good vocal hook.  Unfortunately, the sound I remember thinking was so cool back in 1991 now sounds like a bad idea.  Those sampled, processed saxophone quacks during the chorus now share the same part of my brain with those early dM videos that showed someone playing trumpet every time a vaguely brassy synth sound was going on.  It occupies that no-man’s land between “cleverly-used sample” and “interesting synth sound” and it’s kind of distracting for me now.  Still, the vocal harmonies are nice, and the slide guitar sample is immediately recognizable as a hallmark of the song.  Shame about the saxophones.

“Blue Dress” is…well, it was my least favorite track in 1991, and it remains so now.  The piano-ish sound in the chorus is a bit overly clangy and harsh, the bassline is sort of hammer-y, and the nasal analog pads in the background of the song just sort of bother me.  However, Martin’s vocals are surprisingly nuanced and there are some nice modulations in the chorus.  There’s also a subtle wash of distorted shoegaze-y guitars in the background that fill out the song nicely.  I’d never noticed that before.  I’d want those to be brought forward, but Martin’s vocals are a bit too delicate to fight with that.  While the song probably suffers a bit in terms of presence because of that, in the end it was probably the correct production choice.

The album closes with “Clean” which is an interesting song on many levels.  It feels a bit like a dance track, but it’s slow.  It’s in 3, but it doesn’t feel like it, and doesn’t fall into the “electro waltz” trap.  The arrangement and programming is downright kraftwerkian, all blippy electronic drums, minimal looping bass and choir pads.  The only thing that separates it from something like “Radioaktivitat” is Gahan’s nearly-histrionic vocals.   And the really brilliant bit is that the song ends, then starts up again with just the main drums and bass before going to the fadeout.  There’re two bars of weird resonant bleeps right at the end, which to this day surprise the hell out of me, even 20 years on.   It’s a good way to close out an album.

So has it held up?  For the most part, yes.  There are a few sounds and production tricks that haven’t aged well (primarily with the samples, which often sound dated) and there are a few that were far ahead of their time and set some standards.  Certainly this album’s influence is undeniable.  While Depeche Mode’s fortunes waxed and waned over the next two decades, “Violator” remained their touchstone album, and the reason for that is pretty clear.  It’s a very cleverly-produced album, polished without being overly-slick.

Best Collaborative Album I Was Involved With This Year: The Dark Clan & Null Device – Fading Belief
A cute concept – a cover song tradeoff – anchored by a pretty darn epic title track, if I do say so myself.  Damn fun to do, too.

Vocoder of The Year Award: Skream – Where You Should Be
It’s not quite a dubstep anthem, nor is it the most banging track on his “Outside The Box” release.  But the combination of vocalist Sam Frank and the raspy vocoder is catchy and helps set the song apart.

Best Song About Being a British Girl In A Dance Club: Katy B – Katy On a Mission
And infectious dance track, a mixture of a chugging bassline, an off-kilter shuffling dance rhythm, Katy B’s vocals and…not much else.  And yet it’s basically one giant hook with a great lead vocal, and lyrics that nearly perfectly sum up what it’s like to get down on the dancefloor.  Probably the best song about clubbing since The Streets “Blinded By The Lights.”

Best Song About a Drum Machine: Bassnectar – That 808 Track
808 kick drum, 808 hat, 808 snare drum, 808 clap.  Doesn’t say much, but it adequately sums up the old-skool drum machine that’s defined hip hop, techno, house, and a dozen other genres for the past 20 years.

Best Song Involving Someone Asking What Their Name Is: Vishal  Shekar – “Sheila Ki Jawani”
In the tradition of Eminem’s Slim Shady and Rhianna asking what her name is, comes this Bollywood item song from Tees Meer Khan.  The lyrics seem somewhat vacuous but it’s an earworm of the most pernicious variety, and the dance video involving the face-meltingly attractive Katrina Kaif doesn’t hurt either.

Shoegazer’s Not Dead Award: School Of Seven Bells – Disconnect From Desire
Sounding like a modern updating of classic ‘gazer bands from the 90’s, SVIIB gives us some lush, fuzzed-out epic tracks with surprisingly sharp vocal focus.  Melody is not lost in the wash of guitars and synths or the epic drums.  The leadoff track “Windstorm” sets the tone, and followup songs like “Joviann” and “I L U” are equal parts melancholy dreampop and driving indie rock.

New Wave’s Not Dead Either Award: New Collisions – The Optimist
I had the opportunity to share the stage with these kids on tour, and they’re a pretty solid live act with pretty catchy tunes.  Their sound is pretty much straight-up early 80’s new wave, a la The Cars or The Romantics.  Their sound still bears a few hallmarks of a young band, but

Best Album About Hitting Rock Bottom and Then Throwing Up All Over the Place: Caustic – And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Vomit
Caustic’s probably best known for driving distorted dance tracks with a sense of humour that borders on conceptual art.  However, “…Vomit” finds Mr. Fanale getting surprisingly personal and introspective…or at least as much as one can be through walls of mangled beats and synths.  Still, tracks like “Fail Better” set the tone.  Musically, it’s also a lot more raw and “punk” than previous efforts, although the whole thing still makes a lot more sense when experienced live.

Best Conceptual Indie-Punk/Electronic-Dance Double Album: The Dark Clan – Fade/Dance Magic Dance
I’m not sure what I can say about this album that I haven’t said already.   This is TDC at their most ambitious and at the top of their songwriting game.  While Fade is the most cohesive, with each song staying roughly within the bounds of guitar-based rock of some kind, DMD is more ambitious, leaping from genre to genre and plowing through a dizzying array of guest performers.

Best All-Lady Folk-Ish-Kinda-Sorta-Pop Album: Little Red Wolf – If Only We Were Just Like We Are
It’s alt-ish country-folk pop of the Neko Case variety, arranged for a band with four very talented singers who manage to balance sweet vocal harmonies with varying instrumentation and songs that flirt with a number of genres.

Best Socially-Aware Hip-Hop Album: Guante + Big Cats! –  An Unwelcome Guest
Zombies, Superman, social consciousness…taken by themselves they have the potential to be hopelessly precious.  Taken together, oh my lord what a mess it could’ve been.  And yet, Guante’s incisive lyrics, organic delivery and punchy style coupled with Big Cats!’s Ninjatune-cut-up funk production makes for a deeply compelling mix.  One of the most listenable albums of the year.

Needless Concepts and Weird Cover Art: BT –  These Hopeful Machines
BT’s adopted a goofy emo haircut, slathered his albums and singles with paintings that look like hippie versions of something from an old Skinny Puppy release, and decided the best way to release the album digitally was as two enormous files for “side A” and “side B”, forcing the listener to “experience the album as a whole” (or, in my case, digitally edit the files so I can listen to whichever tracks I want, whenever I want).  The album isn’t bad by any means, it’s impeccably produced and programmed and there’s clearly a lot of interesting ideas there, nearly all of which have had the soul mechanically polished right out of them.

A Step In The Right Direction: Conjure One – Exilarch
It’s no self-titled debut, but it ranks a lot better than the bafflingly lite-FM  “Extraordinary Ways.”  Fulber’s decided he wants to go back to weird synth programming, and I applaud that, although I really wish a lot of his analog atmospheres and bleeps didn’t remind me so much of the intro to Gary Wright’s “Dreamweaver.”

De Rigeur Remix: Nadia Ali – Queen Of Clubs
As the new Go-To Club Music Female Vocalist ™, Ali’s worked with Van Buuren, BT, Morgan Page, Creamer & K, and released a pretty solid solo album.  So it seemed unsurprising that a bunch of club remixes came screaming out this year.  And at least it didn’t have more remixes of “Rapture” (that was saved for yet another single release.  Sigh).

By The Numbers: Panjabi MC – The Raj
It’s not a bad album, strictly speaking.  As bhangra albums go it’s well produced and deviates more from formula than most.  Plus, the title track is probably the only hip-hop tinged history of the Panjab committed to recording.  Unfortunately, as Panjabi MC albums go, it’s still a bit on the dull side.  A few bright spots, like the blistering vocals of bhangra legend Kuldeep Manak, but overall Rajinder Rai is going back to the same wells he’s used many times before, and not necessarily the ones where his best ideas came from.  How many more rehashes of “Sweeter” and “Jindi Mahi” do we really need?

If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Tiesto: Armin Van Buuren – Mirage
It’s gotten to the point where the only way to tell the difference between the major “Dutch Trance” albums is to look at the track listing.  A few years back, you could at least hear a little difference between Tiesto, Van Buuren and Ferry Corsten (especially with Corsten taking a brief foray into harder house music).  Now, the only way to judge a big room trance record is on the quality of its guest stars, and Armin Van Buuren rounds up a bunch of good ones on Mirage.  Nadia Ali shows up to provide a nice break from a sea of ethereal sopranos, and bafflingly BT shows up to lay down vocals (and nothing else) in almost the same manner he did for Tiesto’s last album.  Nothing groundbreaking, but at least it’s fun to dance to in a room full of 5000 of your closest friends.

A Galaxy Of Golden Bass award: Sub Swara – Triggers
Dubstep was always fated to fracture into a million subgenres, as every dance music genre before it had.  Sub Swara has grabbed a few of the hallmarks of the parent genre – the heavy bass, the half-tempo headnodding beats – and fuses it with hip-hop vocals, snatches of Indian melodies and instrumentation, and unexpected arrangements (a Latin brass ensemble?  Sure, why not?).  The overall experience is big, cinematic mix and infectious.

Worthy Successors To Wendy Carlos: Daft Punk – Tron: Legacy
While the film of Tron:Legacy was a little underwhelming, the music is great.  A nice blend of standard soundtrack orchestrals, early-80’s style analog synthesizers, and modern French-house funk.  It never veers too far into straight-out Daft Punk-ishness, but maintains a unique identity while hewing closely to the Carlos-established “sound” of the Tron universe.

Best Iris Album: Iris – Blacklight
They get their own category.  They’re Iris.  I mean, come on.  Chugging IDM programming and dark techno beats, and RJ’s soaring vox.  ”Closer To Real” , “Panic Rev” and “Marianas Depths” are hook-laden, driving electropop.

As usual, I’m probably forgetting about 30 worthwhile albums.

But I’m glad I did. It was sort of eye-opening.

I think I was probably the oldest person in the audience who wasn’t there as someone’s chaperone. It was heartening to see that good old electronic dance music is alive and well with the next generation, and that they’re just as ravy now as we were back in 91. Also, their fashion sense is as terrible now as ours was back then, and worse, those deplorable wookie boots I last saw in the UK in 2003 seem to have finally made their way into american youth fashion. Come on, kids, we made this mistakes so you don’t have to.

The crowd was totally into it from beginning to end. I got there a bit too late to catch much of Nick Nice’s set, but I’ve heard a number of his sets. I cringed when Dirty Disco Kidz came onstage with a lot of ghetto-speke. I cringed more when they opened with a rave-up involving “O Fortuna” – Carl Orff’s lawyers are not known for their mercy to even niche artists. The rest of their set was pretty good, though, and they were clever enough to play “Jump Around” which in Madison will never fail to get a crowd hyped.

Skrillex’s set was essentially an extended love letter to Ableton Live. The oh-so-very-young artist jumped about and headbanged onstage like he was thrashing out on guitar (which, if his wikipedia entry is correct, he actually used to do) when really what he was doing was tweaking a few parameters in Live to sweep filters or trigger BeatRepeat. Dude had a lot of energy.

Deadmau5 came one and…well, everything’s just a blur after that. Make no mistake, it was essentially a big DJ set of original material, cleverly tweaked and mashed up and so forth. What was truly stunning about it was the visual element. Okay, yeah, he’s got a shtick – the giant mouse helmet – and I have time and again harped on the fact that shticks don’t work. Well, his did. And only because it was just ludicrously well-done. I’ll get to that in a bit. His visuals were multi-layered, adding a lot of flexibility and interest to the stage. They were mostly abstract color fields, digital effects, circuit patterns, etc. but there were 4 individual layers of those – his giant “cube” podium was a series of screens, the light bars behind him were actually screens, the hanging strips behind that were also individual screens, and then the backdrop behind the stage was an enormous screen. And THEN halfway through the show, his mousehead mask also started functioning as a screen. Basically, it was every high-tech rave video/lighting system ever taken to the nth degree. Set to pounding electrohouse, and mixed with well-timed spotlights and varilight sweeps, it was a very, very effective mix.

Naturally, me being me, I did my best to analyze the show for my own purposes. My takeaways?

1) Unless you can do it on a pretty hefty scale like this, there’s no point to video and light shows. If the crowd has seen anything approaching this, they will not be impressed by a couple of pin spots.

2) Performance energy is EVERYTHING. None of these acts were doing much in the way of keyboard acrobatics or crazy soloistic virtuosity. And yet they managed to whip 4000 sullen teenagers (and a handful of middle-aged ex-club kids) into an absolute frenzy with stage energy.

3) I think there’s something to this whole “ducking the kick drum” thing.

4) I *really* need to learn more about my samplers.

5) The more dance-oriented shows I see, the more Ableton Live comes into play. I still feel that it’s not a great platform for producing more traditional pop records, but it’s pretty much THE thing if you want to do cutting-edge dance music.

So, for a few hours, for me, it was 1993 again, and I was dancing to techno with a big video screen in front of me. Oh, sure, the music was louder, the video projection system was much fancier, but the vibe was the same.

The digital marketing of this album has frankly been a bit baffling.  In an effort to return listeners to “the album experience”, the itunes and amazon versions of These Hopeful Machines comes as two 50-minute tracks.   While it’s laudable that as an artist he’s insistent  in his artistic vision, it feels a little misguided.  For one thing, there were few albums that ran 50 minutes a side back in the glory days of the LP.  Additionally, these are still essentially distinct pop songs, and despite a continuous mix, there’s no obvious need for a complete lack of track breaks, especially given that digital music can be gaplessly played back, and that one of digital music’s strengths is that the song information can be embedded in the track itself.  One 50 minute track doesn’t indicate easily where one song begins and ends, and while that may be partially the point of his single-track efforts, even the LP had band indicators so the listener at least had a reference.  (As an aside, I got around this by importing the files into my studio software and splitting them into the individual tracks).  As it stands, it’s like listening on cassette – you’re pretty much stuck rewinding and fast-forwarding to get to a specific point in the album, and while BT may want you to listen to the whole thing, it’s a good bet that not everybody is going to want to listen for 45 minutes to get to the one song they like.  A multi-track version is supposedly available, but neither iTunes, Amazon, nor eMusic seem to have it, leaving those who’ve abandoned the physical CD little of the consumer choice that’s coming to define the modern music industry.

The cover art is a little strange too.  It’s apparently a huge oil painting, and on the CD and the accompanying singles, the detail is visible, rendering the whole thing a Bosch-gone-to-Ibiza feel.  Digitally, though, only the front panel is visible, which is just a painting of  an anime-haired BT surrounded by roses, which in isolation looks a bit like something you’d find drawn in an artistically-talented 11th-grader’s notebook.  Thankfully, cover art is rarely the defining aspect of any album.

Disc one kicks off with “Suddenly” which is another in BT’s continuing efforts to make synthesized pop music rock out.  The programming on it is unsurprisingly beautiful, intricate and detailed.  Everything from the chunky guitars to the zillions of vocal layers is microquantized and digitally edited, and sounds pristine.  That’s both the song’s genius and its ultimate downfall – it’s sort of the Platonic Ideal of an electronic rock song – it’s a bit too clinical in many ways to really rock.  From an electronic standpoint, though, there’s a dizzying array of hooks, coming at the listener from various places in the soundfield.   It might not be a headbanging anthem, but it’s never a dull song.

From there, the more traditional dance music kicks in – The Emergency, Light in Things and Rose of Jericho all feature a more standard trance beat, but this being a BT record it is also filled with sweeping ambient passages and granular soundscapes.  Rose of Jericho is a deceptively complex song, which at first listen sounds like a standard tech-trance track but once again there’s a few thousand super-edited things going on in the background.    The non-dance track “Every Other Way”, featuring Jes (formerly of trance hitmakers Motorcycle) is a more subdued affair, although it too is filled with electronic craziness percolating just below the calm pop-ballad surface.  Disc one finishes off with another synth-rock track – this one a little less overwrought than “Suddenly.”  The song closes out with BT’s 5-year old daughter singing the main melody, which is touching if you’re familiar with the family backstory, but if you aren’t it could come off as a bit bewilderingly precious.

Disc two features the pre-requisite appearance by Kristy Hawkshaw – I think there’s a requirement in every major-label dance music contract that specifies at least one Hawkshaw guest vocal.  It’s a more straightforward trance track, and likely to be the one that shows up on every “Trance Smashes 2010″ and “Ministry of Ultra Ibiza” compilation this year.   “A Million Stars” hits every major trance note – the angelic vocals, slightly nonsensical lyrics, 4-on-the-floor beats, breakdowns/buildups and enormous hands-in-the-air club hooks.  Oh, and the 12-minute running time.  It’s still clearly a BT song, but it’s one of his less dramatically trademarked tracks.

“Love Can Kill You” is another electro-rock anthem attempt, and suffers from the same over-egged pudding problem as “Suddenly.”  ”Always” features Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson, which gives the track some rock bona fides, and while the track is again quantized within a sample frame of its life, Dickinson’s voice has a more emotive edge than BT’s, and the wild electronic effects settle more comfortably behind the singer, rather than dominating the song.  It’s a strong candidate for the most radio friendly single on the album.

Despite the title, “Le Nocturne de Lumiere” is not an ambient ballad, but a surprisingly aggressive dance track.  A heavy thumping beat is paired with bouncy glitched synths.  There’s not a whole lot in the way of explicit melody – you can tell there’s a song in there someplace but it’s been granularized and hocketed to the point where the listener is left to fill in the blanks.   It works surprisingly well, and there’s some nice ambient textures in there as well.  It’s as if he took “Flaming June” and ran it through an electric fan (Until it briefly switches to 6/8 time at about the 7 minute mark, which would be the place where everyone on the dance floor either really grooves out or falls over).  Rob Dickinson shows up again on “The Unbreakable” which starts out subdued, and slowly builds to a more epic track, again walking a finely balanced line between a rock song and an electronic dance track.

Everything closes out with an unusual twist – a cover of Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You.”  It’s a quiet, intricate affair, luckily not over-produced (although the occasional granular tweak shows up).  It’s a nice, chilled way to end the album.

Overall, it’s hard to find much fault in this album in terms of its ambition or technical prowess.  While some in the press are hailing the album as some sort of groundbreaking bridge between experimental electronic music and accessible pop, it’s not quite to that point.  The album is still heavily geared towards the dance music audience, and isn’t going to somehow become this Prokofiev-like monument of avant-garde music, especially since a lot of its electronic avant-garde-ness tends to erase the kinds of song elements that help embed a song in the pop music canon (would “Smells Like Teen Spirit” have been a monster hit if the signature guitar riff were ultra-quantized and overdubbed 20 times?)    That said, it’s loaded with pop hooks, even those mangled and twisted by bleeding-edge software.  At the very least, this album will stand as a peak in BT’s development as an artist.  Only time will tell if this is some sort of first shot fired in a software-as-instrument revolution, or simply a refinement of BT’s particular sound.

Download it! – as one big mp3 or a bunch of little ones that you can gaplessly play back.

This year:

1) Midival Punditz – Atomizer
2) Bassnectar – Churn of the Century
3) Gusgus – Add This Song/Simian Mobile Disco – Audacity of Huge
4) Crystal Method (feat. Emily Haines) – Come Back Clean
5) Deadmau5 (feat. Rob Swire)- Ghosts ‘n Stuff
6) Mark Knight & D. Ramirez (feat. Karl Hyde) – Downpipe
7) Flight of the Conchords – Too Many Dicks (On the Dance Floor)
8) Empire of the Sun – We Are The People
9) Royksopp (feat. Robyn) – The Girl and the Robot
10) Orbital – Halcyon (Tom Middleton Re-model)
11) Bell X1 – The Great Defector
12) Nadia Ali – Fine Print
13) Metric – Help I’m Alive
14) IAMX (feat. Imogen Heap) – My Secret Friend
15) Stripmall Architecture – Stop Thief
16) Bear McCreary – All Along the Watchtower

Best Underworld Track That Wasn’t By Underworld: Mark Knight and D. Ramirez feat Karl Hyde – Downpipe
Seriously, a complete banger of a track.  Hyde’s strange cut-and-paste lyrics nicely complement an already pretty decent progressive house track.

Scandinavians Attack, pt. 1:  Royksopp – Junior
A more focused effort by Royksopp, despite the presence of all sorts of different guest vocalists, it seems more cohesive than previous outings.   Some truly catchy, albeit slightly off kilter, tracks define this album, and there’s a noticeable lack of the kind of jambandish meanderings than marred their earlier releases.

Scandinavians Attack, pt 2 The Revenge: Gusgus – 24/7
GG gets their old lead singer back and finds a home on Kompakt, which seems a good fit.  Daniel Agust’s distinctive voice grounds their new album in a way their non-Agust albums couldn’t quite manage.  Their minimalish, Detroit techno sound fits well with the Kompakt family as well.  The main criticism of this album is the same as many later Gusgus releases – the songs go on too long.  “Add This Song”, the single off the album, works great as a 4-minute pop song, but gets annoying after the 7 minute mark.

That Weird Girl You Knew In High School Award: Imogen Heap – Ellipse
Imogen Heap has become the darling of new media as she twittered and vlogged and 12seconded her way through the production of the new album.  She also became the poster child for the DIY artist, writing, performing and engineering nearly everything on her album, earning her feature interviews with the likes of SoundOnSound and Electronic Musician – no small feat for someone who is essentially a singer-songwriter at the core.  So, media aside, how’s the album?  Well, it’s good, and it’s beautiful, and it’s intricate, and it’s enigmatic, and it’s everything you’d expect from a hardcore tech-nerd who also happens to have wacky hair and a penchant for wearing fake feathers.  It does, however lack some of the immediacy and emotional impact of her previous efforts.  One gets the distinct sense that everything on this album is intricately crafted with forethought, which robs some of the tracks of resonance.   It’s still gorgeous to listen to, though.

Shuffling On This Mortal Coil (parte the firste): Claire Voyant – Lustre
I know how irritating it can be as an artist to be told your music sounds like something out of the 80’s.  Certainly, I struggle with that a lot.  In the case of CV, I can say it sounds like something out of the 80’s in the absolute best possible way.  In the mid-late 80’s, that swoony, melodic, shimmery 4AD sound began to take hold…before it was entirely obliterated by shoegazer and grunge, so it never really got its day in court.  Lustre brings that sound back in full force, making you understand what would’ve happened had it been allowed to progress over a decade or two.  Still the glimmery guitars, still the majestic synths, still the dreamy vocals, but with ballsier production and less of the twee-pop sound that those early 4AD recordings often had.

Shuffling On This Mortal Coil (parte the seconde): Stripmall Architecture – We Were Flying Kites
Another band in the “what would happen if Ivo Watts-Russell and Jon Fryer were still doing that thing today” category.   Stripmall Architecture takes a slightly different tack, with a bit more of a rock edge and some sonic nods to the glitch-pop sound, like if Jimmy Tamborello and Dean Garcia suddenly joined the Cocteau Twins.  Sharp songwriting and incisive lyrics elevate this beyond the “conceptually interesting” level to something that holds up extraordinarily well to repeated close listening.

I Did Not Expect This To Be So Good: Metric – Fantasies
It’s hard for me to listen to this album all the way through.   Not because it’s bad, but because I’m completely enraptured by the first track, “Help, I’m Alive” and I want to put it on repeat.  The song switches back and forth from ominous to spunky on a dime,  and is filled with monster hooks.  The rest of the album is kinda like that too, but “Help” is so damn good I’ve almost entirely forgotten what comes after it.

New Zealand’s Fourth Best Comedy Folk Album: Flight of the Conchords – I Told You I Was Freaky
Nothing on the album quite measures up to “Business Time” or  “Bowie”, there are still some fabulously funny tracks on this album.  “Too Many Dicks (On The Dancefloor)” is a prime example of what FOTC do so well – they ape a style without directly parodying a song.

My Alt-Country Girlfriend: Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
This time out, her songs are a little less straightforward, and a little more fleshed-out than her previous works.  Given how well that Spartan aesthetic has worked for her in the past, it’s risky for her to layer instruments and production over her voice.  But it works.  Boy does it work.  Her voice still soars over strings and bells and helicopter guitars.  There are still a few tracks of her trademark sparse country-noir sound.  And that voice.  That voice!

Kingdom of Welcome Followup Albums: IAMX – Kingdom of Welcome Addiction
It’s pretty much what we’d expect from IAMX – enigmatic, bombastic songs of loss and addiction. It’s a bit more emotional than “The Alternative” and it feels slightly more harrowing to listen to.

Almost, But Not Quite, a New Order Album: Bad Lieutenant – Never Cry Another Tear
It’s hard to have much of an opinion on this one.  Bernard Sumner and the non-Peter-Hook members of late-period New Order (well, occasionally – Stephen Morris isn’t on every track).  It sounds a little like New Order without Hook’s high-fret basswork, but not quite.  Maybe like a set of B-sides from Electronic’s second album.

Daybreak: Bear McCreary – Battlestar Galactica Season Four Original Soundtrack
A sprawling 2-disc sequence featuring music from the fourth season, and the series finale, in which McCreary pulls out all the stops.  More ethnic instruments, more orchestra, more electric violin, more taikos.   Every theme from the series, and some from the original series, seem to come into play, overlapping and interplaying.  Whatever opinions critics may have had of the finale or even the final season, the soundtrack is fairly unimpeachable.

Back to the Roots: BT- Rose of Jericho
While I have this sinking feeling, given the title of his upcoming album (“These Hopeful Machines”) and the pattern he’s taking for his new cover art, that BT’s next full-length may devolve into over-produced synthesizer acrobatics rather than accessible songs,  “Rose of Jericho” is a smashing trance track, full of bleepy hooks and a solid four-on-the floor rhythm.   Oh, sure, it’s rife with stutter edits and meticulously programmed effects, but it’s still a dance track like he used to write, not some attempt to be a rmicroquantized rock god or a modernized Wendy Carlos.

Change of Direction: AFI – Crash Love
AFI ditches a lot of the bombast and sing-along choruses of Decemberunderground for a more traditional punk-pop structure.  But…well, it doesn’t quite work.  It’s not bad, but after the soaring hooks of DU, it all feels a little forced.

What Is The Deal With Australians?  Empire of The Sun – Walking on a Dream
It’s perplexing, given that their single was also the title track of their first album.  It’s also perplexing that a band with a distinct visual concept of “bad 80’s scifi/fantasy film” and a sonic aesthetic to match, and a lead singer who sounds like he’s being pulled through Limahl’s nasal cavities would be so…good.   The chugging retro synths, the 1980’s drum machines, the jangly guitars the falsetto choruses, all belie a sharply modern edge in the production and songwriting.

Best Crackhead Rant-based Song: Bogart Shwadchuck – Ben The Rat
What can you really say about a dubstep wobbler featuring a sample of a deranged crackhead repeating “Butt-naked wonda, big brotha thunda, and the master blaster!” among other bizarre nonsequiturs?  It’s just ridiculous and fun.

Wait, What?: MIDIval PunditZ – Hello Hello
I’d heard MP ages ago.  They were okay, one of those Asian Massive bands that threw drum-n-bass beats over tabla.   They didn’t really do a whole a lot for me.  One a lark, while browsing the CD racks at a bookstore, I saw this album and gave it a listen.  I was quite frankly stunned.  Tracks like “Electric Universe” and “Atomizer” are grungy electro, rife with vocoders and strong tech-house beats over the Indian roots.  I know from experience that it’s hard to make that work – when done wrong it can be a complete trainwreck.  This manages to work.

Most Egregious Use of Peter Hook:  The Crystal Method – Divided by Night
The latest entry from The Crystal Method crew isn’t a bad album by any means.  It’s not as edgy as their earlier works, but it’s a pretty decent album.  Peter Hook, now that he’s free of New Order, seems to be showing up everywhere, and he shows up on a few tracks.   He seems to show up, cash a paycheck, and then go home – his basslines are his usual high-neck bass-noodling, but without the grounding of a New Order song structure it sounds more like he’s just doing finger exercises.

Ludicrous Earworm: Das Racist – Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
Dear god, this song is ridiculous, and catchy.   It’s dumb, dumb music, but completely manages to hook itself into your head.  It’s practically a cultural phenomenon.

Interesting film.  It’s quickly very clear why those particular three guitarists (Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White) were picked – they each represent a different era of guitar heroics, and they’re also the kind of guitarists who are known for their sound as much as any guitar heroics.  As much as there are many super-shredders out there who could outplay all three of them, probably only EVH would have the appropriate amount of crossover appeal.

It’s also clear what these guys did, in terms of their places in their respective bands – Page was a consummate Musician, joining bands after long stints as a studio musician and arranger; The Edge was a hardcore technician and sonic architect, showing up with a guitar and 4 giant racks of effects gear; Jack White was…well, Jack White’s a douchebag.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair.  He has a very distinctive sound and manner of playing, and he’s probably the one of the three who’s got the closest ties to old blues, so there’s that, and he’s  admittedly a reasonably iconic axeman.  But he was also the only one with a lot of conceits – he had his special outfits, he had a sidekick of “12-year-old Jack White” which was a mini-me version of him, and he was busy showing off his playing in some tumbledown old Tennessee house as though he were some backcountry bluesman, and not the $37M-valued rockstar he actually is.  While Page and Edge were pretty frank about what they did and how they did it, Jack White spent about as much time espousing his personal philosophy about vintage gear, recording a song on a battered old plywood guitar into an ancient reel-to-reel (I noted that he  *was* using a like-new $3000 Coles ribbon mic).  He was frankly pretty annoying.

The Edge was, to me, fascinating.  He was pretty spare with words, but he was also surprisingly humble.  He fully acknowledges he’s not an incredible player, but he also displayed almost boyish glee showing off his electronics gear and effects processors.   It was also interesting to see that a good portion of his “U2 sound” was in the way he voiced his chords.

I’ve never been a big Zeppelin fan, although I acknowledge their impact on the development of rock and roll.   And Page was a capital-M musician.  He certainly makes playing look effortless.  His callbacks to those heady, experimental days of the late 60’s when Zep recorded in manor house stairwells with cables running out to a mobile truck were fascinating.  It was also interesting to note his early career – as a kid in a skiffle band, then as a fill-in session musician, then a regularly gigging studio aguitarist doing everything from rock songs to muzak before he finally got fed up and joined the Yardbirds.  He also seems to be the godfather of Rock Face.  Most intriguingly he said he wept while watching Spinal Tap – not because he didn’t think it was funny, but because he said it was hardly parody, accurately portraying the ridiculous excesses of the 70’s rock band.

A lot of the actual music in the film was surprisingly sub-standard.  You’d think that three iconic players in one room jamming would lead to some crazy sessions, but it was really just three dudes sitting on couches halfheartedly strumming their way through the Led Zeppelin backcatalogue, each with a wildly different guitar tone clashing with the other two.   The exception was when Page played something by himself, and it was obvious that neither the Edge nor White could really conceal their joy at watching Jimmy Freakin’ Page cruise through a legendary rock song.

Overall, from a music-nerd standpoint, it was a fascinating film.  Other than U2 I can’t say I’m a big fan of the artists involved, but they did represent three very distinct points of view and approaches to musicmaking.  Also, the “early years” footage of each of the bands in question was often hilarious.  A big-haired, macho-rocking embryonic U2 from the early early 80’s was hysterical, and a 14-year-old Jimmy Page playing “Momma Don’t Allow No Skiffle” on British TV was rather cute.  Footage of the White Stripes obviously doesn’t go back as far, although what was most interesting was how much Meg White’s drumming has improved in the intervening decade.

Sadly, during the film, it never really did get loud.   It did get interesting.

That said, I’d like to say that this is a pretty fantastic release.  It alternates between extremely delicate micro-programmed electronics, lush soundscapes, and fuzzed-out guitar pop with almost dizzying frequency, as though My Bloody Valentine were trying to make a Dntel album.  The whole thing is anchored by Rebecca Coseboom’s voice,  a dreamy soprano.  The surprising thing is how well it cuts through the mix and drives the melodies – the tendency for most artists of this stripe is to use vocals like this as a texture, burying them amongst all the noises and effects, but they come through clear here.

The other surprising thing is that there seems to be no shortage of hooks, something again rare in the genres of music that this album overlaps.  Tracks like “Stop Thief” and “What’s Wrong With The Kids Today” are surprisingly driving shoegazy-rock songs with very well-defined melodic hooks.

I still don’t know what a “Minnesota smile” is, though.

Claire Voyant – Lustre

Keeping with the theme of dreamy pop from the west coast, Claire Voyant returns after a too-long absence with what is frankly a phenomenal album.  It’s both reminiscent of 80’s 4AD dreampop (This Mortal Coil springs to mind, particularly on tracks like “Mercurial”) but yet full of modern production sheen and electronic textures.  Victoria’s voice, however, doesn’t fall into the same kind of “ethereal” mold that often defines such music – she has a stronger vibrato and more raw power than say, a Liz Fraser.

I do have trouble getting away from the 4AD comparisons, because for a solid chunk of the album I could swear Watts-Russell and Fryer are behind the mixing board.   Lest anyone think this is a bad thing, I would point out how much I love the old 4AD sound and lament the fact that it kind of got consumed by Britpop in the early 90’s.  This reminds me strongly of what would’ve happened if it had been allowed to evolve into the current era – the shimmery synth pads of old amended with treated samples and tweaked electronics, the vocals brought down from the inscrutable stratosphere into the forefront, and the tendency to kick a little harder (case in point – “Painted Gold” builds to a chunky guitar riff and swirling synths from a  simple mix of staccato guitars and vocals).

In short, it’s really freaking good.

Gusgus – 24/7

I’ve been a fan of this band since their 9-piece-Icelandc-artist-collective days, and have always been a little leery of a lot of their transformations.  They’ve lost members, they’ve added members.  Now they’re down to a three-piece again, original vocalist Daniel Agust is back with them, they’re signed to the label for all things minimal, Kompakt, and their sound is stripped down to a core of techno beats, squelchy basslines, buzzing synth leads, and slick vocals.

This works pretty well, actually.  While it lacks some of the immediate hooks we got on their first two albums,  the return of Agust augurs well for them.  I had no problem with their previous vocalist, “Earth”, other than she sounded a bit too house-diva for their sound, stripping the music of some of its originality.

“24/7” is surprisingly short – it’s only six tracks (albeit, some are upwards of 12 minutes long) and I honestly find about two tracks to be on the annoying side.  When it works, though, it really works.  The lead single “Add This Song” is a driving techno track of the old-school Detroit variety, with an infectious vocal hook.   “Hateful” features guest vocals from Jimi Tenor and a machine-gun of a bassline.  “Bremen Cowboys” sounds like a classic techno jam.

It’s not quite a return to form, but it’s a unique sound melding a retro cool with a pop sensibility.

Bell X1 – Blue Lights on The Runway

The single “The Great Defector” has made some inroads in US pop radio of late, although I heard it played constantly on the radio in their homeland of Ireland several months back.

That track displays an affinity for an almost Talking Heads-like sound.  The rest of the album doesn’t sound like that, though.   Paul Noonan’s vocals does veer into Byrne-ish textures, but the bulk of the album is straightup pop.  While a lot of the arrangement harkens back to classic 60’s guitar bands and alt-pop, the instrumentation and performance displays a distinctly modern electropop edge.  The lyrics display a rather unusual wordplay, veering from literary references to oblique metaphor to pop culture references, but without the kind of preciousness that one might think accompanies that.

Being a pop band, their music would have to live and die by the hooks.  When they’ve got a hook, it’s usually pretty monstrous.  The aforementioned single is ludicrously catchy, as are more straightforward songs like “Amelia”  and  “One Stringed Harp.”

What is surprising is the lack of seriously uptempo tracks – aside from “Defector”, pretty much everything falls into the mid-tempo or ballad category.  And then the ballads have a twangy, almost alt-country feel about them.  “The Curtains Are Twitchin’” almost expects Neko Case to make an appearance.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag overall – satisfying listening from a pop standpoint, but not heavy on single material.

Empire of The Sun – Walking On A Dream

Australia’s Empire Of The Sun had a minor hit on their hands when iTunes listed  “Walking on a Dream” as a featured single, and “We Are The People” ended up in a commercial. It provided a pretty good snapshot of what the band was all about, too.  It’s an odd band, overall – the music is very much informed by 80’s radio pop, and the vocals sound like Gary Numan after a bender with Brian Molko.   Jangly guitars, chugging rock basses and fuzzy analog synths all come into play with a slightly more modern house/hip-hop production edge.  Their album cover deliberately looks like the poster for a cheesy 80’s sci-fi/fantasy epic, which says a lot about what the band is trying to accomplish.  It does sound like a soundtrack for some nonexistent “Neverending Story” ripoff, right down to the gratingly annoying love ballads.  It borders on self-parody, but that appears deliberate, and I can’t decide if that’s clever or just irritating.

It’ll be interesting to see what this band carries off in the future – the shtick that informs their music works now, but whether their catchy retro-dance tracks will stand up to future exploration is a big unknown.  Especially given the lack of variety in Luke Steele’s voice.

Imogen Heap – Ellipse

Imogen Heap is an odd bird.  And when I say “bird”, I’m not using the britslang for woman, I mean “she’s often seen wearing a lot of feathers.”

I’m almost tempted to forego saying anything about her new album, “Ellipse”, merely because she has blogged , vBlogged, tweeted, forum’ed, and youtubed the album’s creation in such detail that anyone who’s aware of the album probably already knows an awful lot of fine-grained details.

The album itself?  It’s good.  It’s not as immediate as “Speak For Yourself” – there’s nothing quite as soaring as “Hide and Seek” and nothing quite as dark as “Headlock” or  “Closing In.”  It is, however, much more complex in terms of arrangement, production and programming.  It’s intensely multilayered, the soundfield is huge and detailed, and the sound is astoundingly lush.  Her voice remains as elastic as ever, even within the hundreds of overdubs.

So that’s not a problem.

The songs themselves usually take a while to develop.  The leadoff single, “First Train Home” has a spartan, understated beat until the climax of the song.  Most songs take a bit to get going.  Once they do get going, the wait is usually worth it.    All it means is that there are fewer “radio-friendly” songs, which is kind of a non-issue for Imogen Heap anyway.

That’s not a problem either.

The problem is that a number of the songs teeter on the self-indulgent side.  The lyrics wander into twee, Tori-Amos-in-fairyland territory periodically, there’s a song that’s made entirely of processed vocal overdubs and beatboxing (didn’t Bjork do that already?  And isn’t that a bad sign?)  The “making of” video that comes with the iTunes download is bafflingly strange, involving Heap wandering around her house with plastic biscuit containers over her ears, supposedly as a way of explaining the songs.  She hasn’t quite gone over to the inexplicable side yet, but she’s dangerously on the edge.

What is frankly amazing about this album was the level of interaction Heap had with her hardcore fanbase during its production.  While she’s never been a multiplatinum artist, she’s developed an enthusiastic following, and her constant updates, use of fan feedback to determine which versions of songs make it to the album, and solicitation of fan artwork basically ensured extremely strong sales on release.   She’s quickly become the darling of the “new media” world, which is both heartening and annoying.  Heartening because it does prove the concept of some of these new media promotion processes, annoying because now they’re all going to be de rigueur  for anyone releasing anything, giving those of us who make music independently even more distasteful stuff to do.   Even Ms. Heap complained about the level of self-promo she had to do.  That doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

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.