Records

MARIA MINERVA

OH LAND

JEFF & JANE HUDSON

ROOTS MANUVA

When Ghostface and Raekwon grumbled that

8 Diagrams

, with its kook-rock guests and Beatles knock-offs, was nothing but hippy-hop, presumably this is what they were outwardly longing for: a compilation of wall-to-wall Wu that takes no chances and offers no surprises, but is just as effective as the last time you put Heinz ketchup on your bacon sandwich. Still, amid the weariness and familiarity there’s enough to remind you why you wouldn’t switch to mayo.

TODD PHUTURE

ROOTS MANUVA

4everevolution

Big Dada

Toddla T’s muse comes from all the right places—dancehall, hip-hop, house, squidgy-bouncy electronic noises­—and none of the shit ones. So this should really be much better than it is. Not that it’s bad, but it should be sell-your-granny great. Instead it’s just kind of like listening to a more reggaefied Basement Jaxx album, minus the moments of genius. Watching him dance might actually be more enjoyable.

STEVE WHY

Rodney Smith’s lexicographical mastery and big huggy baritone means just him talking over the hum of distant traffic would satisfy some of us. And yet

4everevolution

is the first time he’s sounded like he’d rather be supping Guinness than pushing himself back around the block. The words are good, the stories are sharp, the music sounds like something you’d see being dragged out of bed in a documentary about care homes.

LAURA MERCI

Azari & III are four Canadian house music fruits who look like extras in a nightclub scene from an early-90s Harrison Ford thriller. Having released “Reckless With Your Love” and “Hungry for the Power” about 28 times in three years, they’ve managed to get it together for long enough to produce a whole album of warehouse chuggers and smoochy disco which sounds like the smacked-out hi-NRG record the Scissor Sisters badly wanted to make but didn’t have the balls to. Any takers?

THEYDON BOIS

APPARAT

The Devil’s Walk

Mute

With

The Devil’s Walk

, Teutonic techno dandy Sascha Ring bids farewell to the lucrative Euro club circuit and sets out with his new band to slog round the toilets of Great Britain peddling swooning Sigur Rós melancholia. The transition from solo electro pin-up to indie dream-pop four-piece may be bumpy at first, but his doe-eyed mix of Steve Reich and Snow Patrol should see him through. It worked for Caribou, and Apparat is an altogether classier proposition.

THANDIE NEUTRON

JOAKIM

Nothing Gold

Tigersushi

If first impressions count, then I’m saying that Joakim has extracted some lovely sounds from his synthesisers and drum machines, and blended his fourth album beautifully on his customised mixing desk. But as an artist with something to say, even after four albums, I’m not convinced by the French producer. “Forever Young” and “Labyrinth” are great here, but little else really grabs me. I’d rather listen to his remixes, where he seems less self-conscious.

LES PANINI

JEFF & JANE HUDSON

Flesh

Captured Tracks

Superior no-wave synth artefact, recorded by a New York husband-and-wife duo in 1981 and dusted down for the reissue treatment by Captured Tracks. Her songs are sing-along pop exotica with a deceptively sweet exterior, his tracks are fraught nuclear-age electronics that sound quite a lot like that recent John Maus album. Back in the day they played shows with Suicide but I just googled them and nowadays they’re an adorable silver-haired couple who run an antiques store in Massachusetts and yeah, I wish they were my uncle and aunt, OK?

DEAN FUNK

ZOLA JESUS

Conatus

Souterrain Transmissions

MARIA MINERVA

Cabaret Cixous

Not Not Fun

Despite her surly pose in photos, Maria Minerva is easily one of the best pop stars to come out of nowhere in 2011. This year the 23-year-old Estonian has already released two mini-albums of druggy nocturnal overtures on Not Not Fun and 100% Silk, and now she completes the perverse trilogy with

Cabaret Cixous

, a full-length album of hallucinatory disco, exotic mind games and post-feminist rhetoric set to streaky sci-fi soul that’s tricky to grab hold of, but once you have it’s hard to forget. Whether stumbling through Abba’s “Honey Honey”, alluding to French philosopher Hélène Cixous, or pastiching the late-90s work of Rocco Siffredi in the video for “Soo High”, she’s invented her own peculiar world and managed to make it appear incredibly seductive. Beyond all the surface stuff, though, it’s her trippy music that you return to with a curious smile on your lips.

JENNIFER JUPITER

THE RAPTURE

In the Grace of

Your Love

DFA

Everybody loved the Rapture, but hasn’t their time passed? Evidently not. Producer Philippe Zdar gave Phoenix the kick up the arse they needed, and here he manages to address the problems the Rapture always had—feeling like a slickly airbrushed approximation of a band more than a band in itself—to breathe new life into their project. Accordingly,

In the Grace of Your Love

strips back the gloss, leaving its frantic dance-punk loft party with exposed beams, dodgy plumbing and more than enough sweat glistening on the ceiling.

GEORGIE GREED

LADYTRON

Gravity the Seducer

Nettwerk

The ’Tron’s 91st release in their 600-year career damps down some of the techno textures of

Velocifero

for a more stately, bitter, bewitching bitches’ brew: a mid-paced ghost-ride through the burnt-out husks of digital dreams that displays the same imperious disdain for reinvention they’ve always shown.

ROSIE BOYCOCK

RUBIK

Communication

Domestic

Don’t play this if you’re having a party. It’ll put everyone in a terrible mood. Want something beautiful to burn a hole in your brain?

Communication

will do the trick. Rubik is a bloke called Shaun Yule who got the dubstep thing out of his system on his last album. Now he’s treading a line between morose and sentimental, and pulling it off fairly elegantly.

BIMBO BAGGINS

While it’s hard to fault any of Nika Danilova’s records to date, the feeling lingers that everything she’s done so far has been a bit of a rush-job, bashed out in spare moments between listening to industrial music, leafing through heavy tomes by continental philosophers, and moping around looking complicated in middle-American shopping malls.

Conatus

is a slightly more nuanced listen than

Stridulum

, crashing war-drums replaced by glitches and pulsing electronics, but really it’s her voice you listen for, a blend of Siouxsie and Florence Welch that’s big like cathedrals.

MILEY O’CYRUS

THE MEN

Leave Home

Sacred Bones

Not to be confused with former Le Tigre sorts MEN, the Men are, quite literally, men. Dirty, unpleasant-looking men, from Brooklyn, probably sporting bad tattoos, playing lumbering, feedback-soused noise-rock that sounds, in the slower bits, kind of like Harvey Milk if all their occasional moments of fist-pumping celebration were replaced by a general mood of creeping black depression. It’s pretty good, like.

CHARLES HANSON

CHARLES ALBRIGHT

Weight 7"

Permanent Records

Not enough people are glorifying serial killers these days even though it’s a surefire way to get attention. Naming your band after the guy better known as the Dallas Ripper and the Eyeball Killer (because he would surgically remove the eyes of prostitutes after shooting them) is a good first step. Making a really noisy, screechy punk record where you overwhelm your listeners was the second good thing you did. The third good thing was giving me a copy. The Spits already have a song called “Drop Out”, but telling people to drop out is important.

DIXIE

Årabrot are from Norway and apparently named after one of the nation’s municipal dumps, which should give you a bit of an idea of where they fall on the “easy listening” to “unpleasant noise” axis.

Solar Anus

, it probably won’t surprise you, was recorded by Steve Albini, and with its monotonous drums, grinding guitars and apparent sex pest on vocals, does a pretty good job of making your skin crawl just like the Jesus Lizard might have done back in the day.

INSTANT SHARMA

NIG-HEIST

S/t

Drag City

Black Flag were always renowned for their confrontational approach to playing live—setting up an environment designed to antagonise. The apex of this was the puerile id-rock of de facto support band Nig-Heist. Led by SST employee and roadie Mugger, every night audiences were baited by juvenilia and partial nudity, gay jokes and rape allusions from a revolving door of musicians who should have known better. Here, stripped of context, you’re left with an idiot savant collection of brain-stem cock-rock that makes the Meatmen look sophisticated. Highlight “Walking Down the Street” evokes the early Flag/Stooges/Ramones worship with Greg Ginn’s unmistakable downstroke attack.

DOUBLE EWW

When he’s not illustrating his comics, blogging, working on Lightspeed Champion, writing film scores, collaborating with Van Dyke Parks, publishing short stories or shopping around for great deals on car insurance, Dev Hynes likes nothing more than to kick back by making albums of lo-fi soul influenced by tragic transgender New York model Octavia St Laurent under his Blood Orange

nom de suave

. What he brings back from the intersex hinterland is strange fruit indeed: a slowed-down, creamy-dreamy world in which Sade has replaced the Beatles as the bedrock of popular music, underlined by a girly new singing voice caused in part by a recent throat operation. Trend report: transgender is officially hip again.

MAX PASTINGS

THE DRUMS

Portamento

Moshi Moshi

It’s a slightly weird thing that there’s a generation of handsome young American men with such a boner for obscure British indie-pop that they spend their blessed existence moping around like bored teenagers from dull market towns in the 80s and know Bobby Gillespie best as that guy who used to play bass in the Wake. In these fairly narrow boundaries in which the second album by the Drums exists, it’s reasonably hard to find much fault, although both Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing do this winsome, why-won’t-girls-talk-to-me jangle with a spot more nous.

LUIGI PATAZONI

STEPKIDS

S/t

Stones Throw

Backing the likes of Fiddy and Alicia Keys on tour would be enough to drive the

Daily Mail

to drugs, and this Connecticut psych-funk-soul trio of old stagehands sound like they’ve been neck-deep in a bucket of maggot brains. But among the swish and swirl and psychedelic stick-ons, there’s a sunniness to the songwriting that makes

Stepkids

more than just Stones Throw’s latest stab at cornering the retro market.

FUNKER CLERIC

LAURA MARLING

A Creature I Don’t Know

Virgin

In my imagination, anything that receives the semen of Marcus Mumford immediately withers and dies, but actually Laura Marling has made a very pleasant folk record here. One that’s particularly nice if your mum used to listen to Joni Mitchell, like mothers often do.

CHILL DAVE

OH LAND

S/t

RCA

I imagine when Oh Land fills out a tax form she scribbles drawings of fawns in the margins, then writes “a debt paid with love” in red crayon across the front, and posts it attached to a magical stone shaped like a swan. Well, I hope the tax authorities bang her up and she ends up in the Danish equivalent of Cell Block H, making shanks out of teaspoons and stacking weight on her hips from endless rounds of bread and jam. Teeth-rottingly kooky, this is poppy folktronica so inherently super-Scandinavian that Anders Breivik would give it at least 3-and-a-half stars in Q, yet it brings nothing to the table that Lykke Li or a dozen others haven’t with less of a patience-testing patina of self-congratulation.

DOMINIC MOHAWK

BEIRUT

The Rip Tide

Pompeii

It must really suck to play in a wandering gypsy band and suddenly turn up in town to find that a 12-year-old boy with an accordion has totally stolen your audience. Welcome to the free market, losers!

EL PEE

BUTCHER BOY

Helping Hands

Damaged Goods

For the uninitiated, Butcher Boy basically sound like Belle & Sebastian jamming with Belle & Sebastian over old Belle & Sebastian records while Belle & Sebastian wander in from the next room to ask if anyone wants to go see Belle & Sebastian at the Belle & Sebastian Arena. This would be less exciting were we not living in a world in which Belle & Sebastian remain imprisoned in an ongoing mojo crisis involving fuck-awful synths and Corinne Bailey Rae, so there’s something heartening about the way their seven-piece Glasgow doppelgängers have stayed true to the purist “don’t fuck with the flutes” principles of indie-pop. They did so more concisely on 2009’s

React or Die

, true, but

Helping Hands

remains an indulgent pleasure.

CHRIS BLACKWURST

BOOMBAY BICYCLE CLUB

A Different Kind of Fix

Island

In my head, BBC are twinned with that other great club, Two Door Cinema, in the bracket “Things that reveal an alarming previously unimagined mass public appetite for MOR teen indie-pop made by milksop boys with slightly less personality than shopping channels”. I imagine lots of frantic record label conversations about whether they’ve found anyone with a more recessive personality than Jack Steadman yet, or anyone with Alex Trimble’s gift for polite nodding, because that’s where the motherfucking sales gold is. If I were reviewing this for a sensible periodical, I’d probably sneak a look at the general trajectory of industry chatter and say “big step up”, “stunningly mature” now. As I’m not, I can spare everyone the gladhanding and say: “Pfffffffffffffft. Boring.”

KELVIN MACKCRACKERS

BAXTER DURY

Happy Soup

Regal

Baxter Dury is a proper diamond who looks like he’d be a right laugh to hang out with. He writes songs about birds and coke and London town but his career’s always been overshadowed by his more famous dad, Ian. It’s about time folk picked up on Baxter, particularly because this third album of sweet funk and lairy soul is his best yet. He calls

Happy Soup

a “candid portrait of romantic failures”, and you know what? The geezer is spot on.

FRUITY MCGINTY

GANGLIANS

Still Living

Souterrain Transmissions

Hmm, Ganglians. Are you the ones who are dating Beth from that Great Coast band? Or are you the ones who are best friends with the weird dude who runs Captured Tracks? Was one of you the drummer in Crystal Stilts? Honestly, the hazy, sepia-toned US lo-fi scene is so confusingly incestuous from this distance, it’s hard to get a grip. Oh right—you’re the ones who do that Flying Nun-derived outsider pop with the supersized twangy echo effects. And yeah, like a lot of that stuff, their second is totally pleasant, if not always engaging; a thicket of reverb you have to crawl through on your belly, but worth it for the occasional shafts of brilliant odd-pop sunshine.

LARRY LAMBO

People who spend a lot of time writing on noise message boards have been getting their panties in a twist about the new Prurient album, which marks a shift from the whole screaming-and-feedback thing into new, synthier, electronic realms. But there’s no getting round the fact that

Bermuda Drain

is basically a masterpiece, a gloomy collage of melancholy synth, industrial wreckage, Dennis Cooper-style spoken-word and on “A Meal Can Be Made” and “There Are Still Secrets”, pulsating EBM over which Dom Fernow shrieks himself hoarse. Technically, it’s not a noise album, but it’s every inch a Prurient album, and another landmark in a restless, exploratory discography.

CANARY DWARF

Rumours of this collaboration have billowed for aeons, and, apt for music so stoned that it can barely stand up, the assumption was it would lay slumped in the vaults, unable to string a sentence together, let alone put its trousers on and meet the public. THC troubadour Alex Tucker, Mothlite/Miracle man Daniel O’Sullivan and Jussi Lehtisalo from Finnish institution Circle all pray for smoke over cathedral pipes and joyous clamour, building a remarkably coherent ode to bliss from the dreamlike mire. Serves particularly well as a soundtrack to the lightshow under your eyelids.

PAPA VUH