10 The Mechanical Man – “Just Dance Tonight”
DJ The Mechanical Man, hailing from Naples, Italy, makes the kind of easy, hypnotic techno music that seems familiar, even if you’ve never heard it, like something naturally destined to be around for ages. “Just Dance Tonight” kicks off his professional-grade-but-casual Original Vibes EP, just out this year, a mood stabilizer for the restless and a lullaby for the weary.
..
9 Godfather Don – “Full Court Press”
Godfather Don is billed on Bandcamp as “producer and rapper from New York City.” True to form, these beats are completely undeniable — lively, complete, snappy and mean, with Don’s flow, in general, becoming perhaps a little bit monotonous and isolated on the album as a whole. Still, as an opener, “Full Court Press” is a promising party banger, full of samples and swagger.
..
8 Qetsy – “Cuatrocientos”
Paraguayan producer Qetsy unleashes a stupefying, exhaustive beast in IDM for this year in the form of Espiral, an LP on which no stone in programming, sampling and just downright misanthropic wordplay seems unturned. Somewhat arbitrarily, I selected “Cuatrocientos” from this unwieldy beast, in large part for its busy, closely juxtaposed splicings of samples, which made for a real head-inverting time.
..
7 Peace de Resistance – “You Are Absurd”
NYC dance-punk weirdos Peace de Resistance hit their stride with the light-but-twisted “You Are Absurd”; on which singer Moses Brown kind of flirts out the vocals in spoken word, like Lou Reed meets Courtney Taylor-Taylor of The Dandy Warhols.
..
6 Factor Chandelier – “Elevators (Faded)”
Every time I see this guy’s name — “Factor Chandelier” — I write him off over again as some overly cerebral, overly sensitive hipster with no street cred. Well, maybe that “tortured soul” shtick has yielded him some serious ammunition for his art, on display on the indefatigable DJ album Cold, Cold World, and this emotional bookend, on which the whole thing seems to crumble in on itself in a beautiful, apocalyptic sort of way.
..
5 REMOTEWORKER – “Fire Roads”
Ah, it’s good to have REMOTEWORKER back. His 2021 issue PINNACLES crashed the Dolby’s year-end party, and the new, brilliant, Interregnum obviates the same sort of distant, uncomfortable musical mission that seems to bleed urgency and tension. “Fire Roads” saunters along steadily, with many organic-sounding drums undergirding an ethereal wealth of swirling, atonal synths.
..
4 Grand Choice Records & Friends – “Fly”
This was another hip-hop LP that started out with promise but devolved soon into stagnant megalomania — but again, “Fly” is an anatomically complete group energizer, with Sealey’s straight-ahead flow sounding like pure street experience and genuineness.
..
3 Skylar Gudasz – “Outlaw”
Continuing in the proud songwriting tradition from North Carolina (Ben Folds, Ryan Adams), Skylar Gudasz assembles some inimitably genuine and digestible songcraft all over the excellent new album COUNTRY (perhaps a reference to a nation, as on this track she sings “Baby / This country’s trying to kill you”), with “Outlaw” like a neat little cluster of beautiful desire and melodic zeal, packaged concisely in a four-minute pop song.
..
2 Ezra Collective – “The Herald”
Ezra Collective is, respectively, a “hip-hop group”; a “British jazz quintet” or a nondescript musical enigma, depending on which website you consult (Bandcamp being culpable for that last exploit). Well, sometimes there’s power in ambiguity, it seems, as their new album Dance, No One’s Watching is a towering, invincible ode to “getting down” (actually, that is actually billed as its mission statement on Bandcamp), with “The Herald” ingratiating itself to the collection as a groove that anyone, even Khruangbin, would have been proud to plot down on wax.
..
1 Factor Chandelier – “Dancing on My Neck”
Another selection here from the new album by the Canadian DJ, “Dancing on My Neck” has the ethereal energy of a club banger and the texture and melodic nuance of Four Tet, making for an inimitable, irreplaceable listen, and giving Canadian electro a good name the way Caribou might, in one of his more approachable musical bouts.
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>
..
<!– Google Tag Manager –>
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({‘gtm.start’:
new Date().getTime(),event:’gtm.js’});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!=‘dataLayer’?’&l=‘+l:’’;j.async=true;j.src=
‘https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=‘+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,’script’,’dataLayer’,’GTM-5KV22KW’);</script>
<!– End Google Tag Manager –>
<!– Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>
<noscript><iframe src=“https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-5KV22KW”
height=“0” width=“0” style=“display:none;visibility:hidden”></iframe></noscript>
<!– End Google Tag Manager (noscript) –>