10 Herbert & Momoko – “Mowing”
This electro-pop collabo between an indie veteran an a precocious young crooner lays down as just as organic and earthen as you might expect out of an old guru who never got his due props, with approachable, textural percussion sounds forming the rudiments of “Mowing”; ceding to Momoko Gill’s lilting vocals and endless subdued ambience.
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9 Pearl Charles – “Step Too Far”
I’d pretty much declared this as the best pop song since “I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues”; or maybe “Sleeping Satellite”; so it’s certainly jolting to find it only ranking ninth on this list. That’s just the type of sh** I’ve been sniffing these days, I guess. Yup, Miss Charles, out of LA, got it all, ushering us down her own artistic corridor of transcendence and ecstasy with some romantic crooning and even doling out the lines “I don’t mind a broken heart / Put it together just to tear it apart” like she’s thinking out loud about what to order on a Wednesday night at Milano’s Pizza.
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8 Raul Monsalve & Los Forajidos – “Fuego al Campanero”
The rhythms and general musical interface on Paris-based Raul Monsalve and Los Forajidos is so intricate and complex that I thought it was electronic music when I went back and listened to it a second time. The song is anchored, in vocals, by the mantra “Yo yo yo yo hey / Fuego al Campanero”; rendered continually, not within a chorus but saturating an entire structurally basic time span. The result is pure hypnosis, rhythm and purpose.
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7 Rainy Miller – “Chrome, Hallowed be.”
The overtly androgynous new offering from UK DJ Rainy Miller, Joseph, What Have You Done?, is a mournful, even orchestral tour de force in all-the-feels club techno, with “Chrome, Hallowed be.” somehow blending the cutting-edge sound with the album’s fabric of emotional reservoir for something very well beholden to the term “centerpiece.”
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6 Say Sue Me – “Mexico”
South Korea’s indie/twee pop harbingers Say Sue Me are back this year with an excellent EP, Time is Not Yours, which bleeds volumes and volumes of purpose and singular musical vision, rendered, of course, with the simple rudiments of something like Broken Social Scene covering The Vaselines. “Mexico” romps along as particularly amusing, for being an instrumental, and also for finding guitarist Choi Sumi saturating his guitar sound in an intriguing wealth of distortion and haziness, for a result way closer arena rock than I, for one, expected out of these guys.
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5 xicada – “INNERVAJRA”
These artists whom I can’t find on Spotify, but only Bandcamp, always hold a soft spot in my heart. Regardless, Toronto DJ xicada sounds anything but puerile and undeveloped on “INNERVAJRA”; with a weird slew of seemingly random jungle noises leading into a veritable clinic in 808-heavy jungle techno.
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4 Celestaphone & Dealers of God – “Moscovium”
The Needle Drop grants Celestaphone the epithet of “cult rap figure” and cites Dealers of God as an “Australian psycho-hop collective.” The result seems like something so oddly conceived and unexpected that its very disposition can’t help but be original and innovative. Sure enough, “Moscovium” is weird, futuristic rap, with no chorus, and with a full band behind it staunchly defying the conventional with warbly synth and jazzy drum beats.
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3 Say Sue Me – “In This Mess”
“In This Mess” is the broad, six-minute centerpiece on the excellent Time is Not Yours and hypnotizes aptly with shifting guitar intervals, and, again, polymorphous sound from psych-minded production. The song is strengthened and given strong legitimacy by dual vocals from Choi Sumi and Kim Buyngkyu, who leave the mood and emotion light enough to make this sound like Beat Happening or the Marine Girls, albeit an incarnation with a significantly more bulbous studio budget.
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2 L’éclair – “VERTIGO”
Here, in the Swiss-founded L’éclair, we have a full band utilizing electronic drum programming, adding to the eclectic stew already consisting of a rap band with a drummer, and ample rock and electro presence on this list. At the end of the day, though, L’éclair remind us that style is arbitrary, really, but can be fun, as their hypnotic percussion and guttural, gorgeous synthesizers will soundly prove.
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1 Celestaphone & Dealers of God – “Chaenodraco”
“Chaenodraco” begins like a juicy, loungy sort of reggae number, but Celestaphone’s indefatigable flow just doesn’t seem comfortable with the taciturn, and he’s all over this track again with an endless litany of off-the-cuff rants about society and life, again, with no verse or chorus, like primarily a screw-you to radio but also a jazzy canvas for his incessant pipes, like a beat poet who, rightly enough, likes the sound of his own voice.
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