May: 18 albums you need to hear this month

Little Dragon 'Season High'

Is there a better electronic pop quartet out there right now than Little Dragon? Since 2014’s Grammy-nominated (but slightly underwhelming) ‘Nabuma Rubberband’, their output has been limited to smart collaborations with De La Soul (‘Drawn’) and Flume (‘Take A Chance’), but on the strength of their luxurious new single ‘High’ and accompanying album ‘Season High’, the sensual, creative spark which made their early albums such a delight is back. They’ve always been able to make concise records with hooks that upon repeated listens burrow into your brain, demonstrated immediately here by sublime opener ‘Celebrate’. Singer Yukimi Nagano and the rest of the band channel everything from Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to the dreamy synths of New Look (whatever happened to them?); then a wailing guitar solo that Slash wouldn’t sniff at appears, albeit briefly, and somehow it all makes sense. It’s a stunning start – and thankfully, the songs that follow are just as strong. It’s clear by now that ‘High’ already ranks as one of their best singles; it’s followed by ‘The Pop Life’, which is the most upbeat electronic moment on the album and is just screaming out for the right (Flume) mix. The sweetness of ‘Sweet’ comes next and then ‘Butterflies’, on which Yukimi talks of singing a lullaby to a butterfly over ice-cold chords for the best part of six minutes. ‘Should I’ is quintessential Dragon-pop, while ‘Don’t Cry’ is equally charged with emotion and comes on like Robyn in ‘Handle Me’-mode (and also features one of Yukimi’s most soulful vocals to date). And it all closes with ‘Gravity’, arguably their classiest ballad since breakthrough hit ‘Ritual Union’. In short: this one’s highly recommended.

9/10

Various 'Air Texture Volume V: Selected By Spacetime Continuum And Juju & Jordash' (Air Texture)

This lush compilation is for anyone seeking a laser-targeted primer of contemporary experimental electronic beats. Spacetime Continuum and Israeli psychtronic duo Juju & Jordash curate one CD each, but there’s a shared love for grand, dramatic and, often, refreshingly meditative electronica. Contributors across the previously unreleased 24 tracks include Donato Dozzy, Fred P and Terre ‘DJ Sprinkles’ Thaemlitz. Dozzy’s offering, ‘Valentina’, is representative of what’s on offer – a frozen world inhabited by swollen synths, avian chatter and an icy wind. A majestic elegance percolates through every track.

9/10

Kevin Over 'Back To Back Vol 11' (Mobilee Records)

Kevin Over delivers 12 upbeat house groovers for Mobilee’s 11th ‘Back To Back’ comp. Soulphiction’s stunning ‘2002’ dub sets the pace with sprinkling synths, before Jacob Korn’s ‘Shady’ rework layers percussive house over clapping hats and techno kicks. Of Over’s five original tracks, ‘Look At Me Sartre’ is the punchy highlight, while ‘Pfeffi Care’ becomes a funky mover. Later, he skews William Djoko’s ‘Satisfied’ into jagged tech-house and transfoms And.ID’s ‘Frozen’ into a hypnotic late-night trip. Marquis Hawkes’ monstrous techno remix of Over’s ‘Blue Ox’ is the standout, though, with its squelching acid lines, crashing synths and animalistic screams.

9/10

Rebekah 'Fear Paralysis' (Soma)

Deep in the midst of Soma’s 25th anniversary, Rebekah’s debut LP aims to go big on her trademark club-ready annihilators while still exploring the creative freedom an artist album can offer. ‘Breakfast With Jeff’ feels manic with its anxiety-inducing bleeps and creeping low-end, ‘Breathe’ uses climatic productions to send you spiralling and ‘1997 Reprise’ is a minimal techno highlight. But the pummelling staccatos, sinister rattles (‘Again’) and enveloping journeys (‘Requiem For A Dream’) mean that while the paranoia-prompting themes of the album don’t necessarily feel disjointed, the story it tries to tell can occasionally seem fractured due to its penchant for peak-time pursuits.

7/10

Dark Sky 'Othona' (Monkeytown Records)

Dark Sky build a colourful landscape out of textured electronic sounds inspired by field recordings and photos from isolated landscapes they’ve visited while touring. Fusing intriguing melodies (‘JJJ’) with shape-shifting rhythms (‘Cyan’), Matt Benyayer and Tom Edwards pick up where 2014’s debut album ‘Imagin’ left off. Gentle opener ‘Othona’ eases in emotive pads and nostalgic synths, ‘The Walker’ transforms melancholy into euphoria and ‘Angels’ is the adventurous highlight before heavier, kick drum-indebted closer ‘Field Tower’. Bridging the gap between electronica, British bass music and techno, ‘Othona’ ties together the atmospheric styles of Gold Panda, Bonobo and Throwing Snow perfectly.

8/10

Ryuichi Sakamoto 'async' (Milan)

Let’s not beat about the bush: Ryuichi Sakamoto is an electronic music god. His early tunes such as ‘Firecracker’ (with Yellow Magic Orchestra) and ‘Riot In Lagos’ influenced the birth of hip hop, electro and techno, and still sound fresh enough to be played by the most cutting-edge DJs. His film soundtracks, right up to his recent work on The Revenant, are hugely influential, and he’s made some of the greatest abstract/ambient electronica out there. His first solo album in seven years is no less special: it’s full of church organs, hazy reverb, rippling synths and poetry about mortality and eternity, as well as Sakamoto’s distinctive piano, sonar bleeps and unforgettable melodies.
It’s arguably the most beautiful record you’ll hear this year.

10/10

Anthony Parasole 'Infrared Vision' (Dekmantel)

DKMNTL UFO is a Dekmantel festival stage and sub-label specifically designed for intergalactic techno. In stepping up with his debut artist LP, Anthony Parasole sticks to the brief and cooks up 10 tracks of tough, titanium-plated techno that journeys to the edges of the galaxy. Along the way it encounters tribal robot discos, desolate planets inhabited only by machines and mid-air battles between laser-shooting flying saucers and malevolent objects. Always evocative and driven by a visceral sense of rhythm, there’s a robust feel to the hardware-made grooves that never fails to arrest your attention. Far from being an overly brutal affair, though, there’s enough nuance and depth to these tracks to stimulate your mind.

9/10

Shed 'The Final Experiment' (Monkeytown)

There’s been a lot of rave-revival stuff in the world of Berlin techno recently – breaks, bleeps, sub-bass, warm ‘n’ nice inside the place – but few can do it as convincingly as René Pawlowitz, aka Shed. His productions have always had a strong thread of UK bass running through them, but on ‘The Final Experiment’ he’s gone through a wormhole and ended up at that magic moment in 1993, where the separations of genres still hadn’t quite happened. You can hear the influence of Detroit techno, hip hop and soundsystem culture. You can hear the beginnings of jungle, not quite yet separated off into its own space. And more than anything, you can hear the experimentalisits who first melted all this together into expressions of pure pleasure for both raves and home listening: Global Communication, Future Sound Of The Left, The Black Dog, Luke Slater’s 7th Plain. Yet it’s not just some purely retro trip. It’s an album that’s been realised through a dubwise Berlin filter, soaking up every sonic lesson of a lineage that runs from Basic Channel through Marcel Dettman, and honed on soundsystems such as Berghain. Each of its tunes have been constructed for maximum impact on the senses, not just the nostalgia circuits of your brain. The silvery breakbeats of ‘Call 32075!’, the Aphex Twin-ish acid gurgle of ‘Taken Effekt’ and the levitating robot choirs of ‘Outgoing Society’ all work because they’re brilliant, not because they’re telling you something you’ve heard before or are nodding to some past experience. Blissful.

8/10

LA Takedown 'LA Takedown II' (Domino)

If you find ornate guitar solos about as attractive as root canal treatment, then LA Takedown’s new album may send you into an incandescent rage. But if you’ve got a predilection for Vampire Weekend’s baroque alt-pop, Tame Impala’s psychedelica or the hazy bombast of M83 you’ll find this a comforting, welcoming destination. LA Takedown describe their music as ‘Baywatch krautrock’, and there’s certainly a hypnotic, sun-dappled quality to both ‘Night Skiing’ and ‘City Of Glass’. At times, the fretwork of guitarist Aaron M Olson takes on voice-like qualities, as if telling the tale of some hedonistic rampage through Hollywood circa 1982. And if you find your hands twitching, don’t worry – it’s probably just Airguitaritis.

7/10

The Bug vs Earth 'Concrete Desert' (Ninja Tune)

Inspired by both “urban dystopias” and English writers such as JG Ballard, kinetic producer The Bug and doom-heavy maverick Earth unite for a long-awaited full-length album on Ninja Tune. Titles such as ‘City Of Fallen Angels’ and ‘American Dream’ are clear indications of the LP’s focus on exploring the “fragmented underbelly” of LA, and the songs themselves are no less melancholy with their deep, viscous notes and barely-there sounds. Lead single ‘Snakes vs Rats’ adds stalling beats to echoing guitar licks and sludgy riffs, while the title track is a 14-minute cut of gliding sonics. ‘Concrete Desert’ is a potent blend of cinematic music-for-outsiders and deep, drone-leaning sounds.

7/10

Penguin Café 'The Imperfect Sea' (Erased Tapes)

Back in the 1970s, Simon Jeffes formed Penguin Café Orchestra. Blending classical, folk and innovative sound manipulation into gentle repetitions, they inadvertently created several Balearic classics in the process, influencing so much we hear in modern music (including the post-classical Erased Tapes label). His son Arthur is still continuing the musical mission, so it’s a perfect fit for him to end up on ET. The way PCO have been absorbed into the world of TV and advertising could make this overly familiar (and to be fair, it can just waft by), but ultimately, the sincerity and craft of the composition and production make it much more emotionally satisfying than the untold PCO knock-offs out there.

7/10

Wrongtom Meets The Ragga Twins 'In Time' (Tru Thoughts)

There’s a lot of interest these days in the UK’s reggae soundsystem culture of the 80s, which spawned the Ragga Twins as well as the likes of Daddy Freddy, Tippa Irie and a good section of the jungle scene. Producer Wrongtom, probably best known for his Roots Manuva collabs, is one of the finest revivalists of the 80s production style – so this LP, which takes the Twins back to their roots, is a marriage made in soundboy heaven. It’s a flashback to the era when London’s FM frequencies crackled with a thousand ragga and roots pirates full of swaggering pride, songs and jump-around digital sound. Original it’s not, but it’s a trip in a time machine worth taking.

7/10

Diagrams 'Dorothy' (Bookshop)

If anyone was going to make an album with a 90-year-old poet living on an island in the far Pacific Northwest of the USA, it was Sam Genders. Since founding Tunng in the early-00s he’s taken a strange and winding path, making very beautiful records with The Accidental, Throws and Diagrams, always with a gently visionary slant to the lyrics. Two years ago, he discovered poet Dorothy Trogdon, with the pair corresponding before meeting in person. As a result, Diagrams now have ‘Dorothy’, an album full of gorgeous electronic folk and psych-pop, with Trogdon’s observations of the minutiae of life, love and nature (“the kindness of rain”; “everything on its way to being something else”) sitting perfectly in the mix. And it’s great.

8/10

Scarper 'Warmer Squares' (Plexus)

Scarper’s new album is strictly UK business. Drenched in blissful colours, alternating tempos, ambient textures and scattered rhythms, ‘Warmer Squares’ feels like an ode to the M25 area, circa 1991. ‘Twisty’ is probably the most dancefloor-ready cut, but the solid broken grooves dancing around acid bass lines and bleeps on each of these nine thumping tracks could work any room at the right moment. The two ambient outros, meanwhile, provide a welcome break and boast arguably the best production found on the LP. Towards the end of the excellent ‘Fellow Munk’, a vocal sample from Kraftwerk reminds us that “music itself is a non-static phenomena” – a philosophy Scarper clearly abides by.

8/10

Carl Craig 'Versus' (InFiné)

Take dance music visionary Carl Craig, add a prodigious pianist, a pioneer of dub techno and an orchestra, and you get ‘Versus’: an album of dramatic neo-classical reinterpretations of some of Craig’s best-known work. A decade in the making, he leads his collaborators (a list which includes Basic Channel, Moritz von Oswald and Francesco Tristano) through an album full of grand themes. Passages of pummeling grooves, emotional strings and delicate piano are impressively tied together by Craig’s dancefloor expertise. His remix of Maurizio’s ‘Domina’ is transformed into a Lalo Schifrin-style thriller soundtrack, while ‘At Les’ morphs from sleepy orchestral ambience to growling tech rave-up at the flick of a baton.

8/10

Juana Molina 'Halo' (Crammed Discs)

Is there a cooler Argentinian than Juana Molina? She’s spent the last two decades constructing her own magical world with experimentalist electronica as her base – a kind of aural version of the Latin American hyperrealism of author Gabriel García Márquez and director Guillermo del Toro. ‘Halo’ smooches around in the same territory: beats flutter with hummingbird-wing intensity and elegant guitars flit in and out. As on the swirling psych-hop of ‘Sin Dones’, she often leaves a layer of the song unvarnished, scuzzing it up with electronic interference. Then there’s her voice, sweet and breathy, uttering lyrics that are always in Spanish, yet sometimes content just to form unfamiliar, onomatopoeic sounds. It’s endlessly bewitching.

7/10

Jamiroquai 'Automaton' (Virgin EMI)

Let’s get straight into it: ‘Automaton’ is Jay Kay’s biggest pop moment since 2005’s ‘Feels Just Like It Should.’ Its electronic confidence is thanks in part to keyboardist Matt Johnson, as well as a general rethink after 2010’s slightly underwhelming ‘Rock Dust Light Star’. ‘Cloud 9’, for example, is quintessential 90s Jamiroquai (which is a good thing), but ‘Shake It Off’ is a production in search of a proper chorus that only suffers further next to ‘Automaton’, which immediately heads for the stars. ‘Superfresh’ is less than the sum of its disco parts, though, while the less said about ‘Hot Property’ the better. But it picks up with ‘Something About You’ and ‘Summer Girl’, while ‘Carla’ is an electro-funk classic.

7/10

Calibre 'The Deep' (Signature Recordings)

The relentlessly prolific Dominick Martin follows up downtempo masterpiece ‘Grow’ with his most important d’n’b record in over a decade. This is the LP that knits together the sonic strains of his previously separate downtempo material and his signature liquid-funk arias: a delicious hinterland of ghosting electronica, Thom Yorke-esque psych-blues vocal tracks and monogrammed 170bpm snare textures. In particular, it’s his vocals that have hit new heights: he filters his own falsetto into sublime angelic shapes on ‘No One Gets You’, and nails a murmurming Yorke-like croon on trilling bluesy shuffler ‘Mr Natural’. Card-carrying Calibre fans will still slurp greedily at the traditional sonic watermarks – glacial piano arpeggios on ‘Complain’; the jungle-flecked briskness of ‘Echoes’ – but they’ll also float away on the lucid brilliance of the untied electronic immersions. With ‘The Deep’, Calibre seems to have finally unlocked all the secrets at once. Lord help us!

9/10