Top 10 Best Electronic Albums of 2010

SPOILER ALERT!!! Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack did not make this list. Neither did the latest offerings by scene stalwarts Massive Attack, Underworld, Röyksopp, Goldfrapp, or Cassius. Why, without solid contributions from The Books and The Chemical Brothers, there’s a decent chance I could have made it through this entire article without resorting to that tired phrase beloved by Wikipedia editors, “electronic music duo.”

We’re firmly in the era of the bedroom musician, a fitting title for what has long been a lonely art. Dancing may well be the ultimate expression of communal joy, but most modern dance music is created in isolation, and the internet has merely catalyzed—

...Ahem… THUMP THUMP BLEEP BLOOP PARTY WOOOOOOOO!!!

Without further melodramatic ado, here are the “best” “electronic” “albums” of 2010:

Were this a competition for best single, you could remove the zero from that “10.” Erupting from obscurity in late May, “CMYK” dominated the musical zeitgeist for the better part of a month. With its creepily irresistible chop-shop hook, no-nonsense bassline, and a beat reminiscent of Burial’s best, there’s little doubt as to why. Sadly, each release since then—four EPs at last count—has failed to live up to that early promise. Prospects thusly dimmed, he may want to lie low until suitably inspired. To paraphrase Voltaire, it is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad music.

I’m sure some folks still pigeonhole The Chemical Brothers as has-been pioneers of the ‘90s big beat explosion, and that’s a shame. With a few glaring exceptions (*cough*WeAreTheNight*cough*), this electronic music duo—ba-dum tsch!—has pumped out a string of relentlessly inventive LPs, the likes of which can only make The Crystal Method and The Prodigy seethe with jealousy. Further is the latest step on a long journey, and as such it pays homage to the past (note the Orbital sample that forms the basis of “Swoon,” or the nod to “Baba O’Riley” in “Escape Velocity”) while still pointing in the only direction that matters: forward.

When you begin your career so far outside the realm of popular music that only a small subset of minimalist techno nerds buys your album, it’s somehow less distasteful when you eventually make a few concessions to the mainstream. Since his 2003 debut, Leave Luck to Heaven, Matthew Dear has consistently edged in that direction. A smattering of traditional song structure, some relatively lush sonic landscapes, and an increasingly strong vocal presence have combined to make Black City his most radio-friendly—and, in the author’s humble opinion, best—effort to date.

It’s almost boring to report, but The Books have done it again. Cultural dregs have been gathered, curated, and playfully shuffled (“Group Autogenics I,” re-contextualized snippets from guided meditation tapes). The nerdiest of music nerd in-jokes have been rendered in song (“Beautiful People,” an ode to the twelfth root of two, the ratio between notes in a chromatic scale). Downright nightmarish revenge fantasies have been rendered strangely hilarious (“Cold Freezin’ Night,” a collage of children’s murderous rants caught on tape.) A fine effort, and exactly the sort of instant treasure we’ve come to expect from The Books.

Baths caught me completely by surprise this summer. One minute I was strolling merrily along, the next utterly transfixed by an avalanche of slippery rhythms and otherworldly vocals. Cerulean exhibits a certain sonic quality that can best be described as organic. Every song seems buoyed along by an army of tiny insects, exhibiting the sort of emergent behavior that is nigh impossible to plan. My one gripe here is the overabundance of side-chain compression, a production technique wherein the volume of other sounds is lowered (or “ducked”) to make room for a spectrum-hungry sample, usually a bass drum. It sounds right at home in a French house track, but quickly wears out its welcome in this context.

As I type this sentence, I’m still dreading the paragraph ahead. What’s left to say about James Murphy that hasn’t already clattered ‘round the ol’ music blog echo chamber? Ah well, let’s just get on with it. Like every LCD Soundsystem album before it, This Is Happening suffers from a bit of unevenness. At its best (“Dance Yrself Clean,” “I Can Change”), it reads like Sylvia Plath: raw, confessional, rhythmic, powerful. That brand of magic is difficult to maintain for 65 minutes, and while there are more peaks than valleys, I find myself skipping certain songs again and again. Murphy’s talents are too great to waste on filler, and I wish he’d stop.

There’s a moment during “Love Cry” when I can almost convince myself that Kieran Hebden has abandoned his roots to create a coherent, upbeat, even somewhat generic dance song. Mind you, that moment comes four and a half minutes into a twisted take on deep house, and is chased by a signature choppy loop of ethereal guitar. Even so, it’s apparent that There Is Love in You is more dancefloor-oriented than anything in Four Tet’s past, and that’s not an entirely bad thing. Honed during a series of regular club gigs in London, the sounds here are designed to shake a booty or two, and hence they stray from the post-rock glitch-jazz to which we’ve grown accustomed. Rounds this ain’t, but you don’t always gotta dance with the one who brung ya. Experimentation has long been Hebden’s credo; in this case it just happened to lead him away from the “experimental” label.

What an embarrassment of riches; in another year, this could easily have been my top pick. Flying Lotus defines the avant-garde of instrumental hip-hop, and has borne that torch since the moment J Dilla died. Cosmogramma is packed to the gills with so much grit, blood, and soul, it’s hard to believe the sounds within were ever digitized. Don’t expect to find yourself dancing along, but only because your body will be too busy transmigrating to another dimension. These beats are alive, and they will devour you.

Through even the most sun-drenched psychedelic moments of earlier albums, Daniel Snaith has always displayed a fetish for precision, and with Swim he lets his freak flag fly. Each arpeggiated synth line is panned to perfection, each filter sweep meticulously timed. It’s easy to picture Snaith slaving over a particularly tricky snare sample into the wee hours, tweaking the sound until it mirrors the one in his head. Yet the album doesn’t suffer from any heavy-handedness; if anything, the surgical approach breathes life into an otherwise sterile underwater disco. Fragmented vocals drift in from time to time, evoking embers of a dying relationship, but it’s the music that tells the story.

At first it seemed easy to write off Gold Panda as yet another genre-bending, sample-chopping loner on the ever-growing Ghostly International roster, but with the release of his first full-length album that become impossible. There’s something special about young Derwin; something besides his lack of a known surname. Myriad influences pervade Lucky Shiner, from the MPC wizardry of early DJ Shadow, to the post-structuralist glossolalia of Four Tet, but the result is far from a Bloomian paralysis of anxiety. Wow, okay, enough pseudo-intellectual rambling. Simply put, this music is surprising, intoxicating, and goddamn brilliant. Put it in your ears.

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