Top 10 Best Electronic Albums of 2011

I wonder if an antipodean version of this list would be quite so . . . sad. Could the typical December day in Seattle—a cold, dampish blanket of low stratus clouds—have an undue effect on these rankings, quashing any hope of an uptempo, disco-drenched #1? Let’s consult the record:

2007: The Field - From Here We Go Sublime

This we can forgive. That album is fucking amazing.

2008: N/A

Bye year. [Though if you put a time-traveling gun to my head, Flying Lotus’ darkly twisted Los Angeles would’ve been up there.]

2009: The Field - Yesterday and Today

I plain fucked this one up. I mean sure, it’s a good album, but Fever Ray deserved the title. The bleak, foreboding tones which conjured nighttime in a primeval forest; the plaintive drone of Karin Dreijer Andersson’s subhuman vocals—oh, wait. Not helping.

2010: Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner

You could almost trick yourself into thinking this is happy music, but a mean trick it’d be. Sonically, Gold Panda owes a substantial debt to the likes of Four Tet and DJ Shadow: guys whose idea of a good time is a sleepless night, alone, in a windowless studio, with an obsolete sampler. This is music for headphones, not for dancing.

Actually, that’s not a bad subtitle. Here then, to accompany your weekly S.A.D. treatment under the sun lamp, I humbly present:

The Top 10 Electronic Albums of 2011 [for headphones, not for dancing]

After all that, I immediately contradict myself with what is essentially a collection of disco edits. Through the Green is more than that, of course: it’s a cohesive collection of very good disco edits. The mildly mysterious duo of Tiger & Woods (Larry Tiger and David Woods . . . riiiiight) has tapped into some dark sample-and-hold magic, using crude tools to fashion micro-samples into complex narrative. Plus, hey, you can dance to it.

Here lies the debut full-length from Praveen Sharma and Travis Stewart, both of whom achieved considerable success as solo artists (Braille and Machinedrum, respectively). As names go, Sepalcure fits the bill better than most: frenetic percussion and befuzzed synths plumb the dank catacombs of bass music (think Burial), while warped, ethereal vocals lend each track an almost hymnal quality. The end result is atmospheric as all get-out, a transcendent dubby treat for the ears.

The dissonant notes and nascent wobbles of “Start from the Beginning” serve as caveat: don’t get too comfortable. Even the most radio-friendly track (“Crysalis Records”) does not conform to expectation, gyrating out of kilter and denying climax. Other songs (“Rooks Theme”) are downright antisocial. Dubstep, UK Funky, and their myriad genre brethren excel at this dysfunctional dynamic, and the Night Slugs crew (Egyptrixx among them) consistently pull it off with subdued aplomb.

For an album this funky, and with such a sense of humor (the opening track is 39 seconds of text-to-speech software attempting to pronounce “Rimer”), Rimer London’s self-titled LP sure explores some dark places. Amid the filtered squawks of analog synths, the thematic content is decidedly bleak. Violent imagery abounds (“Love Dagger,” “Put Your Gun Away,” “Aim At My Body”), and yet each of those songs would fit right in at your next pool party. This is the audio equivalent of a Xanax overdose.

James Blake stole my heart with “CMYK,” and I worry that his subsequent efforts will never live up to that first impression. There are wonderful moments here, not the least of which is the paternal love letter / cinephile in-joke “The Wilhelm Scream,” but none of them approach that initial ecstasy. What remains is a competent, quiet, introspective tome, which has somehow garnered the world’s attention. I’m happy for him, but it’s bittersweet.

Technically the sum of two EPs released this year, though it hardly matters in the face of such funky aural adhesive. “Waulking Song” alone guarantees a top ten spot (I dare you to resist its rhythmic charms), but the entirety of Prehistory carries that same restless, infectious energy. Press play and set phasers to “shuffle.”

Man, what is with that mask? Is it a too-clever take on post-colonial African identity? A denial of individuality and/or basic humanity (à la Daft Punk)? A shy person’s coping mechanism? A gimmick that stuck? I don’t much care, but I hate that I end up thinking about this rather than the music—which, by the way, is deeply mesmerizing. Whatever ridiculous names we assign to the descendants of 2-step/garage (Post-dubstep? Really?), the music is remarkably adaptable: these songs work at the club, on the way home, and on a bus at 8am the next morning. Evolution is scary.

Moritz Friedrich’s studio is a mess. The cover art? A snapshot of his floor. Being a pack rat has its benefits, though, and in this case that amounts to five years of accumulated audio projects (as well as, it would seem, a Casio rifle). Over the course of three months, this raw material was combined, Voltron-like, to form the (understandably kaleidoscopic and scatterbrained) Mosaik. Genres are hopped willy-nilly, and there’s scant connective tissue, but it hardly matters when your head is bobbing this violently.

Nicolas Jaar does not make party music. You cannot bring it to the beach. No one is singing along with him as they cruise the strip and test their subwoofers. The beats are few and far between (as in slow). There are pianos, and strings, and monotonous vocals in foreign tongues. Everything is drenched in a crap-ton of reverb. By the time you’re half-way through “Colomb,” sunlight and oxygen are but faint memories, and you surrender yourself to the ocean currents. At least it’s peaceful down here.

A lot of words have been applied to Anthony Gonzalez’s latest opus, most of them synonymous with “epic.” If synth lines were stanzas, he’d be the Milton of shoegaze. Mind you, none of the elements here are particularly new—the protracted crescendos, the primal screaming, the childish spoken-word narratives, the salty-sweet brine of nostalgia—but there is some serious alchemy at work. Hurry Up feels conceptually complete in a way that none of M83’s previous efforts have managed: every listen demands a fresh start; there’s no skipping ahead to favorite tracks. In an era of throwaway digital singles, here is an album. So dust off the turntable and dim the lights, because the night’s young and you’re not going anywhere.

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