After an exhaustive round-up of end-of-year best-of lists and a silly season crammed with money-making compilations, the start of the year is a croaky, stifled yawn when it comes to new albums. The cogs are finally starting to turn again, but luckily some artists threw in a few extra gift ideas to keep music fans’ playlists stocked up in this traditionally quiet period.
After an exhaustive round-up of end-of-year best-of lists and a silly season crammed with money-making compilations, the start of the year is a croaky, stifled yawn when it comes to new albums. The cogs are finally starting to turn again, but luckily some artists threw in a few extra gift ideas to keep music fans’ playlists stocked up in this traditionally quiet period.
Two of the most disappointing albums of last year, for me, were jj’s n˚3 and M.I.A’s Maya – one, an insipid, drowsy shell of a superior debut; the other, an abrasive, inconsistent hotchpotch. But both acts have redressed the balance with some up-tempo, inventive and – most importantly of all – fun albums, both in the form of mixtapes.
Joakim Benon and Elin Kastlander of jj make gentle electo-pop that can sometimes veer a little to the MOR side. With Kills (sincerelyyours.se), they build on their strongest material (Ecstasy, My Life) and wholeheartedly embrace their r’n’b side. The result is a vibrant ten tracks melding together samples of MIA, Jay-Z and Dr Dre, to name but a few. Kastlander’s sugar-coating vocal is laced across a sometime surprising smorgasbord of sounds, making for the ultimate mixtape.
M.I.A. ‘s Vicki Leekz (vickileekx.com/mixtape) is a triumphant coda to her jumbled internet-themed 2010 album, Maya. She has no shortage of ideas and they are not always well executed, though here they are bundled up into a giddy thirty-six minutes of party music that raises a smile and even some LOLs. There are some sly digs at manufactured pop (always welcome), but the music isn’t consumed by anger and spite, a factor that has bogged down M.I.A.’s music of late.
Atlas Sounds ’ latest sounds are more bootleg than mixtape. The always fascinating Bradford Cox shoots off four albums’ worth of material in his lo-fi Bedroom Databank series (deerhuntertheband.blogspot.com). The inconsistency of these works shows just how selective Cox is when collating his ‘proper’ albums, but a few gems surface – most notably Mona Lisa and Wild Love. Still, it offers an opportunity to be immersed in Cox’s more experimental, ambient side, and will appeal to Deerhunter fans who preferred Weird Era Cont. over Microcastle. Plus of course it’s all free. You’d be crazy to complain about that.
