Please let me know about any dodgy links, but also, given the amount of links to shared files here I hope anyone taking advantage of them does try their best to balance out sharing with PAYING, and doesn't re-host the files. I've got no love for haters of the industry.
Here goes...
A Remix
Yeah, if you didn't hear it you were either in a cave for the whole year or Jo Whiley (actually that's not fair. I'm sure this was the one dubstep track she plugged relentlessly this year like she had plucked it fresh out of a stream with her bare hands). In no way was this the best remix of the year, but it played a big part in foregrounding to the mainstream that sultry bitch that is dubstep, and actually it does 
inevitably tickle the ear drums when the bass comes in - subwoofer or decent headphones essential.
Skream's ever-so-clever new format of dub remix (take latest single from electro-songstress; start with a-capella vocals smeared with reverb; cue sub bass) was also hilariously and relentlessly mimicked by other producers - see Nero's remix of La Roux's I'm Not Your Toy. Also fairly similar and probably inspired by Skream's remix, but infinitely richer, was Jakwob's cheeky pair of Ellie Goulding remixes: here and here.
There were, however, s o many (arguably better) remixes, which you can check out in my separate 2009 Remixes section.
An Electro-Pop High
The EP Chunk of Change which kick-started the electronic band was intended as a gift for frontman Michael Angelakos' girlfriend, and it's that genuine emotional feel to their music, added to Angelakos' signature falsetto and charmingly naive live presence (I've never smiled so much in a concert) that sky-rocketed the group above similar acts in 2009, when their album Manners came out. Also, ignore the over-hyped Sleepyhead, it's all about Little Secrets and Let Your Love Grow Tall.
An Anniversary
Yup, the above track signifies the enigmatic, pioneering and unbeatable label Warp Records, who turned 20 this year, leaving behind quite a legacy! I'm not about to write a history (those more in tune with the label, skip the next paragraph) but, for any who are unfamiliar, Warp started out when two guys in an obscure Shefield record shop started financially backing new and exciting electronica. The first few releases included tracks by Nightmares On Wax and LFO, and the label went on to pioneer the legend that is Aphex Twin, as well as Boards of Canada, Autechre and Squarepusher to name a few. As well as going on to start releasing a few films (including Shane Meadows' This Is England) the label have signed more conven tional indie and rock artists such as Maximo Park, Grizzly Bear and Born Ruffians. 
So yeah, the anniversary has spawned a series of Warp20 compilations (including remixes, covers and new material) and a box set, but also given us all a chance to look back on the challenging, unconventional beauty of the music left in its wake.Highlights for Warp virgins to check out include a good chunk of Aphex Twin's work obviously (check out anything from the Come To Daddy EP, notably the Little Lord Faulteroy Mix and more soul-calming Flim and Iz-Us; but also Windowlicker and its epic and facking hilarious music video) and some more old-school Autechre (here). Also worth checking out is the bizarre sonic-pervert Tim Exile (here) and indie-wise, for anyone who's unaware of them (they were that twee little live band in that Skins episode where Cassie randomly turned up in New York), Born Ruffians, who are definitely worth a listen - a million miles away from Warp's characteristic sick-and-twisted electronic vibe.
Okay, so that was a bit of a chronological wander away from 2009, whoops. Back to the present.
A Drum & Bass Label
Oh, as if I hadn't mentioned enough electronica... Well fuck it, the boys at Hospital have been doing very well this year, releasing (almost) golden boy Mistabishi's wonderfully eclectic album, discovering the beautifully enigmatic Bop (see my separate review) along with a cohort of Russian producers released in their Future Sound of Russia compilation, and also reaching number 100 in their unbeatable podcast, which is definitely worth listening to. Wannabe-cool Jack-the-lad uncle Tony 'The Colmanator' Colman might prove a bit annoying at first, but his fairly frequent discovered gems of DnB and the like are rewarding enough to warrant getting used to his interruptions.Their compilation Sick Music should make non-believers understand - try Beautiful Lies, Red Mist VIP, the Apex remix of Tony's Just One Second and Empty Streets just for a taste...
A Comeback
Yeah, I know, the Prodigy never really left (although the considerable gap between all of their albums makes each new release seem like a comeback) but their contribution to this year did feel pretty momentous and very nostalgic, what with the welcome return of Liam Howlett's wingmen Maxim and the enigmatic Keith Flint on the new record - the first time they'd collaborated on an album since The Fat of the Land twelve years ago! Actually, I say collaborated, I think 'yelled over Liam's masterful production' would be more truthful, but it's still nice to hear the group as, err, a group.Despite not being a proper comeback, I have to say it felt more impactive than the more traditional comebacks of The Specials and Blur, but then the Prodigy do love to make a whole fucking lot of noise...
Having said that, the Prodigy never were an album group and Invaders Must Die did what they always do, destroying dance-floors with massive singles but sacrificing consistency in doing so. Still, relative wank like 'Thunder' and 'Colours' were among the relatively few tracks spoiling the album, Howlett keeping his good name with madness-provoking singles Omen, Take Me to the Hospital and Warrior's Dance.
They did milk this album to the point of ripping the prodigy's neon teat... Each single was remixed to death (ignore the poison of any remixes of Invaders Must Die or Warrior's Dance - there's no remedy for Chase & Status' signature 'look it's us shitting drum and bass all over the Prodigy' IMD remix) with the exception of the tastefully done Noisia remix of Omen and (classic) Sub Focus remix of Take Me to the Hospital.
They did milk this album to the point of ripping the prodigy's neon teat... Each single was remixed to death (ignore the poison of any remixes of Invaders Must Die or Warrior's Dance - there's no remedy for Chase & Status' signature 'look it's us shitting drum and bass all over the Prodigy' IMD remix) with the exception of the tastefully done Noisia remix of Omen and (classic) Sub Focus remix of Take Me to the Hospital.
An Album
You know what, I'm not choosing one. I don't think it was the best year for them by any means. I'm an album man through and through but there were no For Emmas this year. Having said that I enjoyed Memory Tapes' Seek Magic (see A Year of Tapes below), The Flaming Lips' Embryonic (see A Lack of Rocking and Rolling below), Bop's Clear Your Mind (listen), Mistabishi's Drop (see A Genre, a Sample Too Far and a DJing Shambles below) Passion Pit's Manners (see top) and Enter Shikari's Common Dreads (try, try) amongst others.
Also be sure to check out Sparklehorse & Danger Mouse's collaboration Dark Night of the Soul - an album full to the brim with famous guest singers including Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas, Cardigans' singer Nina Persson and Iggy Pop. The release was an eclectic mix of emotional extremes (to be expected from the bizarre mental state of Sparklehorse) and was so obscure that it wasn't actually released due to legal reasons. The only way to get it is by illegal download, so google away. If you can't be arsed to download the whole thing first, then try Revenge (ft. Wayne Coyne) and The Man Who Played God, and take my word for it that every other track boasts an equally unique sound.
A Year of Tapes
Memory Tapes - Bicycle
Any excuse to mention the producer behind aliases Memory Tapes, Weird Tapes and Memory Cassette: Dayve Hawkes. Enthralled but by no means satisfied by my exposure to Weird Tapes early in the year, discovering Hawke's other chief alias Memory Tapes was like a child wetting themselves watching the original star wars trilogy for the first time after watching the latest prequels (except that Weird Tapes' work was also intelligent, spiritual and completely Jar Jar Binks-free).
While Weird Tapes seems to cling more strongly onto the legs of more established electronica, Memory Tapes strays away more from its dominating genre with vocals and surly guitar parts, delving more into the pop spotlight. To be honest though, they both sound pretty fucking similar, and pretty fucking good. Critics have used the term Glo-Fi to describe their shimmering blend of haunting and gloriously uplifting melody, bolstered by immaculately smooth and dynamic production and grounded by eccentric, yet dancefloor-friendly beats.
Tapes have been all over 2009, with Weird Tapes' 2008 release More Tapes (try My Babe Walk) bleeding through into the beginning of the year, not to mention the full-length Memory Tapes album Seek Magic, which boasted the Tape-loving producer's incredible versatility. And it's this versatility that's so impressive; Tapes production varies from the slightly eerie with massive breaks (Weird Tapes - The Talking Dead) to the accessible and joyful smothering moody guitars (Memory Tapes - Plain Material) via the occasional momentous and grandiose ambient 20-minute masterpiece (Memory Tapes - Treeship).
On top of this, the man's been smothering his remixing across the board over 2009, his blog We're Tapes featuring a new remix every few weeks! My favourites are the soul-ticklingly warm Fool's Gold Remix, the oddly bubbly retro progression of the Grum Remix, and the subtly chopped-up remix for Peter Bjorn & John. The group have also been remixed themselves, receiving attention from the Horrors in the form of their remix of Bicycle.
Memory Tapes - Bicycle
Any excuse to mention the producer behind aliases Memory Tapes, Weird Tapes and Memory Cassette: Dayve Hawkes. Enthralled but by no means satisfied by my exposure to Weird Tapes early in the year, discovering Hawke's other chief alias Memory Tapes was like a child wetting themselves watching the original star wars trilogy for the first time after watching the latest prequels (except that Weird Tapes' work was also intelligent, spiritual and completely Jar Jar Binks-free).While Weird Tapes seems to cling more strongly onto the legs of more established electronica, Memory Tapes strays away more from its dominating genre with vocals and surly guitar parts, delving more into the pop spotlight. To be honest though, they both sound pretty fucking similar, and pretty fucking good. Critics have used the term Glo-Fi to describe their shimmering blend of haunting and gloriously uplifting melody, bolstered by immaculately smooth and dynamic production and grounded by eccentric, yet dancefloor-friendly beats.
Tapes have been all over 2009, with Weird Tapes' 2008 release More Tapes (try My Babe Walk) bleeding through into the beginning of the year, not to mention the full-length Memory Tapes album Seek Magic, which boasted the Tape-loving producer's incredible versatility. And it's this versatility that's so impressive; Tapes production varies from the slightly eerie with massive breaks (Weird Tapes - The Talking Dead) to the accessible and joyful smothering moody guitars (Memory Tapes - Plain Material) via the occasional momentous and grandiose ambient 20-minute masterpiece (Memory Tapes - Treeship).
On top of this, the man's been smothering his remixing across the board over 2009, his blog We're Tapes featuring a new remix every few weeks! My favourites are the soul-ticklingly warm Fool's Gold Remix, the oddly bubbly retro progression of the Grum Remix, and the subtly chopped-up remix for Peter Bjorn & John. The group have also been remixed themselves, receiving attention from the Horrors in the form of their remix of Bicycle.
A Genre, a Sample Too Far and a DJing Shambles
(Dubstep)
Hospital Records' early-2009 jewel in their crown, DnB (and more) producer Mistabishi made a very nice entrance to the scene this year with an incredibly diverse and smoothly produced full-length album (check out No Matter What and White Collar Grime). But the track which most tickled the mainstream was Printer Jam - guess what noise is sampled throughout? The original was clever but ridiculously unnecessary and crass, but what eventually followed was this remix, which took unnecessary and crass and multiplied them ten-fold to the point of being beautiful! Yes, it's a dubstep remix, and dubstep is a genre which (although not new) has really broken through to the mainstream in 2009, thanks to the likes of Skream (see A Remix above) and Chase & Status, who are now working with the likes of Rihanna and Snoop Dogg. That dark and mysteriously badass genre has stopped shooting up behind the bike sheds, leaving its selective clique of tech-heads to hang out with the cool kids. Sell out? Make up your own mind.
As for DJing shambles? Well, as much as Mistabishi's production talents sparked a pretty respectful reception overall from the drum & bass community, this was all but swept away after an embarrassing incident at a recent gig of his, where fans began to notice that he was pretending to choose and spin records, while he was actually just playing a pre-recorded mix CD and arbitrarily wiggling his turntables and knobs on his mixer just to seem like he was doing something.Apart from provoking, expectedly, an uproar amongst fans and turntablists, I think this might just say something slightly depressing about the world of DJing. As much respect as we have for DJs' mixing and sonic manipulation skills live, it's all too possible for some twat to just play us a CD with absolutely no improvisation and still have everyone going just as mental.
A Lack of Rocking and Rolling...
I realise that this retrospective has been thoroughly biased towards electronica, dnb and the like - while this is in part owing to my personal aversion (or ignorance) towards a lot of modern rock, pop and folk, I think that the year's not been so good for it...
This is an electronic age and a lot of the most exciting and boundary-breaking music released has been electronica or one of its illegitimate relatives (like that bastard teen cousin dubstep, not to mention obscure three-times-removed genres such as neurofunk, glo-fi etc). The (partly) refreshing wave of fresh electro-influenced rock and pop, as well as more obscure genres, has perhaps served as the antidote for the noughties' progressively shit crop of landfill indie music - we can blame The Strokes for that one probably.
Certainly rock music seems to have branched off into such an umbrella term that there doesn't seem to be much that we can comfortably dub 'rock' any more. It seems to me that you've either got your indie rock (each word in this genre having been rendered meaningless by this point), your emoey MCR-esque Fallout Boy conformist whiney tripe rock or your guitarists' rock - I mean the kind of rock that only rock musicians listen to, a genre so circular that it's spiralled into a-melodic noisy image-central auditory vomit. It seems that only at rock's borders can pure magic be found, as alternative giants Radiohead, The Flaming Lips etc. just keep on producing magic. (We all enjoyed their tribute to the last WWI vet Harry Patch, and await Thom, Jonny and co's 2010 album release, and many have been enjoying Wayne Coyne's incredibly weird last 'Lips album Embryonic - ch-ch-check it.) Plus anything Josh Homme has touched seems worth a listen, him single-handedly maintaining rock 'n' roll's pulse, and acceptably silly Biffy Clyro's persistent touring and new album does seem to come pretty close to ticking all the rock boxes - there's nowt much wrong with That Golden Rule, it serving as a direct cut-copy-paste reincarnation of Puzzle's Living Is A Problem (complete with pointlessly syncopated strings/drums/guitar section) which was also fuckin' awesome.
It was unfair of me to mock folk's progression however, as everyone's favourite posh boys Mumford & Sons have been blazing a trail across 2009 (we still prefer early tracks White Blank Page and Liar) and even borderline folk-pop golden boys Noah And The Whale returned on partly good form with the progressive and melancholy The First Days of Spring. It just seems folk had a hard act to follow what with last years incredible Dark Was the Night compilation (try Jose Gonzalez' Nick drake cover Cello Song, a bit of Feist & co and Decemberists' eight-minute 'is it annoying, actually I think I like it' epic Sleepless - then actually buy the album, its proceeds going to charity, you heartless cunt) as well as the wake of Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. Actually Justin Vernon did release Bon Iver's pretty nice Blood Bank EP (lovely) in January and side-project Volcano Choir's album Unmap recently (try Island, IS).
An Attempt to Prove I Listened to Some Hip Hop
The Bloody Beetroots - Awesome (ft. Cool Kids)
A Couple of Tracks that Needed Mentioning But Didn't Fit Anywhere Else
Pretty Lights - More Important Than Michael Jordan
SebastiAn - H.A.L.
All done! Try not to get lost amongst the web of repetition and sea of download links, I don't expect anyone to try everything, but if you find one thing you love then my work is done.
Please comment away in terms of your agreement/disagreement.
Bring on the next decade...
I realise that this retrospective has been thoroughly biased towards electronica, dnb and the like - while this is in part owing to my personal aversion (or ignorance) towards a lot of modern rock, pop and folk, I think that the year's not been so good for it...This is an electronic age and a lot of the most exciting and boundary-breaking music released has been electronica or one of its illegitimate relatives (like that bastard teen cousin dubstep, not to mention obscure three-times-removed genres such as neurofunk, glo-fi etc). The (partly) refreshing wave of fresh electro-influenced rock and pop, as well as more obscure genres, has perhaps served as the antidote for the noughties' progressively shit crop of landfill indie music - we can blame The Strokes for that one probably.
Certainly rock music seems to have branched off into such an umbrella term that there doesn't seem to be much that we can comfortably dub 'rock' any more. It seems to me that you've either got your indie rock (each word in this genre having been rendered meaningless by this point), your emoey MCR-esque Fallout Boy conformist whiney tripe rock or your guitarists' rock - I mean the kind of rock that only rock musicians listen to, a genre so circular that it's spiralled into a-melodic noisy image-central auditory vomit. It seems that only at rock's borders can pure magic be found, as alternative giants Radiohead, The Flaming Lips etc. just keep on producing magic. (We all enjoyed their tribute to the last WWI vet Harry Patch, and await Thom, Jonny and co's 2010 album release, and many have been enjoying Wayne Coyne's incredibly weird last 'Lips album Embryonic - ch-ch-check it.) Plus anything Josh Homme has touched seems worth a listen, him single-handedly maintaining rock 'n' roll's pulse, and acceptably silly Biffy Clyro's persistent touring and new album does seem to come pretty close to ticking all the rock boxes - there's nowt much wrong with That Golden Rule, it serving as a direct cut-copy-paste reincarnation of Puzzle's Living Is A Problem (complete with pointlessly syncopated strings/drums/guitar section) which was also fuckin' awesome.It was unfair of me to mock folk's progression however, as everyone's favourite posh boys Mumford & Sons have been blazing a trail across 2009 (we still prefer early tracks White Blank Page and Liar) and even borderline folk-pop golden boys Noah And The Whale returned on partly good form with the progressive and melancholy The First Days of Spring. It just seems folk had a hard act to follow what with last years incredible Dark Was the Night compilation (try Jose Gonzalez' Nick drake cover Cello Song, a bit of Feist & co and Decemberists' eight-minute 'is it annoying, actually I think I like it' epic Sleepless - then actually buy the album, its proceeds going to charity, you heartless cunt) as well as the wake of Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. Actually Justin Vernon did release Bon Iver's pretty nice Blood Bank EP (lovely) in January and side-project Volcano Choir's album Unmap recently (try Island, IS).An Attempt to Prove I Listened to Some Hip Hop
The Bloody Beetroots - Awesome (ft. Cool Kids)
A Couple of Tracks that Needed Mentioning But Didn't Fit Anywhere Else
Pretty Lights - More Important Than Michael Jordan
SebastiAn - H.A.L.
All done! Try not to get lost amongst the web of repetition and sea of download links, I don't expect anyone to try everything, but if you find one thing you love then my work is done.
Please comment away in terms of your agreement/disagreement.
Bring on the next decade...
