CD Album Recommendations May 2012

Review: It's a commonly held belief that good house albums - and, for that matter, great deep house albums - are notoriously few and far between. Manuel Tur's first album for Freerange, 0201, got round this by peppering the album with downtempo interludes. This time round, he's done the same (see the blunted jazz of "Mirrors" or the glitchy, minimalist ambient-pop of Blakkat collab "I'm Alive"), though he's confident enough to devote much more space to proper deep house. It's a wise choice. Utilizing real instruments, looser grooves, more vocals and a broader range of house influences (Chicago jack, woozy techno, main room pomp and Detroitian deepness), Swans Reflecting Elephants is easily his strongest release to date.

Review: Voices From The Lake is the first full-length collaboration between Italian techno producers Donato Dozzy and Neel. The album was recorded last summer in Rome, before being previewed as a live show at a wooded mountainside festival in Japan. This detail is perhaps crucial. Throughout, Voices From The Lake feels surprisingly 'live', given its almost entirely electronic contents. There's a fluidity to the rhythms and a green, organic tinge to the musty, atmospheric sounds that flit between the speakers. It's minimal, yes, but there's a strange warmth to proceedings. It's not cold and icy - an accusation often leveled at atmospheric techno - but rather pleasingly cosy.

Review: "It's like painting with button and sliders... Melting and dripping, seeping yourself liquid into the machinery." So said Darren Cunningham when discussing the creation of R.I.P, his long awaited follow up to Splazsh. It's a compelling image that works in practice too. R.I.P creates microcosmic sound worlds within each track: "Holy Water" for instance tumbles in on itself in a melange of shimmering sine wave droplets, while the pitch shifted waves of "Tree Of Knowledge" seem to inhale and exhale like a living being, crumpling inwards on itself to repeat the same motion ad infinitum. And although it uses much the same, occasionally abrasive sonic building blocks as Cunningham's been developing for many years, the pastoral tones of "Uriel's Black Harp" and the Alva Noto styles of "Jardin" make R.I.P a surprisingly graceful album. It may not be techno as many will know it, but Cunningham has never made techno in the traditional sense anyway - and it's clear on listening to R.I.P that he's only just beginning to realise the musical forms that have been swarming inside his brain for years.

Review: Coming storming back after a three year hiatus, Hospital stalwart Matt Gresham aka Logistics is back with his fourth artist album on London's legendary D&B imprint. The follow up to 2009's Crash, Bang, Wallop sees the Cambridge based producer take a more synth-led approach, covering a wide range of tempos and styles across the 15-track selection but still retaining his core sound. Highlights include "2999 (Wherever You Go)", future jungle cut "Early Again" and the gorgeous melodies of "Sendai Song", not forgetting euphoric outro "Watching The World Go By". Top quality stuff here - don't miss out.

Review: It's been four long years since the release of Franz "Cupp Cake" Baker's full-length debut Garbage Pail Beats, a strange but endearing fusion of leftfield hip-hop and samples from records aimed at children. Musically he seems to have moved on much in that time, because follow-up Retina Waves, is a totally different beats. He's still concerned with the possibilities of MPC beat-making and off-kilter rhythms, but the sounds employed atop - glitchy samples, woozy chords and twinkling melodies - are far deeper and, we'd argue, more organic than previous outings. It's a combination that largely makes for an enthralling am entertaining set, two parts Flying Lotus and three parts Broadcast.

Review: St Albans-based Daniel Richmond has quietly built a solid reputation as a purveyor of woozy, atmospheric dubstep via a series of quality full-lengths. In the past, he's been compared to Burial, though Richmond's music and rhythms lack the paranoid, panic-stricken intensity associated with dubstep's self-styled man of mystery. There are some similarities, though, not least a love of subtle melodies, quietly upbeat compositions and wrong speed vocal cut-ups. This third album is arguably Richmond's most confident and swaggering, a typically robust set that fixes floor-friendly rhythms to his usual dreamy soundscapes.

Review: Having previously impressed with a serious of eye-popping albums that fused techno, electro and raw acid, veteran duo Motor have gone back to their roots on this fifth full-length. With Gary Numan, Depeche Mode's Martin Gore and veteran singer-for-hire Billie Ray Martin in tow, they've laid down an album that looks to 1980s EBM and industrial for inspiration. The resultant set bristles with dark swagger and druggy intent. Musically, it's a pleasing mix of darkroom synth-pop, new wave menace and dirty dancefloor grooves, with the odd moment of contemplative clarity thrown in. For the most part, though, it sounds like Nitzer Ebb for the 21st century.

Review: A sight to cheer for any regular Tru Thoughts follower - a brand new collaboration between veteran producer Will "Quantic" Holland (now bearded and looking very much like a muso version of Eric Cantona) and regular chanteuse Alice Russell. Unlike many of their previous combined outings, Look Around The Corner largely eschews hard-boiled funk and heavy soul in favour of a looser, folksier, more organic sound clearly inspired by Rotary Connection (and in particular the production of Charles Stepney). With Quantic's Cuban backing band, Combo Barbaro, offering solid backing, and Holland himself in the control room, it's an expansive, adventurous and finely crafted album that boasts far more hits than misses.

Review: Since first surfacing way back in 2007, Dutch producer TJ Kong has proved adept at making the sort of comfy, melodic, heavily electronic dance music that defies easy categorization. On this debut album - produced with pal Modular A - he's up to his old tricks again. Dream Cargoes is full of music that slips down the cracks between genres; deep house with smacked-out trance synths, touchy-feely techno with old prog house influences, even slo-mo electronica with sweeping, cinematic melodies. Then there's "Studio 5, The Stars", which sounds like a jolly Dutch take on the Bradock classic "Deep Burnt". However you describe it, Dream Cargoes is an enjoyable set -and that, after all, is the only thing that matters.

Review: Previously known for their pioneering and, at times, outstanding work as Hype Williams, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland have decided to change tack with a suitably eclectic and unusual full-length for Hyperdub. Black Is Beautiful is an odd but endearing collection that leaps between sounds, styles and genres almost at will. Opening with a blast of fuzzy jazz-rock, its 15 tracks variously touches on skewed dream-pop, E'd-up downtempo curiosities, wrongspeed electronica, calming ambience, woozy demo-pop, skittering, smacked-out rave rhythyms, droning madness and impossible-to-define strangeness. It could just be the album of the year.