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Top 6? Naw top 7 1⁄4 son.

By Omar (@siegarettes)

In an ongoing show of hipster one-upmanship, I’ve elected to force yet another top albums list upon you, dear reader. Except this time I can’t even bother to use whole numbers. A combination of artists you probably never heard of and a few blatantly obvious hipster choices.

All that aside, I’ve curated a list for you that felt ambitious, personal, and meaningful to me. Some have made it to me recently, some represent defining moments of my life and musical taste. All of them are breathless passion, some kind of sonic poetry.

In no particular order, I present them to you below:

I. Playing the Angel - Depeche Mode 

In my time of adolescent angst and mass consumption of Linkin Park I slowly began to understand “alternative” music and develop an identity. Playing the Angel was just the right combination dark moods and emotion, a transition away from the more upbeat sounds built on 80’s dance synth. Playing the Angel evokes Biblical imagery, lamentations on the grip of our sinful nature, and a sense of a world that keeps us slipping into suffering. “Suffer Well” and “A Pain that I’m Used To” are resilient meditations on existence, while “Precious”, the album’s showpiece, is a tender heat wandering in fear and compassion. The whole album is an intimate melancholy. 

II. Mezzanine - Massive Attack

I paid 70 USD to import a copy of this record from the UK. That is how significant Mezzanine’s is. I first discovered Massive Attack through the soundtrack for the film Danny the Dog or Unleashed as it released in the States. There was something about the heavy atmospheres that drew me inexorably towards it. 

Mezzanine is finely balanced. It brings the steady beats and tempos of their early work to a more electronic space, without the ethereal mood that would overwhelm the later 100th Window. “Angel”, “Risingson”, and “Inertia Creeps”, bring an uncomfortable sensuality, with “Mezzanine" and "Black Milk” following with moody release. My favorites are definitely “Dissolved Girl"and "Teardrop”, the latter you might know as the theme for the TV show House, managing to feel both airy and dense. “Dissolved Girl” is a sigh of song, all breathy vocals and pent up longing. 

Layered, detailed, and sublime, I’m still finding spaces to fall into in this album.

III. The XX - The XX

The XX is an album that will forever be tied to specific moments in my life. Along with the follow up, Coexist, it bookends a beginning and end of one a romantic relationship in my life. I can’t tell you if it’s the timing that’s made it stick with me, but when I first heard the album it consumed me, overwriting the desire to listen to other albums. In that way, maybe it felt a bit like love. 

The XX isn’t dense or detailed. Its purposefully stripped back, vulnerable and intimate. Guitar melodies paired with hip hop like drumbeats, The XX is illustrated in small moments, overwhelming sincerity and a sense basic intimacy in slowly knowing another person. 

Shorted of the third X on the billing, The XX carries itself with a sensuality that is visibly sexual but vulnerable. The warmth of an intense, open flame, and the an anxiety that being hurt by that heat.

IV: Midnight Orphans - Disasterpeace

Midnight Orphans is kind of strange. It remains my favorite album by Disasterpeace despite obviously not being his best work. Since then he’s gone on to do a lot of projects, from his best known work on FEZ's soundtrack to The Floor Is Jelly more recently. 

Midnight Orphans is composed of B-sides he made from 2006-2010, tracks that didn’t quite fit anywhere else. It’s not entirely cohesive but it feels personal. Most of all it brings a softness to the chiptune sound that is absent from a lot of the genre. I first stumbled across “St. Valentine” on 8-Bit Collective, before it was collected here. Contextualized among many high energy rampages it was a revelation. I had never heard so much emotion out of square and sine waves. It feels right at home now, surrounded the other Orphans. 

V. Night Piece - Shugo Tokumaru

This is probably the most “screw off hipster” entry on this list. An indie psychedelic pop folk album from Japan. Its lyrics are made of surreal imagery compiled from Tokumaru’s dream diary, and set to complex and layered soundscapes which he plays every instrument on. Or so I’m told. I can’t understand a word of it. 

Despite that fact, there is a universality to the music that transcends the barriers of language. There’s a defined sense of mood unique to his work. Unlike his later albums, this one is still complex but not overwhelmingly layered. There’s a sense of calm and optimism to it. 

VI. I’m New Here - Gil Scott-Heron

Best know for his lyrical call to arms “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, Gil Scott-Heron eschews his regular funk sound for a minimalist electronic sound produced by Richard Russel (you may know him as co-producer on Damon Albarn’s latest, Everyday Robots).

This would be his last album before his death. Maybe that’s the reason it carries such a melancholy with it. It may not have the rhythm of his other work, but it carries the same signature lyricism. The lyrics here are reflective and carry the weight of a life with history. The micro-stories he tells during the interludes ground it while each song feels like a moment captured itself. There’s a cover of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil"that I dare say I like even more than the original, and "Where Did The Night Go”, “Running”, and “The Crutch” contain some of the most absorbing atmospheres on the album. 

It just feels human.

VII. Year Zero - Nine Inch Nails

Ambitious and modern, Year Zero marked not only a change in atmosphere and style for Trent Reznor but something that feels frighteningly prophetic. Born of the same sociopolitical anxiety that birthed works like Little Brother, Year Zero uses dense digital soundscape, glitch art aesthetics, and videogame sensibilities to explore similar themes and ideas of control, censorship, and surveillance. Year Zero serves as a concept album, and the crux of an entire alternate digital future where terrorist attacks have led the US to enact totalitarian control upon the population. Bolstered by an alternate reality game created by the same people who create Halo 2’s famous “I Love Bees”.

Consisting of hidden internet webpages, resistance groups, spooky spectral presences within songs, phone numbers that lead to recordings from the fictional US Bureau of Morality warning you that you and your family have been flagged as militants, and webpage address hidden in binary on the heat sensitive disc itself, Year Zero is comprehensive. Since then we’ve since seen the reveal of the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program, which, poetically, launched in the same year the album released. In a world where mass surveillance and data mining is now a naked truth, there runs a terrifying thread of truth that makes the album still feel all too relevant.

Year Zero is not the most sonically rounded record by NIN. Without the singular focus of a few earlier albums it is uneven, with some songs feeling largely transitional. Still, it retains an aggressive energy and paranoid atmosphere that makes it unlike the albums that preceded it, with hints at  NIN’s future. “Another Version of the Truth” strongly suggests the sonic landscape of Ghosts. "The Good Soldier" and “Me, I’m Not” tackle a loss of individual thought. “Survivalism” reads like a manifesto of control: I’ve got my propaganda/I’ve got revisionism/I’ve got my violence in hi-def ultrarealism/all a part of this great nation.

Year Zero is dense, ambitious, and still contemporary, maybe even more so than before. 

 VII (¼). Ego/Mirror - Burial / Thom Yorke / Four Tet

My come down song. I don’t know what it is about this one. A song about the kind of nervous babble and nonsense you’re liable to spew to a girl at a bar. In a way, it feels like a complement to Radiohead’s “Creep”. A song about the distance between your thoughts, your words, and the person in front of you. 

“Mirror”, the second side, waxes poetic about the other side of the self, and provides an immediate follow up to “Ego”. Reflections and false faces abound. It’s just our nature. Burial and Four Tet of course provide their deep bass production on the tracks, creating that ethereal space for Yorke to play in. Overall, simply a grand showcase for all three artists in collab.