The beast that is 20JFG has always had one head with an abnormal taste for that which its other heads should conventional abhor.  Yet the 20JFGbeast cares not for convention.  And so it is then that we continue this end of year round up with a survey of that which could or most definitely should be infiltrating commercial radio, should be covered on X-Factor, should be plastered all over the walls of the future.  Not pop in so much as what is popular but what should be.  While we freely accept that a lot of the music posted on here looks best draped in the dark anonymity of the night (and the immense popularity that can also bring) we wish sometimes to dwell in the light.

What follows is a journey through a land of PRs, pluggers and dreams.  It is also a journey through a mirror world of independence, a world of limited 7″s, self released mp3s and support slots.  It’s a world still capable of retaining its edge while worshipping in the church of the hook, the spirit of the emotional key change, the achingly deadpan and the earworm.

Like everything on 20JFG, this is music we love but sometimes its nice to be loved back…in under 4 minutes.

Animal Collective – My Girls – Jamie Principal knocking out the foundations beneath Maslow‘s pyramidal structure.

Cat Killer – Tree Limbs Together – Lost in a tape hiss haze of nostalgia for purple hued Polaroids of Pet Sounds.

Dan Deacon – Bromst – A Minimalist world recreated by Dan Deacon could only ever turn out this intricate and joyful.  Like Stan Brakhage remaking Metropolis.

Dirty Projectors – Stillness Is The Move – Timbaland chilling in his angora sweater.

The Dream – Love Vs Money – Sex is best when you’re levitating.

Electrik Red – Drink In My Cup – Four poison tongued Vanity 6 fembots malfunctioning atop a tidal wave of tech-crunk liquid evil.

Fever Ray- S/T- Crawling in the penumbra of a dusty cellar full of eerie African mementos, nightmarish  hallucinations of Gothic pierrots reciting dada poetry. And lasers. As close to essential as music an be this year thanks to an absolutely mesmerising live show, impeccable music videos and an album that reaches into the heart of the night and extracts the beautiful, terrifying and banal then unites them in the service of  primordial techno.

Gang Gang Dance- Saint Dymphna- Another of the best albums of the year, standard. The best party that ever took place in the heart of darkness.

Gay Against You- Righteous Signals/Sour Dudes- The sound of the Epcot Centre if it had been designed by Keita Takahashi

Glasser – Glad (Delorean Remix) – Devotional sun-burst freestyle as heard from the inside of a diamond conch on a gold leaf beach exploding with luminescent orbs on their way out to sea.

HTRK – Fascinator – Emerging out of a black sea to croon over your half-dreamt visions of a desolate morning.

jj – ecstacy – Why people do drugs. And always will.

King Kong Ding Dong- Youth Culture Index- Philadelphia Psychic to Southern Gothic.

Light Asylum – A Certain Person – Grace Jones and a hi-NRG haunted industrial leather boy fused into one perfect chimera and trapped in gold plating for sweaty feral kids to gather around and adorn with their silver tears.

Lil’ Wayne – Yes – Robotic alien garble, the colour purple, straining to be heard from inside an LFO tar pit.

Julian Lynch – Bananna Jam Pt.1 – Every faded 16mm California dream condensed into one sustained note on a keyboard then sent off to shuffle around the last embers of the night’s fire.

Christina Milian – Chameleon – Minimal on the verge of non-existence. A phantom low bass growl and a serpentine whisper so uncomfortably intimate you feel as if a spider just crawled into your ear.

Keke Palmer – Superjerkin’ – In dark rooms everywhere Dizney kids hypnotized by an evil T-Pain chipmunk and blocks of electro dread will be found rocking back and forth in a trance, eating their own plastic Mickey Mouse ears.

Palms – Boundary Waters (Gavin Russom Remix) – Apocalypse Pop for rips in space and time.

Plug – You Keep the Beats – acerbic minimal synth bliss.

Quik & Kurupt – 9 x Outta 10 – A ribcage rattling electric storm of clipped industrial power, cracking jaws left, right and center.

Salem – Frost / Skullcrush – Still awesome and getting better. Akin to being dragged into a cave decorated with locks of lover’s hair and the soiled bones of dead juke legends by the ghost of DJ Screw and Elizabeth Fraser’s, expelled to the woods, witch sister.

Sleigh Bells – Crown On The Ground – Driving head first into a wall with a volume of Now That’s What I Call Music on blast never sounded so fun.

S U R V I V E - S/T – Martin Galway lost in the bowls of the machine only to emerge into a euphoric basement club all primary colours clashing into each other.

Telepathe – Dance Mother – Pagan pop poetry conjured into beautiful life by two high priestess’ caught up in a ritualistic glitterbomb thunder-dance  outside the Sacred Church of Three 6 Mafia. Quite possibly pop record of the year.

These Are Powers – Candyman – Plastic regal pomposity, sexily nightmarish undulating bass reverberations courtesy of the The Rectum and gun funk squall that makes you wanna crawl into a mosh pit on dislocated joints.

Tickley Feather- Happies- I craft symbols with derelict and twisted branches, and hang them full of love from the trees in my garden. This is the music of their dangling in the night.

Trish – Bump – Rihanna put on some fake barbed wire and rocked out to Fisher Price axe solos. Trish put a strip pole up in Rubber Johnny’s basement and grinded men in gas masks to the sound of death bed oboes and noisy dissonance. Who you gonna sweat with?

Various – Berlin 61/89 – Avoiding the fetishisation of geo-political disaster and collecting together a tome of the half-remembered, the long overlooked and the glorious in two CDs of thoughtfully mixed reverie.

The xx – s/t – Midnight majesty captured perfectly and whispered into a bottle to be put out to sea.

It seems impossible to separate the the hushed soulful vocal of Alt Altman from the ghostly presence of Arthur Russell, which is of course immediately endearing.  Yet the backdrop here is the shrill tweet of 8-bit synths, minimal-house programming and glacial guitar washes rather than a spare string arrangement or the mutant disco of 80s NYC.  A warm voice floats out of these parts, offering his hand to drag you through this night of strangely compartmentalised dance tropes.  Not pastiche, more slightly defocused scale models of clubs, booths and bars.  A world of distorted colours drifting out of the night into the cold morning light both comforting and wind-chill fresh.

Digits – Volley Into The Night

Petit Mal’s self titled debut album came out at the beginning of the year on the ever awesome Difficult Fun.  It’s an album that makes me shake with rage that this isn’t on every HMV rack, making Amazon’s best sellers list like some SuBo synthpop chariot.  This album feels like a part of the 20JFGs aching heart.  In a year of facile synthpop affectations turned into several careers this is the real deal.  Creating an exquisite pathway back to a hook laden, keyboard driven world of songs about things other than love – or rather a love that strikes the writer dumb, a love so overwhelming that it can only be expressed in the most banal of language and metaphor.  Well that’s the charitable view anyway.  I’d rather this as the corrective, pressed in its millions and packaged alongside every point of sale in the land.

Appropriate then that the moment that grabs your heart here is the extortion to ‘love you bastards love…’, a glorious moment in the poem from which this song’s lyrics are freely adapted.  A moment where the narrator lays claim to an ideal of love in the face of lust.  A duality that’s forever doomed to play out in one of the beastly heads of 20JFG.
Petit Mal – Song To Shout In The Ruins

As a bonus, here yo have a mixtape put together for you by your caring 20Jazzfunkgreats peeps. It includes many a song that we have been delighted by this year…and ends with one that will be delighting us to no end in the year that comes. Enjoy.

And here’s the tracklist:

1- Prince Rama of Ayodhya: Land of the Apocalypse Transcended
2-King Kong Ding Dong: Hot Train
3-Pantah du Prince featuring Panda Bear: Stick by My Side
4-Palms: Boundary Waters (Gavin Russom Remix)
5-Teeth of the Sea- Inside the Space Capsule (Love Theme)
6-Fuckbuttons: Space Mountain
7-Erik XVI: Kalabaliken i Bender
8-Bront Industries Kapital: Knights of Vipco
9-Hounds of Hate: I Love Triangles
10-Hudson Mohawke: Polkadot Blues
11-Joker: Digidesign
12-S U R V I V E: Holographic Landscape
13-OoOOo:NoSummr4u
14-Liars:Scissor

20jazzfunkgreats mixtape: Twins themes of frost and illumination, blinding ice

The artwork is by Simen Johan as discovered through Sci-fi-o-rama.

image by Jon Bennett

Time moves along a mobius strip in the echoing halls of 20JFG’s leaking Victorian haven.  It was back in 2005 that we first posted Antifamily’s Staring at a Point.  When we finally took possession of their debut LP in early 2007 it turned out to be a deadpan dub infused masterpiece and we eagerly awaited the ensuing explosion of interest…which never really came.  Which is sad because it really was one of the best albums of this fractious decade.

And so, earlier this year I went in search of the elusive band and their (likely feral) descendants.  Time moves strangely if you recall.

Petit Mal are in fact a side project of Antifamily thereby slightly skewing the genealogical metaphor…They released their album this year thus showing signs of life in ethereal, erudite synth pop in the UK.  A rain slick collection of strangely tarnished futurism that falls between Glass Candy’s analogue romanticism and some alien reconstruction of Germanic electronic experimentations from the early 70s.

John Foxx haunts the Underpass of the crumbling city streets that Mt. Dimension inhabits with its oft-quoted ‘Escher-like cross characterisation’. Towering synths pierce the oppressive spires that surround, before revealing themselves as spot-lights heralding the approach of Melanie Gilligan’s cold-wave vocal.  Chris & Cosey hover above and allow their missile-sleek, fatalistic synth progeny to play among the laser lines of a forgotten Thamesmead.

Petit Mal – Mt Dimension

As a bonus here’s a live set they did for the excellent Choking on Cufflinks on WFMU in May.

League of Nations were a short lived band from LA who seem to have been active between 1981 – 1984.  The left us with one mini-album, a 7″ and this 12″ containing Fade and Thin Ice.  Both desperate, mesmerising cold-wave classics.  Echoing drum machines and celestial synth washes hover in front of you, menacing and seductive in their programmed perfection.  The lyrics seem only a primer for the ascension of the piercing electronic chimes that herald a glistening soulless future.

League of Nations – Fade (12″ version)

Simple Minds were a short lived yet prolific Glaswegian new-wave band who released their wonderful 4th album(s) Sons and Fascination / Sister Feelings Call in 1981 before disappearing in an ill-suited light aircraft somewhere over the pacific, en route to Chicago.

League of Nations opens with an almost irresistible baseline; only the punctuation of sharp stabs of guitar suggesting something altogether more Suicidal.  Jim Kerr’s repetitious drawl matching the rumbling bass and grounding the airborne synth melody – always attempting to escape the sprawl but forever fading back into it.

Simple Minds – League of Nations