Âme : “Enoi"

Now this is fucking blistering, and I don't use the bad word lightly. What a simple idea. Take a techno track with scattered vocal fragments rippling through the hi-gloss fabric: "Wish", "eeeh" etc; take various frenzied clankings and spastik sound events and gothik synths and peculiar chants, then build up the beats and the bass-spring and the intensity, and then, just when it's really ticking, introduce us to the cry of the alien tripods from War of the Worlds, like a psychotic fog-horn. Scared the willies out of me the first time. And then every other time too. The A-Side, Balandine, is equally unhinged, a vicious bass-riff being submerged beneath hard Detroit beats.

Frenzied, epic, orchestral, this is techno at its best.

Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night

In which the Chemical Brothers continue their ineluctable slide toward the awful. I've given it a few tries now, and the question keeps coming up: when and why would I listen to this? When it's sonically affecting (which is not often), I still can't help wonder what I could be listening to that would deliver the same payoff at least twice as hard. The beats used to fun or hard or dirty or some thrilling combination of the three; now they mostly just sit there. The psychedelia, already largely in retreat with Push The Button, has all but disappeared, and the songs just aren't memorable enough.

The title track never gets going, the Midlake track is banal, and I never want to hear the nonsense with Willy Mason or god help us the Klaxons again. Easily the most enjoyable track is The Salmon Song with Fatlip, and that's the one that sounds least like the Chems. Maybe I need to listen a few more times. It's just that right now, doing that sounds like a chore; something I never thought I'd be saying about a Chems album.

The Field - From Here We Go Sublime

Is this the sort of record you give to someone who professes to hate techno, or is it exactly the kind of record they would hate? Dunno. But I love it. The simple drum patterns, the micro-snatches of pop songs you can't quite recognise, chopped up and then streched across the airy synth dronescape like so many deliquesent clocks. "Kappsta", which was on Kompakt's Pop Ambient 2007 collection, is eerily gorgeous, a balletic glide through the upper atmosphere of some billowing gas giant, and is a good place to hear the basic trick in action, which involves endlessly delaying the chord changes so that when they come they're sudden rays of sunlight. "Everyday" is monstrous, building (or should that be tunnelling?) into a furious chant.

It's true that the record shares more than a little DNA with trance. But then, trance never had this monumental and geometric beauty before, constructed of interlocking planes of sound.

Plus, "On The Ice" samples Kate Bush, so it must be good, right?