The 2kDozen 500: #69 - Edzayawa, "Projection One"

Some teen mid-Seventies Afro-rock from Ghana via Fela Kuti's Nigerian compound. Influenced I read on the Soundway label's website by the 6/8 rhythm with the Ewe people from south east Ghana and western Togo. Strange to think of influence moving in that way over rock music, but I suppose this was 1973 and there were flautists in cod pieces cleaning up across the Midwest United States. I shouldn't be surprised.

The opener, "Darkness", has a positive message for the kids about freedom and love. Although "give yourself to God" doesn't have a deafening ring of freedom to it. The bass has a pleasing clipping rasp to it. If it is a bass. But the lyrics are not around for too long: it's much more about the groove.

"Naa Korle" fills a funky gap, as you might expect. Trembling guitar, insistant organ and waves of percussion. Instrumental - although the language barrier is far more of an added extra than a problem. (Especially when you are as poor at listening out for lyrics as I am.) I suppose it's just like listening to Y Niwl for people from outside Wales.

Odion "Comrade" Iruoje, the producer, is widely credited (from what I've read) as being the creative force with these young Ghanian lads. The Albini to their Cloud Nothings. I don't know enough about African music of the Seventies or any other decade to pronounce on that question. But he is at least a shaft of light falling across an outfit otherwise rather too obscure for even the interweb to spill about.

I'm aware that I'm circling around a vague imperialist trap of enjoying the ethnicity of it all. Oh, how fascinating, these chaps have a Hammond organ! But aside from the time signatures and the language, it sounds like rock music. Or is that the danger? Oh, my head spins!

"Abonsan" is sleeker perhaps than all the rest, absorbing more of the funk feel - but it changes gear than once, with greasy guitar licks set against optimistic harmonies. "Obuebee" and "Adesa" are a little more frantic. All three have a bit of laddish choral singing. But it's all chained together by the organ sound. Similar bones to The Specials: Lagos twinned with Coventry? I'm reminded a bit of north Wales rockers Jen Jeniro as well. Just a sense of a room full of quiet, intense young fellers.

This was their only album and they called it a day a couple of years later. Shame.

Rating: Reaching To Me out of Somewhen Else

The 2kDozen 500: #68 - John Talabot, "Fin"

Nice oily beginning. All spooky, misty jungle choirs and polyparanoiac gunfire in Eighties films about Colombian druglords. And those laughing parrots. And 808 handclaps. The cover also looks like a black oily fingerprint.

I've been hoping to hear this album for a wee while. I liked the sound of the jib I heard described in articles about the Catalan man.

"El Oeste" and "Oro y Sangre" could soundtrack a great 8-bit Western. I can see the giant pixels of Monument Valley now, basking in a glorious bloody two-colour sunset. The first is slow and impressively mushy and cloud-bound. The second is more cheerful VHS territory, even beginning with a schlocky video nasty scream.

I'm struck by a strange sensation of a mumbling robot Kriss Kross at the beginning of "Missing You", telling me in their tiny voices that they'll make me "Jump! Jump!". Some robot warbling kicks in and a tensile snap of an elastic bassline. Sleek and appetising stuff. I imagine myself in some seriously swanky urban, ocean-side bar. Like in an imaginary SuperPorto. Where the port flows like wine.

"Last Land" has a lovely, warm party feel, a chopped-up samba party made into a good vibes smoothie. A happy wee voice bobs about in the mix. This is the second time I've thought about little voices. "Estiu" has them dancing around big disco machines as well. I suppose that is the scale of it. These disco machines have glinting, laser-planed edges on them too, whirring balletically. It ends with a sensitive little bacon-y crackle.

There are no trite sounds on this album; it's all pretty fresh. Fresh to my ears at least. But it can also drift by before you've really starting listening. I'm back in that ocean-facing bar again. "When The Past Was Present" is bumping fists with House's early Gospel-soaked movements, shivering in an echo chamber. "So Will Be Now" also rolls around the same area, but with a more Depeche Mode feel. Music I could be persuaded to do Cocaerobics to. Provided I'd first dibs on the leotards.

Rating: Beach Party out of Record Collection

The 2kDozen 500: #67 - Ital, "Hive Mind"

OK, so I don't spot the Lady Gaga source of the opening track, "Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)", although I did spot the Whitney fragments. The Stool Pigeon had to point it out to me. They also pointed out that Mr Ital was a DC Hardcore individual some decade or so ago. That's interesting.

Title suggests that Ital is not a fan of the disco escape path. It's a big, brawling statement of intent to open a mini-LP with, eh? Fading into Chris Morris-like time-delay chaos at the end, as it does.

"Floridian Void" is anything but, crowded and with Michael Mann ocean keyboards washing up at our sock-less slip-ons. The air is pretty thick with the hipster moider about Klingon and what have you weaving in and out reminding me of Beck's "Heartland Feeling".

"Privacy Settings" doesn't have the house backdrop of the first tune, but slips and slides around in a minimal-beat undergrowth with metallic sibillant whispers and a lupine chorus belting out orgiastically in the woods out back. A fairy tale gone viral inside and out. You're listening to maggots, Michael.

Ideas about foliage grow up around "Israel" too - a lush Antarctic anti-forest reaching for the distant sun around a sample about the evils about the internet that washes in and out of the mix. Then melting cowbells and a bongo-ish groove come to the party, skidding about the tarmac while a tsunami of gelid synths tower above threatening to crash over the portals of the New Jerusalem and lay serious waste. Shimmering house thud. A glorious ten minutes of it.

"First Wave" carries on with the Eighties baton, bunting of the stuff hanging from the ceilings and fashioned into screen curtains to keep the flies away from the meat within. It struts along very cool with chunky bass digs and artificial organ pipes.

It's a wobbly Polaroid of house, sick on 'flu and poor life choices, experimental bad dreams about its future dripping from every pore. Good, good.

Rating: Sculpture out of Unsculpture

The 2kDozen 500: #66 - Cloud Nothings, "Attack on Memory"

Bring me the production talents of Steve Albini!

I've heard some Cloud Nothings before, played them in my dormant podcast series, Insidious Junkbox. But I'm pretty sure they weren't as Albini as this before. I seem to remember a cloudier version of guitars. Now here come the thunder! A real rain is going to wash the bubblegum off the streets.

There's the epic distance between instruments that points out the Rapeman, the shredding of vocal cords against the big, blank indifference of life. He does make music for the little guy, don't he? Is there a mutual attraction between him and bands like this? Or does he drag out their inner Steve?

The cover of the album is like an attack on memory itself, an out of focus black and white picture of a harbour wall and lighthouse. The kind of image you imagine popping up in the flailing mind of a dying person, while their brain looks for any information that could help them survive.

The opener "No Future/No Past" has a bit of The Exorcist in its back pocket, a grunge malevolence and a noise like the tube coming to a station. Baldi leaves pieces of his throat on the studio wallpaper as he urges us to dwell nihilistically in the moment. "Wasted Days" does not give a flying fuck, fucks flying about it like monkeys in a convent. Very Nirvana,  and all disappointed with himself at the age of twenty - "I thought I would be more than this" - before getting into some sparse heaviosity.

"Fall In" is weaker, though it does wail in around the middle. "Stay Useless" should be anthemic going by the title, but it too moves itself nearer to Green Day than might seem wise. "Separation" comes in at more angles, most of them jangling and some jaunty.

This is very much a manifestal album (so I make up new words, so ensueify me!) with "No Sentiment" barking out "no nostalgia" and "Our Plans" pithily spitting "No one knows our plans for us/We won't last long" over a growling, broody backscape. The guitar gets oddly airbrushed into the distance of the latter, an attacked memory.

"Cut You" is a neatly teenage jealous rage, where everything seems at stake - but nothing at the same time. I'm patronising. I'm sorry. It's a weakness of the bearded.

Rating: Pick The Albini out of That, Son

The 2kDozen 500: #65 - King Creosote, "Bombshells"

After discussing the King Creosote/Jon Hopkins album with a friend on the Twitter, the album I managed to listen to with my earphones attached improperly and therefore got a ghostly version of widescreen pipers and smudged voices and no main vocal, after all this, she urged I give "Bombshells" a go - as it was currently lodged in her head.

So here I listen, earphones properly inserted. A Fifer with an accordion and a sad and sweet, slightly faulty voice, who lives by the sea and wends his own way along the pebbles and cracked shells. To my limited imagination, he sounds like a more mellifluous Ivor Cutler, whose dry Scots flavour evokes all kinds of witty oddness. Damon Gough is another marker, but perhaps one best skidded over.

Typically, the version I'm listening to has the tracks in the wrong order. So that actual intro "Leslie" is later on in my version. Sounds a powerful cry for help, not in the barbiturates and brandy sense; but a reaching out to another magic person. "Home in a Sentence" is a bit Snow Patrol for my liking. "You've No Clue Do You" is a bit too much of an indie disco thumper, a bit Bloc Party. Opening line, "As with all your rules of thumb/This comes with an index" is a beaut, mind - as is the boardgame conceit.

Might "Cowardly Custard" be addressed more to the government ("Did you just have me wired/Keeping tab of my motions?") than to an imagined human-sized stalker? If not, it's at least a deft piece of Metaphysical sleight of metaphor.  "There's None of That" is also a contrarian joke about increasingly unlikely signifiers of romantic life before concluding "Giving up before we've started/Back-pedalling excuses...There's plenty of that."

"Bombshell" is angry. Angry thumbs jarring angry strings. I can't help thinking this is at Blair and Brown and New Labour Dem and the wars they were responsible for, they "shut out the decent wardens". This is before the Credit Crunch and a different Britain, when the anger was more about conduct abroad and erosions of civil liberties at home then the scabrous treatment of our own poor and weak. He holds on to the words of the chorus for a electrically vitriolic long span of time, daring them: "now drop your bombshells".

"Don't let you eyes stray low...Keep the Springtime at bay" ("Spystick") is a poet's guide to a first date and no mistake. "Cockle Shell" is about "pretty maidens in a row" and a private inferno of being a non-comittal romantic "airhead" fit for the guillotine, and has a sweetly-intoned masochistic streak a yard across - "Choke me/Blind me/Cut off my hands".

"Girlfriend, it's you I'll scuttle ships for/Make my first mate walk the plank for..I'm Admiral of nothing at all" somes up the power of words and images and how little power they really generate, no matter how big they might make you feel. This sense of scale runs through the whole album, and I like it much. Muchly much.

Rating: Thank Ali out of Gratitude

The 2kDozen 500: #64 - Tennis, "Young and Old"

By my reckoning, my current pace will leave me 30 albums short by year's end - so I need to apply myself more.

Patrick Carney of The Black Keys produced this, I understand. So you got your zeitgeist right there. It certainly sounds pretty fresh and crisp with the piano and bass combo pushed to the fore as you might expect. It swings back and forth in an indie ballroom kind of way. Or like a tennis match doth.

It's probably wrong of me, but I find her voice a little squeaky and annoying. (Again with the gender-based critique of the voice. I need to try harder.)

No real danger, no gamble. I'd look for a bit more drama. Maybe it's more cheerful than I'm feeling at the moment. The couple at the centre of the music have gotten themselves married to one another since the last one (their first), so maybe that would explain the happiness.

"When I pass away/All this will fade away." A very sweet form of nihilism.

Rating: Happiness out of Wedlock

The 2kDozen 500: #63 - Suzanne Ciani, "Lixiviation"

Piccadilly Records alerted me to this fascinating wee album.

Suzanne Ciani was a later Julia Derbyshire type stitching together (ooh, gendered!) electronic music back in the dawn of circuits in the 1970s using her Buchla Analogue Modular Synthesizer. Most of the tracks on the compilation are background jingles for Atari products or TV promos; but then there are a couple of hypnotic full-length numbers as well. And she herself was a classical pianist, whose sound effect work for ads was massively in demand. She even contributed effects to the disco version of Star Wars, which seems to have brought her face before the cameras.

The title track has the air of an abandoned playground, rusty swing and all. Or a complicated form of living chess played in an imagined future, parallel to our past. "Paris 1971" sounds as though it was pretty cold there that year. And that a lot of walls were stared out with great de-focused intent. It's the sound that the things in the corner of your eye make when they're trying to get your attention. "Princess With Orange Feet" burbles in a highly irregal fashion. It has has a sense of her machines trying to express themselves and I'm not sure how much her equipment may have been left to its own devices.

"Second Breath" is intense. A long electric throb of a beginning that never ends, pressing my ear to an enormous bug zapper in massive slow motion. Something is combusting in this sound. Maybe it has a meditative purpose. My tinnitus chimes in with this grey noise. The soundtrack to the scariest public information film you'll ever see. Boards in Canada in purgatory. I like it: all nine minutes.

It's the smaller pieces that illustrate more of the effect that Ciani had on pop culture. The electronic flags that fluttered from a thousand TV stations, corporations and video games. They seem empty in a sense and difficult to tie in with her later New Age fame without taking a cynical view of one or both enterprises. So I'll try not to.

"Sound of Wetness" rounds it off with the classic "computer brain" tinkling noise and some squelches. Bam!

Rating:  Entrepreneurial Quids out of Motherboards of Invention