The 2kDozen 500: #207 - The Hundred in the Hands, "Red Night"

This was shoved in my direction by the expert curator of all things mindworthy, Darren E Parry of Mon FM fame. He is a fan of the unusual; as his music show The Difference Engine would lead you to expect.

There is cavernous empty noises with the absent echoes of string sections at the beginning of "Empty Stations" as she sings of trains and absence over a locomotive rhythm, something about a "midnight broadcast/Your voice like white noise", then it kicks off into clashing brassy orchestral cacophony. There's a Europhile sheen to "Recognise" that I can't quite ..erm, recognise. Reminds me of Mezzanine era Massive Attack. A slow-moving guitar motif that struts at a kingly pace.

"Come With Me" ups the pace a bit, then the title track goes back to the mezzanine. Dream pop, eh? It has the creamy pace of dreams alright, but not so much of the unpredictability, I suppose. The lyrics are hard for me to catch, as usual, so I don't have as much insight there as I'd like. What I can hear seems to be about dislocation and absence. "Keep It Low" has a jagged piece of Pet Shop Boys riven through the centre: "Under solid black skies/Wide awake/I don't want to go home". Choirs swell up under more ghostly vocals in "Faded" and the pattern is pretty well established. Lyrically, more heartbreak.

Gears changes to something a bit tougher and chewier for "Tunnels" and there's talk of cities being built. There's the same architectural clang to "Stay the Night". It would possibly scare me off a bit if someone proposed a night-time of entertainment to this soundtrack. Sounds a bit strict. But there's a gorgeous stack of vocals about halfway through before the bass bubble kicks back in. It's as though a few hundred noir-ish films have been blended together and pumped into some heavy cloud cover and it's pouring down on top of us.

"Lead In The Light" has some more drifting, classical-inflected lyrics going on and big country drums. I can feel the sun rising through the cracks, casting light over Polynesian waters. And the lyrics end "I'll stay with you". So that's all resolved then.

Rating: Regal Travelogue out of Noir Clouds

The 2kDozen 500: #206 - Slabdragger, "Regress"

There are perhaps two kinds of metal: that into which I can get, and those into which I cannot. There are no obvious ingredients. No obvious line that you can stand on one side of the other or choose to straddle. Sometimes the bombast works and sometimes it smells of lunchtime in the schoolyard. This stuff works, I reckon.

All kinds of words about lava bubble up to my brain surface; slow-moving, superheated, indistinct and insurmountable. "Bab el-Mandeb" really piles them up - a whole Pacific Rim island system of riffs, rolling over one another; battling thessalocracies. The title is the name of an isthmus at the ocean-end of the Persian Gulf, obscure title fans. It means Gate of Grief - nice. "Erroneus Maximus" is a bit livelier and shorter, but equally impenetrable. This is a music to be pressed under or to appreciate from an ironic distance; not to get tangled up in the shards of. Not today.

Those hip hop/metal crossover albums like Judgement Night that came out in the early Nineties make some sense. Two complimentary hyper-"masculinities" weaving in amongst each other, supporting each other's extreme statements and postures in an Iron John fashion. "Regression" bursts like an extreme slo-mo atomic mushroom with extended samples from ancient US cartoons and the movie Network and George Carlin; paranoid stoner TV. Perfect. A big night on the salvia.

"Murky Fen" (how good a track name is that?!) has lyrical glimpses about life being "futile" and "wasted" while more menhirs of metallic forethought tumble and rumble behind them. And "Woe Betide" brings more of the "pain". It's hard to get a solid bead on whether it's a tight, little sense of humour that's on display in this music. Or rather if it's a healthy laughter at death and pain and suffering, rather than a constipated ironic laughter at the whole idea of singing about death and pain and suffering. That crippling ironic thing. The outfits suggest they mean it; but I suspect it's a subtle thing that lurks below conscious intent.

It plays out with "Trichrome Oddyssey", which starts slower and more thoughtful before the Earth's mantle shifts again and the bad liquid pumice stone juju rears up once again. And there's some Buddhist sounding chanting comes in as the tension is released and the music ebbs to a conclusion.

Rating: Lava out of Sweaty Bedroom

The 2kDozen 500; #205 - Graham Coxon, "A+E"

This has been out a wee while and I quite like Graham Coxon, so I'm surprised it managed to slip under my radar until now.

"What'll it take to make you people dance?" suggests Graham was a bit frustrated in advance with lukewarm reactions to these tunes. "I wrote a new song/While I was touring/But it was no good/Totally boring" he moans on the opener "Advice". I like the tunes though. It has a flavour of The Who about it, fiery guitar and bubbling keyboards and disassociation and distemper. "Meet and Drink and Pollinate" has a similar sulky stomp about it and some New Order bass and the same bare lyrics. I like it. It has post-punk bite. It bleeds off into a hazy saxophone wheeze.

There's a paranoid rumble to "The Truth", which I also like. Sax pokes out again on "Seven Naked Valleys", which is as pastoral as the pop gets on this album. A touch of the Floyd that is never very far from the back of Graham's wandering mind. Some nice noise and womanly mumbling. (Somehow I imagine Graham being surrounded by inspiring women friends that would make breathy noises as and when required for recording purposes.)

Broody chords underpin "Knife in the Cast", which operates with a dark cloud inside, quite downbeat and contemplative where "Ooh, Yeh Yeh" is breezy and sassy and all too easy to imagine popping up on Jools Holland - even taking into account its distorted, kraut-ish coda. It's Coxonpop!

Is Graham Coxon the UK equivalent of Jack White? Or is he an updated Pete Townsend? "We don't like your accent or your Northampton shoes", he snarls on "Running for Your Life" before a typically-stirring power pop maelstrom kick in. There's a strangely anachronistic reference to "bags of glue".It has the feel of pop-rock-addressing-society about it. I find my affection for Graham hard to explain.

The tunes are generally slightly too long - run to four and a half minutes when they could be three. But I like the angles that Graham swoops down from. In these Jubilee times, he seems very English in a way more meaningful to me than Cliff Richard & cream or warm beer and conkers: William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer - all that everything. The intensity is good: turning his unease into pop music.

Rating: Jack White out of Pete Townsend

The 2kDozen 500: #204 - The D.O.C., "No One Can Do It Better"

Firstly, let it be called that the "Y'all ready for this" at the beginning of 2 Unlimited's No Limits opens the album. I love it when fragments like that are traced back to the original random blurt. Secondly, this is Dr Dre knocking about in the studio in 1989, so almost contemporary with "Stright Outta Comption". Although hip hop was moving so quickly during this period that there would have been considerable developments over the course of a couple of nights.

DOC seems to straddle the Eighties and Nineties ends of the Golden Age. "It's Funky Enough" whines with cartoon aggression like a forerunner of Cypress Hill, while "Lend Me An Ear" has the vintage R&B snatches and 808 bass of the Eric Bs and Eighties East Coast business. Even his flow seems to bridge Ice Cube and the less shouty, more straight-talking styles of Tupac and so on. Bass worship on "Let the Bass Go" ("I make this record for you to jam, so use it") is very welcome. Definitely not that gangster. "Beautiful But Deadly" is very Eighties, demonising women rather than brutalising them into bitches and hoes. Even PE had "She Watch Channel Zero?".

This Ruthless protegee was involved in a car accident which damaged his voice and his promising partnership with Dre was pretty much over. But this album still emerged, a year or two earlier than you might think on first listen. And it does sound packed with possibilities.  "Whirlwind Pyramid" has the Bomb Squad energy of the early Ice Cube albums: jazz pancakes and rattling drums piled up on each other. (But did he say "pywamid"?) "The Formula" hosts the beginnings of G-Funk.

"Hey, baby, what the fuck you still listening to this side for?/You can turn the shit over now." Sounds like Samuel L Jackson. Oh, I recognise the tune sampled in "D.O.C. AND THE DOCTOR" from something of a similar vintage - aaahh, Jungle Brothers' Straight Out The Jungle!! Cool. "Knowledge is the key/And hard work is the fee" - more of the entertainer than the thug-for-life rapping about how much coke he's pushed that week. That's the title track, which manages to avoid James Bond - so thumbs up. "The Grande Finale" even has a live bands with a drum kit and everything. Plus guest spots from NWA colleagues like Eazy E.

Rating: Straight out of Eighties Nineties

The 2kDozen 500: #203 - Azealia Banks, "1991 EP"

The title of the EP would be enough to grab my interest alone. Even more so when Azealia sounds like a character from The Fresh Prince. This also has "212" on it, which I already know I like. So maybe I shouldn't listen to it. Naw, it's going in!

Dense like hardwood with a real flavour of Nineties House, that's the title track. It has a sleek and rugged tumble that moves forwards and backwards at the same time. The spirit of the fractal wasn't just in the dreadlocked quarter of dance music, it was in the champagne-sipping necks of the woods as well that went spinning out on random genome strains of disco-tech. Azealia's vocals almost burble rather than flow, sneers always at the lips with "bitch", "nigga" and "cunt" spat out regularly. Also mentioning "a sip of Baileys": drinks never quite move the same in different cultures, do they? There's the coke-tinged aspirational sheen of UK Garage as well. Against all these odds, I like it.

"Van Vouge" has a stuttering spiral of House keys and more Tourettes as AB looks to grind her opposition at the local nitespot into irrelevance. And there's a weird spoken bit at the end, laughing at meeting people from the Hood who claim to have given up smoking blunts and now drink white wine not Hennessey. "212" has a more poppy feel in the voice and the whoosh of the keyboards, more than Flat Eric; but the lyrics are still pretty fierce. "I guess that cunt gettin' eaten" - Britney doesn't seem to have turned up to the same game, eh?

"Liquorice" is sizzling with that early House/techno crossover energy, stacking up with storey after storey of agitated, overloaded little circuits. Stabbing fingers and tinkling 808 drums and easy-going bass bloops. Mighty sounds. There's even a quiet little "Ooh, yeah" as in Rob Base It Takes Two. Dip me in and call me Todd. Lyrically, she's being a bit flirtier but still acidic.

Every tune is a collection of putdowns to people in clubs. I reckon that much be the stage her career has reached. Might not like her if I met her; but the production is mega.

Rating: Classic House Cat Fight Getting out of Hand

The 2kDozen 500: #202 - DM Bob & The Deficits, "Bad w/ Wimen"

Good, clattering country music, this. Recorded in 1996 but it sounded as if it could've been thirty or forty years earlier. The voice sounds as though it's being sung through long-worn, unstuck false teeth. The cover of T-Rex's "Jeepster" is nicely chaotic and whistly. And I learn too that they were from Germany. (I think the DM might stand for Deutschmark.) Mid-Nineties Germany this does not sound like. I don't remember it sounding like that; I remember it sounding like Fantastischen Vier and Die Toten Hosen and Back Street Boys. I wonder what it was they were looking to recreate.

Plenty of tracks on it too. "Meanstreak" has exactly that, rattlesnake riffs and drums looking for a rumble.I like it. They haven't cheered up much by "Quit Your Job", echoing drums and old school guitar competing with razored bass bins for the title of the Fuckest Uppest. I can't believe any Bob with this level of gritty swing has problems with the ladies. I can hear The Fall doing a cover of "Cowpower"; I can even imagine MES writing it himself, were he a Texas farmlad instead of a Salford occultist and psychogeographer.

The "Breathless" cover transmits some of the careless magic of Jerry Lee Lewis. What a wedding band they could/might/must have been! "How Do You Spell Love" even has a touch of funky wah-wah in the mix. A rougher and unreadier version of the Blues Explosion catalogue with vocals touched by Jonathan Richman. (Incidentally, you spell it "M O N E Y".) A bit of German and some folksy accordion crop up on "The Same Thing" while it grinds with agreeable lumpen beats - touch of the Tom Waits here, I'd suggest. It could be another cover of some cabaret routine that I don't recognise.

There's a bizarre sloping in and out goes on during "Uh-Oh" that almost seems to demand a new instrument to play it but settles on a curious high-pitch bottle guitar. "Don't watch TV or ride a car...Forty years alone in his/One room home" is the case of one eccentric loner describing another. At least those are many lazy thoughts at this time in the morning. "Blind man with a pistol/Just trying to make a new start". The final track almost makes a "Yard Sale" sound glamourous and uncompromising.

Almost goes without saying that it came from the Peel Archive. Almost. Just happened at the end there.

Rating: No Sign Of Running out of Cowpower

The 2kDozen 500: #201 - Hatchback, "Zeus & Apollo"

Very chilled music, this. Best enjoyed on a long train journeys with big windows and beautiful vistas galloping past. But then, what wouldn't sound good in that scenario?

"Sunrise Prototypes" is a great title and it is a long, languid radox of a tune as well. There's plenty of majesty to be heard on "Zeus and Apollo" too from the peal of thunder at the beginning onwards. I cannot imagine having a headache listening to this music; but on the obverse, I suppose I can't imagine it being too exciting either. A bit on the passive side, a bit sober.

"Orinoco Waltz" again moves at this sedate pace, as you might expect a dancing river to do. Ideas of huge spheres turning slowly in space as a giant saxophone casts its golden light on the relevant hemosphere from somewhere further out into the cosmos. I read the words kraut and disco in a description of him on last.fm and they make some sense. "Tapir Tango" ends with some see saw Chinese music. I'm veering over into the realms of the uncritical again.

And it goes on. Pianos tinkle. Vibes travel out in waves, most slow-motionly. It closes with "The Violet Sequence" and I'm not sure how much it may represent the colour, but it builds and swells to a North Sea dimension by the end of its sixteen minutes. Choppy and cold.

Rating: Huge Spheres out of Sedation