The 2kDozen 500: #168 - The Magnetic North, "Orkney: Symphony of the Magnetic North"

A tribute to the Orcadian homeland of the band themselves, I'm led to believe. It radiates an energy from some midpoint between Scotland and Scandanavia, as you might expect.

There's a soft shoe shuffle to "Bay of Skaill", best indicated by a deft little bass signature that scribbles by every few bars at the beginning. And there are strings and warm brass. "Hi Life" too has a very unusual angle to it, the strings and a bass parp pulling out a curious tension that reminds of late Radiohead. There's some beautiful humming.  "Betty Corrigall" has more of a traditional feel that you might expect, but the AM radio whistle in the background is a lovely touch. The following track, "Warbeth", has a Tales of the Unexpected twist in the music, elegaic and untrustworthy - like homesickness. There's a doomy choir, electronically juddered, and more strings and bleeps later on. Dead classy; I like. It ends with the twinned sounds of a guitar and a computer unravelling happily together.

The scope of this album reminds me of Super Furry Animals a bit. Not the sound so much, though there are actual sounds I recognise from SFA albums past, and not the vocals, which are clearer and more crystal; the scope is more those parts of ideas they are prepared to touch. An armada of wobbly mandolins or whatever the ffffucuckckk hulk across the scene on "Old Man of Hoy" before a musical box tidies the place up. "Netherton's Teeth" mentions something about "foolish ire", but "Ward Hill" ups the wail quotient and sits on the sea wall looking out at the bruised waters and salty clouds and considers its options.

"The Black Craig" summons up all the terror and intrigue that playing double basses with bowes and spooky brass key changes and slightly subliminal choirs can muster. And there are no words to put me off. "Orphir" is a fascinating mix of pagan chant, beefy electronic washes and even a hint of dub bassline. Possibly the strongest track on a pretty strong album. "Yesnaby" rounds the album off with more decomposed children's themes working over a thudding, insistent . It ends the relax, warm-down section of the album. A couple of voices crying "a place to hide/No more shouting, no more silence." There are a lot of elementals round there, I suppose.

Rating: Wobbling Smartly out of Magnetic Orbit

The 2kDozen 500: #167 - Kimbra, "Vows"

I was pointed in this direction by my sister-in-law Junko, who was listening to Kimbra off the back of the hit with Gotye. She's from New Zealand and has a bit of a kohl-eyed look going on; not to judge her by her looks or owt. I don't know what the stage school situation is like down there in the Antipodes, but if she was a UK artist, I'd be suspicious.

The opening track, "Good Intent", has a noir slink to it. The good intent of the album, eh? The second track starts with a Trainspotting lean on the keyboard, but then strays into Pebble Mill, strolling backing singer territory. Don't like the sound of "Open up your heart" over and again with that backdrop. Reeks of Radio Two dogfood: they've got lumps of it round the back. "Call Me" has a bit of a Nineties British R&B feel to it - brassy stabs, scooping bass. Not sure I can identify what it is: a kind of cautious positivity. It's easy to think life is sweet after 100 consecutive days of Californian sun, but good feelings need to tempered by expectations under cloudier UK skies. Or indeed NZ ones.

Judging by the title, this is an album about relationships. "Old Flame" is set in the same kind of situation as "Call Me", but the complicated situation is reflected in some interesting key changes and sounds like thunderclouds. Even her voice has a dark, chewy quality. None of the lyrics stick though. It gets a bit more playful on "Limbo" with bird-like vocal flutterings papering it all behind. It has a fairground coda as well with seagulls on it. "Settle Down" starts out with an imagined settled down life together (and a kid called Nebraska Jones) and I wait for a sting in the tail for quite a while and there doesn't seem to be one. Strange.

Minor vocal gymnastics on "Two Way Street" followed some crackly, pounded piano on "Wandering Limbs". There's a vintage clothes shop feeling to a lot of the production and the directions a lot of the tunes take. It's a duet as well. There are noises like big warning signs hitting the carpet and that Eighties soul sheen again. Her lyrics slip through cracks in the floor again. It's a big cloudy mass of sound that clears away onto a chiming couple of notes. "Withdraw" is belted out like Pink Floyd soul, something about a "heart-shaped hole on hold for you" over scrawled-big swirls.

I'm not sure quite where to place Kimbra. There are some more experimental vocal ideas that pitch her in the Bjork nexus (like "The Build Up"); there are some rather middle-aged sounding tunes that disturb me slightly. She's not quite dark, but not quite sunny. The breaking of tracks into two bits is interesting. There are bits of old jazzy, bluesy torch-singing (like the second bit of "The Build Up"); there are beats. And her voice is a little strange, a little lower than expected; like honey with salt and vinegar. I am not of one mind.

It ends with a gold ring on the finger: "In my heart it will never be Spring/As long as he wears that plain gold ring". So not very straightforward then.

Rating: Dark Honey out of Relationships

The 2kDozen 500: #166 - Tangerine Dream, "Thief"

Saw this album mentioned on Twitter somewhere earlier this weekend, and thought I should give it a go. Plus Tangerine Dream are one of the missus' favourite bands. They worked on the Michael Mann film from 1981, "Thief"; and it's listening to this that I realise again how crucial Tangerine Dream were to much of the high Eighties output, that link of moody synths and moodier-yet guitar solos.

This album fits that same mold with "Diamond Diary" dancing up and down the arpeggios and making much with the wailing and windmill arms. "Burning Bar" has that Mayan intensity that I've long come to associate with the Tangerines. "Beach Scene" should probably sound relaxed but it burns with too much Scarface-like energy, as though the circuits are coked up and not quite able to pull off serene. The strangled, claustrophobic guitar sound on "Scrap Yard" is also very High Eighties, jets across the stratosphere and chainsaws in the bathroom and rolled-up neon sleeves and no socks and that. "Trap Feeling" is more at the Doctor Who/Darkplace end of the spectrum. Then it's all warm build at the beginning of "Igneous", a title I'm fond of already, and some serious jangling with what sounds like an electronic wolf in the background.

The movie has got to be worth a watch. Even if it stars James Caan.

Rating: High Eighties out of Mayan

The 2kDozen 500: #165 - Factory Floor, "Lying/In a Wooden Box"

OK. I've got to be quick. The pace, she lags, the slag. This has lagged all the back to 2010, or 2kTen as I should probably call it.

Factory Floor are a band I confuse with another band; I think it's Cold Cave. They aren't the same; FF are more sombre, a closer link to the late Seventies industrial musics. Even collaborating with them. These aren't lush tunes, they are skeletal. "16-16-9-20-1-14-9-7" is a very tight sound; ten minutes of subtle drumming and very unsubtle tapped keys. No idea what the numbers of the title mean. They reflect the enigmatic fixedness of the music neatly. It's a delicious, unflinching focus; but I'm not sure what the focus is on. Something I cannot see.

"A Wooden Box" sounds very box, but not so wooden. It has a very Teutonic sheen on top of its alarm bell synths and live drum kit. This is lent extra Deutsch by flat-pack vocals about "bullet train" and "lay it down on the ground" that I can't follow. It just wants to run and run until it crashes into the grandfather clock overdrive of the last two minutes.

 "Solid Sound" rounds the collection off with noises moving in the dark, guitars bumping against the furniture and a big spooky hiss dripping from the wallpaper. I prefer the propulsive stuff, but I admire their techno-gumption; bringing the electricity in the instruments under their control one strand at a time. Even when they bark and strain. Solid work.

Rating: Enigma out of Intensity

The 2kDozen 500: #164 - Dry & Heavy, "One Punch"

This album is from 1998 and produced by dub supremo Adrian Sherwood. I heard a track by Dry & Heavy on The Difference Engine, which is a very good weekly show on Anglesey's (currently) online only radio station, Mon FM. I'd never realised they existed, although a Japanese dub band makes perfect sense.

I'm struck by the fact that a female vocalist sounds a bit unusual fronting a straight-laced dub band. I don't whether it's actually unusual or whether that just reflects my narrow-eyed view of the world. Also, they are one of those groups whose name describes the style of music they play very neatly. Like Crisp & Dry but far more palatable. And the album title? It's cute to see the dub/kung fu obsession from the opposite angle: of an easterly drift.

"TKO" piles it on especially portentously. Big cymbal crashing build-up intro. Boosshhh! Dry and Heavy are apparently the nicknames of two of the band, Sly & Robbie style. "Lost World" ruminates with diplodocus majesty, chewing up all manner of herb, I've no doubt. "Say No More" is a slinky slice of pop dub with more of the vocals and a playful touch of flute and some Seventies-sounding rinky-dink piano.

Ah, the drift of meaning! I still want to crack the music critically. It's both warm and cold, airy and earthy. I think it's an idea of ghosts, of thoughts interrupted or semi-obliterated that appeals. And the monstrous bass grooves, of course. Is it also even more of a departure than the usual reggae of re-interpreting US R&B trends with an off-beat skank? Rather than Bob Marley being some kind of Marvin Gaye mutation (which is far-fetched, I'll admit; but I like to fetch from far off), dub is the genuine attempt to explore a new area. It's certainly music that explores space, whether by reverberating through it or just dropping stuff out. Damn, I wish I understood The Wire better!

"When I get low, I get high." "Dub the Bong Around" has a robot voice, that then gets the dub echo chamber treatment; is that one of the most dub things I've ever heard? (Even the word dub is so hard to break down. So fucking elemental.) There's martial, rapid drumming on "The Athlete" and some blousy brass work: completely compensating for the slightly weedy male vocal. (Dub just never wants to stop, does it? It's music where the background - bass - is moved to the front and centre. That's another thing I like about it.)

It's a wide and wonderful and tiny world in which we live, eh?

Rating: Dry out of Heavy

The 2kDozen 500: #163 - Distal, "EEL EP"

A less spiritual direction now.

The title track grinds upwards through the gears, vertically driving upwards and upwards. The sounds aren't massive; there's no a big bass element to it. It's the sound of fierce, insistent propulsion. The second track, "Kurgan" is more dubsteppy, but again has a great revving monstrousness in the heart of it. And the bit in Highlander when the Kurgan quotes Neil Young; "It's better to burn out than to fade away". It rattles the cowbells and struts syncopatedly.

"Hut" has even more dubstep deathray sizzling through the middle of it, throttling back and forward in an anchorless fidget. Then Machinedrum has a go at it, and it's more skeletal, like the joints in the sound are being joined. And then more and more of the dots get joined until it's thick as nautical rope. DS1's swipe at "Eel" has smokey, monk-like keyboard chills and then some Eighties sounding slickness congealing on top like night-out puke. In a good way; I mean that in a good way.

BD1982's version of "Kurgan" is nowhere. Dev79 & Thrills' remix of "Hut", however, tickles my cochlea from the outset and keeps them involved in a weird fashion. Squelches of liquid confusion swell up into dense balloons of noise. There's a sound like quacking; metal flying ducks over the hearth.  ID has a crack at "Kurgan" too and it pops and cracks joints and shuffling motion. I likes it. It sets a frame of old school house somehow, maybe it's the handclaps or a sense of room inbetween the details.

Rating: Dancefloor out of Swordplay

The 2kDozen 500: #162 - Abyssinians, "Arise"

More Peel Archive business. I'm working my way through some issues here. One of those issues might be that I really didn't get dub when I first started listening in 1989. I don't know if it wasn't edgy enough - but it wasn't until I well into my twenties that it clicked. The rule though that I don't like music that Peelie never played still seems hard and fast.

The Abyssinians got played so often though that even with the early blanking I still got to hear plenty of them on the shows. Occasionally I get taken away into a world where these guys would crop up regularly on TOTP and the Britannia Music Club on the back of the Radio Times while UB40 could've been one hit wonders with "One in Ten" (which I quite like) and then disappeared. But I find thinking about these worlds does my contentment levels no good at all. No.

So sweetly heavy and righteously-weighted, these tunes. The congas on "Let My Days Be Long" are pretty annoying in the left headphone, but that would be my only criticism. (That's the kind of fairminded guy I am.) It seems close to effortless, although it can't have been. And I don't know how keen I'd be on the lyrics to "Mightiest of All" if they were out of the mouths of some Arkansas rednecks; but they weren't. I'm looking for the reasons why I shouldn't find this straightforwardly excellent. Maybe that was my problem from the outset. "Wicked Men" even makes being stuck in an oppressive riot sound like a smooth way to spend an afternoon.

Compared to the disturbing politics of Sizzla's Ghanian album a month or two ago, this is all about love and freedom as ideas. Thence flows its power. Whereas Sizzla would have the righteous marked out and the rest marked for damnation, Abyssinians make the point "The greatest love/I have ever loved/Is to love and be loved in return/Jah loves in return/Jah loves you, man." Criticism proof.

Rating: Heavy out of Smooth