Somewhere between 2003’s Haha Sound and the recently released Tender Buttons, Broadcast lost two members. Maybe it’s the band’s new configuration as a duo, or perhaps it’s simply the ravages of time, but Tender Buttons is a far different animal from its predecessor. To be fair, so was Haha Sound; but while the 2003 album was a far lusher, more evocative take on the brooding, distant psychedelia of The Noise Made By People, Tender Buttons is not so much an extension of previous work as it is a discontinuity. The cinematic scope is gone, and most of the songs are buried in far more static and distortion than anything previously. The exceptions to the new regime are equally curious; “Tears In The Typing Pool” and the title track are extremely spare and organic, anchored by the vocals of Trish Keenan and muted guitar.

“America’s Boy” is more representative of the album’s makeup, and sounds as though the backing track was piped through an old television with bad reception. Broadcast has always evoked a mood resembling a past depiction of an industrial future long dead; this aesthetic was most obvious on earlier instrumental tracks like The Noise Made By People’s “Dead The Long Year.” The songs were echoes of an ancestry obsessed with progress and technology; they sounded like pristine lullabies shot through a distorted lens, filled with reverb and static. Tender Buttons feels far more immediate in a sense; less reminiscent of the past and less evocative of the future, the album loses out on much of the atmosphere of previous work. In its place is a new sort of sound that seems to communicate something equally interesting; what that is, I don’t quite know.

Having finally listened to the whole album, I can say with certainty that Adelie Land is an unstoppable force that should reach the top of many a best-of-year list, if there’s any justice in this world.

So in case you weren’t convinced by the last track, here’s another.

Quickly gaining a reputation as “the Japanese Go! Team,” Handsomeboy Technique will nevertheless be hard-pressed to replicate the Stateside success of Japanese luminaries like Cibo Matto or Puffy AmiYumi. While lots of indie bands here have found that you really can become big in Japan, the reverse has never really been true; Puffy was only able to gain traction here after the Cartoon Network thought they’d make really cool role models for school-aged girls. While the Handsomeboy Technique is also a duo, I doubt they’d ever get their own cartoon show.

On the other hand, “Season Of Young Mouss” makes a convincing case otherwise; while there are surface similarities to the Go! Team (tons of samples, really upbeat, funky but practically indecipherable raps), the overall atmosphere is very different. The Go! Team are all about funky 1970s action shows, spaghetti westerns and Schoolhouse Rock; they love their harmonicas and horn samples and sound as though they were recorded on a four-track. “Season Of Young Mouss,” on the other hand, is far more overtly twee; it’s pure candy-coated rainbows and big, bold, technicolour cuteness. Throw in some awesome jazz flute, two rappers that do sound a lot like the vocals on the Go! Team’s “Bottle Rocket,” and a blissfully narcotic “doo-doo-doo” vocal sample, and you’ve got a track that bursts at the seams with goodness.

Adelie Land is only available as an import at the moment (gee, also like the Go! Team), and somehow it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see this Japanese duo on our shores. But so long as they keep manufacturing hits of sunshine like this, it’s easy to forgive these minor problems.

The closest Photek came to mainstream fame was back in 1998, when the landmark album Modus Operandi was released. Shortly afterwards, the drum and bass genius’s early singles were compiled and released as Form And Function, giving further insight into Modus Operandi’s jazz-influenced minimalist drum and bass. Both were released at the height of late-90s electronica, when radio was beginning to discover there were beats beyond big beat, and the man behind the machine, Rupert Parkes, was the man to beat in some circles—here was someone doing something popular, and yet different from the rest of a scene already falling into habit and cliche. It was, as much as anything else, his moment to shine.

But time stands still for no one; the drum and bass revolution fizzled, radio turned away from electronica and subsumed the poppier elements into the mainstream, and Photek had to keep up or shut up. But 2000’s Solaris was a stylistic shift, almost completely abandoning the clinical, minimalist sound for a more upbeat house atmosphere. And while the darkness still remained in some of his tracks, it was obvious Parkes had moved on. With Solaris, Photek retreated from view, his contract with Science finished.

Since then we’ve heard very little from Photek proper, though his Special Forces alias has put out some hard-hitting drum and bass that resembles neither his late-90s work nor Solaris; as the name implies, Special Forces puts out a far more aggressive brand of drum and bass miles apart from Parkes’ older work. Recently, that style has carried over to his Photek-labelled work, as evidenced by this compilation track. Whether Photek will ever reappear in the same capacity as before—releasing full albums as opposed to twelve-inches and compilation tracks here and there—remains to be seen, but it’s clear that even if he’s kept a low profile, Rupert Parkes continues to evolve.

Featuring the lovely Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne on vocals, “Sunset Spirals” is not necessarily what you’d expect from a duo that lists as their defining moment a DJ night where they fast-forwarded through jazz songs to get to the drum solos. Xploding Plastix, as much as anyone else these days, act as a sort of ambassador to the electronic movement—The Donca Matic Singalongs jumps from subgenre to subgenre, and while none of the tracks are shining examples of any particular style, it all holds together quite well. “Sunset Spirals” serves at the centerpiece (and the first single): all warm, sublime synths and cosmopolitan beats, plus the aforementioned Cracknell for another layer of stylish sweetness.

Other tracks veer off in entirely different directions; opener “Donca Matic” and “Dizzy Blonde” are low-key ambient tracks that vaguely recall Wagon Christ’s less kitschy qualities, while “Geigerteller” and “The Famous Biting Guy” are full-on action-packed thrillers. “Tripwire” and “One Bullet Fits All” venture into darker territory, with the latter injecting some drum’n'bass into the album. But for all the genrehopping, The Donca Matic Singalongs is surprisingly satisfying. You can actually listen to the whole album in one sitting if you like, though it still works better if you split it into two or three-track suites. But if you’ve been out of touch with anything without a guitar in it, and want to know what you’ve missed, this is as good a place as any to start.