The chiptune genre is the red headed stepchild of electronic music. Aside from Beck’s chiptune-remix album Guerolito, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a lot of mainstream releases of chiptunes; that’s because the vast majority of the genre’s practitioners (including many of the contributors to Guerolito) are enthusiastic homebrewers working in front of arcane tracker displays to concoct their tributes to the age of bleep-heavy vintage computer music.

Anyone who’s played Super Mario already knows arguably the most ubiquitous chiptune in existence: the Super Mario theme song, known to millions and always a crowd favorite. The Arcade Fire know it by heart, and so do you. But since the heady days of the Commodore 64 and the NES, when the only way to compose music was to use the built-in music synthesizer chips, chiptunes have expanded beyond their video game origins. While actually creating the music is still a somewhat complex proposition, you don’t need a lot of recording equipment, and most people already have a computer—everything you need to start composing your own chiptunes. As to the sound quality, there are plenty of practitioners who enjoy the constraints of a limited sound bank. And then there’s the irresistable retro quality: a lot of people grew up playing games and listening to chiptunes without ever really thinking about the music. What elevator music and commercial jingles were to the 60s, chiptunes are to the 80s: ephemeral music with cultural import we’re only now beginning to recognize.

But sometimes you don’t care about cultural import; sometimes it’s just that stuff sounds really cool when it sounds like it was played on an old computer. virt’s one of a legion of chiptune artists who do a lot of covers. And this is one of his latest creations: the theme to the PS2 classic Katamari Damacy, in chiptunes form.

Jackie Cane: a starlet, an ingenue, a woman all used up. A character so compelling, so unique, that an entire album was created to tell her story. Anyways, that’s what Hooverphonic would have you believe; Hooverphonic Presents Jackie Cane was a concept album that owes its life to this one song, off 2000’s The Magnificent Tree. At first blush, the song doesn’t seem to paint that compelling a portrait; it’s a pretty basic tale of a woman used and abused by those who exploited her talents. Take a closer look, and you’ll find… well, you’ll find your first impressions were correct. But Hooverphonic’s strength has never been in its lyrics but in its sound, and “Jackie Cane” was one of the more lively tracks on The Magnificent Tree. Perhaps that was the reason why Ms. Cane got an entire album devoted to her; she was evidence that Hooverphonic hadn’t lost their vitality beneath layers of production.

So when Hooverphonic Presents Jackie Cane came along, we were given a more complete story. More than that, we were given a musical chronicling her life, full of horns and strings and explosions and drama. But perhaps Jackie Cane was never meant for the grand life; for all its energy and verve, Hooverphonic Presents Jackie Cane often feels like an exercise, every bit as staged as a Broadway musical, every bit as fake as Jackie Cane herself. Better to remember her as a vaguely sketched mystery, before she became Hooverphonic’s muse.

Kathleen Hanna has achieved a great deal of success with the feminist electropunk band Le Tigre—so much so that the band’s accomplishments have overshadowed her two previous claims to fame, leading riot-grrl pioneers Bikini Kill and being assaulted by Courtney Love. When “Deceptacon” hit the dance floors near the end of 1999, it was a revelation. Leave it to an Olympia ex-pat and the godmother of riot grrl to give the world a political revolution Emma Goldman would be proud of. Because Le Tigre’s debut album was, in fact, political and dancefloor dynamite, and its energy and spirit seemed to appear out of nowhere, fully formed and polished.

But the Le Tigre template wasn’t created overnight. In fact, originally Le Tigre wasn’t supposed to be Le Tigre; when Hanna started collaborating with Johanna Fateman, the idea was to put together a backing band for Hanna’s solo project and alter ego, Julie Ruin. Conceived and produced in the year between Bikini Kill’s dissolution and Le Tigre’s formation, Julie Ruin was an experiment for Hanna: take the punk ethos and the anarchic sound of Bikini Kill, but replace the guitars with a sampler and old keyboards. Recorded mostly in her bedroom and produced on her own, Julie Ruin is not just a great set of songs, but also a fruitful new direction Hanna would carry into Le Tigre, minus the four-track production. If you want an idea of where “My My Metrocard” and “Well Well Well” came from, look no further than Ms. Ruin, Valley Girl Intelligentsia.

“Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

President Jimmy Carter wrote the liner notes for the strangest record to be released in 1977: the Voyager Golden Record, placed in the two Voyager interstellar probes launched that year by NASA. 90 minutes of musical selections were included alongside recorded greetings in 55 different languages and images encoded in the record’s grooves. As a first contact gesture, the record is probably more symbolic than anything else. By the time any alien civilization could possibly find it, it’s entirely possible radio and television broadcasts, travelling at far greater speeds than Voyager, may have already been intercepted and deciphered.

Speaking of futile gestures, the European Space Agency commissioned a great deal of artwork in support of the Beagle 2 mission. Part of the ESA’s Mars Express program, Beagle 2 was a British probe intended to search the Martian landscape for signs of ancient life. After ESA officials heard “Beagle 2,” a b-side Blur put out in 1999, the band was asked to write and perform a song to serve as the probe’s callsign—the signal Beagle 2 would send upon a successful landing on the Martian surface. The probe—and the Mars mission in general—got some much needed press attention and post-Britpop cool, and Blur got what could have been its coolest audience yet: extraterrestrial life in the form of dead microbes and signs of surface water.

Alas, it wasn’t to be; you may remember Beagle 2 as the Mars probe the ESA launched and subsequently lost in 2003. The craft was deployed successfully, but somewhere along the trip from the Mars Odyssey orbital craft to a landing spot on Isidis Planitia, something went wrong. Beagle 2 never re-established contact after its landing, and so the callsign was never heard from the probe. Evidence suggests, however, that the probe may still be mostly intact, if non-functional, on the surface of Mars. Perhaps one day, out of nowhere, we’ll hear Blur blaring from the speakers at ESA’s mission control.

Wipeout is as well known for its soundtrack and visual aesthetic as it is for its actual gameplay. As one of the original Playstation’s signature titles, the futuristic anti-gravity racer was a visual and aural feast. The influence of The Designers Republic on the game’s iconography and visuals inspired an entire school of angular technofuturistic design, and the original score—done by a Psygnosis employee under the alias of Cold Storage—set a new standard for video game soundtracks, which had until recently consisted mostly of simple MIDI tracks. The second game in the series, Wipeout XL/2097, was one of the first games to release an actual soundtrack on CD seperately from the game. Through some combination of luck, cultural trendspotting and market research, Astralwerks jumped on the bandwagon just as the electronica movement exploded in North America. As a result, the Wipeout XL soundtrack is a surprisingly excellent artifact of the era, and proof that video game soundtracks had hit the big time. With exclusive tracks and mixes from Daft Punk, Source Direct and Fluke, as well as seminal tracks from the Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Future Sound of London, the Wipeout XL soundtrack was like a who’s who of mid-90s electronica.

After the wildly popular second game, both the Wipeout series of games and electronica took a bit of a nosedive. Wipeout 3 didn’t get a seperate soundtrack release, despite the presence of several exclusive Sasha tracks and the help of Paul Van Dyk, Orbital and the Propellerheads. By the time Wipeout Fusion came out in 2002, the train had left the station; Fusion was passed over by Sony for a North American release, the first game in the series to merit such a dubious fate; eventually it was released stateside by a third-party publisher. But then a funny thing happened: just when everyone figured Wipeout had disappeared into the annals of video game history, Sony announced a launch lineup for its new PSP system that included Wipeout Pure. And then that game went on to win critical raves and awards after its release. Suddenly Wipeout had been brought to an entirely new generation of gamers a decade after the first game, and its visual and musical style had been left largely intact.

Wipeout Pure was only the second game in the series to get its own soundtrack, this time through Distinctive Records in the UK. The packaging of the Pure soundtrack is a stark reminder that electronica’s heyday has long since passed; it’s far less lavish and detailed than the Wipeout XL soundtrack, which contained more TDR design goodness and full bios on every artist featured on the compilation. But the CD itself is still Wipeout pedigree, with the likes of Aphex Twin, LFO and Photek contributing tracks. It’s not the revelation Wipeout XL was, but it’s still a decent compilation and a worthy addition to the series. It’s also a sign of everything coming full circle: one of the tracks on the soundtrack was composed by none other than Cold Storage, the man who started the Wipeout techno revolution.

[review 2005: the best of the year]

Theoretically, the Saint Etienne album should be at the top of this list. Many years from now, when my old fogey self looks back at 2005, it’ll likely be Tales From Turnpike House that stands the test of time, the album that becomes a classic. So consider that album the philosophical favourite of the year. But I spent a month listening to Adelie Land, and absolutely nothing this year sounded anything near as cool as this. Listening to “Season Of Young Mouss” for the first time reminded me what it was like to be hopelessly addicted to music. These sorts of moments have been few and far between lately; the last time I remember feeling the same way about an album was the Go! Team’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike. Fitting that it was my favourite album of last year.

But let’s stick with the Go! Team comparison for a bit, since everyone and their dog has made it. Yes, Handsomeboy Technique sounds a lot like the Go! Team. It’s sample-heavy hip-hop without the frontin’ and tha bitches; everything’s in technicolour and all the sounds remind you of being a kid on a sugar high. Some people have even gone so far as to call Adelie Land the second Go! Team album in spirit, and maybe they’re right. But where the Go! Team is the product of Schoolhouse Rock, double-dutch chants and 70s action car chases, Handsomeboy Technique sounds a lot more like the soundtrack to a Katamari Damacy game. Adelie Land and Thunder, Lightning, Strike are two sides of the same coin: the Go! Team are more New York hipster, the Handsomeboy Technique more twee. Take out some of the trumpets, the banjo, the harmonica; add in some keyboards, some disco beats, some ba-ba-bas. The Go! Team are purposefully lofi; Adelie Land, by contrast, sounds almost bigger than life itself.

Adelie Land is addictive. “Adelie Coast Waltz” and “Affections” sit on one end of the spectrum, moving at an upbeat yet unhurried pace, so that the soundscapes pass by like a narcotic dream. At the other end lie songs like “Season Of Young Mouss” and “Miami Radio Flash,” psychedelic dance tracks that burst with ear candy. Everything on the album puts a smile on your face, from the wicked beat of “Miami Radio Flash” to the beatboxing on “8000 Laurels,” from the trumpet blasts on “A Walk Across The Rooftops” to the Jackie Deshannon samples on “Your Blessings.” This album is concentrated Prozac, pressed into a CD and available without a prescription (but sadly only in the band’s native Japan; there’s probably no chance this album will ever come out stateside). You owe it to yourself to find a copy of this album and give it a spin, because Adelie Land is so giddy, so sweet and juicy, just so amazing that it may very well save your life.

[review 2005: the best of the year]

Broadcast is very good at making themselves scarce; with every album, there’s the nagging concern that the CD you hold in your hands may very well be the last Broadcast release you ever hold. The pattern is the same every time: in the three years between 1997’s Work and Non-Work and the low-key psychedelic nightmare of The Noise Made By People, there was barely a word from the Broadcast camp, leading a lot of fans to believe the band had broken up. After the 2000 release, Broadcast played a few shows in North America before returning to Britain, cutting their ties to U.S. distributor Tommy Boy, and disappearing for another three years. Haha Sound, the lush stereophonic spectacular to Noise’s radio transmission echo, was a revelation when it finally appeared. Dogged for years by comparisons to Stereolab that never quite seemed to fit, Haha Sound was the album that should’ve put all the comparisons to rest. The bubbly 21st century bossa nova motif Stereolab was plying bore little resemblance to the reverb-heavy electronic noir. Broadcast was anything but airy lightness; even the poppiest songs on Haha Sound, like “Before We Begin” and “Lunch Hour Pops,” tread a fine line between alluring and menacing. Occasionally difficult but ultimately rewarding, the album became Broadcast’s high-water mark. But then Broadcast pulled their traditional disappearing act, leaving us to wonder what they’d do for an encore.

By this year, the answer was clear: replace the drummer with a drum machine, pare the band down to a duo, and forget the lush psychedelic atmospherics. Tender Buttons is a different affair from Haha Sound in more ways than one. “I Found The F,” the first track, is misleading; sounds like a real drummer, doesn’t it? But it’s also the track that veers closest to Broadcast’s old material, as if the band had decided to ease you into the pool instead of tossing you in all at once. “Black Cat” throws in the drum machine, and suddenly you get the full effect of the new sound. Broadcast was once very good at communicating a sense of space through their music, whether it was claustrophobia (the eerie “Until Then” from Noise) or a tunnel-like hollowness (”Man Is Not A Bird” from Haha Sound.). But on Tender Buttons Broadcast largely destroys your sense of space through the use of buzzy, distorted electronic paraphernalia. Everything flattens out; on first listen, it leaves an oddly limp impression. It takes some work to find the melodies through the static; it’s the musical equivalent of trying to make out naked breasts on scrambled pay-per-view porn.

The process of acclimation starts slowly. “Tears in the Typing Pool” is a standout track; it’s just singer Trish Keenan and an acoustic guitar for the most part. By the by, Trish Keenan is an important reason why Broadcast works; though her vocals are often unadorned and frigid, she remains the thread of humanity that weaves through the tapestry. And when she doesn’t pull her punches and displays the full effect of her talents, like on this track, it’s chillingly beautiful. From there, other songs start to slowly open up. The title track is another delicious slice of low-key electronic noodling, with Keenan in a breathy, deadpan kind of mood. “Michael A Grammar” is a perky, upbeat burst of synthesizers and canned beats. “You And Me In Time” is the big brother to “Until Then,” another minor-key exercise in emotional discomfort that ends up being strangely comforting. It’s not long before you realize Tender Buttons isn’t all that different from Broadcast’s previous albums. And yet it’s clear Broadcast have moved beyond their old retro-futurism, tied as it was to a specific place and time. An exciting time for Broadcast, and an album that is, in the final equation, the equal of Haha Sound.

[review 2005: the honourable mentions]

I haven’t heard most of Felt Mountain, the first Goldfrapp album, so I can only guess its contents based on the many reviews out there. But if you’d tossed me Supernature and Black Cherry at the same time and I’d never listened to them before, I’d probably have guessed that Supernature came first. When Black Cherry surfaced two years ago, a lot of people didn’t know quite what to make of it; I guess they were expecting something more along the lines of Portishead with an orchestra. Instead, they got a fully realized vision of neon-inflected electronic pop, at once seductive and fetishistic. It made you feel a little dirty in a good way. Once people got used to Alison Goldfrapp parading around on stage wearing a horse’s tail and playing a theremin, Black Cherry made a lot of sense.

Supernature doesn’t get under your skin in the same way. More cabaret than strip club this time around, Goldfrapp returns with a set of songs that sound less polished—perhaps on purpose—but also less coherent as an album. More comfortable with the mid-tempo tracks than the extremes, Supernature is an oddly tepid affair despite the presence of some very good songs. Much of the damage occurs at the beginning of the album. If “Crystalline Green” was the archway to a new world, “Ooh La La” is simply a welcome back to the fold, a somewhat uninspired mixture of “Train” and “Strict Machine.” And while “Lovely 2 C U” is well played, it’s fairly obvious that no new ground’s being broken here.

There are too many good hooks and alluring melodies on Supernature to write it off, though. Goldfrapp is at its best when the band tries its hand at ballads; “Let It Take You” and “Time Out From The World” showcase Alison Goldfrapp’s voice in ways the louder, brasher tracks don’t allow. They glide effortlessly through a narcotic dreamscape, the closest the album comes to taking you to another world. But for some reason, the other tracks don’t stick. Perhaps without the thematic unity of the previous album, the new tracks fall apart. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with “Satin Chic” or “Slide In,” two of the better full-vamp tracks; it’s just that you’re not going to remember them the same way you remember, say, “Tiptoe” or “Twist.”

Supernature, then, is a bit frustrating; you keep hoping there’s something you’ve missed, something that pulls this album out of the muck and makes it truly great. But perhaps one review said it best when it guessed Supernature worked best as remix fodder. Give the songs a heaping dose of canned beats and outrageous samples and they’ll light up the clubs, I’m sure. The Tiefschwarz remix of “Ooh La La” is proof positive. On its own merits, though, Supernature is good—but not great.

[review 2005: the honourable mentions]

If you pick up a Thievery Corporation album, chances are you know what to expect: polished downtempo electronica with a great beat and a world music aesthetic, something inoffensive enough to play in a coffee shop but interesting enough that you could throw a track on at a party and no one would necessarily blink an eye. Alternatively, pick any Thievery Corporation album and your finest pot, hotbox the bedroom, and you’re all set.

The Cosmic Game is merely the latest version of the Thievery Corporation sound; perhaps more worldbeat, less downtempo this time around. Despite the presence of guest vocalists like Perry Farrell, David Byrne and Wayne Coyne, I imagine your reaction to The Cosmic Game will be roughly the same as it has been to other Thievery Corporation efforts. And while the electronic duo are nothing if not consistent, all that can really be said about their latest album is that it is slightly better than the rest of their work, but equally anonymous. The album works well taken as a whole, but it’s impossible to ignore the sameness of The Cosmic Game’s sixteen tracks, nor the relative blandness of the material. No new ground is being broken, and everyone knows it.

In the end, I’m glad I bought this because I don’t own any of the other Thievery Corporation albums out there. But after listening to The Cosmic Game, good as it is, I don’t think I’ll need to pick up any others.

[review 2005: the disappointments]

If anyone could have pulled it off, it would’ve been Ladytron. Thrust somewhat unwillingly into the role of electroclash pioneer, Ladytron have always floated somewhere above the Miss Kittins and Peaches of the world; not quite content to merely rehash the 80s, there were times when Ladytron attempted to remake it in their image. 604 was the raw blueprint, “Commodore Rock” their call to arms. Then Light + Magic hit, and it was as if Ladytron had pulled their music straight into hyper-Technicolour. It was an album that sounded larger than life, a fully realized depiction of a seductive plastic utopia. If Ladytron had had any smarts, they would’ve figured out how to top the accomplishment, or quit while they were ahead. Unfortunately, the band did neither.

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way. First off, the resurgence of the guitar has not been lost on Ladytron; while electronics still dominate on Witching Hour, you can hear the influence of the guitar in the distortion that coats almost every track. “High Rise” is a prime example; what should’ve been Ladytron’s “Commodore Rock Revisited” is blunted by the traditional—dare I say boring?—arrangement of drums, guitars and keyboards. Helen Marnie’s vocals take a hit as well; the vocal effects turn her into a ghost on her own track, barely able to rise above the muck of the surrounding instruments. Far from the crystal clarity of Light + Magic, the fuzzier sound of Witching Hour puts distance between the songs and the listener. It’s less immediate.

This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the songs behind the thick veneer were worth examining; this is true only occasionally. Another major problem with the album is that Ladytron have run short on ideas. “High Rise” is a song that should’ve been much better than it is. “International Dateline,” however, is exactly as good as it sounds, which is to say not very. And if you listen to “High Rise” and “International Dateline” back to back, you’ll hear pretty much the same melodic hook. This happens again, though not so blatantly, on “Sugar” and “The Last One Standing.” All this repetition does is add substandard material to the album’s running time while blunting the effect of the superior versions. Why even bother?

And then there’s the most heartbreaking change of all, the apparent loss of Mira Arroyo. When Light + Magic began to feature Helen Marnie’s vocals on more songs, everyone praised it as a smart move. It took Ladytron away from the more strident feel of 604, and it gave Ladytron more options. Unfortunately, as great as Marnie sounds, she dominates Witching Hour. Marnie is the group’s Janet Jackson; she’s got a pretty voice, but it’s not versatile enough to carry a whole album. Arroyo’s thick, Bulgarian vocals are sorely missed. Perhaps it’s just the band couldn’t write enough new songs that used her effectively; “Fighting in Built Up Areas” and “amTV,” while not up to the standards of previous albums, are two of the better songs on Witching Hour, and they’re both fronted by Arroyo. They should’ve tried harder; a “Flicking Your Switch,” “Nuhorizons” or a “Paco!” would’ve added much-needed variety to the album, especially if the cost is a throwaway like “White Light Generator” or “Weekend.”