Hotel Rooms, Party Gods, and the Smurfs
Moby made Destroyed in hotel rooms, late at night, in cities whose names he probably couldn’t always remember by morning. All fifteen tracks carry that quality—a particular stillness that only insomnia and anonymous spaces can produce, recorded on vintage analog gear, uninterested in demanding anything from you. It slips into your acoustic memory without announcing itself, which is either a flaw or the whole point depending on how you’re feeling about silence that week. I think it’s the whole point.
Deichkind’s Arbeit nervt—the title translates roughly as "Work is a pain in the ass," which is also the album’s complete thesis—is the exact opposite of a hotel room at 3am. The Hamburg electro-rap collective, whose live shows involve costumes, structural chaos, and genuine danger to bystanders, produced something here that sits in your chest like a kick drum and stays there. Fat beats, lyrics that sound like they were dictated by the personal deity of booze and bad decisions, electro that hits you with something between aggression and genuine warmth. It has a residual taste. Like a very good, very filthy party you’re still thinking about three days later.
Five years in the making, Rome by Danger Mouse and Italian composer Daniele Lupi is the record that shouldn’t exist but does, improbably intact. Built from Italian Western film music, recorded entirely without electronic production, with Jack White and Norah Jones as guests, it sounds like it was written in 1968 and found in a vault. The patience required to make something like this—two people, five years, a clear shared vision, no shortcuts—is itself an argument against the way most music gets made now. What’s good survives. This will.
Natasha Khan only needs to open her mouth and the temperature in the room drops a degree. Two Suns, the second Bat For Lashes album, is full of songs about love and loss and the specific mythology she constructs around both—not pop songs wearing literary clothing, but the real thing, strange and ancient-feeling, with a falsetto that sounds like it’s holding something back it has no intention of releasing. It was already two years old when I wrote this and I was already waiting for whatever came next.
Obviously the greatest album ever made is not by Michael Jackson, Lykke Li, or Regina Spektor. Obviously it is Tekkno ist cool by Die Schlümpfe—the Smurfs—released in 1995, proof that the universe occasionally has a sense of humor. The little blue Belgian mushroom-dwellers somehow ended up in a German techno studio and produced party anthems that I cannot rationally defend and refuse to stop enjoying. "Keine Schule," "Ich bin die Prinzessin"—legendary. Ideal for dancing. Structurally superior to most things released in the same decade.
Then there’s the record that actually did change my life: Tracy Chapman’s debut. I fell in love with her voice from the very first minute—that guitar, that gravity, that composure of someone telling you something completely true. Each of the eleven songs on that milestone album takes your heart out, rearranges it slightly, puts it back in a better position. She wasn’t just singing about revolution. She was one. Decades later and nothing about it has faded. That’s the only test that matters.