Cobwebs and Geometry
Battles took three years after Mirrored to deliver Gloss Drop, and the wait was worth it for anyone who missed having music that made their head move involuntarily while the rest of their body tried to keep pace. They’ve brought in more vocals this time—not because they needed them, but because it turns out the architecture of a Battles track can carry a singer without losing any of its feral geometry. The result is more varied without being less strange.
Putting Thriller in any weekly list feels almost too obvious to justify, except that obvious and necessary aren’t the same thing. The record is a milestone in a way that most records called milestones simply aren’t—it set a material and creative standard that the entire industry reorganized around, track by track, each one landing differently. If Billie Jean has worn past the point of hearing, go find something in the back half and start again.
Cinematic Orchestra’s Ma Fleur from 2007 is one of those records I return to when I need something operating at a different emotional temperature. Fontella Bass, Louise Rhodes, Patrick Watson—each bringing a voice that the album knows exactly how to hold. The band builds the architecture and stays out of the way. It repays the decision to just let it run from start to finish without looking at the tracklist.
The James Drake mixtape does what The Notorious XX did—takes two genre-dominant artists who have no obvious business sharing space and finds the underlying logic connecting them. Hip-hop, post-dubstep, soul, electronics: it moves across all of it without feeling like a party trick. The seams should be visible and mostly aren’t.
The Cure’s Greatest Hits is the kind of record you don’t put on for nostalgia so much as for the reminder that Robert Smith’s voice remains one of the stranger instruments in pop music—that particular combination of plaintive and theatrical, draped in reverb, built around moonlight and minor keys. Disheveled hair, black-painted eyes, cobwebs threaded through the sound. There’s nobody else doing exactly that, and there probably won’t be.
Paul Kalkbrenner has been everywhere, constantly, and somehow still found time for Icke Wieder—sixty minutes of pure instrumental Berlin techno that doesn’t apologize for being exactly what it is. Old-school Kalkbrenner: minimalist, forward-moving, emotionally present without ever forcing it. The best possible argument for going against your own momentum.