Sarahindie

Once a year, I get into something totally weird and outside of my comfort zone. Sometimes it’s shoegaze, sometimes electronica, but most of them have ended up in this list.

Mew, And the Brass Handed Kites:  This, man. This is weird, Scandinavian indie electronic ambient pop. It’s Sigur Ros for people who don’t have time to be arsing around with made up languages. It’s got these huge sounds and weird melodies and it’s the sort of cohesive album experience that means hearing one song on my Pandora will mean I have to go to iTunes and listen to the next in the series. It is that compelling. Plus, the only time I’ve heard J. Mascis sing and liked it. Just, check out “Apocalypto,” okay? It’s Muse, but weird.

Autolux, Future Perfect: This album is one of my absolute favorites of the decade. I love it so much that I don’t recommend it to people, for fear that they won’t like it. There’s nothing about this album on its surface that should recommend it to me. It’s sort of electronic shoegaze, weird, high vocals and an almost sleepy feeling. But then I heard the drums. Carla Azar’s huge, powerful drumming pulls the whole album back down to earth and makes the music invigorating. You may not be able to dance to it, but you will damn well try.

Camille, Le Fil: French chanteuse Camille, whom I discovered through Nouvelle Vague, believes that everyone has a note that is their note. Hers is B-natural. There’s a hum of it from the opening of the album to the close. And using herself as a lot of the instruments (looping her voice, slapping hands on skin), she put together a whole album around that note. Some of the songs are fast and furious (“Au Port“) and some are slow and melancholic (“Pale Septembre“). There’s even one song that is sort of both (the three movement ramble “Janine”). The lyrics are sometimes personal and sometimes tell a wild story, but the language barrier never gets in the way. Just listen to her wild, tumbling French and I promise you’ll be able to identify the emotions.

Beck, Guero/The Information: The 90s/early 00s were a weird, exciting time for the Beck fan. There was the worry that he would never grow up after Midnite Vultures, and then the fear that he’d grown too old with the divorce saga Sea Change. Then came Guero. Beck had remarried and drawn inspiration from both the weirdest parts of electronic culture and the Latino community that surrounded him in LA. (“Guero” means white boy, the Latino answer to “honky.”) Guero was weird, fun, exciting and fascinating. And he continued the magic with The Information, dropping the Latino influence in favor of enough noises, samples and loops to keep his live dj employed well into the 2010s.

And that’s it! Those are the albums that you cannot go bravely into the ’10s without knowing. Next time you have a free hour, or need some background music, go to lala.com and hit up one of these! Maybe you’ll fall in love too.