Black Devil Disco Club – 28 After Lo Recordings, 2006 | buy
The best records seem to appear without hype or explanation. Instead, they’re often steeped in mystery and speculation. Depending on whom you ask, Bernard Fevre’s dark disco odyssey may have been recorded in 1978 or 2006 or sometime between. Or maybe it was him and another guy. Or it wasn’t him at all. It doesn’t matter. Speeding along a perfect rail between jittery robo-dystopia and a warm analogue bubblebath, these seven perfect anthems feel as if they’ve been in heavy rotation for decades.
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Gas – Pop Mille Plateaux, 2000 | buy
A final winter storm of swirling galaxy music rounds out Wolfgang Voigt’s epic four-disc cycle. Stern, frostbitten, and slightly woozy, this is the panoramic music of serious landscapes: glaciers and mountains and wide-open fields. The final track, ‘Pop VII’, might be one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded.
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Gas – Pop VII
Jan Jelinek - Loop-Finding Jazz Records _scape, 2001 | buy
It’s one o’clock in the morning and some beat-to-hell jazz record ends and the needle skates around the label. Vinyl snaps and crackles, making strange melodies in the back of your head. Jelinek lives in this moment. He cranks the volume, grabs the reverberation-soaked echoes from the tail end of an old Blue Note album and installs a quiet kick drum and some drowsy bass. This is perfect everything music that can crackle and loop forever.
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Adult. – Resuscitation Ersatz, 2001 | buy
Some geeks will rightly point out that most of the songs on Resuscitation were recorded before 2000. Fine. But no other record casts a longer shadow over the new millennium than Nicola Kuperus and Adam Miller’s anxious retro-future ode to dread. Do you like my handbag? It’s filled with lots of money. Can you entertain me? By 2005, the dead-eyed electroclash pose became so ubiquitous that it’s easy to overlook what the Detroit duo accomplished on this record: smashing Joy Division and Cybotron into the sleek synthesizers of the Hague’s disco elite for a brand new sound. Sometimes I drive so fast I can’t even breathe the air. Unlike their progeny, Adult. aren’t cynical posers; they’re really rattled. Dig those track titles: Nausea. Human Wreck. Contagious. Few records said so much about anxiety in the modern age.
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M83 – Before the Dawn Heals Us Mute, 2006 | buy
The flipside to Adult’s nervous crank, M83′s third album is a joyous sobbing earnest mess. This is the soundtrack for speeding across the desert floor with tears in your eyes (I do it every summer). Burning guitars, thundering drums and widescreen synthesizers scream up to stratospheric heights, riding on heavy breathing lyrics that follow a screwy line between the diary of a lovestruck fifteen year old girl and JG Ballard on one of his darkest days: Out of the flames, a piece of brain in my hair. The wheels are melting, a ghost is screaming your name. A puzzling mixture of haunting ballads, unnerving moments of silence, and nailbitten climaxes, Before the Dawn Heals Us is an exhausting and cathartic listen. It pacifies, perplexes, and excites on a gut level — just like the most primal music is designed to do.
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Beautiful list, James. Short, concise in taste, straight to the point.
I have to admit it took me 4 long years (and two remixes) to finally digest M83. I used to feel somewhat annoyed by the muddy, red loudness in their sound. Now I understand it wouldn’t make any sense without it.
I kept this open in a tab so I could sample all of them when I had some free moments. Adult & M83 were my favorites; but even more so: your descriptions! Wonderful.
James A. Reeves is a writer, designer, teacher, and law student. He's currently finishing a big book about America, available on W. W. Norton in 2011. He lives in New Orleans.
The Lordsburg Killings 
Meeting Elvis 
Babushka Lady
Beautiful list, James. Short, concise in taste, straight to the point.
I have to admit it took me 4 long years (and two remixes) to finally digest M83. I used to feel somewhat annoyed by the muddy, red loudness in their sound. Now I understand it wouldn’t make any sense without it.
I kept this open in a tab so I could sample all of them when I had some free moments. Adult & M83 were my favorites; but even more so: your descriptions! Wonderful.