The third album by nerdy funk-rockers !!! (pronounced chk chk chk) finds the band at their most danceable. The instrumentation is reduced to the most basic elements, i.e. drums and guitars for rhythm and a bass, and spiced up with sparse vocals by Nic Offer and Shannon Funchess. Finally some electronic sounds are added to this mix and bring the music of !!! as close to house as never before. Granted, the album is not as versatile as earlier offerings, but it is guarantied to make you dance. A lot.

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You may know Seu Jorge from Wes Anderson´s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”, a movie in which he occasionally pops up with his acoustic guitar singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The retro aesthetic of that film fits his music perfectly. He was clearly raised on Brazil’s Tropicalia music, but he combines that tradition with other music of the late 60s and early 70s – glam rock, funk, psychedelia, reggae.

His newest album, a self-titled collaboration with a band called Almaz, continues in the same spirit. The highlights are once again the covers: “Das Model” by Kraftwerk is redone as a dubby reggae number, and Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” is infused with a croon not unlike that late Barry White.

Janelle Monáe‘s debut album is an amazing collection of often fast paced and futuristic funk gems. After the EP “Suite I of IV: The Chase EP” this album continues the musical cycle with the suites II and III and hence consists of two halves, each beginning with an orchestral overture.
The tracks flow nicely one into another and the sound is as crisp and clean as you would expect from a release on P Diddy’s Label, but nonetheless you hear a lot of amazing ideas and the album never gets boring. Take for example the collaboration with Of Montreal “Make The Bus”, a short indie-dance epic with various breaks and rhythm changes, all crested by Janelle’s impressive singing voice.

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I think “orchestral gypsy pop” is the most irritating definition I read of how Marc Almonds first Album since his Accident in 2004 sounds. I understand the “orchestral” part of this statement – the album sounds as opulent as you would expect from an experienced showman as Marc Almond. But the “gypsy” part is more difficult, since the album is far away from any Gypsy Groove hecticness. However if you take the on-the-road lifestyle of a gypsy into account this statement might be right. Almonds album sounds like a story told by a worldly wise man standing on the stage of a variety show, backed by a big band. And this is exactly what you would expect judging only by the title.

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Just because she finally decided to release her first album Karen Elson won’t end her modelling career. You can’t dissimulate that her husband Jack White (yes, the one from the White Stripes) had an influence on her decision to record the songs she has been working in her spare time during the last years. But the result is a coherent folk album with enough pop appeal to be catchy, enough spookiness to be exciting and no traces of the White Stripes what so ever. The atmosphere of the album ranges from melancholic (“Lunasa”) to tragic (“Mouths to Feed”) and some songs even manage to combine both moods, like my favourite “The Truth is in the Dirt”.

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James Yuill might have started out as “folktronica’s next great hope“, but already then his productions were a little bit to much dance oriented to fit just that one label – and they still are on his new album “Movement In a Storm”. With “Foreign Shore” and “Wild Goose at Night” he delivers the only real folk songs while all his other tracks are closer to the tradition of house and disco, such as “First in Line” with it’s chopped up vocals and compressed synths. One of the most interesting tracks is the very experimental and noisy “My Fears”, while “Sing Me a Song” is as close to Yuill’s heroes Postal Service as you can get without copying. A really well crafted and diverse pop album.

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After a load of singles and remixes for the likes of Hot Chip, Friendly Fires or The Juan Maclean the British DJ and producer-duo Mock & Toof releases with “Tuning Echoes” its first full length album. Well known for their Nu-Disco sound they present here a collection of nicely grooving, bright and funky songs of which some will make you dance instantly (“Norman’s Eyes”) while others will creep into your ears and make you hum their hooks (“Shoeshine Boogie”). So in general this is not yet an other release that jumps on the disco bandwagon, but a great, electronic pop album.

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Since “Antidotes” was such a highly acclaimed release the expectations for the new Foals album were equally high. And you easily can say that all these expectations are exceeded – at least if you do not expect to dance as much as you could to the last album. Here Foals present a more atmospheric and versatile sound and generally try to experiment with the structure and feeling of their songs. Especially the second part of the album, featuring tracks like “Alabaster” or “2 Trees”, is unexpectedly hypnotic and veers away from a classic song structure. But my own personal favourite is the first single “Spanish Sahara”, because of its restrained build-up and pumping beat.

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The compass Jamie gave us seems to be broken; it leads us straight into troubled waters. Lidells fourth album is brimful with diverse influences and genres, ranging from Sly Stone to The Stooges, from Funk to Punk – sometimes even in the same track, like with “Gypsy Soul”. The times when Jamie Lidell tried to concentrate on only some of these references seem to be over; instead he shows us the full range of his musical schizophrenia. But since Beck was the assistant producer on this record this new change in Lidell’s sound is no surprise and very convincing.

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The two gentlemen Andrew Claristidge and Richard D’Alpert like to hide behind their music and, at least that’s how their debut album sounds like, behind giant walls of vintage synthesizers and drum machines. But with Giorgio Moroder and Steve Reich as the influences they name the most you know you can expect more than just a simple electro-pop album. Acid Washed either built up epic, electronic sound-scapes with an atmosphere fitting a dark 1980s gangster-movie or produce laid back and groovy dance tracks – yet in both cases they stay diverse and slack.