Last 10 Years

Yesterdays post about Fenech-Soler brought back memories of other music I was listening to when I first discovered them. Basically I didn't think I was old enough to reach the 'better in the old days' stage of my life and made an effort to keep my music tastes current.

One thing I did was pick my 25 favourite albums. It was a very biased list favouring the more recent albums though, 17 of them were from the 21st century and the other 8 were from the 90s. It also included an album which had only just come out at the time.

Nowadays I'm at a point where I'm not even up to date with a lot of artists I've liked in years gone by. Some went to to make some truly dreadful music and others I just forgot about. I do sometimes seek out new music from an artist if I'm going to see them in concert, but many don't really bother making new music anymore and stick to the classics.

It got me thinking, what albums have the 25 artists of those albums I picked released in the last 10 years. Well here's the answer:

2 Many DJs - No albums

Norman Jay - 2 albums: Skank & Boogie (2015), Mister Good Times (2017)

Portishead - No albums

Massive Attack - No albums

High Contrast - 2 albums: Night Gallery (2017), Notes from the Underground (2020)

Plump DJs - No albums

Jacques Lu Cont - No albums

Erol Alkan - 1 album: Fabriclive 77 (2014)

Spiritcatcher - No albums

Various Artists - N/A

DJ Shadow - 2 albums: The Mountain Will Fall (2016), Our Pathetic Age (2019)

Tiga - 1 album: No Fantasy Required  (2016)

Air - No albums

Fatboy Slim - No albums

Sander Kleinenberg - No albums

Snoop Dogg - 6 albums: Bush (2015), Coolaid (2016), Neva Left (2017), Bible of Love (2018), I Wanna Thank Me (2019), From tha Streets 2 tha Suites (2021), BODR (2022)

Jurassic 5 - No albums

Kruder & Dorfmeister - 1 album: Johnson (2022)

Zero 7 - No albums

Mylo - No albums

Digitalism - 2 albums: Mirage (2016), JPEG (2019)

Underworld - 2 albums: Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future (2016), Drift Series 1 (2019)

LCD Soundsystem - 1 album: American Dream (2017)

London Elektricity - 2 albums: Are We There Yet? (2015), Building Better Worlds (2019)

Propellerheads - No albums

Just 11 of the artists have released an album in the last 10 years and only 3 of them have released one in the decade so far. Only Snoop Dogg has been prolific with none of the others managing more than 2 albums in a decade.

This leads to another question, are these albums any good?

Just one way to find out. I'm going to give each of those albums a listen and post what I think of them here.

My 25 Favourite Albums: Plump DJs - A Plump Night Out

A key moment in the history of rave came in the mid-90s when the scene split into Happy Hardcore and Drum & Bass. As both genres evolved, by the end of the 90s they were both completely different to the original rave sound they grew out of.

At the same time, it was becoming more common for Old Skool sets to feature at raves to cater for those who missed the older sound.

My tapepack collection only went back as far as 1993 so when I got my first tape pack to feature the Ratpack doing an Old Skool set I thought it was great. However a few tapepacks later I started to realise the limitation of an Old Skool set was that there are only a finite number of tunes from 1992. You were never going to hear anything new and ground-breaking, it was all from the past.

The solution to this was Nu Skool Breaks which basically took the old skool breakbeat formula to create new music.

In 2000, Nu Skool Breaks DJs the Plump DJs released "A Plump Night Out". It's a DJ mix album as opposed to studio album, but it consists entirely of their own material either as the original artist or remixers.

It's not an album that sounds like it's from 1992 though, in fact the beats are where the similarities end. The rest is essentially a mix of all different kinds of dance music.

That's what makes the album so great, the beats keep the album flowing and you get variety everywhere else.