Coil – The New Backwards [2008; Threshold House]

Containing reworkings of material appearing on the leaked demo of Coil’s unreleased Backwards album, The New Backwards, like the semi-posthumous The Ape of Naples, shows a rather sharp change in style from their previous studio album (discounting the machine process material of 2003/2004′s ANS releases), 2002′s The Remote Viewer, which focused on drones mixed with ethnicity-linked instrumentation. It also differs from the ‘main-line’ material the group released around 1993 or 1996 (the alleged dates for the recording of the original Backwards) and ends up feeling more like cast-offs from 1991′s Love’s Secret Domain or their vs. side-projects (e.g., Coil vs. ELpH) than any of their subsequent Coil-only works.

Audio manipulation plays a heavy role in the songs, with distortion, pitch-shifting, chopping, stitching, and randomization regularly applied to the vocals. Masses of altered samples and densely-programmed synths provide the accompanying rhythms and other audio activity, warbling, juddering, uncurling, and expanding in disorienting directions, only to thread out a clear melody from the disorder. While notably less satisfying than one of Coil’s full ‘concept’ albums, of which there were relatively few, it still presents the group’s technical and creative qualities in impressive form, with a few moments of striking emotion among the more process-focused work.

Various Artists – You Don’t Know: Ninja Cuts [2008; Beat Records, Ninja Tune]

Presenting three CDs worth of label holdings, this compilation largely restricts itself to material issued by Ninja Tune in the five years leading up to its release (the earliest inclusion comes from 1998, with nothing from the eight years of the label’s existence before that making an appearance). The set serves up pieces of alternative pop, conscious hip-hop, amped-up breakbeat, jazzy leftfield, pop rap, electrofunk, and a bevy of other niche and cross-pollinated styles, with over forty artists, plus dozens of guests and remixers, shown off over the three hours and change of its run-time.

Unsurprisingly, most of the picks are tunes which had been deemed worthy of being put out as a single, due to catchiness, especially strong beats, or whatever other factors, so there’s a fairly strong base-line to the quality of the music. Production values are high, with a warehouse’s worth of synths, drum machines, and samples put to work, while the turntable antics associated with the label’s founders, Coldcut (who get in a few tracks of their own), get much less exposure than might be expected.

There’s no apparent division or theming between the three discs (titled, respectively, “You”, “Don’t”, and “Know”), aside from the second having a lot of heavy lyrical repetition, which seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for running the tracks in chronological (or even alphabetical) order, or breaking it into groups of the most similarly-styled tracks. Despite that, there’s a good flow to each, and to the compilation as a whole, so it’s not much of a fault, just weirdly directionless for such a large collection. And though that bulkiness does make diving into the fifty songs a little off-putting, it also gives a nice cross-section of Ninja Tunes’ styles at the time, so in the end, it does all that it was meant to do.

MGMT – Electric Feel [2008; Columbia, Sony BMG Music Entertainment]

The album mix opens this single, with glimmering synths and strutting bass making for a pop/funk/electro melt that doesn’t seem worried about much beyond maintaining the beat’s groove. The B-side remix by Justice does seem rearrangement of the elements, cutting between conga drumming and deepened bass wells, while charging the synth lines with the electric buzz that characterized their † album, released the previous year. It makes for a more energized take on the track, but the fundamentals don’t move much, despite the extensive mixing treatments given to the assorted channels. A neat twist, but one which stays more or less on even footing with the original.

Here’s the alternate cover art.

Badgeek / L’Homme Fatal – Disco Sucks, Fuck Everything [2008; Glitch City]

In this quarter-hour split, Badgeek takes the first five tracks before passing it off to L’Homme Fatal. In Badgeek’s section, he experiments with intercutting grindcore into Backstreet Boys, Sonic the Hedgehog music, and chiptune classical, which, while somewhat amusing, doesn’t really lead to much of interest or apparent effort. L’Homme Fatal’s side turns to more standard internet noisecore fare, like the cutting-together of sped-up pop, sample-jumping through selections from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack, sudden blasts of harsh tones, pounding bass percussion, and so on. While the second half is more expected of the label’s output, it’s also put together with more creativity and effectiveness, though not quite enough to salvage the split as a whole.

Various Artists – You Don’t Know Ninja Cuts: DJ Food’s 1000 Masks Mix [2008; Ninja Tune]

Released with the stated goal of providing an updated overview of Ninja Tune’s catalog at the time, this DJ mix jumps through 39 tracks in ~50 minutes, with inclusions from DJ Shadow, Amon Tobin, Roots Manuva, The Bug, and label founders Coldcut, among others. The quick pacing of the mix, along with a handful of amusing and well-picked drop-in samples, gels with the song selections to effectively demonstrate the label’s move from downtempo and chillout electronic music to material with more pop and hip-hop influence.

Suiting the ‘label sampler’ intent, the mix is kept pretty discrete with its arrangement, basically highlighting the singles’ hooks of the songs before flowing into the next one, and rarely mixing them together past the transition point. But the joining and overlays are done with style and smoothness, accentuating the stronger beats without losing focus, and while the ‘best of’ cut-ins are kind of blatant with their ear-grabs, they’re kept moving fast enough to all work together, making for a semi-kaleidoscopic run-through of the label’s offerings at the time.