Album: Moby - Always Centered at Night

★★ MOBY - ALWAYS CENTERED AT NIGHT A sometimes unstimulating collaborative album

A sprinkling of well-wrought songs enliven a sometimes unstimulating collaborative album

US electronic perennial Moby has had a good run. He was a rave culture phenomenon from 1991 onwards. He blew that with a vegan punk album. He released Play at the decade’s end and sold millions. He then had decadent superstar years, a run of huge, often juicy albums. He quit booze’n’drugs in 2008. His music blossomed again, culminating in a trio of albums raging at the state of his nation.

Album: Becky Hill - Believe Me Now?

★★★★ BECKY HILL - BELIEVE ME NOW? The pop rave queen of England reigns on

The pop rave queen of England refuses to leave the dancefloor

There’s a whole generation of singers who’ve risen to considerable fame on the back of the return of home-grown commercial dance music to the charts since the early 2010s. Various Jesses and Ellas, Nathans and Calums have flooded daytime radio with decent enough, often TV talent show-winning, more or less generic vocals.

Album: Justice - Hyperdrama

★★★ JUSTICE - HYPERDRAMA French electronic dance stalwarts return in fine fettle

French electronic dance stalwarts return from eight-year break in fine fettle

Justice are a couple of super-suave rock star analogues. Leathers and aviators, yes, but with a very Parisian insouciance. Their music is the same. It has a rocker-friendly je-ne-sais-quoi, but air-brushed with the glitzy sci-fi futurism one might expect from a couple of guys whose origins lie in design.

Album: EMEL - MRA

Tunisian-American singer's latest is fired with feminism and global electro-pop maximalism

At a time when conflicts in the Middle East are reaching fever pitch, Emel Mathlouthi represents hope. Her new album MRA, is titled for the Arabic word for “woman” and was created entirely by women, as in, every single person involved with it at any level is female. She has said of it, “I've come to discover the true meaning of sisterhood… I want us to change the system from within, by and through women.” Happily, this outlook is attached to music that’s sonically exciting.

Album: Chromeo - Adult Contemporary

Dave-1 and P-Thugg's sixth album maintains their post-modern smooth-funkin'

A decade ago Canadian duo Chromeo had their biggest success with the single “Jealous (I Ain’t With It)” and its parent album, White Women. However, it didn’t presage a move into the mainstream.

Album: Altered Natives - Time Decays All Things

Album ten for the perpetual squarepeg of London bass music ups the tempo

There are musicians on the UK dance underground who doggedly identify with particular scenes and evolve with them. There are those who adapt stylistically in order to move from scene, or manage to be part of several at the same time. And then there is Londoner Danny Native aka Altered Natives. He is truly the outsider’s outsider.

DVD/Blu-ray: 23 Seconds to Eternity

Collection capturing the berserk, exhilarating vision of music-art mavericks The KLF

The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).

Album: The Chemical Brothers - For That Beautiful Feeling

★★★★★ THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS - FOR THAT BEAUTIFUL FEELING Longstanding dance duo maintain juggernaut status on mighty tenth

Longstanding dance duo maintain juggernaut status on mighty tenth

The Chemical Brothers are unstoppable. Their live shows are a guaranteed monster good time, redolent of proper old-school rave-ups, but with visual tech from some freaky eye-boggling future. Their last album, 2019’s No Geography, was a total belter. Their latest, their tenth, is also a total belter. They do what they do. But they do it so bloody well.

Album: Georgia - Euphoric

Mononymous producer remains at the beating heart of the dancefloor

For someone predominantly poised at her kit, the mononymous music producer’s return is surprisingly devoid of live drums. Daughter of Leftfield cofounder Neil Barnes, Georgia has made a name for herself as the drummer for artists such as Kwes and Kae Tempest. Her 2019 release Seeking Thrills was “a hymn to British hedonism” with a hefty slice of Robyn-esque pop panache. Last year saw Georgia embrace these stadium-sized singalongs as tour support for LA sister trio Haim.

Album: Kaidi Taitham - The Only Way

Rich dancefloor jazz fusions from enduring Brit mega talent

The broken beat movement, centred on West London around the turn of the millennium, wasn’t super press friendly. Its complex rhythms were eclipsed in the populism stakes by its close cousin UK garage, and serious commentators didn’t really know what to do with a broadly working class, multicultural scene that was aspirational and privileged virtuosic production and musicianship. Indeed there was a distinct inverted snobbery in the refusal refusal to treat it with the respect afforded other electronic music which fit into a scholarly vs “street” dichotomy.