Factory Floor
Fall Back (DFA)
People say there is no confrontation, no truth in modern music. Those people didn't see Factory Floor at Manchester's Warehouse Project in October. Playing a night apparently designed to anoint Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs as the new Calvin Harris, they arrived on stage at 3am and didn't say a word as, hidden in the shadows, they emitted dark waves of analogue techno that, essentially, emptied the main room. It was awesome, if a little surprising, given that – like early New Order, Ben Klock or Miss Kittin – Fall Back trades in rippling, octave-jumping electro that could make the dead dance. Yes, it sounds bleak, but isn't life? Others ask you to throw your hands in the air; Factory Floor channel angry despair.
Barker & Baumecker
Crows (Blawan Remix) (Ostgut Ton)
This Barnsley versus Berlin bout goes the full 10, as tattooed Brit techno force Blawan rips Sam Barker and Andreas Baumecker a new one. On the Transsektoral album, Crows was the odd, quasi-ambient runt of B&B's tech-garage litter, but Blawan rebuilds it as a clonking stomp-monster that not only demands you report to the dancefloor, but which, in its hovering spectral melodies and late burst of warped, angelic sighs, is quietly beautiful.
FrYars
In My Arms (679 Recordings)
Back in the day (ie 2008), Benjamin Garrett was electropop's Evelyn Waugh. He wrote sour little songs, sung in a withering, plummy accent; typical subject matter: a professor's affair with a Hungarian student is exposed, in a moment of low farce, by some confusion over a bottle of wine. It was ludicrous stuff, but Garrett had an acid turn of phrase and his DIY tunes boasted neat hooks. So what happened? (Apart from FrYars not selling any records first time around.) This comeback is all mid-Atlantic vowels and banal lyrics about love; glossy pop underpinned by a little skittish, neutered electronica. It is frightfully dull, old bean.
The Men
Electric (Sacred Bones)
Poor old guitar music. Is it back? Does anyone give a toss? If it must exist, best that it all sounds like this. That is, like a Ramones demo or a Strokes B-side that ramma-lamma-ding-dongs along in 3min 10secs flat. It is a distant, dying echo of true greatness; an irrelevance ultimately, but it will push your buttons, a bit.
Scrufizzer
Rap Rave (Ministry Of Sound)
Not, sadly, young London rising up against David Guetta's rap-rave dictatorship, but 22-year-old Romani Lorenzo informing us, woodenly, that, "when I rap, you rave". The grime MC with a "fizzy flow" (sounds painful) achieves a winning, weightless momentum in the verses, but for all his strangulated similarities to Dizzie, for all Rap Rave's revving bass, it's tame. In 2013, those Dominator-style Hoover riffs sound comical, not cataclysmic.
