Adele Returns To The Top Of The ARIA Chart

Adele returns to number one in 2012, in this week’s uninspiring (apart from Foster The People) ARIA chart.

The queen of the chart in 2011 has reclaimed her throne in 2012, 21 returning to number one this week. It’s a flashback all around (not least due to the dearth of new releases): LMFAO at number two, Reece Mastin at three, Coldplay at four and Bruno Mars at five.

Triplej’s Like a Version, Gotye’s Making Mirrors and the Black Keys shoot back up to the next three spots, with One Direction and Florence + The Machine rounding out the top ten.

The only new entries are the Chipwrecked soundtrack at 42 and Skrillex’s Bangarang EP at 44.

Unsurprisingly, Buble’s Christmas album plummeted from number one last week to number 29, but that still means people were buying it in the week after Christmas.

LMFAO’s ‘Sexy And I Know It’ retains the top spot on the Singles Chart.

But the big story is Foster The People’s incessant ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ single is finally all the way up at number two, 15 months since its initial release.

Can they make it to number one? We’ll have to wait until next week.

Electronic dance music hits a groove

Will 2012 be the year for electronic dance music?

With dubstep artist Skrillex nabbing five Grammy Award nominations and superstar DJ deadmau5 landing three, all indicators say yes.

“Skrillex is a purely electronic artist, and getting a best-new-artist nomination is Grammy’s way of acknowledging the rise of EDM (electronic dance music),” says Keith Caulfield, associate director of charts at Billboard. The awards “have overlooked EDM artists in the past, like David Guetta and Moby. Skrillex is the face of all EDM at the Grammys.”

Who is Skrillex? With his eerie, spine-tingling samples and grinding bass lines, 23-year-old Sonny Moore — a diminutive, bespectacled Los Angeles-based DJ and producer — is the undeniable leader of dubstep.

“What makes this an incredible achievement is that he has been so successful by being off the radar,” Caulfield says. “Sure, kids know who he is, dance fans know him.” But when the awards show rolls around Feb. 12, “your average music fan won’t have the foggiest idea who he is.”

EDM is having its moment, says electronica pioneer Moby, who broke through to mainstream audiences in 1999 with album Play, which sold 3 million copies.

“For pop stars, their main currency is youth and the record label. For rock stars, their currency is songwriting and their ability to play live,” Moby says. “Electronic music artists are only as good as the last record they played, and their ability to play other people’s records. Luckily, there are a lot of good records out there.”

Last summer yielded a bumper crop of electronic dance festivals, from Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, which pulled in 250,000 attendees, to Live Nation-backed IDentity, the first electronica touring festival, which made 20 stops. Dozens more such fests are slated for 2012.

“If you go to a rock concert, there are four people standing onstage playing songs that sound nice,” Moby says. “You go see Skrillex or deadmau5 live, and there’s a huge production value, the lights, the sound. It’s hard not to be impressed.”

The audience for such spectacles is almost certain to get bigger.

“Pop music has become so aggressively uptempo, when people go to search for more of this kind of music, they’re discovering this whole world that exists,” Caulfield says.

Girls LOVE Skrillex!

I love girls and skrillex!

Skrillex gleefully mashes up genres on seven-song Bangarang EP

Bangarang (Warner)

Okay, so either Skrillex is dubstep but is bastardizing the style to his own ends, or he’s not dubstep at all, right? Or maybe he’s the saviour of the genre, singlehandedly responsible for lifting it out of the obscurity of the electronica underground and into the mainstream. If these seem like rather meaningless talking points, that’s because they are, but that hasn’t stopped the type of geeks who frequent Internet message boards from either crucifying Sonny Moore or venerating him.

Moore probably doesn’t have much time to worry about how his music is labelled; he’s too busy racking up Grammy nominations and playing sold-out shows to pay much attention to his detractors. Oh, and recording, too. The seven-song Bangarang is the fourth Skrillex EP in less than two years, and his first full-length album, Voltage , is slated for release later this month.

It should be interesting to see where Moore takes things, because while Bangarang shows off the impressive range of his musical influences, it also hints at the limitations of his own creative impulses. The most intriguing track is “Breakn’ a Sweat”, a collaboration with members of the Doors that, despite boasting a signature spiralling organ part from Ray Manzarek, sounds very little like anything Jim Morrison would recognize. “Kyoto” is a mind-melting mix of industrial-strength distorted chords, Far East synth lines, and hard-core rap (courtesy of L.A. indie hip-popper Sirah). “Right on Time”, coproduced by 12 th Planet and Kill the Noise, revs up like a ’90s trance-techno cut but then never quite turns into one.

While it’s clear that former hardcore kid Moore is comfortable mashing up genres with all the gleeful abandon of Girl Talk, he tends to rely on the same few techniques to juice up his tracks. At some point in just about every song, the rhythm breaks down to the same simple cut-time beat to which Moore wobbles the shit out of everything until it sounds like a pleasure droid having a grand mal seizure. This brain-shaking oscillation is a fun, and effective trick, but it’s quickly becoming a cliché, which should be anathema to an obviously forward-thinking artist like Skrillex.