Artist: Pinch
Album: Fabric Live 61
Rating: 
Dubstep artist Pinch is millibars away from genius with this piping hot set at better-than-the-rest London club Fabric. Fusing minimalist House with progressive Techno and post-Dubstep, Pinch creates an energetic and laudable ensemble of tracks with all the tricks and surprises that one would come to expect from one of the UK’s most visionary producers. Both hard-edged and toxic as in Venom (Part 2), rhythmic and engaging as in Uncertain and also downright irritating as in A Case of the Bleeps, this is a mix to either kick off a raucous evening or set the sun on a great night out.
Artist: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Album: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo OST
Rating:
Following on from their success with the score for the Social Network, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver a hauntingly dystopian soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is a sprawling three-hour collection of dark ambient music, both workable as singular tracks and as a long player, although if you listen to this beast in its entirety you may need psychiatric treatment. For those not wishing to expose their brains to three hours of the apocalyptic, I heartily recommend devoting time to The Heretics, An Itch and Pinned and Mounted, and if those tracks are not your cup of tea, you are simply not hard enough for the full lunch.
Artist: Cloud Nothings
Album: Stay Useless
Rating:
Deliberately brilliant band Cloud Nothings have finally tried on a sound that fits. After several likeable LPs that breathed life into your stereo for a few weeks before being cast-out to the purgatory of the half-remembered and not worth digging out box, Stay Useless is an album that will stay… erm,… useful. The band’s real fans would likely castrate me for alluding to a similarity between Cloud Nothings, Vampire Weekend and Green Day, but hey, it’s there and it’s nothing to be ashamed of, not really. Far from constituting purely sophomoric sentiments, this album will appeal to the more discerning amongst us, as well as those whose dinner consists of Cheese on Toast and a half-smoked Benny Hedge Hog.