I’m always just short of reticent to check out whatever discs, albums, releases or assorted ephemera are touted at the end of a calendar year. And a lot of the time this plan doesn’t really leave me wanting. Last year, though, I missed two pretty remarkable instrumental albums by relatively new producers. My bad.

I’m always just short of reticent to check out whatever discs, albums, releases or assorted ephemera are touted at the end of a calendar year. And a lot of the time this plan doesn’t really leave me wanting. Last year, though, I missed two pretty remarkable instrumental albums by relatively new producers. My bad.

Most know Tobacco from Black Moth Super Rainbow, but last year he released a disc via Anticon that put almost everything else to shame. The work with his band can be seen to have some tangential similarities – most just the production. But it’s pretty bloody amusing that Fucked Up Friends was so well received considering the fact that his band doesn’t really work in hip hop world – electro, yes. But for this producer to come from another place entirely and release a superb album would be like Jerry Lewis doing Hamlet. Well, almost.

By contrast, Flying Lotus has been releasing full length albums since his 2006 disc for Plug Research entitled 1983. Unfortunately, judging from the press that the disc received – or lack there of – it might be safe to assume that the fact that Alice Coltrane being his great aunt is just as interesting (that fact would also account for the truncated “Auntie’s Harp”).

Of the two, though, the latter producer seemed to receive far more acclaim. And while I can’t say that it wasn’t warranted, my personal pick between the two would be that of Tobacco’s Fucked Up Friends. While neither album sounds anything close to what could be referred to as organic, Tobacco’s effort seems to be more of a self contained and unified disc.

That’s not to detract from Los Angeles. The hype surrounding this producer is certainly warranted. And on the track following the familial appropriation, Flying Lotus turns in “Testament” which features vocalist Gonja Sufi. For the most part, IDM, down tempo and instrumental hip hop doesn’t benefit from the inclusion of hooks (for me at least). But here, the spacey, distant and overwhelmingly ghostly singing works to engorge the track with something just short of a sedative effect. Of course the very next track, which sports Daedelus’ better half, could have done well to be stripped of artifice and function simply under the auspices of music for music’s sake. It didn’t. But the music represented on Los Angeles is strong enough to over come virtually anything.

Tobacco’s disc by contrast, doesn’t feature any singers – Aesop Rock makes a quick appearance, but that’s about it. In this examination of personnel, though, one needs to figure that Tobacco’s work needs to be more propulsive. And it is. Flying Lotus doesn’t suffer from the fact that nothing he turned in is really a straight banger. And in fact, that’s where the album derives a great deal of its charm from. It is spacey and detached. It’s almost art music. But Tobacco, seemingly, wanted to make people dance for forty minutes straight. And he may well have achieved that.

By no means were these two discs the only notable instrumental (almost) hip hop discs from last year. But no one would be able to refute the fact that nothing else from 2008 was in the same league.