Yobosayo friends! As we approach the end of the year, the monumental task of determining what records are gonna make our end of the year list looms large. With albums still to be released and plenty of disks we’d like to revisit before we really start talking (soy-based substitute) turkey, November tends to be the calm before the storm, a pleasant period of general peace the senior staff enjoys with the understanding that the HQ will soon be ringing with the sounds of bitter argumentation punctuated with the slamming doors and loud, aggressive typing. We take this stuff seriously dear reader, and not to oversell it or anything but with a year as strong as 2013 we expect that this’ll be the toughest top 25 we’ve ever had to hash out. We hope you’re looking as forward to it as we are, in the interim why don’t you enjoy this week’s batch of new songs?

I miss Sascha's Hawaiian shirt look, but I'm still glad he's back.

Neuroticfish, “Silence”
There’s no denying that you had to be there to really understand how ubiquitous Sascha Mario Klein’s trance inflected futurepop was in the club scene in the early 2000s. You couldn’t go out without hearing one or more cuts from Neuroticfish, and despite being dancefloor bangers I find myself weirdly attached to numbers like “The Bomb” and “Velocity” in 2013, as my intensely cathartic reaction to seeing Klein (accompanied by “Cubase-God” Henning Verlage) perform at Resistanz this year will attest. No real news on the release of their new album A Sign of Life yet, but if it’s all jams like “Silence” I won’t be upset. Call it cheesy, call it dated, I don’t much care: as long as the beat is right and the sequences are tight I’ll be feeling it.

Vomito Negro, “Death Sun”
Huh, aside from Gin Devo’s vocals I don’t know that this really sounds like a Vomito Negro track to me. Not that that’s a bad thing; since returning from an 8 year hiatus with 2010’s Skull & Bones the Belgian EBM outfit has been stretching their template, finding new ways to express their nasty, bleak, beat driven body music. This cut (apparently the title track for their 2014 album) is practically a pop tune by their standards, less concerned with attacking the listener than getting them to move god damn it. An interesting turn from an act who are having something of a late career renaissance.

Cryo, “Believer (Remix)”
I was all over In Your Eyes, the first single from Cryo’s soon to be released album Retropia. This is the sort of thing I expect from them, dancefloor tunes that refer to classic body music while acknowledging the work that artists like Covenant have done in the genre’s more recent history. Less spacey and more direct than a lot of the songs on their last LP (keeping in mind that this is a remix), I’m curious to see if Cryo are splitting the difference between complexity and accessibility. We’ll need to wait ’til 2014 to find out!

Pouppée Fabrikk, “H8 U (Blush Response remix)”
The comeback record from Pouppée Fabrikk was pretty raw and uncompromising, not unexpectedly as the cult Swedish act have usually been known for grit and anger more than polish. The “Death to False EBM” vibe of that record notwithstanding, PF have sought out some interesting remixers for their latest single, including Norwegian club mavens Kant Kino, Aesthetische and North American analogue synth industrialist Joey Blush. The Blush Response mix is something of a departure from the original cut, swapping out the looping aggression of the original for a distinct build and breakdown format, with a pretty ridiculous drum breakdown to cap it off. Nice meeting of the minds here, check the single out over on Bandcamp.

Blac Kolor, “Kold”
Basic Unit Productions is dropping bombs left and right as we approach the end of the year. Aside from wicked good singles from Div|der and R010R, we get this handy slice of beats, bass and sirens from Blac Kolor, the instrumental act who make a case for “techno body music” being an actual thing worth caring about. With remixes by Square7 and Liebknecht, this single release makes for a nice capper for BK, whose Range EP you may recall we enjoyed.