Did they just…? I think they did… I mean… really? Yes, ok, yes, they did. Equinox Records has a sticker on One Year & A Day: A Sound Expo­sure Vol. 2, their new com­pi­la­tion, that reads “the self-appointed album of the year.” And…it’s actu­ally true. Their pre­vi­ous label com­pi­la­tion was the fan­tas­tic Wel­come to the Neo Golden Age, which brought this pre­vi­ously vinyl only label a bit wider spread atten­tion. It’s a col­lec­tion of music I still lis­ten to with great envy. Not to men­tion, they went all out with a hard­back book style pack­ag­ing scheme (as they do for Vol. 2 here). One Year & A Day started out with the lim­ited vinyl/mp3 down­load The 5 Inch Files, a short set of short tracks. It was a great lit­tle teaser to what has come before us now.

The full blown com­pi­la­tion album, though, is an epic and var­ied fun house of music. At times melan­choly, fre­quently blis­ter­ing, it’s punc­tu­ated by a few moments of humor as well. How­ever, the most defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of it is how shock­ingly orig­i­nal it sounds for a pre­dom­i­nately “instru­men­tal hip-hop” com­pi­la­tion. There are no loops of funk drums or laid-back crackly rhodes sam­ples here. What we are treated to is far more tex­tural and futur­is­tic, even while stretch­ing into the psy­che rock past for much of it’s influ­ence. The first orig­i­nal thing about this com­pi­la­tion is the bril­liant open­ing theme, the 1972 com­po­si­tion, “A Year and A Day (Meta­mor­pho­sis),” by The Ped­dlers with the Lon­don Phil­har­monic and Roy Philips singing. It’s such an odd way to open this col­lec­tion, it made me sit up and take a bit more notice the first time I put it on. I wasn’t expect­ing the sym­phonic, light, and beau­ti­ful track to be the intro to what I fig­ured would be some qual­ity beats and elec­tron­ics. Mov­ing along, we get to Free The Robot’s “Times Like This,” a ver­i­ta­ble whirl­wind of snare rolls and infec­tious gui­tar. Fans of DJ Shadow would go weak in the knees for this track. I don’t know too much about this band, but it seems like this is some­what of an odd­ity for them. Nonethe­less, it’s astound­ing. 2econd Class Citizen’s “Wish­ing Well (Re-Wyred Mix)” shows just why his early music was a main­stay on the Rhythm Incur­sions radio show, a lovely blend of beats, gui­tar, and impec­ca­ble song­writ­ing. Equinox vet­eran Arc­sin shows up with a cover of that crate digger’s fave “Beau­ti­ful Scar­let,” trans­form­ing it into a drum based psych-hop track. You’ll rec­og­nize the song from which it’s cov­ered by appear­ances on Com­mon­wealth Kids and Diplo’s “Summer’s Gonna Hurt You.” And then we come to Dead­pan Darling’s “Laugh Track,” a song that sits astride the mid­dle of this com­pi­la­tion like some mag­nif­i­cent rough beast, defy­ing expla­na­tion, but strik­ing a res­o­nant chord deep within the lis­tener. The pro­duc­ers are Blue Sky Black Death, with the maudlin singing of Ceschi Ramos. This utterly per­fect pro­duc­tion is a lilt­ing melody, deep bass, and com­pletely inven­tive lyrics. I promise you won’t be expect­ing this one.… it just has to be heard.

All in all, this comp does exactly what it says on the sticker: it self-appoints itself album of the year by sheer qual­ity alone. Highly rec­om­mended.
The 5 Inch Files (zip — mp3s)
Clips of all tracks (mp3)