A concept album that sticks straitjacket tight to its concept throughout, Shobaleader One: d'Demonstrator is a record of throwback electronic rock, with an R&B edge and synthesized vocals, performed by a hooded band - and if Daft Punk springs to mind, it should. After a record of solo bass (titled Solo Electric Bass, Vol. 1), Squarepusher's Tom Jenkinson soon unveiled his next project: the masked foursome named Shobaleader One. (Jenkinson's claims that the group consists of real people is certainly possible, but the omnipresent masks make one wonder if the producer is playing puppetmaster here.) A combination of stark electro and swinging funk, most tracks featuring vocals, the album will have listeners thinking of Daft Punk one minute and stark '80s television themes the next (read Knight Rider)…

Not long into the ceaseless promotional parade for Born This Way, Lady Gaga’s second full-length record and easily the most anticipated record of the 2010s, a certain sense of inevitability crept into play. It was inevitable that Born This Way would be an escalation of The Fame, it was inevitable that Gaga would go where others feared to tread, it was inevitable that it would be bigger than any other record thrown down in 2011, both in its scale and success…

LFO are one of the most influential dance acts to come out of the UK. Signed to Warp over two decades ago on the strength of a few scrappy demos, their sound is still as fresh today as it was in warehouse parties of the early nineties. Frequencies has influenced multiple producers, DJs and bands throughout the years, and the original album charted worldwide and gained Top 40 placement in the UK. It includes the cult dance floor filler ''LFO,'' which achieved a number twelve chart position in the UK. LFO originally released Frequencies in 1991, an album that not only plays a crucial part in Warp's history - but also represents a pivotal moment for the British rave movement.

Flash was the DJ and the Furious Five were the best multiple rappers around, moving from the music's low-rent dance origins (it was Flash who began cutting in repeated portions of other records) and party spirit to the "message" approach that took over in the mid 80s, prefigured in "The Message." Much of what came later, started here.

Although Autobahn was a left-field masterpiece, Trans-Europe Express is often cited as perhaps the archetypal (and most accessible) Kraftwerk album. Melodic themes are repeated often and occasionally interwoven over deliberate, chugging beats, sometimes with manipulated vocals; the effect is mechanical yet hypnotic…

The Man-Machine is closer to the sound and style that would define early new wave electro-pop – less minimalistic in its arrangements and more complex and danceable in its underlying rhythms…

A concept album exploring themes of broadcast communications, Radio-Activity marked Kraftwerk's return to more obtuse territory, extensively utilizing static, oscillators, and even Cage-like moments of silence to approximate the sense of radio transmission; a pivotal record in the group's continuing development, the title track – the first they ever recorded in English – is their most fully realized electro-pop effort to date, while "The Voice of Energy" precipitates the robot voice so crucial to their subsequent work.

Although Kraftwerk's first three albums were groundbreaking in their own right, Autobahn is where the group's hypnotic electronic pulse genuinely came into its own. The main difference between Autobahn and its predecessors is how it develops an insistent, propulsive pulse that makes the repeated rhythms and riffs of the shimmering electronic keyboards and trance-like guitars all the more hypnotizing…