Right, as this is (probably) the last album I’m going to review this year, best make it a good one. A good album, I mean. That the review won’t be any good is “a given”. If there is a band which sounds more like the logical conclusion of 2009’s hypnagogic and hauntological strands than Oneohtrix Point Never, then I haven’t heard them. Which of course means that Oneohtrix Point Never are at once achingly now, and yet sound painfully like they are from another era entirely. The early 1980s, specifically. Rifts collects together a trilogy of limited-run LPs that Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, released on the No Fun and Arbor labels over the last year, adding a good shake of rarities from other sources. I already own the Zones Without People LP, which came with an insert of brightly coloured images, crude vector drawings of people, landscapes and ”“ of course ”“ cassettes. This is Lopatin’s shamelessly retro-futurist world, full of glistening synths which at their best (as on the glorious 'Zones Without People' or 'Russian Mind' title tracks) evoke the soundtracks to computer games, or themes to wildly-optimistic technology television shows from the 1980s. However, this technological fascination is combined with a typically hypnagogic interest in the natural world, running water and bird song keeping this grounded on earth whenever the phaser-bleeps of something like 'Physical Memories' threaten to rocket it spacewards. The time-eroded blurry memories can appear to emanate from some darker recesses of the mind, with a piece like 'Months' sounding like an extended, beat-free introduction to something vaguely sinister by Boards Of Canada.Despite not being conceived as such, Rifts feels like the last great album of 2009. Or of 1982.Tickets for Oneohtrix Point Never’s London show with Carlos Giffoni next March can be purchased from We Got Tickets.This review originally appeared on Mapsadaisical blog