That Fly Shit

You have probably heard about Blakroc by now - an impressive collaboration between the Black Keys, Damon Dash, and a slew of hip hop artists. Mos Def, Jim Jones, Rza, Raekwon, Noe and others provide the vocals over some truly bluesed out Black Keys tunes. Some songs are better than others, but Raekwon absolutely murders this track. It's two and a half minutes of straight free flow rhyming, no chorus, no refrain.

L-I-V-I-N

Bang this



and this....

Best of the Rest

Merry Christmas everyone, and thanks for reading our silly little blog. Instead of posting my Top 5 of the past year (like you all really care what order I have Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, and Phoenix in, right? 2009 should be known as the year of completely uninteresting year-end lists), I went back to find 5 standout albums of the past year which I've been meaning to post but never got around to. So here they are, the top 5 least-heard of 2009:

Lee Fields & The Expressions - My World

Soul record of the year. Lee Fields connects all of the dots between Gaye, Mayfield, Winehouse, and Lidell. True, he gets some help from his friends - a band made up of Budos, El Michel, and Menahan members - but rather than attempt to force an update of his 70's sound, they cede the floor completely to his James Brown swagger and Otis Redding strain. Yeah, it's that good. Also, some of you who've been bumping J Cole's mixtape might hear some familiar things, especially on track 5...



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Platinum Pied Pipers - Abundance

From old to neo-soul, the Platinum Pied Pipers are a couple of Detroit producers who have created the first real essential R&B album of the millennium. Though the singing is just OK, it's saved by the expansive and adventurous production, where electronic and acoustic sounds don't so much blend as spar as the tracks go on. Forward-thinking and almost too rich, you can chew on this one for months and months and still not really figure it out. The black Portishead? The urban Fleet Foxes? The first Andre 3000 tribute band? Yeah, it's something like that.



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Foreign Born - Person To Person

So here's a unique story: band moves to L.A. to make it big, ends up writing a sunny pop album about all of the beautiful/ugly contradictions of SoCal life. But wait, you guys, Foreign Born is different. Not in any big way, really...or even any noticeable way. It just sticks in ways and in places other bands don't. Think of the first Weezer album, or Bloc Party, or Interpol. There's no real reason these bands should have risen above the rest, but we're all in agreement that they should've. Foreign Born is like that.



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Phantogram - Eyelid Movies

They would've gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those damn kids. Phantogram, a boy/girl duo from Saratoga Springs, NY, put out a flawless album of electro minimalism, only to have a bunch of British teenagers totally upstage them and their sound. However, Phantogram's own vibe - more hip-hop than XX, and way dancier - deserves its own buzz. They say they aim to be the halfway point between Serge Gainsbourg and J Dilla, and if that doesn't get you to listen, you should probably just leave.



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Paul White - The Strange Dreams of Paul White

This last one is for all the beatheads out there. Paul White is a whitehot producer out of Britain that combines the sampling skill and aesthetic of Madlib and Flying Lotus with the musical ear and weird-love of RJD2. The 21 beats on his debut are some of the most innovative music hip-hop made in 2009. Yeah, as the album title says it's really really strange, but the strangest thing about it is how addicting it is - whenever I put this on I can almost never take it off, because each track is so bizarrely fascinating. Get this man a rapper immediately.



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No Depression

Both lyrically and musically, this album provides everything one might expect from a 2009 collaboration between Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary. Purists might be more inclined to compare Buddy and Julie Miller's Written in Chalk, No Depression's 2009 Album of the Year, to a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris duet.

It's really up to you. This isn't the married couple's first record together. It is, however, in the ultimate test of it's worth, the first one I've ever heard. In hard economic times, people inevitably yearn for a return to a past unsullied by compromise, greed and complexity. Check out these lyrics from the opening track:

Take me back when times were hard but we didn't know it
If we ate it we had to grow it
Take me back when all we could afford was laughter
And two mules instead of a tractor
Take me back again

Click here to go back again...

Tune Up

Ski feat. Mos Def-Taxi from Creative Control on Vimeo.

Mos Def is all the way back.

As an addition - this video was pulled from Dame Dash's latest project, creativecontrol.tv. I highly, highly recommend poking around this site a bit. The Ski beatz under shows, Mos Def's channel, the Sessions @ DD172. I've never thought Dame Dash was a visionary by any means, more business man than anything. But he's founded this gallery/studio DD172 and this website to go along side it. It's like hip hop is having its hippy, psychedelic exploration period, but in the year 2009 with Dame Dash at the center, trying to make something a little more substantial and forward looking. It's an interesting thing, he's really just trying to get people together and get them to make their music and generate ideas. Mos Def is clearly perfect for this as it seems he has rhythm, verses, beats and talent coming out of every pore. Plus it seems getting high on camera is heavily encouraged.

Another gem from Creative + Control

The Autobiography from Creative Control on Vimeo

A Mos Def track from the Ski Beatz mixtape

Banging Around

Some albums I've been meaning to throw up here.



The XX is a British band which has been on the radar for a couple months. Impressive album from a young band. Reserved, intricate - they push limits at just the right moments.They have a true touch for when to ease in and when to lay it on. They have a lot of the funky syncopated rhythms of bands like Phoenix, but the guitar is a dead ringer for Modest Mouse and the echoey, hollowed out sounds remind me a great deal of the Walkmen. But put that all together with a female lead vocalist, some dark lyricism and extremely particular production.



Second up The Dodos. Three guys (used to be two until they added a vibraphone player) with a propensity for African polyrhythms and folk music. It's a nice combination to say the least. You might say, well isn't that just Vampire Weekend without the amps? No, because the Dodos have been around longer than Vampire Weekend. So there.



Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros have that huge, full stage Polyphonic Spree kind of thing going on. Except without the weird hippy cult aspect and their music is better. It's more Arcade Fire, if the Arcade Fire came from LA instead of Canada. It's a lot brighter, sunnier - very conducive to trips across the desert and singing at loud volumes. Fun tunes.



Last but not least - Bear in Heaven has released a pretty overwhelming album. The music is half Interpol, half My Bloody Valentine. There are very poignant, spare sounds that kind of punctuate the songs, but they come jumping out from behind a big wall of sound. It makes for an unusual mix - you would think the subtle, ambient stuff would get lost, but it manages to stand alone in its way until they decide it's time to put everything together, and then the whole thing just knocks you over. It's intimidating.

The xx
The Dodos - Time to Die
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - From Below
Bear in Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth

Something for the Holidays

Way Trippier than Melville

You're looking at the self-titled debut album of Moby Grape, the 1967 San Francisco critical darlings that time seems to have forgot. As one commenter put it, "The Grape's saga is one of squandered potential, absurdly misguided decisions, bad-luck, blunders and excruciating heartbreak, all set to the tune of some of the greatest rock and roll ever to emerge from San Francisco. Moby Grape could have had it all, but they ended up with nothing, and less."

This album is equal parts CSNY, late-1990's Beck and 60's Motown. I realize how ridiculous that sounds but it just flat out has to be heard. The only "hit" on here is a song called Omaha which the Boss has been known to cover occasionally and which charted all the way up to #88. Other standouts include "Come in the Morning," "Hey Grandma," and the beautifully short ballad "Naked, If I Want To" (only 58 seconds).

Accolade-wise, the rock press has always been and continues to be very kind to both the band and in particular this album, which ranked #121 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The band's become more well known of late for in-fighting and litigation, but it's worth noting that they did in fact perform at the infamous 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, during which The Who smashed their instruments and Hendrix notoriously lit his guitar on fire during an odd sacrificial ritual.

Round 2

I threw this up here a few months back, but DC's main MC has just released his debut album and Wale is not going to miss his shot. This guy has been grinding it out in DC for years and he definitely has something to prove. Prove it he does. He draws a bit more from the Lupe Fiasco school of hip hop - smoother story-telling, somewhat more conscientious and abstract - than from the traditional top 40 radio stuff. But he has his moments of flashy cars and fashion labels and whatnot. Some lyricists just sound like they're working for it - he does not. On Mirrors in particular, you are with him every step of the way, same on Shades. Very tight, clean stuff with some excellent production from folks like Mark Ronson, TV on the Radio, and Pharrell. The backup lyrics on Pretty Girls is straight 70s smooth jazz, while Shades takes me right to a Mary J Blige 90s track - but it's all current, fresh and funky as hell. You don't hear a lot of hip hop artists working with staccato, syncopation and really using the off beats to their advantage, but he really plays with pacing, pauses and open space. It's impressive - dude has a style.







Attention Deficit

tUnE-YaRdS

(The third and fourth tracks will hook you)

I have been to a few live shows in my time. I generally avoid the opening act - by and large this has been an appropriate plan of action. There have been a few exceptions - the Cool Kids, Fujiya and Miyagi. tUnE-YaRdS takes the cake. Not only was this the best opening act I have ever seen - the Dirty Projectors had an extremely tough act to follow, they may have come up short. tUnE-YaRds is essentially just Merrill Garbus - a woman with a voice so incomprehensible, you actually spend a lot of time trying to understand where all those sounds come from. During the set, you could see the audience go from, "What the fuck is this," to "Wow, who the fuck is this?

To begin with, her voice is a cross between Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin and Fela Kuti (with some Prince thrown in for good measure). She borrows a lot from African and Reggae traditions in her singing. But when you listen to this music you absolutely must keep one thing in mind - she is the ONLY one singing, producing, percussing, strumming. She does the whole thing. To watch live is essentially to watch her record the album anew. She sings some background vocals and records them, then does some percussion and records it, then adds a little something oddball and records it, then mixes it all together and the song begins. It's nuts. Not to mention, wait for it, her main instrument is an ELECTRIFIED UKULELE. Not only does she play it magnificently, but you find yourself wondering why she was the first to think of it. To be fair, she has a bassist, but he is really just a dude that stands in the background.

Unfortunately the album, which she recorded herself on a digital voice recorder, does not nearly compare to the live version. With that in mind though, I cannot say enough about the live experience. Blew my mind.

With that in mind: More

Boy Crisis

Courtesy of Josh Holland

"As the story goes, sometime around the summer solstice of 1982, a meeting was called in the secret laboratories located below the throbbing floors of Studio 54. Among the attendees were Rick James, David Bowie, Giorgio Moroder, ESG, Herbie Hancock, Oates (Hall was on a ski trip), a young Gary Numan, and a 7-foot robot controlled from space by Afrika Bambaataa. According to legend, the meeting lasted over 25 days, because this consortium of musical geniuses was there for one unprecedented reason: to breed the greatest pop band of all time. With the help of some young Dutch geneticists, the Consortium collected each member's DNA and created specific "genetic cocktails." These were then spliced into five embryos that would soon bloom into the five cutest babies the world had ever seen. The babies soon turned into boys, and the boys to men, and then back to boys again, and then slowly into young adults, which is about when they met at the Wesleyan Pop Conservatory in Connecticut, USA (all part of the Consortium's plan). These five were Tal Rozen, Victor Vazquez, Alex Kestner, Owen Roberts, and Lee Pender (in order of height, ascending), and now, they are Boy Crisis. One part funk, two parts electrofunk, and ten parts electrosexfunk, Boy Crisis is here to make sure that all your parts feel like grooving, whether they want to or not. Each song is a 3-minute ritual to the Gods of Pop, like Prince and Quincy Jones (the band was at one point named Princey Jones), but they also sacrifice to a variety of Muses, like Tom Tom Club, Sade, and KC and the Sunshine Band."

Electric Feel

Probably nothing can sum up my love/hate relationship with Jay Electronica better than the short video above, a teaser for a track with Just Blaze off of his ever-forthcoming debut. For the first 45 seconds, it's the most pretentious thing hip-hop has ever produced, like a black Hansel from Zoolander inserted into a Wes Anderson film. I mean, really?

Then the beat goes full-retard at :46 and I forget where my face is.

Then Jay-E materializes out of the ether and tears it open with 4 bars that bleed in a way rap never does, with genuine vulnerability and uncertainty.

Then, just as I'm wrapping my head around it, around all of the dizzying possibility just laid in my lap in the space of a minute in a half, it's over.

So it is with the whole of Jay's career, a series of false starts that are all the more infuriating for their ineffable brilliance. The dude is a total enigma, disappearing for months at a time only to resurface with a track so untouchable, so right, that all the hype in the world doesn't seem like enough. Then, like clockwork, he pulls a Chappelle and flees. Such talent, such a tease.

In an era when every other rapper is using the internet to bury their fans with every half-baked idea that enters their mind (hi Weezy), Jay-E has slowly and methodically brought the entire blogosphere to a fever pitch. And for good reason - nobody in rap has ever set the lyrical bar as high as he does. He spits with an insatiable curiosity that this incurious genre has never seen before, a pleading, an effort, an exploding in every direction that reminds me of no one else. All of which means this: Jay Electronica might be the first rapper to be bigger than hip hop, or he might never release another song in his life. He’s 4 bars in and all we can do is wait.

Download the "What the F*ck is a Jay Electronica" Mixtape here

Lo-Fi Is Good for the Soul

Ducktails - Various Songs from Chocolate Bobka on Vimeo.

Apparently there is no shortage of these dudes making warm, worn-in, cassettes full of summer psychedelia and mellowed-out surf rock. This one comes from Matthew Mondanile, otherwise known as Ducktails. He's got his fingers in various projects, but it all boils down to another dude who lives with his folks and makes music all day that sounds like someone poured sun over everything and played it on an old sneaker. And damn is it good. Like Washed Out, Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, this guy just simply does his thing on this album. His stuff is a bit more raw and pared down than some of the others, and, as a result, has more in common with bands like Explosions in the Sky or Of Montreal than some of his other contemporaries - less synth, more guitar pedals. The instrumentation is basic, vocals are limited, but he just rides the sounds, pours on the echos and feedback and it all turns out quite wonderfully. One of the more soothing records I've heard in a long time.

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A Postcard from Cali

That's Cali in Columbia, a city known as "the salsa capital of the world". After some successful experiments in 70's American funk, Jamaican dub, and Caribbean island music, British producer Quantic decided in 2007 to move there and start his musical career over, recruiting a band of regional musicians for a group he called "Combo Barbaro", adopting the endearing term Europeans use for people of the Americas.

"Tradition in Transition", his first record with the group, is interesting for the ways it engages with its surroundings. What continues to separate Quantic from, say, Buena Vista Social Club, is his refusal to be swallowed whole by his influences. Though the music here is shaded by different latin genres, it retains a definite North American groove and feel throughout. Rather than trying to be any realistic representation of Columbian music and Columbian life, it portrays his very skewed fantasy of it, and that proves to be far more intoxicating. This is so goddamn good, you guys.

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Ya'll Order the Pizza?

Please be forewarned, this is a bluegrass post perhaps like none ever before to the Bangers, so if you're turned off by harmony vocals, mandolin, upright bass and alot of lead guitar, skip above or below. If this kind of stuff switches you to on, prepare to ejaculate like Sting with Megan Fox after a session with the Maharishi. (If that made no sense, see here. If it still doesn't make sense, blame it on the east coast/west coast rap feud [or Suge Knight.])

As legend goes, at some point in the early 1990s, a pizza delivery man stole a cassette tape containing a momentous yet seemingly impromptu jam session between Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, his longtime mandolin player and muse David Grisman, and Garcia's friend, guitarist Tony Rice. The recordings were made in February of 1993, just over a year before Garcia's untimely death (Who could have seen that coming? He looked so healthy.)

All joking aside, this album is extremely unique in a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot kinda way. Basically, the album leaked, became fodder for Deadhead tape traders and then, over a decade after it was recorded, finally saw an official release and remastering by Grisman. There are mistakes amidst the conversations, but the most unbelievable thing about this recording, and please accept my apologies if I sound sappy, is its heart and soul. These are the intimate recordings of an incredibly epic, prolific guitarist playing the music he first fell in love with in the company of a few close friends. Truly incomparable.

Highlights include "Shady Grove," "House of the Rising Sun," Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," and Miles Davis' "So What." I think it's more than ironic that the trio covered Miles, given the fact that I consider this gem to be the closest to jazz that bluegrass music has ever come. Enjoy.

Hot Tracks

Here's a quick hit for you all. I posted about The Cool Kids way back when they were opening for MIA. Turns out they're a Chicago band (and now that I live here, I feel compelled to represent) and have teamed up with another local crew, Hey Champ who recently toured with Lupe Fiasco. Many of you know our own MW Levy, who may or may not know the Hey Champ boys. Anywho...this shit is smoothed out. It's pretty nice to see some local bands with a little bit of hype putting their heads together and helping each other out. Plus they both earn points for having great band names.

Fresh Out Da Pen

Gucci Mane just got out of jail and he is wasting NO time. He just released a 3-part mixtape series: The Cold Wars. The mixtapes are basically the tease for an upcoming 30-track album. And this is after an already released mixtape with Shawty Lo and another planned for around Halloween. This makes me tired just thinking about it. I can't say I've been pining for Gucci Mane's release, but he has a track with Big Boi that is worth your time. A friend passed it along, and I had to share.

This will get you to the mixtapes.



And in case that weren't enough...Big Boi has signed with Def Jam and will soon be releasing Sir Lucious Left Foot. A tease below.

If Nintendo Produced Albums...

This is what they would sound like. No joke though, this album is somewhere between house/funk and Asteroids. This should have been the soundtrack for that movie the Wizard starring Fred Savage. I posted a Neon Indian video a few weeks back. The song was a teaser for what is really a fine album. Full of oddities and geeked out little DJ tricks, the music is pretty damned fun.

Enjoy

It Came From Africa

You couldn't help but feel a little sorry for Vampire Weekend. Here they were, a bunch of 20 year olds from Columbia who listened to a couple Afrobeat records and were inspired to write a crossover pop album, and almost immediately they were cruxified for it. The accusations ranged from the ludicrous ("how dare smart white people play soweto") to the legitimate ("how dare smart white people retread the Talking Heads"), but beyond that the uproar raised a lot of interesting questions around authenticity and artistry, and which music belongs to who. That argument has only gotten more complex as we barrel through the internet age, and artists like M.I.A. and Bande do Role assert their regional identities at the same time as artists like Santigold and Diplo appropriate them.

With this ongoing battle as backdrop, The Very Best have arrived to provide an argument of their own. Formed in London when two DJs walked into a used furniture store and discovered the Malawian owner of the store could actually sing his ass off, they released a mixtape last year that was met with near-universal acclaim. The key to their success is an inversion of a well-worn formula: instead of cross-polinating African textures and rhythms with pop songs, ala Graceland or the aforementioned Vampires, they've lifted all the sounds of modern western music and molded them to fit traditional African song structures. Though the energy and originality of the music speaks for itself, the inclusion of both Ezra Koenig of VW and M.I.A. on their debut LP drives home the point: true music is boundless.





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Similar in approach but totally different in genre, the BLK JKS are an indie rock band from Johannesburg that deserve way more ears than they're currently getting. Discovered by Diplo (who else?) on a 2008 trip to South Africa, they remind me either of TVotR covering Rusted Root, or Mars Volta backing up Santana, depending on the song. Which is to say: WTF.

BLK JKS enlisted our old friends the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble for their debut, and, like TVotR before them, the "wall of sound" school of production wails about as often as it wears. When they wail, like on opener "Molalatladi", the Afroelectric storm rains down with unopposible force and everything from the warble in the lead singer's voice to the ska-like guitar flicks seems to pulsate with the same rhythm. But unlike their Brooklyn brethren, BLK JKS haven't yet figured out how to maintain the tension while dialing down the tempo, as "Standby" blandly proves. Still, there seems to be something effortlessly natural about the Prog&Beats combination that the BLK JKS are advancing, and if they're given more time to refine it, they might arrive somewhere neither their home country nor their adopted one could've imagined.

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Dub Trio - Exploring the Dangers of

These dudes are a Brooklyn supergroup pounding out legit King Tubby style dub. The drummer toured with The Fugees, Stu Brooks is G Units bass player, and DP plays guitar for Mos and Common. Basically, they're highly coveted musicians. And its no wonder, cause the three of them make this shit sound silky smooth, staying true to the dub sound with nothing more than looping effects and their respective instruments. Its tight. This is their debut from 03, which is super laid back and just plain dope. Their last record with Mike Patton's label Ipecac is a metal/dub blend, which is in many ways more impressive, but probably a little harder to get into for most. That being said, this record is just silly good. If you get a chance to see these dudes live, do not miss it.

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