recent picks

alright, here's a cut and dry list of new downloads. i'm sure i've missed a few and there may be some repeats form earlier posts, just going thru my downloads list:

johann johannsson - fordlandia
- haven't listened to yet, but if you like his IBM record...

califone - deceleration one
- mostly instrumental, more experimental than their folk/country roots

the gaslight anthem - the '59 sound
- got good reviews, but it hasn't stuck with me. rather poppy.

carolina chocolate drops - dona got a ramblin' mind
- frenetic bluegrass, a bit repetitive/ redundant. i thought the first two songs were the same on first listen.

crooked still - shaken by a low sound
- slick-production bluegrass. "ain't no grave" is a standout track, otherwise a bit meh.

collections of colonies of bees - customer
- instrumental. highly recommended.

illa j - yancey boys
- j dilla's youngest brother. keeps the jazz/rhyme style alive.

enrique villegas - encuentro
- solid mid-60's bop

famous l. renfroe - children
- a "gospel" record. lo-fi. a gem.

flying lotus - 1983
- mostly instrumental hip hop. good stuff.

styrofoam - a thousand words
- worst pick of the year

the new year - the new year
- quiet, pleasant.

king khan and the shrines - the supreme genius of
- over the top booty rock

the shakey hands - lunglight
- solid rock n roll, recommended. i really like this guy's voice.

Sonic Youth: J' Accuse Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes was a poet and the famed husband of Sylvia Plath. Why someone would accuse him of anything, other than making the wrong marital choice, is not clarified in the new SYR7 recording.

piggy-backing on a lot of what i wrote yesterday, J' Accuse Ted Hughes is a pair of live tracks recorded by the band proper in 2000 and 2003 (respectively?).

Kim handles the vocals on the first track "J'Accuse Ted Hughes", and her moaning is a surprising change from he speak-sing style. "You are a poet-tah/Take a wrong way hooooome-muh." Then drones, then Kim asserting "I will fuck you-huh" She sounds more like witch than gutter-punk.

23 minutes of drone. And the last 3 minutes are the best part, I'm sure this sounds sexier on vinyl.

Track two "Agnès B. Musique" is a vast departure from the standard SY catalog: chilled out ambient. after being accosted by KG (and sexually aroused?) "Musique" is a welcome change. The fuzzed out synth drones and sly guitar feedback may feel more comfortable on a Mogwai record perhaps, but no less interesting. And the last 5 minutes, once again, make the previous 14 minutes all the more worthwhile.

Original Silence

i often wonder how i came across some of the albums i save or download. The First Original Silence can be counted among that Bermuda triangle of memes that float through the transom. I certainly keep an eye out for new music, especially when there are only two tracks which is highly valuable when getting to the end of the monthly paydirt.

so OS (that's a palindrome, yo) is a[nother] noise assault from the Sonic Youth family tree featuring: thurston moore, jim o'rourke, free jazzers from the Thing, a pair from the Ex plus the bass player from Zu. (I'm not going to pretend i know their names, and had to look up who constituted OS. thanks wikipedia. but looking at the lineup, the lineage from find to download makes a bit more sense.)

the record is more akin to the Ex than any of the other players involved (see their 2000 release Exhibition), considering a howling sax and driving drums make up the backbone of the songs. i picked up In the Fishtank 5 which they recorded with Tortoise maybe a year or so ago. The Fishtank series pits two bands together to write and record 30 minutes of new music in a weeks time. the record has its moments, but is a bit uneven. I guess the beauty of The First...- with it's 2 songs spanning 60 minutes- is that while a track may loose focus, there is ample time to correct course and end on a high note. In The Fishtank is more structured and looses spontaneity in its formal construction.

but it should by no means be considered an Ex record just as it cannot be considered a Sonic Youth record because TM is involved. there's plenty of crunchy distorted guitars and other electronics to provoke stylistic meandering. the second and more intriguing track (running 45 minutes) begins with bleeps, becomes the soundtrack to your worst nightmares, resurfaces underwater, hits a mellow jazz streak only to twitch to death on a surgeon's table. glorious.

Chikita Violenta - The Stars and Suns Sessions

I don't want to waste a lot of mental energy on these guys, so I'll attempt to keep this brief without going on too much of a tangent as to why this album is so terrible.

Let me start by saying I love Broken Social Scene. L-U-V. They're a band that who collectively, and through individual efforts from their members (Kevin Drew, Feist, Emily Haines, Apostle of Hustle, Stars, Jason Collett, Do Make Say Think, et al) have--in my eyes--yet to make a bad album. And their self-titled album is without question in my top 10 of all time. They deeply resonate with me. And while I can't necessarily explain it (am I part Canadian?), and certainly can, and do, embrace it.

So one bored afternoon at work I'm perusing through various BSS member's myspace pages when I start noticing a band I've never heard of constantly being listed in said BSS member's top friends list.

Enter Chikita Violenta. Apparently they're from Mexico. And BSS member David Newfeld produced this album. There's the connection!

I heard the default song on CV's myspace page and thought it sounded great. "I'm totally downloading this album when I get home.", I thought "There's no way it can be bad. Just no way."

WROOOOOONG

So wrong.

That default song I heard (the delightful "Laydown"), is the only stand-out track on the whole album. While other songs sound okay from time to time, this album lacks any moments that are pure Chikita Violenta. They just come off as a Mexican Broken Social Scene cover band. Also, they're a Mexican band that doesn't sing a single song in Spanish! Infuriating!

The writing was on the wall, people. We all know the track record of non-union Mexican equivalents.

The song "The Last Film" is one of the worst songs I've heard this year. Just dreadful. The lyrics...the music....muy malo.

I think one of the reasons I like Broken Social Scene so much is that I get the feeling their an extremely genuine band who are making music from their heart that they absolutely love. It's indie rock that, while it wears its influences on its sleeve, still has individuality in spades. The same cannot be said about Chikita Violenta. They've made a record that's frustratingly unoriginal, and sadly unenjoyable. At the very least, this record was not put out on Arts & Crafts Records. So I can still view that label as beacon for good indie rock with a spotless record.

In short, The Star and Suns Sessions will leave you feeling more sick than a 5lb bag of Mexican dollar store candy.

Dosh - Wolves and Wishes

WAZZAAAAAAAAAP?!?!

Quite a parallel can be drawn between Martin Dosh's The Lost Take and the tv show Martin starring Martin Lawrence.

While watching any episode of Martin, you ALWAYS knew what you were going to get. Seriously, try and remember the plot line of a Martin episode....still thinking....got nothing, right? Plot didn't essentially matter since you knew Martin was going to throw the same jokes and catch phrases at you every single episode.

And it was always funny for some reason!



With The Lost Take, Minnesota's favorite drum 'n loop virtuoso created a beautiful album that flowed seemlessly from one song to another. He never really strayed away from his winning formula--with one awesome song sounding very similar to the next-- and I didn't give a shit! In the iPod age where albums as a collective piece of art have become increasingly insignificant, Marty D made an album that I almost always have to listen to the whole way through.

Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn Gina! I mean, Dosh!

You just haaad to go try to push you music to grander new heights. While I applaud the effort, I just can't groove to Wolves and Wishes like I do to The Lost Take. While there are moments that make me think Martin Dosh is successfully pushing his music in a more sublime direction ("Don't wait for the needle to drop", "Kit and Pearle", "Keep up appearance"), there are too many moments on this record that feel cluttered and eventually get mentally disregarded as filler ("Bury the ghost", "First Impossible", "The magic stick").

I still think Dosh is brilliant; but I think this album could have used some fleshing out at points. And needless to say, Wolves and Wishes severely lacked it some Sheneneh.

OH MY GOOOOOOOOODNESS!

J Dilla - Ruff Draft

Frasier Crane, George Jefferson, Joey What's-His-Name form Friends

The Common thread? Supporting characters whose popularity catapulted into the spotlight of their own TV shows (with varying degrees of success...you suck, Matt LeBlanc).

J Dilla parlayed a very successful production career (The Pharcyde, Common, Tribe Called Quest among others) into a chance to step up and pull a Kanye. But sadly Dilla's career was cut short due to a rare blood disease.

Donuts, the instrumental record he produced from the confines of his hospital bed, released three days after his death, is one of my favorite albums of all time. It's fresh, smooth, and when it's done all I want to do is listen to it again. There's a palpable feeling of Dilla putting all he's got left into the work.

Now Dilla's solo career is seriously starting to resemble that of one Jeff Buckley. The whole death-after-the-completion-of-your-record-which-happens-to-a-timeless-breakthrough thing.

Let the posthumous parade of inferior records begin!

To call Ruff Draft (as well as the solid The Shining) inferior is a bit unfair since Donuts is so unbelievably serene. Ruff Draft was originally made three years prior to Donuts, while he was seemingly still honing his craft. Ruff Draft definitely has it moments where one will start bobbing their head, light up a joint and (hopefully) yell "That's my Dilla!", the album as a whole is a bit staggered in both pace and quality.

This is my last effort in searching for Donuts: Part 2 in his discography. It was silly for me to think old EPs and and incomplete recording would match up; but I had to give it a try. Pick and choose songs you like, but a full-on purchase of this album may leave you feeling a but disappointed.

"That's My Dilla"

Do Make Say Think - Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn

One of the first things I noticed about Do Make Say Think was its default genre classification on iTunes. I was originally turned onto the band due to their involvement with Broken Social Scene. So you can imagine my befuddlement when I see DMST listed under Jazz.

What, really?

About a year ago, I purchased a CD copy of their latest record You, You're a History in Rust; and what I took away was much more a cousin to Explosions In The Sky, rather than anything akin Miles Davis or Bill Evans.

Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn is my third DMST album, and the first where I can actually see any sort of jazz-like parallel. In fact, this album wears several influences on its sleeve. You'll go from crescendo-core to afrobeat within a matter of songs, all the while keeping the DMST-sound in tact.

At least one download I made this month did very little to stray away from another more popular band's sound; and while their music's okay, it really comes off sounding like a cover band...more on them later!

Of the three DMST albums I own, this album harbors the least amount Broken Social Scene-ness, and I'm totally okay with that. Where in later albums they have relied on more pop-like song structure, this albums has the feeling of a band attempting to discover a new sound through spontaneous experimentation.

How...jazzy.