The rules in making a good-to-great posse cut are quite simple: take an exciting cast of emcees armed with a wide variety of distinctive mic styles to keep one's attention from verse to verse and attach them to a backing track that's catchy and inventive enough to both keep participants inspired and hungry and those emcees not involved green with envy that they weren't asked to join in on the fun for the original round. One of many posse offerings from the T.I. -led Hustle Gang crew's new mixtape G.D.O.D. (Get Dough or [...]
Teen-aged Oslo, Norway indie pop act Kid Astray are one of those bands that make writing perfect pop hooks seem as easy as tying a shoe. "The Mess", an immediate highlight from their debut EP Easily Led Astray , is essentially nothing but a series of earworm loops stitched together, the six-member team of eighteen and nineteen year olds unleashing "Be My Baby" drum stomps, cheery Brit-pop guitar lines, disco bass chugs and sprinklings of keyboard all seemingly in a battle for front-runner position in a game of the song's Most [...]
In the wake of Drake putting out "Girls Love Beyoncé" , a track highlighted by James Fauntleroy's soulful take on "Say My Name", it seems like a serious re-appreciation has swept the globe when it comes to the former Destiny's Child No. 1 single , as if folks had somehow forgot how much the super-catchy take-down of suspicious-acting boyfriends, fueled by Rodney Jerkins' perfectly paranoid-tinged schizophrenic production, represented the finest of post-Timbaland, turn-of-the-century R&B. Buzzing Aussie beat-maker Ta-ku adds his own creative two-cents to the sudden "I (Heart) 'Say My Name' 2K133 bandwagon [...]
With her last two singles-the pleasantly forgettable "Almost Home" and lackluster MMG clash "Triumphant" -D.O.A. on the charts, her at-once promising TV talent show judge gig at "American Idol" drawing more attention for its record low ratings and an increasingly cringe-inducing girl feud, and an awkward situation brewed from the fact that a Nickelodeon teenybopper (actress/ singer Ariana Grande) is currently taking over Top 40 radio with a surprisingly irresistible single ( "The Way" ) in blatant debt to all of her old '902s summer jam tricks, Mariah Carey really needed to drop something to [...]
There's an added benefit to Phoenix releasing a new album beyond the already-fantastic gift of having new Phoenix jams to endlessly bump: that the material included is bound to inspire the creation of somewhere close to a zillion remixes, with a substantial chunk of them ending up pretty darn good. The consistently reliable (and ever-busy) RAC crew end up with one those good ones in their take on Bankrupt! 's tidy come-on "Trying To Be Cool" , a re-edit that *whispers* actually manages to trump the original [...]
While Busta Rhymes hasn't exactly been M.I.A., keeping himself heard with a quasi-ubiquitous presence on remixes and mixtape circuit, it has been a long minute since he blessed us with the kind of must-rewind game-changing insanity he used to effortlessly unleash throughout the '902s and much of the '002s. On his latest solo joint "Twerk It", Busta makes a much-appreciated return to the wildly kooky sensibility that made him such a beloved hip hop icon in the years between "Woo Hah! Got You All In Check" and "Touch It", the colorful, Saturday morning cartoon vibe [...]
For Los Angeles outfit May McDonough & Company 's last single "Hell Is For Lovers" , "The Zombies-as-fronted-by-Grace Slick" is the best way we could think of to describe the track's slinky and bluesy psychedelic-pop/ rock. On follow-up release "Mannequin", MM&C take parts of that winning recipe and toss in a bit of Phil Spector-produced girl group to help frame the tale of a woman who has had it up-to-here with a less-than-satisfying beau. "I've been washing my new skeleton/ And I won’t let you underneath my skin/ Tearing me limb from limb," frontwoman May McDonough [...]
When word got out a minute back that Lauryn Hill had signed a new deal with Sony (a move seemingly put together to help the multi-Grammy-winner through her current legal woes), the level of interest piqued from our direction was definitely through the roof, with all kinds of questions, concerns and hopes pinging through our mind, body and soul of whether the following output-especially under such, ahem... unique circumstances-could possibly come anywhere close to meeting our long held fantasies of how her eons-awaited, studio-born post- Miseducation of Lauryn Hill material [...]
Might Ciara now finally officially be on the "comeback trail" with "Body Party" ? Looking at the all the positive reactions that met the single when it dropped a few months back and the track quickly climbing up the charts to become her first Top 10 R&B Billboard hit since 20102s "Ride" (not to mention the many instances we've seen of various-aged females-of the ratchet vein and not-attempting to recreate the accompanying video 's seductive choreography), it appears so. Montreal's Kid Masterpiece , who has been on a [...]
Is it just us or does it seem like the new breed of talented beatmakers are getting younger and younger by the week? Chicago-born producer BeazyTymes may only be seventeen years old, but one wouldn't know it when tuning into his excellent latest creation, a remix of The xx's fan-beloved Aaliyah cover "Hot Like Fire" that slyly cycles the track back to its Timbaland roots by adding to the remake's dreamy indie rock slow burn a lightly seasoned lining of rapid-fire trap percussion tricks, the subtle tweak more than enough to earn the cut [...]
If we had just released two singles, one largely considered to be the best electronic jam of 2012 and, the other, the same for a still young 2013, best believe we would have probably suffered some nervous breakdown and ended up caving under the pressure in trying to cook up something just as epically lovable for the masses. In the case of British electronic act Disclosure though, after owning numerous personal playlists and slaying the upper reaches of the UK singles chart with their most recent one-offs (the Sam Smith-featured "Latch" and AlunaGeorge-blessed [...]
The past couple weeks via their Soundcloud page , Interscope Records has slowly been unlocking full-length peeks of the star-stacked soundtrack to director Baz Lurhmann's surefire late spring blockbuster The Great Gatsby , and earning "official leak" honors today is "Where The Wind Blows", a solo offering from Quadron vocalist Coco O. that ends up a pretty effective add-on to the oh-so-lengthy list of reasons for why the Danish act deserve to be on everyone's music radar. Keeping apace with the uniquely seasoned soul-pop usually served by Quadron-the [...]
With all of the dizzying hype and wacky on-line insanity that lined the days and weeks going into its official release in full last Friday, it comes as a bit of a head scratcher that the Daft Punk track praised around the world, their Pharrell/ Nile Rodgers-blessed new single "Get Lucky" , has not already been retooled a million different directions already. Proving once again that he's not afraid to strike while the pop culture iron's hot , The Melker Project (Scott Melker) has cleverly opted to use the deafening [...]
Apparently one must keep a constant eye (and both ears) on Montreal remixing/ production phenom Kaytranada , because with the way dude is on his grind, if you happen to turn away for just a second or two, you're bound to miss out on a lot. We last mentioned Kay around these parts last month to gush over his re-edit of Jill Scott's "Golden" , but in the weeks since he has yet to take a pause for the cause, keeping his hustle paws strong with not one, but two stellar tweaks on a couple more [...]
At this point, any day that involves something new dropping from The xx should really be considered some type of global holiday. "Together", the UK act's contribution to the heavily anticipated/ Jay-Z exec-produced soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann/ Leo DiCaprio silver screen behemoth The Great Gatsby , made its premiere in full today, and it pretty much gives listeners everything they could ever want from The xx-sexy, dramatic indie-pop tension as colored by an icy minimalist guitar-sparked musical frame, and the hushed, intimate vocals of Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft. [...]
Less than a month after first catching our attention with wriggly indie-rock confection "Open Arms" , London/ Chicago three-piece Fletcher have returned with that track's parent collection also entitled Open Arms , a six-track EP that enticingly builds upon that initial taste even when injecting heavier dynamics into their comforting Brit-rock template. Further highlights emerge from the shifty guitar work-laced, hooky current single "More Than You Can Chew" and opening cut "The Road I Take"'s well-crafted soft/ loud juxtaposition theatrics, but earning the most re-spins by us so far would [...]
Just when it was looking like our trillionth re-spin of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" would end up owning the title of Jam Groove of the Day for like the seventh day in a row in our hearts, we would have to run into this: Janelle Monáe finally getting around to previewing her long-awaited follow-up to 20102s The Archandroid -the upcoming The Electric Lady -with the release of the project's first single "Q.U.E.E.N." featuring none other than Erykah Badu . Simply looking at these two bright diamonds of soul diva [...]
A nerdcore rap love song? Heh, why not? On "Shawty Want A Nerd", previously MM-hyped North Carolina repper SkyBlew steers his lyrical focus towards a more romantic angle, but this is no ordinary stab at hip hop lady-macking, finding the emcee offering a date proposal that eschews the usual club-hopping flash for a charmingly geeky night-in that involves video games, a TV-watching schedule that includes anime, Sci-Fi Channel (because "screw BET") and King of The Hill , and a different kind of pill-popping ("I ain't talking drugs but the [...]
By this point, we've pretty much given up on trying to predict where Kelis ' stylistic mood will fall next, the singer's catalog up until now proving to us that her creative whims can be as wildly varied as her ever-changing hairdo's. It's all part of the fun in being a Kelis fan though, especially when her traverses through alternative-leaning black pop stumbles on addicting dynamic nuggets like "Milkshake" , "Bossy" , "Young, Fresh & New" and "Trick Me" or the entirety of arguably her best full-length yet, the Neptunes-laced debut effort [...]
Odds are, if you're like us anyways and were in need of a serious escape from the many horrifying front page headlines this past week, much of the time away from having your eyes glued to various news outlet was spent trying to soak in as much of Daft Punk's latest "Get Lucky" as possible, whether that meant enjoying the sequined, old-school Jacksons swag the French dance duo and featured guests Pharrell and Nile Rodgers were giving in the track's minute long extended teaser preview clip on an endless loop, or wading through the [...]
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