The second release following Toronto-based WIDEAwake's purchase of the Death Row catalogue, Snoop Dogg's Lost Sessions Vol. 1 would ostensibly offer a gold mine of unheard rarities cut during the label's 92-96 heyday. Instead it offers a closer look at how quickly Snoop fell off without Dre's serpentine funk and creative direction. Of course, any of the million suckers (myself very much included) that purchased 1996's archetypal sophomore slump, Tha Doggfather, can attest to that fact, but The Lost Sessions confirms it, with the Cadillac strut of Dre's Parliament samples swapped for Snoop's watery [...]
The song commences with Busta admonishing Royce for "sharing your food in a recession." Judging from Bussa Bus' ever-expanding waistline, he hasn't been sharing food since his salad days. It doesn't help when he starts confusing rappers with hamburgers and frankfurters. If you consider "Fried Chicken," his 2008 collaboration with Nas, it's clear that Trevor Smith might be better off spending time with Jenny Craig. Thankfully, he's spending time with Ryan Montgomery, thus redeeming the pair for the relative disappointments that were Back on My B.S. and Slaughterhouse (which wasn't bad , but I refuse [...]
As Dom Passantino pointed out , "Zevon came with more killer openings than Bobby Fischer." Though the lyrics were co-written by a late-period whiskey (and coke and acid)-addled Hunter S. Thompson, it's hard to argue with the efficacy of "You met her in a Turkish town/but you didn't want to bring her here/You didn't want her hanging around in the Kingdom of Fear/So you left her there."The Ramada Room organs are as kitschy and soft as shag carpeting, and the lyrics mordant and perennially wicked. Were there are a Passion of the Weiss Hall of Fame, Warren Z. would [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =mIYHILNRoLo Despite their heavy buzz around Los Angeles, there were a variety of reasons why I never got into R ainbow Arabi a. For one, there is the above video. I'm not quite sure what's going on, though I'm pretty sure that if I tried I could pick enough low-hanging hipster humor fruit to fill up a Carmen Miranda hat. I'm not going to try. Then there's the name Rainbow Arabia, a nomenclature that seems swiped from an excised chapter of V, an outfit fronted by a Levantine midget, with a [...]
From the new EP from Stuart Murdoch's side project . For those who enjoy Isobel Campbell-era Belle & Sebastian, 60s girl groups, and St. Vincent joints. Ideal for a sensitive but quirky Michael Cera indie comedy with a mawkish soundtrack that will mar this song for eternity. Enjoy it while it lasts. Download: MP3: God Help the Girl-"Stills"
Thanks to Nate Patrin , I recently discovered "Midnite Vultures," the would-be title track turned "Nicotine & Gravy" B-side from 1999. Sez Nate: "some days, this would be my favorite Beck track." Sez I: throughout of the duration of the weekend, it was mine. In hindsight, Beck channeling Serge Gainsbourg while smoking Gauloises and sipping Pernod, may have been the right angle, instead of spending the majority of the aughts channeling Beck and/or spending Sundays recording cover albums with Wolfmother and Devendra Banhart. The least they can do is cut Histoire De Melody Nelson. [...]
As seen earlier , Rah Al Milio of the Knux has begun a blogging and recording side-project under the Joey Lestrat (Le Pop Killer) alias. He bills it as "The Knux, Vampires, Guitars and stars." I can't help but view this as a wise move. In these True Blood and Twilight times, the real money is in vampires. Consequently, Passion of the Weiss is switching to an all vampire-all-the-time-aesthetic . Nothing but Lestrat, Manson, and Bauhaus. Bela Lugosi is not dead. About "Touch." It's not rap, so don't download looking for typical [...]
My bad. Three months ago, Smoking Section don, John Gotty sent out an e-mail requesting that I listen to Freddie Gibbs, a Gary, Indiana-raised, Interscope Records refugee with co-signs from Devin the Dude and Just Blaze. For reasons best blamed on scatterbrains and Internet fatigue, I never got around to The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs, an excellent collection of jettisoned major label tracks, freestyles, and stone-cold street raps. Last week, Gibbs released his follow-up, Midwestgangstaboxframecadillac muzik, an album that takes its title from Outkast, but [...]
My former Stylus colleague, Mike Orme tagged "Feel It All Around," from South Carolina's Washed Out, with a Pitchfork Best New Tracks this morning. Rather than fritter away an afternoon grappling with ways to reiterate what Mike already said, I'll just co-sign his sentiments regarding Ernest Greene's sublime vision, "stuck somewhere in an imagined euphoria set after the art rock of the late 70s, with a dotted line drawn directly through the swath of synth pop and all the way to the psychedelic, guitar driven Brit-pop of the Stone Roses." It's easy to sneer at the [...]
Sach O: 1. Holy shit. Ghostface blacks the living fuck out on this. He doesn't walk away with the song, he runs. Like his house was on fire. 2. Dilla is posthumously sonning Rza on his own shit. Which is kind of bittersweet in a weird way but whatever. 3. This Raekwon fellow's album has me *ahem* hyped. 4. If I was Rae and Ghost, I'd be weary of inviting Cappa to the studio, you never know if he'll rip it or come "meh". 5. They should let me pre-order this thing. [...]
See the photo above. HEALTH don't need to "get color." But between the title of the LA electro-noise cabal's forthcoming full-length, and the decision to enlist Tobacco for remix work intimates that they want their shine blinding. Yet the frontman of Black Moth Super Rainbow never bleaches eyes, instead he angles towards chromatic distortion. Other than Joker and Caribou, no one's got the striking synesthesia of Tom Fec, who slathers the grissaile tones of HEALTH's original with an ice cream paint job that could make Dorrough salivate. Ignore the bad beards, asymmetric hair-cuts, [...]
Bleary braille eyes, acrid tobacco tongue, and an apartment a swamp of drained beer bottles-no problem-San Francisco's Sic Alps hit harder than caffeine. Where bubble gum meets barbed wire, channeling that anorexic aperture between harsh daylight and phantom fragments of forgotten conversations. Mike Donovan sneers "she went to seek adoption, just to see wot she had gotten for me, we bombed that mansion, its gonna be the last one, its gonna be the last fling." All tocsins and toxicity. Lo-fi employed as a tool, not just a crutch. Sic Alps' new 73 on Slumberland is teleological in [...]
Even if you're not a fan of the brothers Lindsey, it's difficult not to respect them. Rather than damage inboxes with the umpteenth "freestyle" over "D.O.A.." they've laid low since dropping Remind Me in Three Days last year , opting to eschew the blog hustle for the tangible grind, building a fan base the old-fashioned way: relentless touring and an undeniable live show . They don't do mixtapes, don't collaborate with whoever's hot this hour, and though they're signed to Interscope, they've received a tepid corporate push in contrast to the careful [...]
Why post the front cover when this tape is all about the tracklisting? Murs and the L.A. Leakers deserve plaudits for this essentially flawless compilation of seminal West Coast gangsta' rap. The other Nick Carter says it best in his introduction: "when we were younger, this is what we were listening to on the West Coast...all these songs were my shit...if you don't know, all you young uns need to get educated on how gangsta' rap changed the world." Growing up in Los Angeles, these songs were inescapable on KDAY and later Power 106 and 92.3 The Beat. [...]
I'd tried to avoid the Elbo.ws elbowing over the proprietary rights to New Jersey maharajah's of mystery, Memory Cassette, because well, sometimes it's more fun to run the contrarian jerkstore (see Fire, Arcade). But reading their Pitchfork interview caused me to cave, specifically when head tape, Dayve Hawk declared, "the last thing I want to do is be willfully mysterious. I mean, if I was trying to do that I wouldn't be online. At the same time, I don't want to blow smoke up peoples' asses- I don't want any bios out there about me being some kind [...]
Fresh off three consecutive weeks in rotation on Hot 97's Real Late with Peter Rosenberg comes Prafit's "New York Swing, the Strong Island rapper's latest collaboration with blog and blunt baron, Disco Vietnam . Like its antecedents, "Nice Weather" and "My Life", "New York Swing" channels the city's mid-90s vintage without lapsing into over-cautious rehash. The beat's piano line lifts like a balloon, with an ascendant organ line also angling towards the heavens. Prafit anchors it back to earth, with some brick-bat, bloody-nose raps that seemingly bear out an influence from Uncontrolled [...]
It's apparently come to this. All the good band names are taken. All permutations involving Crystal, Black, and Wolves, have been exhausted. We're down to naming ourselves after vaguely obscure Decathalon Events. It's only a matter of time before 110 Meter Hurdle, Shot Put, and Pole Vault monopolize the Hype Machine (in fact, this may be the opening salvo). But don't dismiss Javelin due to a quirk of poor nomenclature, nor because they bill themselves as "Tropical/Crunk" on their Myspace. Wasn't sincerity supposed to be the new irony? Judging from the Williamsburg pedigree, plus beards, flannels, [...]
Occasionally, you hear a song for the first time and stop whatever is you're doing, because said song is so awesome that it demands your complete attention. I'm not sure how I lived for so long without having heard "Assembly Line," from The Commodores debut album. Especially considering I played Little League and High School baseball with the son of Wak King, the trumpet and synth player. I suppose I associated them with the cod-piece funk of later leisure suit years-that and the name Wak. Thanks to Ivan of Hip-Hop is Read for including this in his [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =B6MHGb1sgYQ If we're really going to go with purple as the new catch-all appellation for the ultra-violet beats bouncing out of Bristol, let's at least acknowledge the real reason why the tag emerged: these guys must be smoking so much purple haze as to make Cam'ron seem Mennonite (no Freaky Ezekiel). Should he keep up this sort of prolificacy, PotW may turn into an all-Joker, all-the-time blog. If only he and Jim Jones can collaborate on a remix that includes a vocal chop of the phrase "THAT PURPLE!" my existence [...]
Britt Daniel is a musical McGyver smoker. Give him a greasy guitar line, a baby grand, a snare, and a snorkel, and watch the smoke soar. The titular single from Spoon's new EP is wrapped with a tension tight as Asclepius' snakes. Alfred Soto described the solo at the 1:05 minute mark, as "moving like a feather up the soles of my bare feet." The piano line about fifteen seconds later finds that same feather floating up your spine. Britt Daniel spits out that he's "got nothing to lose but darkness and shadows." His chaotic pop [...]
The Passion of the Weiss
Usher & Diplo – Climax
The Drums – Days (Trentemoller Remix)
Ellie Goulding – Lights (Back From The Future Dubstep Remix)
Video: Korallreven - "Sa Sa Samoa"
