I'll only Blog DRUNK now.

Saw Rize and did enjoy it. Things I won't too sure of: LaSHA-P visually "hints" at -- not so tacitly, considering the 3803 minute tribal dance montage that almost comes across as insulting -- a South Central reapropriation of African roots, but I'd say that's a bit of a stretch (thanks, Lee). While krumping is definitely far more flamboyant and dire, youthful and energetic, and all those positive adjectives that signify some sort of connection to the being young and alive and all, it's still pretty grounded in modern hip hop dance. But damn if it isn't fast and far more entertaining.

Speaking of the flamboyant, still haven't heard Jamie Lidell -- the recommmmendations have come from strange sources and i don't know who to trust these days, but (to josh) i'll prolly trust you. Metacritic tells me I'm crazy to the tune of a big fat 88. Right behind Sufjan's 91 sits this "MJ plus Prince" thing and here I am listening to Thunderbirds are Now!, reveling in how good Justamustache actually is on 2 billionth listen. Les Savy Fav, yeah. PGMG, yeah. But frenetic guitars always sound fresh. This is crunk punk. This is fucking hype. But hype ain't got shit on:


Harvey Milk - The Boy With Bosoms
[From the album Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men]

If I had to factor in nothing but how fucking totally cool and how fucking totally intense a track is, this is maybe my pick for The Best Song of ALL Time. It's like a sludgey, bottom-heavy Codeine playing in a capitol-C-church, belting out the most intense and devilishly slow hymn God's children did ever penned. Course, this was my favorite HM era -- the slow, the OH SO FUCKING PAINFULLY SLOW, dirgey, ever-repeating, fucking physically enthralling, Good Will era. Here, they took the Melvins to task, took them for everything they had. They saw them and raised them THUNDER and LIGHTNING. They gave tUMULt their t and their U and their M and you get the picture. And "The Boy" (along with that "One of us..." Cohen cover) is their dirty, absolutely brilliant crown.

There's the whole bombastic star-spangled guitar leads that pepper the gritty sections, but then, when it quietensdownnow, the diads are quaint and gorgeous (a perfect, heavenly progression of double stops that BLEEEEEEEEEED into the GLUDGE-GLUUUUDGE of stoner murk the stately disto-breaks offer). And that buried voice??????? The fucking moment in which the vocal CHORDS actually present themselves, clawing their way out of some kind of space-mud bog: you-can't-understand-what/maybe-it-doesn't-even-matter-what Creseton is actually howling. If only everything could be this beautiful and unendingly fucked up.


MC Jack E Chocolate - Pavoraty
[From the album Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats]

This song is MADE by the second guy. Whoever it is, I don't know, help me out PLEASE, just destroys. It's like his words are coming through a thick, thick, thick layer of sumfin. Slurs abound. And that drag on the final Portuguese word slaps. Not to sound insensiTiVo, but he sounds a bit like a deaf man, and in the romanticized world of my appreciation of music, that makes it so much better. And if I start on the sample, I'll never stop. So I won't. And sue me for being a few years late on Baile Funk. Thank god for Blender articles.


Yann Tiersen & Shannon Wright - Ode to a Friend
[From the album Yann Tiersen & Shannon Wright]

No liars here: I was intro'd to Yann via the Amelie soundtrack, which I do enjoy thru and thru just like most of us paste-o-philes enjoy Audrey. But Shannon Wright -- of cap-I jang-hounds Crowsdell (and who incidently lived in Pittsboro, NC which is only a short drive from the Chapel Hill locale I call home) -- does much to compliment the particular brand of muted, something-wrenching melancholia Tiersen specializes in. This is piano, some tasteful percussion, some synths that go easy on the tasteBUDS, and a voice like Chan or Nina (NAstasia) or one of the onther femememe Sadcore stalwarts.


Mugison - I'd Ask
Mugison - Sad as a Truck
[From the album Mugimama is the Monkey Music]

"I'd Ask" is what a Yann Tiersen/Will Oldham colab would sound like. The squeeze box and wavery vox mix up quite nicely, getting down all pastichey in indirect correlation to the funky mashed potato garbage can swagger of "Sad as a Truck". This one is Beefheart for backpacks and IDM gluttons. "Damn, it's true."


Akron/Family - Suchness
[From the album Akron/Family]

Lyrics about lyrics, words about words -- that's what Akron/Family get at on the first few tracks of their self-titled Young God debut. Thank M Gira's cracked sensibility for what you have here on track 2. When the pipes break about half a minute in that's when things get really, really interesting. A fucked up harmony (who don't like measured dissonance?) and LSD-drama rip a folk song right off its skeleton and slap the skin onto a space-ship'd automaton bound for some planet where hippy sway makes a frail refrain like "one suchness" work wonders. Keyboards guide it all home, and home ain't where you thought it was. This is otherworldly in a strangely familiar sense -- like if Robert Johnson was a Caucasian alien. That's right. White green people. Sorry bout that one.


Engineers - Come in and out of the Rain
[From the album Engineers]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a hint of shoegaze here. That and a tad bit of fucking Roxy Muzak going on. Ferry era, when the tissue-box vocals and sopping wet shit was their steez. Yeah, here's a gaunt track from another record Metacritic swears I've been sleeping on. Listening to it for the first time (and isn't that why emmpeefreeeeeeblogs are great? cause you do it with me...), I'm into this in a real simple way. These Engineer shits aren't huge, but they're big songs. "Come In" is a prim Slowdive-y number that takes care to cover all the soggy bases -- the chimey hall-o-guitar thing and the slow melody with the push-drums and the lurching bass. I'm in. We're all in apparently.