SUBTLETY

R. Kelly - Pussy Cry

I've been down with Kells since the first time I heard that intro to Bump N' Grind and he's never steered me wrong. Through questionable marriages, sexual practices where art imitated life, well in a more perverse kinda way (aquitted, bitches), lotsa litigation and even through the most WHAT THE FUCK MOMENT in modern music I could always rely on Kells for mammoth hooks, beautifully arranged jams, and some of the most sincere vocal performances this side of Sam Cooke. And quotes. From all my years listening to the man and witnessing him continually re-invented his style and his sound, watching him effortlessly bridge the gap between honey-love R&B and thuggish hip hop, hearing him pioneer his distinct rhythmic half-sung/half-rap flow which has been jocked and used by an endless list of artists from R&B to rap through to pop, well, I still can't figure out whether or not he's taking us all for a ride with his lyrics. And I love it that way. Mozart crossed with Dolemite.

[R. Kelly MySpace]

[The Demo Tape is R. Kelly's first mixtape. Buy his music from his official site.]

YOU'VE GOT TEETH

Fair Ohs - Hospitals
Fair Ohs hold it down pretty sturdy with their Londony clatter, real muscular and guerny with a post-hardcore sludge and elsewhere classic garage punk rollicks, finding a sonic split on their new tape between all that fun as well as just deconstructed guitar noise/wandery shreddage and also a visual divide between All American teen life feelings that seem to obsess a lot of London DIY bands ie not getting derailed by punk, basketball, burgers and what not. Really liking the thick-neckedness and jauntiness combo.



[Fair Ohs MySpace]

[Buy Our Days On The Pacific Rim from Suplex Cassettes]

BORN 2 CHILL

New Yoga - Gold Trip

Hey so if you didn't already know, Rose Quartz is one of a special few to make sporadic contributions on the music blog over at Vice Magazine which, like here, is full of awesome stuff. We have an upcoming feature on New Yoga for Vice but I thought I'd give a little preview/bonus MP3 here because I'm super stoked on this guy's jams and entire aesthetic really. New Yoga is Jeffrey Joyal who splits time between Boston and the small college town of Tivoli, New York where he makes incredible new age jams and collaborations with his video artist pal Carlos Laszlo. The pair spent six months creating Dark Bong, a sound/video collage project that rulz heaps and you should go and watch right now HERE. '80s Pizza Hut commercials, aerobics videos, geometric Atari spazzes, glowing UFOs and slow-motion Nickelodeon gunge/slimes flow seamlessly, and with New Yoga's peaced-out ambience become recontextualized as a kind of blissful meditation for the internet generation. The interest in plastic nostalgia and an oblique retro-futurism situates New Yoga with dudes like the Skaters and Ducktails, but Joyal sheds the lo-fi haze from his tracks - this stuff has a pretty golden sheen with syrupy guitar reverb and crisp beats. I really want to listen to this sitting cross-legged with index fingers to thumbs on a cliff overlooking a dolphin colony and the aurora borealis, but maybe iTunes visualizer will do.

Here's one of my fave parts of Dark Bong:

(Click THIS for multiplied psychedelia)



[New Yoga Myspace]

[Dark Bong/Beyond Stoned]

Photos: JACKIE-O MOTHERFUCKER

Portland's Jackie-O Motherfucker live @ Newcastle's Star & Shadow, July 8. Photos by Ben Jeans Houghton. Amazing show; especially the support slot from Jackie-O's Brian Mumford's solo project Dragging An Ox Through Water; killer surprise split between Dirty Projectors-style vocal gusto and free noise. Cool subterrainean low-freq noise set from locals Jazzfinger, too. Full review @ Tiny Mix Tapes.

THUNDER APPLAUDS

Crayon Fields - All The Pleasures Of The World

The new Crayon Fields single starts with a mental drum 'n' bass riff. BUT NOT LIKE THAT! (Note to Geoff O'Connor: Roni Size probably has some free time these days. Poss. collab??!?) It's actually more of that classic neat '60s R&B sound they started messing with on Mirror Ball, the gentle, doo-wop gem that came out late last year. But like The Big Bopper's 'Chantilly Lace', this is some dirty shit dressed up as wholesome ballad and in certain circles will be THE sex jam of '09. Exhibit A: "I mess up my collar / Just to feel you correct it". It's not gonna do much for fans of 'My Neck, My Back', but for a specific kind of person it's a perfect line for shuffling over to a girl in a vintage dress for an awkward slow-dance. I just hope Crayon Fields have the foresight to pack mops on their next tour to clean up the hormone explosion that WILL happen when they pull out the line "Thunder applauds us / As we neck in a doorway". PURE SLEAZE.

[Crayon Fields MySpace]

[All The Pleasures Of The World out September through Chapter Music]

THE FLOW IS A COLLAGE

Drake - Juice

Colin Munroe (feat. Drake) - Cannon Ball

I'm still blown away by the fact that Wheelchair Jimmy from Degrassi: The Next Generation grew up to be the most talked about rapper/singer/ladies man of 09. And for good god damn reason. Dabbling in everything from straight hip hop, R&B jams, piano instrumentals, even re-arranging Lykke Li and Peter Bjorn & John jawns on his mixtapes, his sound is an effortless myriad of style upon style.

Taken from the Heartbreak Drake Pt. 2 mixtape, Drake jocks the melody line from Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner", puts it through a toy keyboard, adds some stomp and decides to give it the borderline-whisper-rap treatment. Trying not to bop your head to this is impossible. Cannon Ball is a joint I overlooked when I first posted about Colin Munroe a while ago. From the Unsung Hero mixtape, it's a pop explosion of super sweet keys and synths, melodies and guitars ensconced in reverb, Kanye-esque drums and Drake flowing with what I can only describe as "cruise control vulnerability".

[Drake MySpace]

[Thank Me Later is due for release later this year through Young Money Entertainment/Universal Records.]

INTO SPACE

Erasers - Outside Environment

I bet all the Perth bands that aren’t sunny, jangly indie pop get real shitty with the assumptions that they’ll sound like the Bank Holidays or Institut Polaire or whoever. Erasers are basically the opposite of that stereotype: cold as ice, smooth as glass. This isn’t car music. It’s propulsive, sure, but there’s a serenity to the way this space jam throbs and glides forward and a faraway quality to the vocals that make the song sound like it was recorded on the moon, maybe, or the edge of a giant chasm. It’s supposedly influenced by elements of post-punk, post-rock and drone, and at this stage when you hear those genres being dropped you have good reason to move the fuck on to something else, but the good news is Erasers cherrypick the sounds you wanna hear: they’re like post-punk when it sounded like it was made by melancholic machines, post-rock when it wasn’t background music and drone when... well, I don’t know drone, but I know what I like. I like Erasers.



[Erasers MySpace]

[Buy ERASERS from Etheric Hymns]

BRAIN BANANA

Really want a green screen eh. Cool new video from Brisbane no-wave pop clunkers, real blasé melodies wriggling out of their jams, soo Brisbane!!!

[Kitchen's Floor MySpace]

STRANDED IN JURASSIC PARK

Gay Against You- Cruisin'


These Glasgow guys are getting ridiculously decadent on this new LP, feeling massively lost inside a broke Spectrum but not overly worried about it, just searching through those grey plastic tunnels and designing gawky and elaborate trimmings to go in there, squawking with pre-Christmas ridiculousness, but wait, are they playing in 2D? Sounds like "electric cereal" and obviously like a very manic childhood yeah really loving how they pull this all off without sounding totally annoying, real squiggly and overloaded with KFC and an urge to overdub grainy Ghostbusters tapes with new shinier technologic pixels. I like this album a lot because it sounds like its trying to both manufacture late 80s/early 90s nostalgias as well mirror exact memories of my own with additional blunted new techno feelings.



[Gay Against You MySpace]

[Buy Righteous Signals, Sour Dudes from Upset The Rhythm]

GLASS CHORDS

Black Cab - Rescue

See, Brian Jonestown Massacre, THIS is how you do Stones-influenced dreampop. Shit, Black Cab should just go ahead and offer classes in how to make a 60s rock influence interesting because this is fucking masterful. Their third album, Call Signs, is set to drop next month, and by now Black Cab have pretty much refined their celestially hypnotic & cavernous thang to the point where each track is like slamming down the darkest, sweetest coffee you've ever had in a dive in Istanbul or some shit. Completely overwhelming. Endorphin extravaganza. Rescue is maybe less kraut and more shoegaze than Black Cab's last record, Jesus East, which could mean that these guys finally get to see some financial recompense instead of just being fellated by critics. Fucking primo.



[Black Cab MySpace]

[Call Signs out August through Laughing Outlaw]

ROBIN PECKNOLD COVERS NMH

Robin Pecknold - Two-Headed Boy (Live)

Yeah, I'm a Neutral Milk Hotel fanboy. This is from Stereogum:

"Saturday night was the closing to a week of benefits in support of the Vera Project, a "music and arts center run by and for youth," dubbed A Drink For The Kids and featuring Grand Hallaway, Throw Me The Statue, and a special "solo" headlining set from Robin Pecknold. The lead Fleet Fox delivered a set of his own band's tunes, traditional songs, and some well-chosen covers -- from Neutral Milk Hotel to the Mag Fields to Fleetwood Mac -- joined at times by two of his day job co-workers (J. Tillman and Skyler Skeljet) and later his sister, Aja."

STYLIN' WITH THE CASIO WATCHES

Trife Diesel - 85 Hip Hop

Trife Diesel - War

The list of insufferable hip hop weed carriers these days is endless and thanks to successful (and often times, semi-successful) rappers being given their own vanity labels courtesy of the majors that want to keep their arrangements cushy and narcissism prevalent, we're constantly being bombarded with records by "the guy who featured in the second verse of the remix which appeared on the unofficial mixtape of the guy who's album didn't really get big until the third single gained notoriety on YouTube". Yeah, I got as tired typing that as you just did reading it. So when a rapper like Trife Diesel (formerly Trife Da God), who's 10 years+ deep in experience, who's been cutting his teeth these past few years as a member of Theodore Unit and who's been mentored and schooled by none other than Pretty Toney, decides to finally do the solo thing, you tend to forget the Yung Joc's in the world and remember the time when Jay-Z started out his career carrying trees for Jaz-O. Sure, that's a bit of an exaggeration but the notion of a dude that can outgrow the "hypeman" tag by simply showing off how well he can spit is always welcome.

[Trife Diesel MySpace]

[Better Late Than Never will be released on July 21st. Get it from Fat Beats. The Project Pope mixtape can be downloaded for free from Trife's MySpace.]

NEW JAY REATARD

Jay Reatard - Before I Was Caught

Man this dude is so on fire right now I don't know if he could put out a dud record if he tried. His first actual album since 2006's Blood Visions has just hit the internets and, uh, it's fucking cool. OK, actual music criticism: this track is so far up my alley it's gonna need to pull some Batmobile shit to get out. Driving bass, fuzzy guitars, 50s pop-ish rhythms? I am unable to withstand their allure. Before I Was Caught fits somewhere in between the two singles from Watch Me Fall that have been released thus far: the frantic garage sounds of It Ain't Gonna Save Me and the slick pop hooks of Wounded can both be found here to totally excellent effect. In an interview with Village Voice, Jay promised "more obvious" melodies. Well, he's certainly come up with those, although (fortunately?) Watch Me Fall isn't quite the twee pop extravaganza he'd hinted at elsewhere.



RELATED NEWS FACT: Check out his hilarious spray at Brooklyn on Twitter.

[Jay Reatard MySpace]

[Pre-order Watch Me Fall from Matador]

DREAM DAMAGE

Assassins 88 - Age of Consent

Assassins 88 - Go Go Second Chance Virgin

Assassins 88 seem to write a lot of anthems about sex for kids pushing their pals around in empty supermarket carts in empty supermarket parking lots, walking stoned/bleary-eyed into the sterile brightness of a service station at 3am to buy a pie a Pepsi and a jumbo bag of Burger Rings. It's definitely a sound borne of suburban boredom and I believe they're from Canberra, Australia which my friend once described as a "dead conservative hellhole", but at least these dudes are there to fuck some shit up. The duo keep it simple with bass & drums, no super proficient Lightning Bolts or boring blues rock, just super catchy and a whole lot more chill than other lo-fi punx. This is young & dumb and pumping with hormones and cheap beer, plus "Age of Consent" opens with a creepy sample from Dazed and Confused, perfect.

[Assassins 88 Myspace]

[Dream Damage - for upcoming releases]

TANGIER

Blues Control - Rest On Water
For a duo that aren't really into cosmicness this new Siltbreeze LP captures turns a hazy familiarity into somethig pretty transcendent; feels real innocent ie. piano tinkling in yr holiday house on Summer holidays, curtains in the breeze etc and all in lensflared/beach eyes/forest head, less psych deconstruction and more oblique chill built on lots of subtle percussions and distant Eno echoes. It really makes sense them being pals with Kurt Vile (besties, even? He plays some horns on the start of the record)) cos that similar gritty airyness floats through these quietly dubby jams, all ebb and flow via ex-New Age ideals used to throw melodies out wide.

P.S: Blues Control are playing Newcastle Upon Tyne on September 1 @ Head Of Steam (!!!).



[Blues Control MySpace]

[Buy from Local Flavor from Siltbreeze]