Diplo shone a spotlight on underground Brazilian booty bass with his Favela on Blast mix CD-now Milkcrate Athletics founder Aaron Lacrate and Diplo‘s Hollertronix homeboy Low Budget are poised to do the same thing for Baltimore club music. Their Bmore Gutter Music mix slaps together Charm City anthems like Rod Lee‘s “Dance My Pain Away” and “Puttin‘ It Down” and Blaqstarr‘s “Get My Gun” with special edits and exclusives from Spank Rock and pottymouthed cohort Amanda Blank, the self-proclaimed “Kelly Bundy of rap” who boasts a Twista-fast flow. Though LaCrate‘s in New York and Budget‘s in Philly, they‘ve wisely enlisted Baltimore scene godfather Scottie B (Unruly Records) to executive produce the whole damn thing. The resulting mix has a ghetto crunk party-meets-Downtown New York feel; it‘s a gully party rocker with enough dirty lyrics, crazy stabs and chipmunked melodies to please even the most stubborn asses and shortest attention spans.
Conrad Newholmes Peppermint Styles
A one-inch scratch across this CD‘s surface actually improved a few of Mr. Newholmes‘ songs, which were made more alive with funkier double-time rhythms and vocals diced into split-second bits. That says something about this otherwise second-rate imitation of RJD2. The elements are all here: “earthy” hip-hop rhythms set to a chain-gang hammer pace, good-timey funk riffs and the dorky Ike-era samples of folkies jabbering about nothing. However, our man surprises with the Bach electro-funk of “Earth Dirt the Champ,” the bongo sputters of “King Sucks” and, best of all, the Caterpillar-breakdance jaunt “Beat Down Streets.” Hopefully, Conrad will learn from his mistakes.
Various Artists Funckarma: Refurbished One
On Refurbished One, brothers Don and Roel Funcken remix artists who saw God in the likes of Autechre and Plaid, poking their music just to see embers and smoke pop out. They typically set a midtempo rhythm to strut while they scramble it and let hazes of synth melodies float above. Their formula works on the neon rainfall of Blamstrain‘s “Alive in Arms” and Speedy J‘s “Hayfever,” but eventually it grows redundant, with all the tracks sounding like they were conceived by the same artist. Many remixers desire this effect; in this case, Funckarma has robbed most of these 14 names of their personalities.
VVV Resurrection River
I‘m knocking down the king‘s door/Yeah!/See for yourself, it‘s fate/Look out! Alan Vega is yelping like a street preacher chasing ghosts down an SRO hallway. It makes sense that the ex-frontman of electro-punk icons Suicide would drink from the same bottle as Pan Sonic‘s Mika Vainio and Ilpo Viäsänen. All of them flayed electronic music and kept the bones-creating a tension that their music will either suffocate to death or evaporate into abrupt silence. Here, Vega takes the fore, his usual undead Elvis persona delivering rockabilly sermons about lost souls on the bloodied American soil. The stronger pieces, “11:52 PM” and “Chrome-Z Fighters 2003,” resemble Suicide classics dug from the grave and hastily re-animated. But overall, too much power is denied in Resurrection.
1-Speed Bike Someone Told Me Life Gets Easier in Your 50‘s
“We can talk about economists, doctors, managers, lawyers and bureaucrats, but that would be too fucking boring,” Aidan Girt carps in a pause from the breakbeats he splatters on a White House wall. The drummer for chamber-rockers God Speed You! Black Emperor makes a spectacular ass out of himself in his breakcore excursion as 1-Speed Bike. You don‘t even need to listen to this album to understand what it‘s about-witness song titles like “If You Were a McDonald‘s, Your Lips Would Be an Orange Soda, but Your Dick Would Be a Shriveled-up Fry.” However, he is a deft swordsman on the trapkit, where he instills a loose, duct-taped funk usually missing in the bludgeons of breakcore. While his politics are written above an elementary school urinal (i.e. “I‘m handsome like Donald Rumsfield”), Girt‘s music is a B-movie worth a thousand midnight showings.
Various Artists Aurora 2
Sonically, little to nothing new is featured on Merck‘s latest all-ambient disc. Most of the synth patches are the same ones used by bedroom musicians who are just figuring out their desktop‘s plug-ins. Nonetheless, Aurora 2 is engrossing for how its artists simply breathe. Sabi floats like gutter steam in a rainshower with the pattering beats and narcotic synth tones of “Dancing in a Rainstorm.” Elsewhere, Kettel‘s guitar drones ignite a St. Elmo‘s Fire that glows for miles, while Ginormous levitates into the stratosphere with geothermic symphonics. Most striking is Twerk‘s “From Brown to Green,” where a smooth R&B ballad twitches and struggles to correct itself like a lost space probe hovering around a barren moon.
Désormais Dead Letters to Lost Friends
Désormais travels down a highway during its 27th hour on the road, the tail lights ahead bleeding together and seeming to lift you off the ground toward the heavens where you believe you‘ll soon be. Core members Mitchell Akiyama and Joshua Treble embody that sensation with digitally smeared guitar tones and rhythms that fall in and out of sleep. “One or Many Wolves” drifts to a hypnotic mutant-disco pulse, while the Fennesz-like guitar excursion “Drowning in Place” simply falls to the ground and daydreams under a fog the sun never cracks through. The standout, “I Wore Water Wings But the Chlorine Still Stings,” takes a wafting guitar ballad and smothers it with samples of a dry cleaner. It‘s awfully beautiful, mind you.
Augustus Pablo King David‘s Melody
The late Augustus Pablo was not only a dub master-he was a multifaceted musician. As heard on King David‘s Melody, he utilized everything from the melodica to the xylophone to create an assortment of tranquil instrumentals that transport you to another time and place. From the moment that first note hits your speaker on songs like “Revelation Time,” it becomes easy to forget about your worries and get carried away by the calming Caribbean melodies. Faulty mixing, wherein the volume varies considerably from track to track, often interrupts the tranquility. That aside, this album serves as a nice addition to Augustus‘ sizeable discography.
Colossus West Oaktown Remixes
On this double disc release, producer Charlie Tate and his Colossus crew take on two very different styles of hip-hop. On disc one, Tate crafts ultra-chill jazz and soul-fueled beats, which MCs including Oakland‘s Azeem and London‘s Roots Manuva fluidly rap over. On disc two, the West Town Remixes, Ed Shrager joins Tate to liven things up with some thumping, neck-snapping beats. Musically, disc one features productions that are more refined… but not necessarily better sounding-in fact, it‘s hard not to be drawn to the heavy basslines of the high-powered remix disc.
Various Artists Prince Paul: Hip-Hop Gold Dus
As producer extraordinaire Prince Paul inches closer to officially hanging up his MPC, it‘s only right that his latest release takes a moment to reflect upon his oft-underappreciated career in hip-hop. In doing so, Paul unearths several rare gems from the vaults that are guaranteed to get heads nodding. It‘s dumbfounding to think of how tracks like Justin Warfield‘s slick 1991 single “K Sera Sera” were so slept on or how numbers like LA Symphony‘s hilarious hard-luck anthem “Broken Now” never got released at all. Thanks to Paul and the good folks at Antidote, some of the best hip-hop records you‘ve never heard are now being given a second chance.
