Current Listening:
Lhasa - Anywhere on this Road
The entirety of Lhasa's most recent album
The Living Road is just amazing, but this is the track which grabbed me the fastest and the hardest. I'm wary of making any sudden pronouncements about this album, even though it'll probably end up
at least top five of the year for me, if only because I'd probably fall into the trap of just setting it up falsely against all the other worthy (in both senses of the word) "world" music I pretend I'm justified in ignoring. But I'll fall into the trap momentarily anyway: revelling in the surround-sound multi-tiered kitchen sink rhythms, ominous trumpet calls, bottomless bass and distant bell tolls, I realised that this track could almost be by Ricardo Villalobos. Only Ricardo isn't an intense Mexican chanteuse somewhere between Fiona Apple and Edith Piaf.
Xzibit - Hey Now (Mean Muggin)
That little vocal loop! Simultaneously the most pop, most dancefloor-friendly and most, er, Kanye thing that Timbo's done this year. But is just me or does Xzibit sound a bit like LL Cool J on this? Almost none of that nicotine-encrusted Method Man growl that I loved so much on "Symphony in F Major" etc.
Black Strobe - Pins & Needles
The opening queasy acidic churn reminds me a bit of one of those hyper abstract menacing things that someone like Joachim Spieth might put out on a Kompakt Speicher tune, sort of smacking you in the face without any real awareness that it is doing so. Only Black Strobe are aware even if the groove isn't, cos they lace these uber-goth DK7ish whispers over the top ("I'm addicted to your sweat"), until the groove gradually wobbles out into a rollicking, thrashing synth throb that perhaps surpasses even "The Abwehr Disco" as the most unabashedly apocalyptic they've gotten to date.
The MFA - The Difference It Makes (Superpitcher Mix)
Well, duh. But you should also check out James Holden's "A Break in the Clouds" which Border Community (The MFA's home label) put out last year. I'll write more about that later maybe.
