Grimes - Geidi Primes

Short, but fantastic chillwave album. Etheral vocals, ecclectic sound/instrument samples, and a casio-based beat. Great Stuff!

Pitchfork Review:
Even though it clocks in at a slight 30 minutes, Geidi Primes is a wholly immersive listen. The melodies are hooky and sweet, but each track has a throbbing undercurrent of menace that pulls you in like a riptide. It's hard to pinpoint exactly from where this pervading element of darkness springs-- especially since, on paper, most of the lyrics read like valentines. (Pretty much every discernable chorus revolves around the word "heart.") The hypnotic standout "Feyd Rautha Dark Heart" begins with a simple Casio-style beat and an ostensibly sugary hook-- "I won't break your heart in the dark"-- but the track builds into something decidedly eerie: chilly synth hits, zombified vocals, and percussion that sounds like rattling bones. By the end, even the sweet refrain sounds less like an expression of devotion and more like a chant meant to put you under some kind of spell. Which, you come to realize, is Geidi Primes' main objective.
Perhaps Geidi Primes' greatest virtue is its resourcefulness: It excels at crafting evocative moods from deceivingly simple sonic materials and song structures. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the simple, looping bassline of "Rosa", the brightest and most unabashedly straightforward song on the record, and also the one most likely to stay lodged in your head for days. Then there’s the brief, wordless "Gambang" making utter gorgeousness from nothing more than a slightly warped sample and breathy falsetto curlicues.
As a vocalist, Grimes knows how to work her range. Though she's become known for her impressive falsetto (which she pushes to rapturous, Donna Summer-like heights on the Darkbloom single "Vanessa") and she can occasionally pull of a spooky low tone that's faintly reminiscent of Karin Dreijer Andersson, she spends much of Geidi Primes in mid-range, tuneful deadpan, which lends wry humor to the lines she coos to a lover on "Zoal, Face Dancer": "Everybody thinks that I'm boring/ Many people think I've got no clue." Just because she's spacey-- yes, nerds, those are Dune references scattered throughout the track listing-- doesn't mean she's without earthly wit. It takes a pretty good sense of humor to write an utterly gorgeous closer and call it "Beast Infection".

Preview:
http://www.mediafire.com/?8k7ajzd097jj4dw

Greater Than One - G-Force

Excellent WaxTrax! era proto-industrial...

"Dancefloor Surrealists - and that's just the half of it - GTO
construct collages of multi-lingual samples and wacked-out noises to
cover their technological tracks. G-Force is a cartwheeling
combination of Steinski's nimble feet and The Young Gods' operatic
gusto, all stitched together by St. Winifred's style choir chanting
devil-worship slogans in the middle distance. "Ich Liebe Dich Mein
Prinz" energizes ethnic wailing seemingly recorded through a snorkel,
and "Black Magic" impales minimalist vocals onto a wiry violin while
sevarel Daleks dance themselves dizzy in the studio. Fragments of
MC 900 FT Jesus's harsh, dislocated chatter and Front 242's
leather-clad New Beat throb abound, with tons of Acidic sparks and
dadaist references tossed in for extra momentum. But the weirdest,
simplest track here is "Why Do Men Have Nipples?," marrying
snatches of American dating-game show dialogue with a toe-tapping
tape-loop of numb percussion." - Stephen Dalton, NME

Preview:
www.mediafire.com/?g217fj26i9xf5dtM

DJ Shadow - I Gotta Rokk EP

A 3-track preview of the new DJ Shadow album: The Less You Know The Better! I promise, its nothing like The Outsider; and although its not exactly like Endtroducing..., or The Private Press either, it is closer to the style of those two. I will tell you that it is eclectic and hard to define, but worth a listen.

Preview: http://www.mediafire.com/?3l1ocid6z5flfkk

Absence...

I apologize for the lack of posts lately.
I promise to get something up real soon...

The Orb - Metallic Spheres

I Say: I am both a long-time Orb fan and Pink Floyd fan, so this is like a dream come true; except I never would have dreamed that The Orb and David Gilmour would collaborate together! Both artists are known for their spacey, tripped-out music; one featuring echoing, reverbed beats, the other echoing, reverbed riffs. It's like that old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial: You got peanut butter on my chocolate! No, you got chocolate in my peanut butter! Two great tastes that go great together!

Here's what pitchfork says:

Mostly wordless, full of spaced-out sound effects, and making no concessions to good ol' verse-chorus-verse structures, Spheres is a trip, to use a term once unabashedly uttered by Floyd devotees and revived by Orb aficionados with more of a knowing wink. A headphones record, in other words. Light show and chemical refreshment totally optional. Over two long tracks subdivided into shorter movements, Paterson and fellow Orb-er Youth thread together a post-rave library's worth of slow-rolli ng chillout-room rhythms, referencing everything from dub to krautrock along the way, as Gilmour sweeps in and out on guitar, dropping little shiver-inducing melodic runs like it's no big deal. Though his playing here meanders by design, Gilmour sounds neither lazy nor indulgent, more like a virtuoso who doesn't want to actually seem like he's sleepwalking through his performance. The Orb, on the other hand, are showing off in the best way possible, again crafting the lush, cosmic rhythms they were once so good at, hoping to impress a long-time hero. In the process, they also manage to impress listeners who've stuck with the band through some pretty ropey recent material.

Records like Spheres usually get filed as "ambient" these days, but that's not quite right here. Sure, it's gorgeous and hypnotic and more about beats than songs and all the things you'd probably expect from this pairing. It's also immersive in an old-school way, a long-player of a very pre-digital vintage, a record for people with enough free time (or a long enough commute) to lose themselves in a 50ish-minute composition. With its dramatically orchestrated peaks and valleys, it's an album designed to be listened to, to Take You Somewhere as you lay on your bedroom floor, to conjure futuristic images in the mind's eye of folks who were once teenage fans. In that sense, it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years. And hey, if you want to treat it as background music, that'll work just fine, too.

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5th67ab06k4a43h

Lustmørd - Heresy

Review:
If there is one thing which is conveyed through Brian Williams’ sonic landscapes, if there is one word to describe what it is like to listen to, it would be 'terror'. Williams’ project Lustmørd is often cited as creating the dark ambient genre, and is still one of the finer examples of minimalistic noise which submerges the listener in droning, almost suffocating bass reverb and eerily unnatural noises. Lustmørd’s 1990 album Heresy is widely renowned as a masterpiece of the dark ambient genre; fusing together instruments and sound to create uncomfortable human emotions. There are places where the music is seemingly the background noise one would hear in a horror film; however, the difference between the laughable horror flick soundtrack and the unsettling ambience of Lustmord is the fact that it really and truly makes you feel uneasy by virtue of sound alone.

Ambient music is quite often difficult to describe, much less critique, because it can be interpreted in any number of ways. Take, for example, the second piece on Heresy, a ten minute saunter through a simple piece of soundscapes which comes across with much the same feeling I would imagine as sleeping alone for a night in a subterranean catacomb. Indeed, Williams has gone to great lengths to illustrate the seriousness and atmospheric qualities of his music. Through such methods as sampling recordings in catacombs, abattoirs, mines, crypts, and places where many people were killed, the music transcends the line between reality and nightmare. The only prominent instrument on the album is a Tibetan horn, awash in a thick cloud of rumbling bass. There is something unnatural and paranormal about Heresy which I simply have not seen replicated.

The album is a compilation of actual recordings from 1985-1989 carried out on site, and then fed through a computer to have sound levels manipulated and recordings mastered to the fullest effect, making the listener feel as if they are sitting next to Williams in whatever desolate and morbid place he chooses as inspiration for his music. The incessant droning of sounds whose origin remain a mystery, plays mind games with the listener, and to spin this album before falling asleep is surely asking to do exactly the opposite, because without a doubt you will be left wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling as this one hour trek through the darkness plays out before your mind’s eye.

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?dopjujd2paaxd3i

The Upsetters - 14 Blackboard Jungle

This is it: one of the earliest and best Dub albums ever recorded!

Originally released in 1973 with only 300 copies pressed; this album went on to become the Dub album by which all others are measured against.

The musicians featured on this recording are a litany of some of the best reggae musicians at the time... Augustus Pablo on his Melodica, Bobby Ellis on trumpet, Glen Adams on the organ, Aston "Family Man" Barret on bass and his brother Carlton "Carly" Barret on drums (both of whom would become members of the Wailers), Tommy McCook (founder of the Skatalites) on the piano, Valentine "Tony" Chin guitar, the list goes on; all great muscicians who came together under the divine sympatico of Lee "SCRATCH" Perry's inspired production and Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock's masterful engineering.

Highly Recommended!

Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/?yztywm2qr0u