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Newsletter: betterPropaganda Newsletter - Volume 1, Issue 2
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Featured Download: Why? - The Hollows
Alopecia out 3/11 on Anticon
Vocalist Yoni Wolf calls this track "a feeling...an ominous sensation." I'd give it more credit than the abstraction warrants: the knife-wielding gypsies and other street-crawlers that inhabit this song are pretty viscerally portrayed. But the scenes arrange themselves in odd and illuminating ways, pressed against one another like the narrative of an experimental film. Ominous indeed.
Featured Download: Del - Bubblepop
Definitive Jux releases Eleventh Hour 3/11
Del's delivery kind of reminds me of the logic behind retro fashion sense: it's goofy and familiar, but it works damn well in the context of the present. In a field of rappers jostling to be louder, denser, faster, crasser, it's the looseness and sense of leisure in Bubblepop that hooks me. Del's got it right - if you can't have a little fun with your craft, you ain't all that.
Featured Download: Thao - Beat (Health, Life and Fire)
We Brave Bee Stings and All out now on Kill Rock Stars
What impresses me most about this song - this whole album, actually - is how starkly Thao admits that she doesn't have much of anything figured out. When she delivers a line like "you're never gonna leave / and I'm never gonna leave / but you're never gonna love me like I need," it isn't so much an accusation as it is open-ended bewilderment in the face of human flaw. Pitted against rolling drums and flittering guitar work - almost defiantly upbeat - this plays like a resolution toward optimism in what most would label a bleak romance.
From the Archives: The Perceptionists
Black Dilogue was released back in March of 05!
Anyone who claims even surface knowledge of underground hip hop needs to back their credibility on the essential releases of Mr. Lif and Akrobatik.
Featured Video: M.I.A. - Paper Planes
The newest video from M.I.A.
"Paper Planes" from Kala debuted this January to great fanfare.
Featured Review: Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend self titled release out now on XL Recordings
There's a lot of pretension in singing about week-long vacations in San Juan and checking out your romance studies professor, yes, but at least they aren't bullshitting anyone.
Downloads
play all
The Perceptionists
song:Let's Move
album:Black Dialogue (Definitive Jux…
[ play ] | [ download mp3 ]
Del The Funky Homosapien
song:Bubblepop
album:Eleventh Hour (Definitive Jux)
[ play ] | [ download mp3 ]
Vampire Weekend
song:Oxford Comma
album:Vampire Weekend (XL Recordings…
[ play ] | [ download mp3 ]
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
song:Beat (Health, Life and Fire)
album:We Brave Bee Stings and All (K…
[ play ] | [ download mp3 ]
Why?
song:The Hollows
album:Alopecia (Anticon)
[ play ] | [ download mp3 ]