Deerhoof “Breakup Songs”

Deerhoof pull off a tricky balancing act on Breakup Song: They’ve significantly changed their sound while retaining their very distinct character. The glitchy electronic textures are jarring at first, but it quickly becomes apparent that that their rhythms and melodies have only been changed on a superficial level, and there is a clear aesthetic through line from any point in their creative evolution to where they are right now. “Breakup Songs” is particularly strong – jumpy, jittery and absurdly generous in its variety of tones, but oddly mellow at its core. I can see why this is a “breakup song” – it sounds like being shaken up by a sudden change in status quo, but also understanding on some level why it had to happen.

Buy it from Amazon.

Divine Fits “Would That Not Be Nice”

Britt Daniel and Dan Boechner are such fully formed artists that it’s not much of a surprise that they can only really sound like themselves as Divine Fits, their new band with drummer Sam Brown. The Britt songs sound like Spoon; the Dan songs sound like Handsome Furs, and the reason it fits together is mainly because their aesthetics are complementary – they dress up a similar sexy, hyper-masculine character in different forms of studio gloss and caustic wit. “Would That Not Be Nice,” the only track on the record credited to all three members, is also the number that sounds most like Spoon, with its rumbling funk and liberal use of processing on Britt’s vocal. I really like the sound of that effect here – it kinda swallows up parts of his lines, blurring his meaning and sharpening his delivery. The slapback sounds like a literal slap back at points, which suits the performance rather well: There’s a touch of affection in Britt’s words, but it’s mostly a bit caddish, as he’s working to seduce a woman he seems to resent and fear. But as much as she’s “destructive, alien and deranged,” that clearly turns him on.

Buy it from Amazon.

Teengirl Fantasy featuring Romanthony “Do It”

Romanthony is most famous for being the singer on Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” which is, of course, one of the most widely beloved dance songs of the past 20 years. He brings a similar presence to this new song with Teengirl Fantasy – joyful yet serene, soulful but devoid of angst. The lyrics, about living it up at a dance club, are totally banal, but he elevates them by virtue of total commitment. You hear Romanthony sings these words over these beats, and you know he’s a true believer. He brings an absurd gravitas to it, as though he’s the High Priest of Dancefloor Optimism.

Buy it from Amazon.

Ellie Goulding “Anything Could Happen”

The big keyboard hook in “Anything Could Happen” is so bright and bouncy that it seems to make the whole world sparkle. The song is arranged like a fireworks display, with the big moments bracketed by verses and breakdowns that only seem smaller in scope and intensity because of their proximity to that ecstatic chorus part. At one point, a bridge leads directly into another breakdown, just for extra dramatic flair. This isn’t empty bluster, by the way: This song is a direct descendent of The Knife’s “Heartbeats” on both a musical and lyrical level, and taps into the fierce emotional energy of Björk in her early solo career. Goulding’s wide-eyed optimism is contrasted with lines that soberly accept the worst possibilities implied by “anything could happen,” and in the bridge, she comes to an important realization that while she’s willing to give her lover everything they need, she might not actually need them. The beauty at the core of this song is in how she doesn’t need to know, and how she’s equally open to the possibility of things succeeding or failing. She just wants to be fully alive in every moment, and to avoid the sort of neuroses that stand in the way of true romance.

Buy it from Amazon.

Jessie Ware “Still Love Me”

The music in “Still Love Me” sorta creeps and slinks around, echoing lyrics that pose questions about a romance that’s gone a bit sour. It’s a song that is, on every level, about uncertainty, but Jessie Ware’s phrasing on her lead vocal parts goes against that grain – she lets on a bit of wounded defensiveness, but her tone is stern and sure. This relationship may be a mess, but she knows her love is real, and you can tell she really wants to know if her partner still loves her too. She sounds willing to fight for this, at least if they’re up to the challenge as well.

Buy it from Amazon.

She Does Is Magic “Sing With Me”

A lot of guys write sweet songs about girls, but not everyone can sell it. Chad Serhal, the singer and guitarist for She Does Is Magic, is quite good at it – his voice has a handsome richness, but it’s not slick and studied, like a guy who is obsessed with his own sexual power. There is warmth and wear in his tone and phrasing – at some points he sounds like a more polished version of Lee Ranaldo. He just sounds like a good dude with a kind heart, and that extends to the sound of his guitar, which on this song, alternate between Strokes-y rhythms and pretty lead lines that, if rendered in light, would kinda sparkle softly in the air. This is summer love music, gently easing into the fall with a vague fear that the magic may soon fizzle out.

Visit the She Does Is Magic page on Bandcamp.

King Krule “Rock Bottom”

I used to have an elaborately curated and sequenced iPod playlist that I labelled “Night Town,” and it featured something like four hundred songs from across many genres and eras that…uh, sounded really great late at night. I listened to the playlist mostly when I was traveling home from somewhere late at night. It wasn’t all slow and quiet songs, and it wasn’t all ambient and vibe-y or anything like that. A lot of it rocked, some of it was pretty, and a lot of it had some kind of groove. It all made intuitive sense to me, at least, and I’m sure it would make sense to you if I recreated some stretch of it from memory and shared it with you. It’s a feeling, a resonance, and maybe something tied to memory, as a lot of it came from the 70s and 80s and those sounds formed my childhood. I can say without question that the sort of songs I put on that playlist are among the most evocative and moving pieces of music I know, and I wish that when people ask me what kind of music I like most, I could just say “well…up-tempo pop, cryptic rock, and stuff that would be on my old “Night Town” playlist.” It’s true, but no one would get it.

King Krule’s small but intensely amazing body of work is as “Night Town” as it gets. There are elements of his music that remind me of the Clash – not just his Joe Strummer-esque voice, but that goes a long way – and the Clash is a band that only ever sounds right late at night. Krule goes further with that, giving everything a sort of loose, vaguely impromptu vibe and leaving a lot of space in the music for notes to hang in the air, a bit the way sounds seem more slow and still when streets are empty and there’s not so much light to distract your senses. “Rock Bottom” isn’t quite as bleakly romantic as the cuts from his first EP last year, but the mood is just as potent – more confrontational, a bit more jagged, and the structure meanders a little. He says so much with just the sound of his rasp, I can sometimes forget he’s actually singing words.

Attempt to buy it from Rinse.

Blur “The Universal (Live in London, 8/12/2012)”

As of this writing, I have purchased six official Blur live releases and have acquired at least five other high-quality quality recordings of the band in concert. (I spent money on a few of those too, because it was the 90s, and you had to pay for that sort of thing back then.) I can say with some confidence and a high degree of authority that Parklive, the band’s latest live album, is the best of the lot, or at least on par with my beloved Art School Rocks in Feedback Frenzy! bootleg from the 1997 tour.

The performances in Parklive are great, but the quality really comes down to an excellent engineering and mixing job that captures the energy and sound of the band as well as the vast open air audience, who sing along and elevate the performance with their enthusiastic participation. Capturing the sound of the audience is crucial in a top-quality live document – ideally, the power of a live show is about the dynamic between what’s happening on stage and in the crowd. All through Parklive, you can hear this extraordinarily excited audience egg on the band, resulting in the best and most ecstatic live rendition of “Song 2” I’ve ever encountered, a gloriously goofy “Parklife,” and a heartbreakingly sweet extended breakdown at the end “Tender.” You can go back to the band’s previous live album from 2009, recorded at the same venue and featuring mostly the same songs, and while it’s a good performance, the people are so much more faint. The power isn’t there.

“The Universal” has pushed me to the edge of tears a few times recently, and each time it was kind of a surprise because I was in a good, stable mood until its sentiment stirred something in me. The tone of the song is very bitter and ironic, but somehow the phony optimism of the chorus goes full circle to earnest hopefulness, and the cynicism gets purified by the schmaltz. It’s a very English sort of thing – having those defenses up, but embracing it when the thought of accepting misery becomes too much to bear. Hearing all these people sing along to “it really really really could happen” is both heart-warming and tiny bit soul-crushing, because you just hear all these people affirming their connection to this painful emotional compromise.

Buy it from iTunes.

Garbage “Felt”

So, as it turns out, Garbage can be an exceptional shoegazer band when they want to be one. I kinda wish they wanted to be one more often – whereas a lot of their new comeback record sticks to very familiar ground for them, “Felt” highlights aspects of their sound that were always in the mix, but never quite on the surface. I appreciate Shirley Manson’s bold, snarling personality, but it’s nice – revealing, even – to hear her go soft and ethereal. She conveys a lot of uncertainty in this song, questioning whether her lover “felt anything” with her, and whether she was being fair with their relationship, and whether any of it matters at all. It’s all so open-ended that it’s hard to tell whether she’s still in the thick of this drama, or looking back on it and attempting to figure out what went wrong. It’s a pensive mood and a hazy vibe, but the song has a very solid form – all of the most shoegaze-y moments are punctuated by bold, more typically Garbage-like alt-rock hooks that sound like a mind resetting momentarily to a default position.

Buy it from Amazon.

Opossom “Blue Meanies”

Kody Nielson pulls off something really impressive on the first Opossom record, but it’s rather subtle: The record keeps up a consistent and specific vibe – a relaxed psychedelic funk that falls somewhere between the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the Avalanches’ Since I Left You – but the music itself is constantly shifting its dynamics, so it remains compelling for a solid half hour. This shouldn’t seem like that much of a miracle, but if you hear enough records – especially on the chill end of indie – it’s actually quite rare. “Blue Meanies” is particularly great as its bass line slinks and bobs around a fill-heavy beat that provides a steady form but implies no solid shape. Like everything on the record, it’s clearly defined but feels loose enough to change course completely at a whim.

Buy it from Amazom.

Domo Genesis and the Alchemist featuring Smoke DZA “Power Ballad”

Domo Genesis is a strong rapper, but he’s probably doomed to be forever overshadowed by the more charismatic and/or controversial members of the Odd Future crew. This is a common plight in hip-hop – just look to Inspectah Deck and Masta Killa in the Wu-Tang Clan as a rough analog – and it’s even more common on sports teams and most offices. Like Earl Sweathshirt and Frank Ocean, Domo has made a significant artistic leap this year, but compared to those guys’ breakthroughs, it’s kinda minor. There’s nothing jaw dropping on his Alchemist-produced mixtape No Idols, but his skills have improved considerably, and he’s found a musical context that flatters the tone of his voice and the particular cadences of his rhymes. “Power Ballad” is the standout; he sounds like a harder, more verbally nimble version of Drake framed by a looped lead guitar lick that sounds like it could be lifted from a particularly corny Cinemax skin flick.

Get the mixtape for free from DatPiff.

The Kills “Dreams”

Jamie Hince doesn’t get a lot of credit for being one of the most inventive and distinct guitarists of the past decade, which is sort of aggravating because I get the sense that he’s often underrated and overlooked primarily for his close proximity to the fashion world. But while most every other notable act through the majority of the 00s did their best to either obscure or eliminate the guitar, he obsessed over tone and attack, and tinkered endlessly with digital effects.

This cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” is, sort of unexpectedly, a fine showcase for his style as he basically eliminates every trace of Lindsey Buckingham’s aesthetic in favor of exaggerating his own, emphasizing blunt physical force on the instrument and highly abstracted distortions. Sometimes it just barely sounds musical, but as much as he goes in for this industrial clanging, he never loses the structure of the song itself, so the noise has a loose, gestural quality that suggests the shapes that Buckingham articulated very, very clearly.

Alison Mosshart’s vocals are just as important here: Unlike a lot of singers on this new Fleetwood Mac tribute album, she is actually up to the task of inhabiting a Stevie Nicks song, and can do it without doing an impression. Mosshart comes off a lot tougher than Nicks, who exposed more vulnerability in her earth mother persona, but the moments where she cracks that facade a bit convey so much emotional nuance. There’s a lot of ache just under the surface of her performance.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sauna Youth “Psi Girls”

The words to “Psi Girls” get a bit buried in the mix under the chugging riffs and “la las”, but the singer does his best to get them across, which illustrates the point of the lyrics, in which he expresses frustration in his “inability to communicate” with his partner. But it’s not on a one-way thing: They both struggle with this, and in some way, they’ve bonded over this shared problem. He sounds eager to fix the problem, but also a bit exasperated by the way they’ve found work-arounds for this inarticulate state. He never says it outright, but the title suggests they’ve developed some primitive sort of telepathy, if just through the power of their intimacy.

Visit the Sauna Youth Bandcamp page.

Sky Ferreira “Red Lips”

The last time I wrote about Sky Ferreira here, she was aiming for an icy electro-pop sound with a song that cut up an unaffected vocal line into a mechanical abstraction – romantic obsession rendered as a skipping CD loop. This time around she’s going for 90s alt rock, or to be really specific, a Garbage pastiche. It suits her well: She’s very good at conveying that sort of sullen sexuality, and in spiking her most venomous lines with a bit of pop sugar. The bass and guitar sound nail the aesthetics of the era better than pretty much every faux-90s band I’ve heard in the past year – blunt and violent without obscuring some very catchy hooks. This is likely a bit of bandwagon jumping on Ferreira’s part – she seems to be the kind of young pop singer who ends up casting about for a direction until one sticks – but it suits her extremely well, and better yet, isn’t such a drastic change from her previous singles. I definitely hear echoes of the same person in both “Red Lips” and “One,” and am interested to hear other angles on that persona in other songs.

Buy it from iTunes.

The celebration of the 10th anniversary of this site continues on with this collection of the best and most notable music of 2008. Yes, we are at the point in this project where I am anthologizing the music of the very recent past. Just go with it, it will all make sense when the full decade is complete! Anyway, this is a pretty interesting year in retrospect – you can kinda hear the beginning of trends that are presently dominant in popular music, particularly in the electronic and dance pop tracks. There’s also a lot of terrific obscure stuff in this batch, and without really intending it, I ended up putting a lot of those cuts in prominent positions in the sequencing.

The survey mixes for 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011 are still up. Check in on September 3rd for a look back on 2009.

DOWNLOAD DISC 1

Allá “Una Dia Otra Noche” / Stereolab “Three Women” / of Montreal “Triphallus, to Punctuate!” / Erykah Badu “Twinkle” / Santogold “L.E.S. Artistes” / Hot Chip “Shake A Fist” / Girl Talk “Here’s the Thing” / Lil Wayne “Dr. Carter” / Solange “Would’ve Been the One” / Veronica Maggio “Gammal Sång” / Coldplay “Viva La Vida” / Taylor Swift “You Belong with Me” / Lykke Li “Little Bit” / Weezer “Troublemaker” / Fight Like Apes “Jake Summers” / Be Your Own Pet “Becky” / The Breeders “Walk It Off” / Atlas Sound “River Card” Parenthetical Girls “A Song for Ellie Greenwich” / Portishead “We Carry On”

DOWNLOAD DISC 2

Estelle featuring Kanye West “American Boy” / Beyoncé “Single Ladies” / Hercules and Love Affair “Athene” / Goldfrapp “A&E” / Wild Beasts “The Devil’s Crayon” / Raphael Saadiq “100 Yard Dash” / Q-Tip “Gettin’ Up” / Cat Power “Aretha, Sing One for Me” / The Raconteurs “Top Yourself” / Al Green “Lay It Down” / Beck “Chemtrails” / Clipse “So Fly (Now We’ve Had Her)” / Ne-Yo “Closer” / Ida Maria “Oh My God” / Voluntary Butler Scheme” / School of Language “Extended Holiday” / The Week That Was “The Story Waits for No One” / Spiritualized “Soul on Fire” / The Smashing Pumpkins “No Surrender” / Sigur Rós “Gobbledigook” / Lindsey Buckingham “Time Precious Time”

DOWNLOAD DISC 3

Matmos “Polychords” / Electric Six “Flashy Man” / Marnie Stern “Ruler” / Deerhunter “Never Stops” / The B-52’s “Hot Corner” / Girls Aloud “The Promise” / Rox “My Baby Left Me” / The Dø “At Last” / Rose Elinor Dougall “Another Version of Pop Song” / The Mummers “March of the Dawn” / White Hinterland “Lindberghs and Metal Birds” / Adele “Chasing Pavements” / Lloyd featuring Lil Wayne “Girls Around the World” / Jean Grae “#8” / Johnson&Jonson “Wow!” / Kelley Polar “Entropy Reigns (in the Celestial City)” / Crystal Castles “Untrust Us” / The Fall “Senior Twilight Stock Replacer” / The Whitest Boy Alive “Golden Cage (Fred Falke Mix)” / Gang Gang Dance “House Jam” / Four Tet “Ribbons”

DOWNLOAD DISC 4

Architecture in Helsinki “That Beep” / Annie “I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me” / Max Tundra “Number Our Days” / Kanye West “Paranoid” / TV on the Radio “Golden Age” / Cadence Weapon “Tattoos and What They Really Feel Like” / CSS “Believe Achieve” / Lady Gaga “Poker Face” / Hemme Fatale “Animal Lover” / Beta Satan “666” / Andrew W.K. “KISEKI” / Little Pictures “I Wish I Could Keep You” / Obi Best “What It’s Not” / Brad Neely “George Washington” / The Tough Alliance “Lucky” / Fuck Buttons “Bright Tomorrow” / Flying Lotus “RobertaFlack” / Dizee Rascal “Driving with Nowhere to Go” / Death Cab for Cutie “I Will Possess Your Heart” / Fennesz “Saffron Revolution”

DOWNLOAD DISC 5

Fugiya & Miyagi “Knickerbocker” / The Kills “Last Day of Magic” / The Long Blondes “The Couples” / Alphabeat “What Is Happening?” / Britta Persson “Kill Hollywood Me” / Bell “Echinacea” / Nine Inch Nails “Discipline” / Joker “Snake Eater” / LV “CCTV” / Silje Nes “Dizzy Street” / Ladytron “Ghosts” / Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” / The Mountain Goats “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” / The Magnetic Fields “The Nun’s Litany” / Primal Scream “The Glory of Love” / The Veronicas “Untouched” / M83 “Kim & Jessie” / Marit Larsen “If A Song Could Get Me You” / Frida Hyvönen “Scandinavian Blonde” / She & Him “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?”

DOWNLOAD DISC 6

The Juan Maclean “Happy House” / Big Boi, Andre 3000 and Raekwon “Royal Flush” / The-Dream “Falsetto” / Wale “The Kramer” / Duffy “Mercy” / Jenny Lewis “The Next Messiah” / Fleet Foxes “White Winter Hymnal” / Women “Black Rice” / Beach House “Gila” / Snoop Dogg featuring Robyn “Sexual Eruption (Fyre Department Remix)” / Wiley “Wearing My Rolex” / Britney Spears “Womanizer” / The Ting Tings “That’s Not My Name” / Wire “One of Us” / The Mae Shi “Run to Your Grave” / Wolf Parade “Call It A Ritual” / Anni Rossi “Venice” / Clinic “Emotions”

DOWNLOAD DISC 7

R.E.M. “Living Well is the Best Revenge” / Vampire Weekend “Walcott” / Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “Walk Into the Mirror” / Destroyer “The State” / Sloan “Witch’s Wand” / David Byrne and Brian Eno “Strange Overtones” / SebastiAn “Momy” / Rihanna “Disturbia” / T.I. “Whatever You Like” / The Roots “Get Busy” / The Bug “Warning” / Skream “Hedd Banger” / Brightblack Morning Light “Hologram Buffalo” / Love Is All “Wishing Well” / Mudhoney “I’m Now” / Paramore “Misery Business” / Cut Copy “Lights and Music” / Kleerup featuring Lykke Li “Until We Bleed” / King Midas Sound “One Ting (Dabyre Remix)” / Air France “Collapsing at Your Doorstep”

DOWNLOAD DISC 8

Hauschka “Rode Null” / My Morning Jacket “Evil Urges” / Tricky “Puppy Toy” / Murs “The Science” / Rick Ross “The Boss” / The Cool Kids “88” / Mr. Oizo “Two Takes It” / Katy Perry “Hot N Cold” / Little Boots “Stuck On Repeat” / Amadou & Mariam “Sabali” / Zomby “Mu5h” / No Age “Eraser” / Ponytail “Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came From An Angel)” / Fucked Up “No Epiphany” / Jay Reatard “Always Wanting More” / Blitzen Trapper “Furr” / The Walkmen “In the New Year” / Girls “Hellhole Ratrace”

Rick Ross featuring Andre 3000 “Sixteen”

Rick Ross and Andre 3000 spend much of the first third of “Sixteen” lamenting the limitations of a 16-bar verse; kvetching that the format can’t possibly express the full scope of their consciousness. When Ross drops the idea, he just does a pretty standard Rick Ross verse – heavy on fantasy, but with a touch of pathos. It’s good stuff, but nothing that would make you go “Oh, this guy needs to just keep going and going!” Andre 3000, on the other hand, does just that. Over the course of a few minutes, he lays out a marathon rap that starts off with a loose conversational rhythm but gradually builds in both its rhetoric and emotion. 3000 is always excellent with wordplay but his work here is especially impressive in how his intricate structure progresses over a relatively long stretch. This is from Ross’ album, but he’s the one who seems like a guest here – he’s on just a sliver of the overall track, framing 3000’s performance like he’s the host for the evening.

Buy it from Amazon.

Bat for Lashes “Laura”

“Laura” is an odd choice for a lead single, but perhaps I say that only because it’s fairly uncommon for plaintive, genuinely melancholy piano ballads to be pushed by a major label these days. This isn’t new aesthetic ground for Natasha Khan, but it’s a great showcase for her voice, and her skill for conveying a sense of deep emotional connection to her subject. “Laura” overflows with empathy and affection; there are some turns of phrase and inflections that just break my heart because the intensity of her kindness is almost too much to bear. So it gets to me – why does this song sound so sad? What are we not being told about Laura’s life that makes this tribute come across more like a tragedy? She’s singing about someone who seems to thrive in the spotlight – could it be that she’s lamenting that Laura’s best moments come when she’s furthest away from her?

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Fluxblog at Housing Works: 10 Years of Perfect Tunes

You can download a podcast version of the Fluxblog 10th anniversary event at Housing Works in New York City earlier this week above. It was recorded by the kind people at Housing Works, and it sounds really good. The show is being presented with no edits, but there were only a couple little flubs along the way, so it’s no big deal. I’m really proud of how this turned out – everyone was great, and without any of us having an idea of what each other was doing, the songs all flowed together well and there were a lot of complementary themes. (I’m particularly pleased with how the idea I laid out in my intro was resolved in Rob Sheffield’s finale.)

Here is the running order of speakers:

• Matthew Perpetua on Scissor Sisters’ “Paul McCartney” and music as a way of communicating with and connecting to people we’ve never actually met.

• Emily Gould on Martha Wainwright’s “Love Is A Stranger” and songs that keep you from destroying your life.

• Heather D’Angelo of Au Revoir Simone on Electrelane’s “The Valleys” and how creativity triumphs over destruction.

• Mark Richardson on Silver Jews’ “How to Rent A Room” and learning how to enjoy settling down in one place.

• Amy Rose Spiegel from Rookie on the Delays’ “Nearer Than Heaven” and learning how to find music that you love.

• Sean T. Collins on Nine Inch Nails’ “Leaving Hope” and finding peace of mind in hopelessness.

• Amanda Petrusich on Interpol’s “NYC” and adjusting to life in New York City.

• Dick Valentine of Electric Six on Mark Mallman’s “True Love” and how love songs are often not what they seem to be.

• Rob Sheffield on Stephen Malkmus’ “Malediction” and looking to musicians for advice about life, and finding good advice in unexpected songs.

Plus, the entire group discusses the merits of R. Kelly’s classic “Ignition (Remix).”

You can download a mix featuring all ten of the songs here. Please do what you can to support the writers, the artists and Housing Works, which is a terrific charity and worth your time and money.

Nas “A Queen’s Story”

I have never been invested in Nas enough to be disappointed by any of his many records over the years, but I will say this: Life Is Good is a great rap album, and it’s enjoyable mainly because it seems like the guy has finally stopped struggling to do anything besides the sort of music that made him an icon in the first place. I understand why artists want to stretch out creatively or attempt to be relevant to younger audiences, but that can result in losing track of core strengths. The best tracks on Life Is Good, like the majestic “A Queen’s Story,” don’t sound exactly like Illmatic but they have the same essential glow. Nas’ style has shifted a bit too, but he sounds entirely comfortable in these beats – he has worked a lot of bad impulses out of his system by now, and every bit of technique he’s learned along the way is applied to a sort of flow that is entirely intuitive for him. Particularly on this track, he’s reconnecting with Queens, his earliest muse. There’s a touch of defensiveness in the song, but it’s welcome – as a former longtime resident of the borough, I can tell you, it is aggravating when people diminish that place out of laziness. Nas is rapping specifically about Queensbridge, which is not only one of the most fascinating projects in all of the world, but also a crucial spot in the creation and evolution of rap culture. When he raps about this place, you can feel him beaming through the track with a deserved sense of pride.

Buy it from Amazon.

Micachu and the Shapes “Low Dogg”

Micachu is obsessed with abrasive sounds – scrapes, rattles, clangs, distortions, monotones. She’s not alone in that, but she’s rare in her skill for taking potentially irritating sounds and making them seem seductive or calming in the context of her songs. “Low Dogg” leans very hard on industrial noise, but its rhythms have a lulling quality, as if the song takes a macro view of a life she describes as a dull routine – the agitation and restlessness snaps into a predictable beat, and becomes comfortable in its own strange way.

Buy it from Amazon.