Pitchfork

"Straight from the slums of the Shaolin, it's... THEM!" Well, it's a few of them, at least. Last week we got out first taste of Only Built For Cuban Linx 2, Raekwon's eagerly anticipated sequel to his immortal street classic OB4CL, with the Ghostface-assisted "Criminology 2". While "Criminology 2" fit Rae's description of what we could expect from OB4CL2 (plenty of gun-clapping and rock-slinging), "Back From the Slums" (formerly known "Wu Ooh") manages to appeal to the greater Wu-Tang sensibility, complete with head-scratch slang and effortless flow. It's good to hear Method Man coming hard again (here on chorus duty, followed by a fourth-quarter killer of a verse), especially with Rae and Ghost bouncing off each other in such sublime RAGU fashion. It doesn't hurt that the track's a dazzler too, hypnotic and spooky, harkening back to the Wu days of yore (via Kanye).

MP3/Stream:> Raekwon: "Back From the Slums"
[from Only Built for Cuban Linx 2; expected in March 2009 from Ice Water Records]

Yesterday TMZ posted audio of Christian Bale freaking the fuck out on a director of photography during the filming of Terminator Salvation. A scene was ruined because the guy walked or stood in the wrong place or something, and Bale unleashes a paint-peeling verbal tirade that gives you an idea of the kind of inner anger he draws upon when he's in the midst of an intense scene. L.A.'s the Mae Shi, of the underrated 2008 album HLLLYH, have taken the audio track of the vebal blast and turned it into a song that'll be entertaining for the next few minutes, maybe even a little longer. Props for putting it all together in a day, though, and let's all come together behind this poor DP.

Director Bruno Levy situates this anthemic single from You & Me in the most epic place imaginable-- the roof of the world. Levy was doing a photo tour of Nepal's Kagbeni Mustang region and he assembled this video from thousands of still photographs. We follow a girl in a stocking cap as she wanders between the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas' Annapurna peaks, yaks and sheep trailing behind her in the background, until eventually she meets up with a band of kids and they dance. (Also, if you missed it last week, like we did because we had server problems, the Walkmen played Conan.)

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

[from You & Me; out now on Gigantic]

Yes, three H's. That's the point: excess. It's all over new tape Hottest Ni**a Under the Sun. Mook-rock guitars? Yeah. "Purple Rain" solo w/ falsetto? Yeahh. And-- perhaps most shockingly-- an actually-hilarious verse from Mack Maine? Yeahhh. I mean, bitching about something like "Prom Queen" is like bitching about insects devouring each other on Discovery-- it's disgusting, it's horrible, it's fascinating. Then you flip it off. It's over, onto the next thing. No big deal. Breathe.

Lil Wayne doing rock isn't like Andre doing rock, i.e., dude is still rapping lines around throats, heads, torsos, whatever. Like on "Yeahhh". The song has a rock beat, I guess. But if rock is what's getting Wayne this hyped, give this man his rock. This is throat-jumping-out-of-mouth Wayne, as seen on "Playing With Fire" mixed with go-go-no-hook Wayne, as seen on "A Milli". It's like he's stuck in that space where you realize your entire arm is on fire and people turn into scorching skeletons when you tap them on the shoulder. You know what I mean? No? You are not Wayne.

My favorite line isn't the best line: "Yes, I am a dog/ Now watch me catapult a boy." Right: It's raining pets, hallelujah. But it's the way "catapult a boy" comes out: "cat-a-pult-a-boy," like "cat" is cutting the rope and the "a-pult-a" is the big spoon flying and "boy" is the boulder breaking through a castle wall. Nobody uses catapults in real life anymore, and that's a shame. But there's a lyricism to such ancient weaponry. The angle, the arc, the impact. They flow, in other words. And they hit. 

[from the Hottest Ni**a Under the Sun mixtape]

"Under New Management" reads a sign over the door as we make our way into a Queens laundromat for the latest episode of Pitchfork.tv's analog-meets-internet show, "A>D>D". And boy, they really have made some changes at this place. Live entertainment is provided by Baltimore spazz-rockers Ponytail, who rip through characteristically energetic versions of "Late for School" and "7 Souls" (both from Ice Cream Spiritual) while surrounded by spinning dryers. We've seen people behaving like the band's mighty vocalist Molly Siegel in a laundromat before, but they're usually just there to keep warm, and more often than not they wind up being wrestled to the ground and forcibly ejected by New York's finest. That's rock'n'roll for you.

"Late for School"

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

"7 Souls"

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

[Ice Cream Spiritual is out now on We*Are*Free]

All my favorite singers couldn't sing. Now there's one less of them still performing. We've seen musicians retire and unretire before, but unless David Berman is pulling our leg, Silver Jews are now no more. The band's performance Saturday night at McMinnville, Tennessee's Cumberland Caverns was their last, and included this emotional take on American Water's indelible "We Are Real". But first, Berman gives a brief introduction: "If you're in a position in your life where you need to make a change, this is the best time," he says, citing all the changes going on these days. One of the most recent historical changes, the inauguration of President Obama, flies in the face of the work of Berman's father, whom the Silver Jews main guy recently revealed to be right-wing lobbyist Rick Berman. Strange victory, strange defeat.

Update: "Smith and Jones Forever" is now on YouTube as well.

"Introduction / We Are Real"

"Smith and Jones Forever"

[original versions from American Water; out now on Drag City]

Barcelona-based Filastine creates tracks so geographically and chronologically expansive that they sound less like "world" music than music from another world. Like the previously posted "Fitnah", "Desordenador" comes from Filastine's forthcoming Dirty Bomb, for DJ/rupture's SOOT label (Filastine's "Hungry Ghost (Instrumental)" appears on DJ/rupture's 2008 Uproot). Sort of the way such artists as Talvin Singh combined 1990s electronic music with Indian classical instruments, so Filastine melds the wobbly, bass-heavy electronics of dubstep with the more organic sounds of other dance music styles from around the globe. The video is similarly alien to these North American eyes, with black-and-white geometric shapes flickering in a manner you could display in a modern art museum. According to a Filastine blog post, "It was made live"; Omar Álvarez, Miki Arregui, and Xavier Gibert direct.

Pitchfork.tv page with embed code is here.

from Dirty Bomb; due 02/09/08 on SOOT]

If it feels like Groundhog Day, it's probably because it is. And also because, yes, we've been posting a new song from the same compilation, The Dark Was the Night, almost every day for a while now. But not the same song, and definitely not "I Got You Babe". Instead of Sonny and Cher, you can spend your next six weeks of winter with My Morning Jacket, here playing the laid-back, waltzing "El Caporal". Twangy lead guitar, boisterous horns, and saloon-ready piano drive the song, and Jim James' voice has a touch of Roy Orbison-ish vibrato here, especially on the jolting midsection; he's joined by a bassy backing vocal on the call-and-response choruses. "I just hope that my kisses, love, will linger/ On your sweet, confused captain's face," James seems to be singing, before a touch of trilling guitar. Plenty of confusion in the lyrics, then, but a pretty, swaying country-rock tune on a day that, let's face it, should really be a federal holiday. And not just because there was some kind of sporting event yesterday.

Stream:> My Morning Jacket: "El Caporal"
[from Dark Was the Night; due 02/17/09 via Red Hot]]

Photo by Lauren Dukoff

Devendra Banhart's handful of covers have always stood out to me more than any of his trippy originals. One-offs like "Fistful of Love" and "Don't Look Back in Anger" highlight his vocal nuances without letting him float around in the stratosphere. He needs these songs' rigid structures, and in turn he can loosen them from their original context and completely reshape them.

Such is the case with "Forget About Him", from Chapter Music's upcoming Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom (don't miss Bill Callahan's contribution to the same record). The upbeat tempo and plucky accompaniment of the original belie its romantic hopelessness, and Bloom makes lines like "Guess I'll have to die to forget about him" sound devastating but not overdramatic. Banhart's cover sounds a bit tongue-in-cheek at first, thanks primarily to the spacey effects and his hammy croon. But his misdirection is a sign of humility: Knowing he can't improve on the original, he doesn't even try to communicate resignation and instead makes loopiness a symptom of a broken heart. His cover is a heartfelt valentine to its writer, right down to his final words: "Thanks, Kath!" Indeed. (via Naturalismo)

MP3/Stream:> Devendra Banhart: "Forget About Him"
[from Loving Takes This Course - A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom; due 03/14/09 on Chapter Music]

The Super Bowl worked out just about perfectly for me. I don't much care for the Pittsburgh Steelers or their brand of football, but they only barely squeaked out a victory and looked like pretty big jerks toward the end. I kind of like the Arizona Cardinals, seeing as I once lived there, but I've never been able to stand Kurt Warner (in part because of a childhood antipathy toward the then-Los Angeles Rams; in part because he seems like a self-righteous a-hole). So a close Steelers win ending on a Warner fumble was basically the best I could ask. Oh yeah, also a new Smashing Pumpkins song called "FOL" debuted in a Hyundai ad. You liked "Zero", right? This isn't as good. Best-ever quarterback: still Joe Montana, sorry.

MP3:> Smashing Pumpkins: "FOL"
[from Hyundai ad]