Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream

These come off the Forsaken Cowboy EP, the second single from their latest LP Senior. Enjoy.

Forsaken Cowboy by Röyksopp

British lo-fi outfit made groundbreaking work with their debut Thunder, Lightning, Strike. A blend of hip-hop, pop, electronic, bossa nova, and  70s elevator music, The Go! Team was bringing something fresh and untapped.  The new-found success surely affected their approach to the next critically acclaimed Proof of Youth, as they moved closer and closer towards becoming a one-dimensional hip-hop non-sequitur.  Not my cup of tea, but I will readily admit that The Go! Team’s latest Rolling Blackouts is absolutely wonderful.

Strangely nostalgic in its sound, Rolling Blackouts goes back to what The Go! Team does best: refreshing and modernizing older sounds. Take the short “Lazy Poltergeist”, a delicate piano interlude that seems to long for a simpler time when keyboards were all you really needed. Yet not too much earlier on the album, “Apollo Throwdown” takes a harp, an orchestra of strings, lays a backbeat down, on which TGT drops their signature anthemic rap vocals.  “Bust-Out Brigade” begins with blaring horns more suited for a 80s cop movie, but this instrumental gets more and more intriguing as layers of xylophone and synthesizers get a hold of it. “Buy Nothing Day” sounds like it might have been ripped right out of a mid-90s pop song, but it works. The Beach-Boys-like “Ready to Go Steady” is perhaps the most joyful song on the album, and if the chorus doesn’t stick in your head for days I’d be surprised.

I could go on, but for the sake of brevity I won’t. So go and grab a copy of The Go! Team’s Rolling Blackouts.

Listen to “Apollo Throwdown”

Listen to “Ready to Go Steady“

Terrible band name, yes, but they’ve got an  insanely catchy song “The Golden Age” featured in a Heineken commercial this past week. The song is actually a couple years old, but there’s no time limit on an awesome track.

Listen to “The Golden Age”

I’ll admit I’ve never the biggest fan of TV On the Radio. I thought they were getting accolades for doing nothing but putting out lo-fi esoteric sounds. That said, I’ll never turn down a great song. “Will Do” comes off of TV on the Radio’s 5th LP Nine Types of Light. It begins with a bluesy twinge, as twinkling ivory trickles in ever so slowly, only to be perfectly complemented by a slow pulsating bass line.

Note: Best wishes to Gerard Smith, bassist/keyboardist for TV on the Radio, who was recently diagnosed with Lung Cancer.

Listen to “Will Do“