Danny Brown & Black Milk - Black and Brown

01 Sound Check
02 Wake Up
03 Loosie
04 Zap
05 Jordan VII
06 Dada
07 WTF
08 Lol
09 Dark Sunshine
10 Black & Brown

To say that Black and Brown, the new collaborative EP from Detroit indie-rap producer Black Milk and shock-rap loose cannon Danny Brown, feels "half-finished" would be over-generous. Covering 10 tracks in a scant 22 minutes and bearing a forehead-slap obvious title that probably existed before the project did, Black and Brown is hastily assembled, thoughtlessly sequenced, and conspicuously truncated. There are two songs, back to back, titled "WTF" and "LOL". Four songs don't exceed the two-minute mark. The overwhelming impression is that the EP exists because an assistant stumbled across an "in-progress" folder of mp3s on Black Milk's desktop and leaked the results.

And yet, Black Milk is one of indie rap's best and most reliable producers, and Danny Brown, fresh off his brilliant XXX, is riding a white-hot creative streak: which means that Black and Brown is 22 hastily assembled, thoughtlessly sequenced minutes of vivid beats and incredible rapping. Black Milk's beats are boilerplate Black Milk-- post-Dilla instrumentals hitched to hard-knocking drums-- and Brown brings none of the songwriting skill or emotional range that marked XXX, with its tales of stripping hot water heaters from abandoned houses and harrowing accounts of substance abuse. It's a low-stakes affair, aiming at nothing more than head nods, but it induces some deep ones.

Brown tamps down the keening high edge in his voice, with the result that he sounds more like Pharaohe Monch than usual. Lyrically, he mostly coasts, but even on autopilot he remains absurdly quotable. "Morphine metaphors make you do the shoulder lean," he spits on "Loosie", and the line is a finely tuned mini-marvel of alliteration and craft. Few rappers are as creatively disgusting as Brown-- his missing tooth is "perfect for lickin clits," he informs a potential partner-- but even his shock raps hit their target, more often than not, through some deft bit of linguistic three-card Monte: "Used to make out with runaways in crack houses/ Now I run away from making out with brick houses," he leers on "Loosie". Got that?

Black Milk's production, meanwhile, continues his career-long argument for the power of immacuately prepared comfort food. His work gathers a lot of strength from old-fashioned flipped samples, but the sound he wrings from them is compellingly tactile, as if the samples were made of some dense-but-yielding material only he knows how to manipulate. His drums have so much character and texture they almost seem to hit twice; "Zap"'s bone-jarring backbeat lands somewhere indistinct in headphone-space, over a feebly quavering mini-choir of chipmunk-soul voices, and it sounds like you could reach out and run your fingers over it. Milk switches the beat up every one or two minutes, like impatient channel flicking, which both reinforces the beat-tape feeling of Black and Brown and handily keeps it from getting boring. The whole EP is over seemingly as soon as it begins and is the definition of a simple A+B proposition, right down to its name. But it works, and if it means there's a more considered full-length from these two on the way, even better...www.pitchfork.com

Das Racist - Amazing

01 Relax
02 Michael Jackson
03 Brand New Dance
04 Middle of The Cake
05 Girl
06 Shut Up, Man [ft. El-P]
07 Happy Rappy
08 Bootyin the Air
09 Power [ft. Danny Brown & Despot]
10 Punjabi Song [ft. Bikram Singh]
11 Selena
12 Rainbow in the Dark
13 The Trick
14 Celebration

On September 13th, Himanshu K. Suri aka Heems’s Greedhead Music label will release Relax, the debut full-length from Brooklyn-based rapscallions Das Racist. This builds on two celebrated mixtapes Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man with an album cover that again features a couch, but this time its ON FIRE. It also builds on those collections with some new collaborative efforts (production from Yeasayers and Wilder, Blood Diamonds, Vampire Weekends Rostam Batmanglij, Chairlifts Patrick Wimberly, and vocals from Punjabi-American bhangra artist Bikram Singh and Danny Brown) and DRfamily regulars/heavy MC talent Despot and El-P.

Lunice - One Hunned

1. Glow
2. I See U
3. Juice
4. Bricks
5. Guardian
6. And She Said
7. I See U (The Blessings Remix)
8. I See U (Girl Unit Remix)

ONE HUNNED is to feature 6 all new and original tracks from the Master Chef himself. Yet again, Lunice manages to blur the lines between traditional hip-hop and the UK bass scene with his sub-bass heavy instrumental hip-hop beats. Based on the 6-track preview below, Lunice went into the kitchen to cook up some 5-star ***** meals and came back with some freshly made cooking music...www.liveforthefunk.com

Shlohmo - Bad Vibes

1. Big Feelings
2. Places
3. Anywhere But Here
4. It Was Whatever
5. Parties
6. Just Us
7. Sink
8. I Can't See You I'm Dead
9. Trapped In A Burning House
10. Get Out
11. Your Stupid Face
12. Seriously
13. Same Time

Establishing a sonic personality without lyrical assistance or some unique personal backstory can be tricky, especially when you're in the middle of a room crowded with your peers. The space in question is the one with a "for fans of Flying Lotus" sign posted over the door, and there hasn't been a ton of vacancy in there lately. Those who've broken out have done so by tweaking the sonic imprint of decaying beats and melting analog chords until they come across as distinctly tactile things, humid and slippery, blown-out and elastic.

Reaching out to clutch the music on Shlohmo's Bad Vibes might cause it to crumble in your grasp-- and then cut the hell out of your fingers. The L.A. producer's sophomore full-length comes after a handful of singles, EPs, remixes, and compilation appearances, as well as last year's disorienting debut, Shlomoshun Deluxe. And in that short yet busy time, Shlohmo has dredged up something strange: an aesthetic that's jaggedly delicate, filled with melodic beauty but jostled by abrasive percussive hitches, undercut with sandpapery patches of ambient fuzz. It's a deft merging of gentle, wafting electronic tones and intricately beat-to-shit rhythmic atmosphere, the sounds of old technology trying to reconcile its former gloss with its fading functionality.

The cynical ears that still can't get past the nostalgic surface of chillwave might have their own bone to pick with the cassette-deck/VHS fidelity of Bad Vibes, which stands out pretty prominently in hissy tracks like "Same Time" and "Parties". But instead of celebrating corroded, neon-pastel magnetic-tape detritus for its own sake, the music on this album leans closer to an appreciation of the actual rhythmic counterpoints, quirks, and resonant qualities of white noise. Alongside the moments that seem to revel in the flutter and crackle of old equipment are stretches that draw similar vibes from the sound of literal rainfall ("Seriously") or birdcall-strewn field recordings ("Big Feelings")-- not to mention the texture you can get from good old-fashioned feedback, like the keyboard squall of "Trapped in a Burning House".

The beats themselves are striking enough, whether they're the distant trickling clicks of "Sink" or the sharp, crisp snap-thump grooves that push along cuts like "Places" or "Same Time". Yet even the moments where the beat feels secondary to the other instrumentation have a pulse to them, run through floaty guitars or humming synthesizers that converse with the ambient hiss in compelling ways. Still, neither the melody nor the ambience overwhelms the other. It's easy to hear the silky, billowy tones through the dying-battery distortion, but hard to picture what they'd sound like without it...www.pitchfork.com

Thundercat - The Golden Age Of Apocalypse

01. HooooooO
02. Daylight
03. Fleer Ultra
04. Is It Love?
05. For Love I Come
06. It Really Doesn't Matter to You
07. Jamboree
08. Boat Cruise
09. Seasons
10. Goldenboy
11. Walkin'
12. Mystery Machine (The Golden Age of Apocalypse)
13. Return to the Journey

The album is produced by label head Flying Lotus, who enlisted Thundercat to play bass on "MmmHmm," a track from last year's Cosmogramma. That guest appearance was just one in a long line of high profile gigs for the Los Angeles native: Thundercat's past credits include live performances and studio sessions with everyone from Snoop Dogg to the thrash metal band Suicidal Tendencies, for whom he's still a full-time member. The Golden Age of Apocalypse collects 13 tracks that Thundercat, real name Stephen Bruner, recorded over a long period of time, and that were only considered for release at Flying Lotus' urging. Guest appearances come from, among others, Erykah Badu and Bruner's Grammy award-winning brother, the drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr. You can hear one track from the album, a cover of George Duke's "For Love I Come,"...www.residentadvisor.net

Clams Casino - Rainforest

1 Natural
2 Treetop
3 Waterfalls
4 Drowning
5 Gorilla

Clams Casino might just be the hottest producer on the planet right now. For some time his electrifying beats have been lighting up mixtapes for Lil B, Soulja Boy and other unique personalities in the new rap underground, but recently he's stepped out of the shadows to become acclaimed in his own right, releasing his own instant-classic Instrumentals mixtape, and now proffering a timely EP on Tri Angle, his debut release proper. Those expecting more of the ruggedly romantic R&B infusions he's best known for will be initially surprised, but ultimately enchanted, by the more knotty, abstract direction he's taken for 'Rainforests'. With its foregrounding of crackle, 'Natural' could almost be mistaken for The Caretaker making hip-hop, were it not for the generous dosage of Clams' signature whooshing synth atmospherics and amorphous vocal moans. 'Treetop' is just beautiful, wistul techno arpeggios and barely-there beats foraging forlornly through an ambience of exotic birdsong and high-altitude air pressure. Rhythm is back in the foreground for ‘Waterfalls’, but again this is a tune built to deliver a substantial emotional payload rather than cheap club thrills; 'Drowning' maintains the almost gothic sensibility of the EP, pattering snares, piano chords and sepulchral synth jabs ebbing and flexing in the ether. There's a release of sorts for 'Gorilla', razor-sharp strings lifting the blunted percussion heavenwards, but this vertical ascent isn't quite enough to suppress the all-pervasive feelings of heartache and listlessness. Rainforest is an isolationist hip-hop epic that accords perfectly with the Tri Angle aesthetic while also affirming and deepening Clams' singular production style; it's a new benchmark in the bedroom hip-hop revolution, the real sh*t, and totally essential...www.boomkat.com

Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch The Throne (Deluxe Edition Explicit)

01 No Church In The Wild (feat. Frank Ocean)
02 Lift Off (feat. Beyoncé)
03 Ni**as In Paris
04 Otis (feat. Otis Redding)
05 Gotta Have It
06 New Day
07 That's My Bitch
08 Welcome To The Jungle
09 Who Gon Stop Me
10 Murder To Excellence
11 Made In America (feat. Frank Ocean)
12 Why I Love You (feat. Mr Hudson)
13 Illest Motherf**ker Alive
14 H•a•m
15 Primetime
16 The Joy (feat. Curtis Mayfield)
Digital Booklet - Watch The Throne

Watch the Throne features the following things: absurdly expensive samples, a pair of choruses from Odd Future R&B singer Frank Ocean at the exact moment where he's turning the corner and becoming a Thing, another chorus from long-been-a-Thing Beyoncé, a buddy-buddy shoutout to the President of the United States, multiple namechecks of brands so expensive that you've probably never heard of half of them, a murderers' row of producers working on almost every track, and a fleeting moment where Bon Iver's Justin Vernon sounds like the funkiest man alive. And yet for Jay-Z and Kanye West, this could actually be viewed as a relatively minor album. Amazing.

The album comes hot on the heels of career-landmark albums from both artists, but the few months they spent recording it on multiple continents were practically vacations compared to the way they usually work. Kanye's opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, still less than a year old, won across-the-board critical raves for its lush, prog-rap expansiveness; to create it, Kanye sequestered himself in Hawaii and flew in an endless stream of creative-peak collaborators. Jay, meanwhile, is still cruising on the momentum of The Blueprint 3, an artistically flat but commercially massive grab for continued relevance that did everything he wanted it to do. Watch the Throne brings little of Twisted Fantasy's boundary-melting ambition or The Blueprint 3's commercial acumen. It's just two of rap's biggest figures and best friends getting together to make some of the swollen, epic music that comes so naturally to them. Listening to it is sort of like watching George Clooney get all his movie-star friends together for a party at his Italian villa, and, along the way, maybe dream up Ocean's Twelve. (I liked Ocean's Twelve.)

In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another catastrophic stock market downturn has led some critics to conclude that the pair's boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That's a fair case to make. But one of the striking things about Watch the Throne is how often Jay and Kanye address matters beyond their bank accounts. On "Why I Love You", it's Jay's dismay at past crewmates' betrayals. On "Murder to Excellence", it's black-on-black crime and the scarcity of people of color at society's highest seats. On "Made in America", it's the hardships of youth and coming of age. "New Day" is framed as a letter to the pair's imagined sons, a device that mostly gives them a chance to soul-search and self-criticize. On "Welcome to the Jungle", Jay, never a tortured pop star, actually says, "I'm fuckin' depressed." Despite all the triumphant bravado these two bring to practically everything they do, they work overtime here to bring a sense of empathy to this enterprise. Once in a while, they even sound vaguely humble.

These subtler moments are admirable, but they don't always work. Consider, for example, the song "That's My Bitch", on which Kanye and his collaborators flip the classic "Apache" break into a devastating dance-rap monster with synths zooming off in every direction and Justin Vernon making the aforementioned sweaty soul moves. It's a vicious song, catchy as fuck, but it turns out to be weirdly awkward. Despite the title, Jay's verse is all devotional-prophet; it mostly concerns the way American beauty standards so often work against women of color. The sentiment deserves respect, but his laidback delivery, on a track with production and structure that call for ferocity, drains his ideas of force.

Watch the Throne works best when Jay and Kanye are just talking about how great they are. The single "Otis" is dizzy fun, with Jay and Kanye rapping hard and swapping mics like hungry kids. "Niggas in Paris" rides an impossibly propulsive synth riff and gigantic drums and gives Jay a chance to display the technical rap wizardry he still has in him. (It also features this great Kanye moment, "Doctors say I'm the illest because I'm suffering from realness/ Got my niggas in Paris, and they going gorillas," followed by a sample of Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory talking about how awesome shit doesn't have to mean anything.) "Gotta Have It" unites Kanye and the Neptunes to crazily chop up James Brown vocal samples and Eastern flute melodies. And "Who Gon Stop Me" finds Kanye cussing in Pig Latin while turning dubstep-rap into a viable subgenre.

If you buy Watch the Throne from iTunes-- the only place you can buy it at the moment-- you'll notice that it's credited to "JAY Z & Kanye West" (capital letters and missing hyphen unexplained). But while Jay might be billed first for seniority's sake, Kanye is this album's obvious guiding force. Throughout, he displays levels of unequaled audacity. On "Otis" and "Gotta Have It", he reduces Otis Redding and James Brown to simple grunts, then builds rhythm tracks out of them. On "New Day", over a beat co-produced by RZA, he actually runs Nina Simone through Auto-Tune. On "No Church in the Wild", he authoritatively vows, "You will not control the threesome." The musical scope of Watch the Throne is a tribute to his distinctive taste and sense of style. The whole thing sounds huge, and even the sillier moments ("Made in America", especially, reminds me of the inspirational ballads of late-period Michael Jackson) succeed on pure orchestral excess. Jay and Kanye debuted the album in a private listening session at a New York planetarium, a setting which made perfect sense: even if it never approaches the grandeur or character-study complexity of Twisted Fantasy, this is still exploding-star music.

So: two long-reigning titans make a relatively quick album which, despite their best efforts, still winds up being a monument to their own grandiosity. Should we care? Well, yeah. Kanye doesn't have a cruise-control switch, and when he's around, neither does Jay. On Watch the Throne, they push each other and have fun doing it, and the result is a stadium-sized event-rap spectacle that still sounds like two insanely talented guys' idiosyncratic vision. That's worth celebrating...www.pitchfork.com

AraabMuzik - Electronic Dream

1. Electronic Dream
2. Streetz Tonight
3. Golden Touch
4. Free Spirit
5. Underground Stream
6. Make It Happen
7. Lift Off
8. AT2
9. Let It Go
10. Feelin So Hood
11. Lost In A Maze

Alongside the roaring Harlem rapper Vado, Rhode Island native AraabMuzik has been one of the key figures in the re-emergence of Cam'ron, Dipset's language-bending figurehead. After a long period of complete disappearance, Cam's been going through something of a comeback lately, aided in large part by tracks like Araab's punishing "Get It in Ohio". Araab's work for Cam, and for other freelance clients, sounds dollar-store cheap but knife-edge tense; it reminds me of Steve Jablonsky's score for Friday the 13th. He makes ferocious, diamond-hard gangsta rap beats with a pervading sense of dystopic anxiety. Araab's sense of vision comes through even more strongly in the web videos he's been releasing, in which he shows off his MPC virtuosity and slices up samples of, oh, say, Cannibal Corpse. Like fellow underground rap visionaries Clams Casino and DJ Burn One, Araab makes freelance beats that hint at a fully developed personal aesthetic. And like those guys, he's now striking out on his own, making instrumental music that brings that aesthetic to the forefront.

Electronic Dream is Araab's first commercially available album, but it works more like a collection of remixes. Rather than creating his own tracks from scratch, Araab spends his debut album dismembering a series of cheesed-out hairgel-house superclub anthems: DJ Nosferatu's "The Underground Stream" on "Underground Stream", Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night (Fall in Love With Music)" on "Golden Touch", Starchaser's "So High" on "Feelin So Hood". This is, to put it mildly, an unexpected direction for Araab. With a little bit of Googling, you can find plenty of online screeds from fans frustrated or even enraged at Araab for making an album based on this music, or for dishonoring his sample sources by leaving large pieces of these tracks unchanged while neglecting to properly credit the original producers. But Araab's changes, relatively minor though they may be, turn a sound built on populist uplift into something darker.

It's tough to imagine the tracks on Electronic Dream getting any play in any dance club in the world, and it's virtually impossible to picture anyone rapping over them. Instead, this album is a genre unto itself-- ominous future shit that creates an atmosphere but never bleeds into the background. Araab's snare-hits resonate like eye-punches, and his drum-programming is pure, unrelenting rap shit. But he's applying that sensibility to songs where the melodies shine even when Araab's using a screaming sound effect as part of the rhythm track. The end result is a truly weird little album-- something at once anxious and euphoric.

As hard as his drums punch, though, Araab still let the textures of these anthems shine through. And in Araab's hands, these melodies work differently; the anonymous dance divas wailing ecstatically over their original beats become lost, lonely souls, anxiously whispering to themselves that everything will be OK. Araab's music doesn't allow for dizzy buildups and cathartic breakdowns; instead, it's all murky tension, all the time. At times, his tracks can sound a bit like the woozy bass music of L.A.'s Brainfeeder scene, but Araab is always more direct and more ferocious than those guys. And yet the sugary beauty of those melodies sound like they belong on his tracks; nothing is out of place. "Got a feelin' so high," the singer on "Feelin So Hood" coos, and the drums beat that feeling down while the gorgeous ripples of synth lift it back up.

There's something truly fascinating about the entire LP: An up-and-coming hardcore rap producer leaving his genre behind so that he can twist and scramble this hands-in-the-air big-room sound. And in peeling back its excesses and substituting in his own eccentricities, Araab uncovers a primal emotional force in this music, one that fits beautifully with his own air-raid siren aesthetic. Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade-- you don't want to fuck with it...www.pitchfork.com

Double Helix / Amen Ra - LHF EP2 : The Line Path

1. Double Helix - Chamber of Light
2. Double Helix - Bass 2 Dark
3. Amen Ra - Candy Rain
4. Amen Ra - Trifle

Much anticipated 2nd session from the LHF posse, giving life to four mutant UK underground hybrids from Amen Ra and Double Helix. Compared to the work of John Cage by The Fader, 'The Line Path' is a deftly woven urban collage of extracted HipHop, R&B, Garage, Grime and Dubstep essence, reading like some wordless comic strip set during the weekend of a London raver. Double Helix takes the driving seat with 'Chamber Of Light's Horsepower-style textural interplay, a Cagean adventure in the bass bin. 'Bass 2 Dark' follows, infusing angular ethnocentric drums with 'ardcore flashbacks and dope Wu Tang samples, kinda like some pre-dubstep, adolescent dream finally come to fruition. Matters get brought firmly into 2011 with the sea-sick gangsta-boogie vibes of Amen Ra's 'Candy Rain' on the flip, featuring some grade A accordion wooze, charmingly funked-up bass and pen-on-china percussion for the Mount Kimbie effect, while 'Trifle' is like some Grime instrumental from '04 that was booted out onto the streets only to lose its marbles on hyper-skunk and be discovered at an undisclosed keysight. Heavyweight...www.boomkat.com

Das Racist - Shut Up, Dude

01. Whos That Brooown
02. You Oughta Know
03. Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
04. Rainbow in the Dark
05. Fake Patios
06. Nutmeg
07. Shorty Said Gordon Voidwell Remix
08. Chicken and Meat
09. I Dont Owe Nobody Shit
10. Ek Shaneesh
11. Hugo Chavez
12. I Dont Want to Deal with Those Monsters
13. Don Dada
14. One Dollar Can
15. Coochie Dip City
16. Deep Ass Shit Youll Get It When Youre High
17. Shut Up Dude

When you first heard "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", did you wonder what a full-length Das Racist album would sound like? Did you even think they were capable of an album at all? Maybe you expected a whole mixtape filled with bewildered yelling about name brands on some postmodern Fatboy Slim shit, or one of those hipster-rap records filled with a bunch of half-serious post-crunk/booty bass homages. But if you were a bit more curious, maybe you went to their MySpace page and heard the elaborate reference-fest "Rainbow in the Dark" and a deconstruction of co-opted dancehall dialect called "Fake Patois" and caught on to something deeper. Maybe you started wondering if they were a bit less trivial than you suspected.

As it turns out, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" has as much to do with the whole of Shut Up, Dude as the Beastie Boys' "Cooky Puss" does to the referential overload of Paul's Boutique. Das Racist's Brooklyn-buzz affiliations and humorous bent might mislead you into thinking it's an exercise in cheap laffs for people who don't take rap seriously, but this album feels a lot more like the irreverent hip-hop fanboy mania of ego trip magazine than smarmy genre tourism.

Himanshu Kumar Suri aka "Heems" and Victor Vazquez have something elaborate going on, toying with and subverting the rules of hip-hop lyricism even as they pay them respect. "Who's That? Brooown!" uses A Tribe Called Quest's well-worn "Scenario" as a reference point, but Heems mutters his callbacks to Busta Rhymes' verse in a sleepily cocky voice that sounds like the exact opposite of Busta's off-the-charts energy. The repetition and recursiveness that made "Combination" so polarizing crop up in odd places; one otherwise-complex line in "Ek Shaneesh" simply ends "drinkin' beer, drinkin' beer/ prolly drinkin' some more beer" before teasing an obvious Tears for Fears-referencing internal rhyme that never actually comes. Familiar hit-sourced hooks are self-sabotaged with trailed-off mumbling (the Juelz Santana-sourced, Billy Joel-jacking "You Oughta Know"), the spiritual presence of Bob Marley is called into the not-so-lofty service of soundtracking their tribute to dollar cans of iced tea, and they actually named one of their tracks "Deep Ass Shit (You'll Get It When You're High)" as a rib-jabbing mission statement. (No points in guessing which prolific Oxnard-based underground producer gets his beat used for that one.)

If they were just fucking around, those gags would wear off and leave you with nothing but a series of smug hey-get-it? nudges. But Heems and Victor are serious enough about coming up with memorable lines that they come across like some kind of lyrical stealth operatives. The fact that they often go from water-treading repetition to intricately built phraseology mid-verse is a great riff in itself. One of the shortest and simplest lines on the album is one of the cleverest-- "W.E.B. DuBois/ We be da boys," from "Hugo Chavez"-- but there are also moments where you're left wondering how they could make so many unexpected linguistic connections look so easy. Their go-hard rampage on "Nutmeg" is 1990s-reared, cipher-honed style gone berserk, turning a funhouse mirror on Ghostface's finest moment of abstract pyrotechnics, as it starts with the unlikely couplet "Queens Boulevard/ Kierkegaard" and gets even more dizzyingly ridiculous from there.

Granted, there's a certain information-overload college-student bent to their humor, evident in cross-genre namedrops like "Richard Hell Rell" or the mentions of Tao Lin and "and Dinesh DiSouza. But Das Racist push past mere signifying to come across as straight-up literates with a way of making cultural studies out of entertainment and vice-versa. Several lyrics take offhand references to Bollywood stars and Cuban sandwiches and extrapolate stream-of-consciousness ethnographies out of them, while "Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix)" draws out punchlines and commentary about identification by listing all the racially divergent celebrities that women supposedly claim Victor and Heems resemble (Egyptian Lover; Amitabh Bachchan; Slash without his hat). Das Racist approach this idea of otherness in a way that feels both playful and provocative, asserting their identities in a way that both reinforces their individuality and goofs on their stereotypes. And if it hits a certain nerve, it's probably the same one that got tweaked by the sociological b-boy stoner comedy precedent of "Chappelle's Show". Fast-food hipster-rap, my ass-- these dudes are the truth...www.pitchfork.com

Lukid - Foma

01. Ice Nine
02. Raise High the Roof Beam
03. Veto
04. Slow Hand Slap
05. Saddlebags
06. Chord
07. Foma
08. Fall Apart
09. Laughin
10. Ski Fly
11. Time Doing So Mean

On the strength of his past two albums, Lukid, AKA Luke Blair, may as well re-christen his production alias "The Master of Musical Subtlety." His second collection of perplexingly complex hip-hop instrumentals, Foma, takes the low-slung, late night pace of his first, Onandon, and runs headlong with it through a room full of wilting vinyl into a sample bank of bitty drum hits and scuzzed out succulent synth swells. Selected and arranged culpably and with a seemingly heavy hand, he manages to make these small snatches of sampled melody fit, without completely ironing out the rough creases or crackles.

The first two tracks on Foma, "Ice Nine" and "Raise High the Roof Beam," are pure pressure-builders with Blair creating serious anticipation via some pattering percussion and rolling piano samples. But it's the third track, "Veto," where he first unleashes his trademark bump. Blair sets his splicing of a whirling organ underneath a stabbing piano riff alongside a carefully gesticulated drum pattern and some '80s pop bass stabs, managing to consistently make the song pulse by bringing the force of a 4 x 4 kick drum and muting the slap by boosting the low end.

Steering himself away from just beats, bass and a sample, Lukid epitomises the Grievous Angel-endorsed idea that these days, trip-hop is actually trippy. (Refer to the snatches of scything bass and the lush vibes on "Saddlebags" for any further embellisment of this new psychedelic hip-hop theory.) "Slow Hand Slap" takes things in a moodier direction with a sinister bassline opening proceedings before Blair hijacks some of Rustie's playfully pitched tom drums and lays them over three separate bass evolutions. He lets the tension build before he unleashes the ascending vocal sample, which slays the simplistic drum pattern by serving up a memorable hook that evokes wide-open wafting fields and late '60s flower power temptresses.

Throughout Foma Lukid displays a flair for creating quick witted odysseys. Quick because all—bar one—are less than five minutes long; and odysseys because they unfold and ripen into sonic screenplays that you can re-discover and re-immerse yourself in on each listen. Blair has spent a lot of time finetuning his use of bass and on tracks like "Chord" and the sure-fire standout, "Fall Apart," you can hear the impression a painstakingly wobbled sine wave makes to the overall product. Whilst keeping the insatiable thump displayed on "Onandon" as a heady mainstay in his music, Blair manages to seamlessly combine the impetuous wooziness of his fuzzed-up psychotropics with an impeccable heap of punchy post-Dilla drum programming...www.residentadvisor.net

Clutchy Hopkins Meets Lord Kenjamin - Music Is My Medicine

1. The Old Spot
2. Brother John
3. Cold And Wet
4. Riff Raff Rollin
5. Lord Kenji
6. Doty's Leslie
7. Tune Traveler
8. Shadowfish
9. Gourds Of The Desert
10. Turtle Rock
11. Heavy Hands

This whole Clutchy Hopkins business is very confusing. Ubiquity keep throwing all this mythology our way, telling tales about a mysterious figure leaving traces of himself via bags of 2-inch reels and "a vintage Caribbean tracksuit jacket found in the office fridge". Sidestepping the fiction and getting down to this new release from Clutchy and Lord Kenjamin, you'll find yourself in the presence of an instrumental funk/hip hop/dub melting pot; a record that plays out a little bit like a very live sounding Shawn Lee album - and rumours that Money Mark might be involved in this don't seem entirely frivolous given the emphasis on vintage keyboard instruments. Other prime suspects include Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow, but whoever Clutchy is, this meeting with Lord Kenjamin (is THAT even a real person?) features some great organic, analogue instrumentals that aren't taking themselves too seriously, as demonstrated by a cut like 'Tune Traveller', which waddles along nicely with a wacky, skanking synth. Elsewhere the jazzy reggae grooves of 'Cold And Wet' brings some downtempo depth to the record, oozing warmth from its airy low-end grooves...www.boomkat.com

Narkotiki - Planet Love

01. Puma
02. Give it to me
03. Menty fun
04. Bumbastik
05. Falls in love
06. Joseph Kobzon
07. I drink the blood of
08. Free
09. La-la-la
10. Pistol
11. Clog
12. Have fun
13. Punk (less)

Narkotiki (Russian - Наркотики - drugs, narcotics) is a band of two young men from Moscow, who play disco tunes with hip-hop singing, that is filled with extreme levels of joy and humour...www.last.fm

Tempa - Time to Run EP

1. Nightfall Manoeuvres
2. Fallback
3. Rollin'
4. Time To Run
5. Elevation
6. Lost Souls

Uncategorizable instrumental electronics from Tempa (not to be confused with the label of the same name, of course) whose productions hop around from the strangeness of 'Nightfall Manoeuvres' and its Tom Waits-meets-gamelan-ensemble-in-a-film-noir-soundtrack vibes, all the way over to the tricky jazz-inflected rhythms of 'Fallback' without breaking a proverbial sweat. Elsewhere, the likes of 'Time To Run' are evocative of Shawn Lee's funk excursions while 'Elevation' pushes Flying Lotus-like buttons in fine style...www.boomkat.com

Roebus One - Reflections Of Goodbye

01- Drifter
02- Teenage Angst
03- Suicide Art Star
04- Static
05- Heroine
06- Don't Worry
07- Reflections Of Goodbye
08- Frail
09- Dead
10- Mayhem
11- Stress (Bonus Track)
12- I'm Done (Bonus Track)
13- A Bright Outlook (Bonus Track)
14- Blink (Bonus Track)
15- Rain (Bonus Track)
16- Grip (Bonus Track)

You can’t judge a book by it’s cover; a statement so true after listening to or seeing a live performance by Roebus One. Sizing up at 5”2, the punk rock influenced hip-hop artist hits the stage with a strong voice and an abundance of energy, charisma, and emotionally charged lyrics, something you wouldn’t expect at first sight.
Ater 10 long years of crafting his skills, Roebus One is releasing a full-length album. “REFLECTIONS OF GOODBYE” is a ten song documentation of the last 4 years of his life (produced by TAB) in which he hit an emotional bottom after one of his close friends commited suicide, overcoming drug addiction, and attempting to forget a particular girlfriend. It is raw, progressive hip-hop, with inflences of punk rock, indie rock, and post hardcore, which comes out more in live performances. As a bonus, Roebus One threw in some songs from the past ten years to give listeners the history of his style. March of 2009 will mark his third national tour to support the release.
Overall, no matter what genre of show, Roebus One fits in; whether it’s traditional hip-hop, indie rock, or metal. His primary purpose is making a connection with the crowd and leaving them with an experience they will never forget...www.last.fm

K-os - Yes

01. Mr. Telephone Man
02. The Avenue
03. The Aviator
04. Uptown Girl
05. 4 3 2 1
06. Whip C.R.E.A.M
07. Astronaut
08. Zambony
09. Burning Bridges
10. Fun

An amazing emcee with a reputation for innovation, K-os repeatedly reinvents his style as an musician, songwriter, singer, and super producer. In his own words the album includes “break beats - strings- tabla’s- and keyboard wizardy to be exposed..” an offer he is sure to deliver on.

Weaving Rock’n'Roll and Hip Hop with a string of different styles and production techniques seemlessly allows K-os to captivate audiences winning six Canadian Urban Music awards, a Source award, and a Grammy nomination along the way among many more...www.verygood.com.au

Doom - Born Like This

1. Supervillain Intro
2. Gazzillion Ear 
3. Ballskin
4. Yessir (w/ Raekwon) 
5. Absolutely 
6. Rap Ambush 
7. Lightworks 
8. Batty Boyz 
9. Costume Foolery 
10. Angelz (w/ Ghostface Killah, Raekwon & Paloma Faith)
11. Cellz 
12. Stil Dope (w/ Empress Starhh)
13. Better Than Beer (w/ Kurious Jorge)
14. Microwave Mayo
15. More Rhymin' 
16. That's That 
17. In Ya Dreams 
18. Thank Ya

"Born like this/ Into this/ As the chalk faces smile/ As Mrs Death laughs/ As the elevators break/ As political landscapes dissolve." The first album from Daniel Dumile's latest pseudonym takes its name from Charles Bukowski's poem Dinosauria, We, whose opening lines are sampled here on the B-movie apocalypse of Cellz. The late writer's tale of "hospitals which are so expensive it's cheaper to die... a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed" functions both as a prophesy of doom and a shadow biography of DOOM.

Dumile first appeared in 1990 as Zev Love X, the driving force of New York hip-hoppers KMD. In 1993 he lost both his partner/brother Subroc to a car accident and his Elektra record contract to a row over the artwork of KMD's second album, Bl_ck B_st_rds (Dumile refused to compromise on its cover of a Sambo figure on the gallows). He abandoned music and sank into a depression that saw him sleeping rough in Manhattan. When he re-emerged in 1998, it was as MF Doom, masked supercriminal and man of many further aliases, including Metal Fingers.

Dumile hasn't shown his real face in public since, performing behind his mask, and even conducting interviews in character. His insistence on keeping out of the limelight couldn't be more at odds with the swaggering ego of hip-hop tradition. Is this a screen for the pain that lingers from his KMD days? Or camouflage for the mundane reality that behind this most brilliant of writers lurks a reclusive pot-bellied father of three who loves beer and comic books?

The world of Marvel remains his inspiration: his name, now shortened to DOOM ("all big letters but it isn't no acronym," he declares on the 91-second single, Ballskin), is adapted from Stan Lee's Dr Doom, his records are littered with superhero and monster movie samples and Born Like This contains a rumination on the homoerotic history of the Caped Crusader and his Boy Wonder, the unfortunately titled Batty Boyz. DOOM revels in being the outsider, the freak reviled by society, the supervillain who is not all bad. His twist on hip-hop archetypes, casting himself as a rapping Phantom of the Opera returning to wreak revenge on those who wronged him, is given added spice by his own history.

Although Born Like This is his first album in four years, little has changed. "Same guy, same disguise, sick aim, eye stare," as he says on Rap Ambush, a journey into the heart of a metaphorical insurgent hurling RPGs ("rhyme-propelled grenades"). He still likes to make life difficult. Choruses are a long-standing no-go, tracks veer off at right angles or skid abruptly to a halt. Guests Raekwon and Ghostface are chosen not for their pulling power, but their knack for submerging identity beneath an assumed character. Production duties are mostly split between DOOM and Jake One, fashioning a sound ripe with piercing organs and violins pitched around the point where Frankenstein's monster hauls himself out of his surgical straps.

After a period of workaholism that threatened overkill, followed by a period of hibernation, Born Like This finds DOOM back to his scalpel-tongued, scatter-mouthed best. KMD couldn't have ended worse; Daniel Dumile's renaissance could scarcely have gone better. As the closing lines of Dinosauria, We have it: "Born out of that/ The sun still hidden there/ Awaiting the next chapter."

Lady Sovereign - Jigsaw

01. Let’s Be Mates
02. So Human
03. Jigsaw
04. Bang Bang
05. I Got You Dancing
06. Pennies
07. Guitar
08. Student Union
09. Food Play
10. I Got The Goods

Dozens of musical genres have come to favor and disappeared since Lady Sovereign's debut Public Warning hit in 2006, and now she's back, trying yet again to launch grime into the American mainstream with her new album, Jigsaw. The album's first single, "I Got You Dancing" sounds like M.I.A. filtered through Dizzee Rascal, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it remains to be seen if it can breakthrough further than her hit single, "Love Me Or Hate Me." The album is thefirst for Sovereign's Midget record label...www.prefixmag.com

N.A.S.A. - The Spirit of Apollo

1. Intro
2. The People Tree (feat. David Bryne, Chali 2na, Gift Of Gab & Z-Trip)
3. Money (feat. David Bryne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge & Z-Trip)
4. N.A.S.A. Music (feat. Method Man, E-40 & DJ Swamp)
5. Way Down (feat. RZA, Barbie & John Frusciante)
6. Hip-hop (feat. KRS-One, Fatlip & Slim Kid Tre)
7. Four Rooms Earth View
8. Strange Enough (feat. Karen O, Ol' Dirty Bastard & Fatlip)
9. Spacious Thoughts (feat. Tom Waits & Kool Keith)
10. Gifted (feat. Kanye West, Santa Gold & Lykke Li)
11. A Volta (feat. Sizzla, Amanda Blank & Lovefoxxx)
12. Theirs A Party (feat. George Clinton & Chali 2na)
13. Whatchadoin? (feat. Spank Rock, M.I.A., Santogold & Nick Zinner)
14. O Pata (feat. Kool Kojak & DJ Babao)
15. Soul Samba (feat. Del Tha Funkee Homosapien & DJ Qbert)
16. The Mayor (feat. The Cool Kids, Ghostface Killah, Scarface & DJ AM)
17. N.A.S.A. Anthem

N.A.S.A is an ongoing creative collaboration between two lifelong music aficionados, Squeak E. Clean ad DJ Zegon, and their friends, friends of friends and musical heroes. While N.A.S.A. stands for North America/South America and contains a number of superstar artists from both coasts of the US, it is about as far from a tension-building geographical showdown as a record can get. Rather, their Anti debut The Spirit of Apollo was born with the righteous goal of bringing people together through music and art, and that is exactly what masterminds Sam Spiegel (Squeak E. Clean) and Ze Gonzales (DJ Zegon) have done. Brazilian funk provides the roots of the songs and binds them together into a cohesive whole, but from there, the imagination behind The Spirit of Apollo ranges far and wide. Unexpected collaborations abound on the eighteen track release. Tom Waits growls over Kool Keith, Karen O taunts while Ol' Dirty Bastard gives shout-outs to Wu Tang and N.A.S.A from the grave, and David Byrne, Chuck D and others expound on the evils of "Money." In spite of the range of performers, the pairings seem organic, inspired and make perfect sense on the first listen, never coming off as ironic or impulsive..http://www.anti.com

Zion I - The Take Over

01 The Taking 
02 Geek To The Beat
03 Takeover 
04 DJ DJ
05 Antenna 
06 Caged Bird Pt. 1 (feat. Brother Ali)  
07 In The Mornin’ (Caged Bird Pt. 2)  
08 Radio  
09 Gumbo 
10 Country Baked Yams (feat. Devin The Dude) 
11 Coastin’ (feat. K.Flay) 
12 Juicy Juice  
13 Peppermint Patty  
14 Bring In The Light  
15 Legacy (feat. Ty & Jennifer Johns) 

This Oakland duo, producer AmpLive and emcee Zumbi, have always championed a synthetic sound that incorporates the full spectrum of beat-based music. Their debutMind Over Matter kept a foot in soul and funk sample-based nostalgia while also pushing keys, synths and drum'n'bass beats to the forefront. Almost ten years later, the duo continues to create "sponge music" that soaks up any beat worth taking. Early leaks like "DJ DJ" sound at home with Common's "Universal Mind Control" electro vibe, while first single "Juicy Juice" bristles with Southern-styled 808 kicks. Their rainbow coalition party continues to expand and now includes guests like Devin the Dude, Brother Ali and UK emcee Ty..http://www.prefixmag.com