Favorites

No Rankings, No Best New, Just what we're digging.

  Velvet Underground - The Gift

If this whole Yeezus thing or "Heroin" or Transformer didn't prove Lou Reed could write, this ten-minute cut certainly does. Written by a young Mr. Laurie Anderson back in college and read deadpan by John Cale, "The Gift" helps prove White Light/White Heat as the Velvet's most transgressive record, and perhaps their finest. 

   Salvia Plath - House of leaves

 

Look at that nappy moustache, and tell me that dude can't tell you the deep chemistry of DMT. Loaded with literary and psychedelic references, Salvia Plath's debut LP, The Bardo Story, debuted last week on Weird World Records.

   Orchestre Super Bourgou de Parakou - Wegne'Nda M'Banda

Much love to Analog Africa and Awesome Tapes from Africa, two labels dedicated to re-releasing Afro-Funk from the Motherland. Did you know there was an West African Islamic Funk Belt in the 70s, putting out grooves that would put all but the Godfather to shame? Me neither. Someone get these boys on Spotify.

 DIIV - LIIV @ (SXSW)

 

Yea, he complains too much. But hot damn, Zachary Cole Smith can lay down some spacy jams. Nice mix from the Vans boys, too.

  Run the Jewels (Killer Mike & El-P) - Get It

 
“Mike’ll fuck a rapper’s life up like Mo’Nique did to Precious,” Killer Mike boasts on Run the Jewel's first single "Get It," condensing an album's worth of lyrical content into one quick PSA: we'll fuck you up. On the heels of a pair of career-defining and collaborative LP’s - El-P’s Cancer for Cure and Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music - the emcees have partnered up again to produce one of 2013’s smartest, purest rap albums (it’s online for free, too). Clocking in at just over thirty minutes, Run the Jewels is packed with vile synth landscapes, monstrous bass and enough creative trash talk to make Reggie Miller seem as polite as Duncan.