Having trouble viewing this? Visit the updates archive |
||
 |
 |
Other Music Digital Affiliate Program We are very excited to be launching our new Affiliate Program. You can earn money by sending your web traffic to Other Music Digital for downloads. Click here for more details.
This Week's Free Song Downloads
Free song download of "Ambling Alp," taken from Yeasayer's new album, Odd Blood, out next Tuesday, February 9th. The Brooklyn group's highly-anticipated sophomore album brims with excitement and strangeness in ways entirely different than their stunning debut, All Hour Cymbals. With a pile of pop hooks and slick, 80's-inspired sounds and production, yet still retaining at its core the group's rhythmic and harmonic inventiveness, this record is fully ready for takeoff as a major crossover hit.
If you've been a fan of Fred Cole's fierce, primal rock & roll, from the legendary Dead Moon on backwards to the Nuggets-endorsed Lollipop Shoppe or before, you know the power of his music. Pierced Arrows is his latest project (with wife Toody), and amazingly, Descending Shadows (out Tuesday, February 2) is more unhinged than anything he has done before; raw punk that is as beautiful as it is twisted. Check out this free song download of "Let It Rain" off the new album, and we're sure you'll be back for more! This Week's Featured Downloads
South Rakkas Crew have made a name for themselves producing tracks for many of the top artists on the current dancehall/reggae scene (Elephant Man, Lady Saw, Sizzla, Capleton, Vybz Kartel, Cecile), not to mention their connections to Diplo. Here we find this Florida-based production duo reworking ten of the tracks from 2009's Knowle West Boy, one of Tricky's best records in recent years, and what results is a mixture of souped-up dancehall, dubstep, nouveau electro, and unapologetically modern sounds and tempos. Pulling from current digital production trends in pop, urban and dance music, the tracks are very "now," the South Rakkas Crew pushing Tricky's love of reggae and electro to the forefront by redressing his songs in a heavy bass twitch and Caribbean rave atmosphere. Take "Far Away" for example -- the song would be almost unrecognizable from the original if not for traces of the vocals; South Rakkas Crew rebuild the track from scratch, adding a steel drum melody, bouncing dubstep bassline, filtered and distorted synths, and pounding processed drums. My personal favorite here, however, would be "Coalition," where the dark, slow-burn of Knowle West Boy's version is transformed into a very uptempo, heavy, in-your-face excursion. The whole album is in fact ripped apart and completely re-imagined for a new era, culture and audience -- fans of dubstep, Hollertronix, Major Lazer and even Lady GaGa will find something strangely familiar. Anyone who's followed Tricky through the years knows that he's wandered down many different roads, but this may be the most timely of them, and one that will surely open the doors for a new generation of fans. -Daniel Givens
The always-solid Minimal Wave label treats us to another treasure. On the platter this time around are French robots Moderne, a group active from 1979 until 1981, who released a handful of singles and two LPs before biting the dust. OM customers may know Moderne via the inclusion of their track "Switch on Bach" on the somewhat infamous So Young But So Cold compilation of French cold/new/synth wave from a few years back. If your appetite was whetted, this set reissues in full the band's two long players: 1980's Moderne and 1981's L'Espionne Aimait La Musique. So how's the music? In a word, fantastic. The most obvious comparison would be a French Kraftwerk circa Computer World or The Man Machine (the albums were in fact mixed at the same Dusseldorf studio Kraftwerk used to record The Man Machine back in '78), but I get reminded quite a bit of groups like Marc Moulin's Telex or many of the artists for which he wrote and produced songs, like Lio and Miharu Koshi. The music is lean, economic, and incredibly catchy, with more warmth than the usual Teutonic textures of this sound, and as such the results are beautiful. There are dancefloor killers ("Sans Signalement," "Sé duction," "Eldorado"), some lonely bedroom laments ("Histoire Ordinaire"), and spades of cinematic flare, particularly on the second album. These records have been absurdly rare for quite some time, and I'm going bonkers at finally being able to hear both of these albums after only knowing the singles for so long. -Mikey IQ Jones
A 45-minute piece composed of "ancient" tape loops, William Basinski's Vivian & Ondine was originally performed live at Issue Project Room in 2008, and this version at hand was also performed live, but in his Los Angeles studio. Basinski's loop-based music has an unsettling, disorienting quality that makes it truly psychedelic and here, waves of heavily echo-laden loops bathe the listener in a calm, yet woozy, sound world. Basinski is a master at layering several melodic fragments in a way that produces subtle shifts, causing one to lose their sense of time and space, and this same attention to subtlety is what keeps the piece interesting throughout its duration. The gauzy texture makes the music sound like it has been remembered from the distant past, yet it still sounds modern; fans of James Kirby's recent work as the Caretaker and Leyland Kirby will feel right at home in this hazy cocoon. One of Basinski's biggest strengths is creating somber music that ultimately proves to be uplifting, and that strength is certainly on display here; as this piece was created with the imminent birth of his niece in mind, the aim seems to be a womblike serenity. Basinski is one of few composers working today creating pieces that are on par with Eno's ambient works, and with Vivian & Ondine he proves again that sometimes grand statements can be whispered in the wind. -Marc Moeller
Formed in 1986 and done by 1991, British drone-rockers Loop still managed to leave behind an impressive body of work in those five years, releasing a series of albums and singles that charted their progression from minimalist, Kraut- and garage-inspired shoegazer material to a much gnarlier beast that was surprisingly comfortable collaborating with the likes of Godflesh. Heaven's End and Fade Out won the band endless comparisons to their contemporaries Spacemen 3 (a fact which rather hilariously bugged Kember, Pierce, and company, it should be noted). By the time of A Gilded Eternity, however, they had started to move into far more bleak territory, in the process creating an LP that was easily the band's most grim statement to date. Bearing a bit of a similarity to the work of folks like Sonic Youth, the seven tracks that make up the album proper traipsed through thicker guitars and darker rhythms, replacing the hypnotic feel of their previous albums with a distinct sense of creeping dread. Without a doubt their heaviest album, tracks like "The Nail Will Burn," the slow-building epic "Be Here Now," and the stunning album opener, "Vapour," find the band pairing crushing riffs with pulsing rhythms that make for some of Loop's finest compositions. Better still is "Blood," the most overtly experimental piece here, devoid of almost all guitars and relying solely on a pairing of drums and swirling effects to make for one of the album's highlights.
Originally released as a collection of Loop's first couple of 12" singles, The World in Your Eyes, Reactor's final entry in their reissue series, now greatly expands on that original LP. Still collected are songs from the 16 Dreams and Spinning EPs, which show the group working out their approach to mantra-like riffs and deep, intuitive rhythms. Now, however, the set encompasses singles and compilation tracks from throughout the band's career, in addition to a handful of surprisingly great early demos that really give a full picture of Loop's development. Thus, not only do we get a chance to hear tracks like "Collision," (a taut riff-rocker from a 1988 single), but we also get to hear their take on classics from Neil Young ("Cinnamon Girl"), Can ("Mother Sky," of course), Nick Drake (a surprisingly great and straight "Pink Moon"), and the aforementioned Godflesh. As if that weren't enough, this set also collects tracks from the band's killer last single "Arc-Lite," a brilliant blend of droning guitars and propulsive rhythms that somewhat foreshadowed the direction Loop head honcho Robert Hampson would head with his next project Main. -Michael Crumsho
All too often critics (and I'm not excluding myself, here) will bandy about lazy artist comparisons as if they were going out of fashion. Sounds a little bit electronic? How about dropping Aphex Twin's name in there. Real songs? Well we've got the Beatles, Dylan and the Stones for that. Born in the early 80s and make indie music? Chances are you loved a bit of that jangly stuff everyone's talking about, let's drop a couple of C86 references and be done with it. Occasionally though, these comparisons are deserved, and when listening to the Big Pink, comparisons seem inescapable. Verve (pre 'The') instantly clicked thanks to singer Robbie Furze's Ashcroft-esque whines, then as the thick, noisy electronic drums of "Too Young to Love" flickered to life, it's My Bloody Valentine (whose ex-producer Alan Moulder mixed the album) who sprung to mind. All this through the noisy fug of Jesus and Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen, and while usually I'd try not to drop quite so many influences in one go, just take a listen and you'll know exactly what I mean. Don't, however, for one second assume that this is a bad thing; as you may have read in whatever hipster blog/zine or other you swear by, the Big Pink are really rather good, and managing to kick it confidently while simultaneously harnessing such regal influences is quite some achievement. Luckily, Furze's dulcet tones never warble quite as much as Ashcroft's, the rolling electrical beats never echo quite like MBV's did and that doomed, dark mood that envelopes the album just isn't really exactly the same as Echo and the Bunnymen's; this is the Big Pink's album, and even if you've heard all of the aforementioned bands it's still a record well worth diving into. The pretty dreaminess of the title track, the chunky single "Dominos," the harsh post-shoegaze of "Too Young to Love," they're all proof that the duo manages to transcend the criticism that is leveled at them and simply write great songs. Maybe there's truth in the hype after all. -John Twells
One of our favorite albums of 2009 (number 21 on our Year End Picks list) is now available as a download on Other Music Digital. Last fall, Sa-Ra Creative Partners' Shafiq Husayn stepped up to deliver his first solo album, a dense slice of psychedelic soul that touches upon everything from Funkadelic to Serge Gainsbourg, Flying Lotus and Fela, with the same focus and attention to detail that gives his productions for artists like Erykah Badu such high quality. Shafiq manages over the course of the record to give a thoroughly modern update to a genre in need of an album that's as impressive as it is progressive, filled with equal parts spirituality and technology. -Mikey IQ Jones
Two new tracks from Pocket (a/k/a Burnside Project's Richard Jankovich). The A-side, "Backwards from Ten," features Menomena's Danny Seim, whose voice glides above Pocket's anthemic production work. In contrast, "Echo and Sway" is bouncy and jaunty, featuring unmistakable vocals from Sal Principato, of post-punk-funk legends Liquid Liquid. Also includes three remixes of "Backwards from Ten." |
|
|||||
|
Recommended New Arrivals |
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
