Album of the Day: Massive Attack - Splitting the Atom

Extremely short, but very good. The title track is particularly good, but you can't really go wrong, especially considering that there are only 4 songs here. Pretty good for electronic music, a genre I'm only moderately well versed in.

Album of the Day: Peanut Butter Wolf - Peanut Butter Breaks

A very short (11 tracks, 22 minutes) set of breaks and beats. Nothing major or groundbreaking here, a la “Shades of Blue,” but definitely solid from start to finish. Everything here is very laid back, even by Peanut Butter Wolf standards, and the samples are kept to a minimum: if you need pure, solid chillout beats with the occasional jazzy infusion, look no further.

Album of the Day: Sir Menelik aka Cyclops 4000 - Space Cadillac (Single)

There are only two tracks here, along with a couple of instrumentals. Space Cadillac features Kool Keith, while Nightwork features El-P. Kool Keith flows through his normal crazy outer space rhymes over an old school futuristic beat, full of synth waves and chimes. Not a knock on the artist, but I actually like the instrumental better than the original track. Nightwork has a better feel to it, but I think this is mostly because El-P can absolutely kill any garage beat, especially back in 1999. Neither artist is even trying to do anything spectacular, but somehow both manage to just kill it.

Album of the Day: Cobra Starship - While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets

I'm not exactly a huge pop fan, but I figured I would give this one a go anyway, mostly because I was browsing and came across a couple of cool album covers. 'Send My Love to the Dancefloor, I'll See You in Hell (Hey Mister DJ)' is, if I am interpreting these incredibly dense lyrics correctly, about how dancing is pretty fun, only done, shockingly, in Top 40 pop-hits style. I like to think I'm relatively open minded about music (which probably means that I'm the complete opposite), but that one was pretty rough. If you've ever listened to Fallout Boy or Panic! At the Disco, both good groups that I personally don't happen to be into, you get an idea of what's going on here. It's not bad, it would do the album a disservice to say so, but it's not particularly good, either. Embarassingly, the only song here that I kind of enjoyed was 'Bring It (Snakes on a Plane)'. I will never, ever type that sentence again. While the themes are a bit overdone (pretty much all of the songs here are about partying dancing, and relationships - though I'm a fan of rap music, so I guess I can't really harp too much on that matter), at least the lyrics contain more than seven different words, a quality which I cannot emphasize enough. Even the shittiest song can be made decent with a little variety and though to the subject at hand. In addition, while I don't like much of the genre as a whole, I'm a huge fan of using live instrumentation (whether truly live or produced by a computer) over synthesized pop beats, and the music here is well done in that regard, providing a mix of the two, but skewed a little more toward the former rather than the latter. Lyrics aside (“You can put your hands up/I love girls with Brooklyn haircuts/I'll be you're fanclub/Step, step/You're too slow/Speed it up”? What is that? Or how about this one: “Diamond girl,/I wanna wrap you around the world/I'll never let you touch the ground/I'll be your Biggie, you'll be my Lil' Kim” It's like they're trying overly hard to incorporate deep-sounding lyrics at the expense of content), the music is just varied enough for me to tell when the track changes, but not enough to make them completely distinct from one another. This is great if it gets cut up into singles, but makes listening to an album from start to finish a bit of a pain, not to mention the creative issues involved. Despite all of the negativity, I didn't hate this album, but I didn't particularly like it, either. To rather cynically sum it up: it's hipster music that hipsters would reject. Interpret that how you will.

Album of the Day: Raekwon - Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang

Rawness. 'Nuff said.

Album of the Day: Mad Professor - Mad Professor Captures Pato Banton

This is another one of those albums that I came into having pretty much no knowledge of the artist. It's sort of a hybrid between electronic and reggae, only I don't know if I can call it reggae, since I can understand more than every fifth word. My experience with reggae is admittedly limited, being just a Madlib album, the occasional Bob Marley song, and that one dude from Grand Theft Auto IV. With that in mind, I can't say whether or not this is good in the context of the genre as a whole, but as as it's own work, I definitely enjoy it, particularly the storytelling elements by Pato Banton, particularly in 'Gwarn,' and the live instrument feel (even if they are made with a computer) presented by the Professor. To me, the best remix albums are those that don't wholly change the original content, but add tweaks and minor alterations, more like Shades of Blue rather than [insert any one of the myriad of Jay-Z remix albums]. That's done here, for the most part, retaining the reggae feel while still incorporating the mixer's own interpretation of the music, sort of the way you can (or at least I do) mess around with the beats to different songs in your head as you listen. It is a short album, but it feels twice as long, simply because every track is excellent. The best track of the album, by a distant long shot, is 'My Opinion.' It just oozes raw feeling, as he waxes poetic about England, politics, and religion. It's always great to hear an artist or style that I'd never heard before. 

Album of the Day: Mr. Lif - Enters the Colossus

Man, I miss the heyday of Def Jux, one of the best lineups I can think of in my admittedly limited experience. Mr. Lif is just relentless here: no hooks, no breaks, just wall-to-wall flow that beats you over the head. It's got that Def Jux feel, with very limited sampling, electronic beats (reminiscent of El-P, surely not a coincidence), in-house features, and lyrics that swing back and forth between cryptic and filled with inside jokes that necessitate a second or third listen (“The government strives to be omnipotent/but when I came through on some MC shit, the C's split/since they fear my potency has been kept a secret for years/renegotiated over beers”) and straightforward, to-the-point rhymes (“And if you've ever seen me rhyme, you know/I'll drop a cool flow then flip like Cujo”). It doesn't necessarily feel dated, but you can definitely tell that this was released in 2000. This album is short, at 7 tracks running a half hour (inflated by a nearly 11 minute final track, which features a hidden track, which I won't bother ranting about again), but it's packed with content, as one would expect from a Mr. Lif release.