by Röyksopp ft. Robyn
(Astralwerks)
I’ve never been totally convinced about Robyn’s merits, even when I
liked her work (“With Every Heartbeat” especially), but boy does she
sell this one. What an opening line: “I go mental every time you leave
for work.” I’ll try not to take that literally. And when she gets to
“I’m in love with a robot,” she sounds like her wires are crossing.
Röyksopp had been threatening to drown in irrelevance, so
something this shameless is a marked improvement.
by Pogo
Pogo is a young producer from Western Australia who cuts up and
reconfigures sound snippets from kids’ movies over woozy hiphop and
gauzy house. His Last.fm page describes
his sound as “Fairytale-DisneyHop,” and his newest track, a dazzling
mélange of Mary Poppins lines, makes him sound like a
kind of heir to both the Field and Aphex Twin in his lighter moods.
Goes down best with the YouTube clip, which is as expertly edited as
any I’ve seen.
by Jay-Z
(MP3)
Jay-Z’s broadcasted blasts have always been headline-grabbing
stunts, but the difference is that the stunts didn’t used to seem sad,
and this does. The track has its moments—the quick horn swoops
and heist-soundtrack vibes that peek in between verses build some
tension—but the broken blues-guitar riff and military rat-a-tats
that form the body plod, and lines like “This ain’t a number-one
record/This is practically assault with a deadly weapon” don’t help at
all. I eagerly await the first smart-ass who remixes this thing by
slathering it in vocal processing—and only the first.
by Deuce
(Ostgut Ton)
Minimal techno may well be fading, but it isn’t going to disappear.
The sweaty, hard-hitting analog sound of these three tracks by two of
Germany’s younger comers, Marcel Dettmann and Shed, suggests a bridge
back into thicker, fuller production. “Cue Ed,” the closer, makes a
simple loop of a single note seem like a police light; the severe
drum-machine exercise “Guttering” evokes dark warehouse spaces past and
present; but the real killer is the acidic opener, “Twerp Wiz,” which
sounds like it’s fighting its way through dust clouds and should be
blowing out better speaker cabinets worldwide all summer.
by Green Day
(Reprise)
Damn you, constant airplay and frequent TV appearances. I wanted to
continue hating this record, and now I can’t. Ask again in six months,
though—things may change. 