Blogarhythms

The abundance of quality mixtapes and free downloads that I alluded to in Monday’s post has kept me pretty preoccupied over the last year or so. That’s awesome and all, because it’s renewed my faith in a format I’d become disenchanted with and given me countless new reasons to love Hip-Hop and appreciate it’s diversity. But I hadn’t realized just how much of the time (for example, Izza Kizza’s new mixtape kept me company most of Tuesday and Wednesday) I spend listening to music (and talking and writing about it) I’d been dedicating to those projects until recently.

This sudden new awareness caused me to question whether I hadn’t been neglecting to extol the virtues of a lot of the other music living in piles around my crib and on my various media drives and taking up space in my headphones on a daily basis. It was Yea Big, the beatmaking half of Chicago Alt-Rap duo Yea Big + Kid Static, who instigated this revelation with one eye openign e-mail about how he and his partner in rhyme were embarking on a tour with Los Angeles-based Avant-Punk six-piece The Mae Shi and Bark Bark Bark, a one-man Noistronica band from Tuscon, Arizona. Wait… what?

That line-up sounds like the type of stylistic clusterfuckery that a mashup-happy mixtape DJ might put together, but that’s not what started me examining my umbilicus. No, it was more so the fact that I’m actually a fan of both of the bands joining YB+KS on their cross-country journey and yet, I realized, I’d never mentioned either one here on Blogarhythms. Bark Bark Bark’s album Haunts was a favorite of mine last year, its eclectic songwriting (like MC 900 ft Jesus meets Beck), cacophonous instrumentation, glitchy beats and grainy electronics a perfect compliment to the dim glow of my monitor on many a late night. But that album came out last year, so it doesn’t make that much sense fawning over it now. Luckily the other band on the tour, The Mae Shi, actually released an album I’m quite fond of this year.

The album in question, the awesomely titled HLLLYH (which sounds kinda like MGMT and Animal Collective attending a Church whose pipe organ is really a microKORG with a smuggled-in Game Boy… or maybe Dragons of Zynth, if they were spazzed out and enamoured of anthemic sing-a- long Pop-Punk), has been on my MP3 player since it dropped earlier this year. It’s totally one of those instances where an album’s title, and the names of the songs on the album, offer a window into the demented goodness that you’re in for are you to choose to listen. There’s a song on this record called “Pwnd” for fuck’s sake! And it’s essentially a religiously-themed Prog/Metal opus (think Muse, the Mars Volta, Rush, et al) fused to lo-fi electronics and sardonic Garage-Punk! No, seriously, it’s got an infectious keyboard riff (a-la Justice… who, considering the subject matter, might want to consider remixing it), lyrics about God’s final judgment, and a fiery, near evangelical spoken breakdown that sound like it’s being delivered by an enraged Adam Horovitz or something.

The Mae Shi “Pwnd”

They reprise that catchy keyboard riff elsewhere on the album during an eleven-plus-minute House instrumental that splits the album in half. Yes, I said House instrumental! It’s pretty much the only selection not concerned lyrically (because it doesn’t have any… although its title is “Kingdom Come”) with themes of war (the Auto-Tune-drowned “Young Marks”), death (”Pwnd,” the blippy “Run to Your Grave,” “Divine Harvest”), God (pretty much every song on this bad-boy) and the apocalypse (the chintzy drum-machine hymn “Book of Numbers,” “Pwnd” again). I imagine such heady content might be a downer to some listeners. But it’s far from a Gospel album. And if you’re feeling the thrashing riffage, pounding drums and cheesy 8-bit video game synths enough to listen long enough to hear the lyrics you’re probably down regardless.

The Mae Shi “Run to Your Grave”

Speaking of MGMT and Justice; if you haven’t heard the remix of the Brooklyn Psychtronica duo’s single “Electric Feel” by the French Electro-House duo you need to. It’s probably responsible for eating up as much of my listening time as all those mixtapes, which is impressive since it’s just one song! Seriously, the homie Emeyesi, OKP sports-boarder extraordinaire bshelly and myself all agree it’s one of the finest tracks of the year. And you can’t ask for a better testimonial than that! It’s on the “Electric Feel” single. Go get it.