Sweet Valley - Jenova

When Wavves and Kynan announced they were teaming up to make beat tapes, I’m pretty sure no one expected them to be good. Wavves was known for his surprisingly poppy loser noise-punk (and his onstage meltdowns) and his brother was known in some parts for for his surprisingly poppy electro-noise ballads. So the combination of them producing some hazy, funny, dense beats that I love was unexpected. Though I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising, as I’ve enjoyed everything else they’ve put out. 

Bixel Boys - Love Like This EP

We’ve been going through a serious R&B revival in the bleeding edge of the mainstream. Look at successes like the Weeknd or Frank Ocean and expect more vapid copies of them to slowly start to appear and make lots of money. Right now though, LA’s Bixel Boys are taking that devotion to late 90s R&B pop and dropping over solid 2010s house tracks. Lead off track takes Biggie’s widow Faith Evans same-titled hit and makes it a dance-floor monster. A little less reverence is given to the Janet Jackson sample on the B-side—it’s much more cut up and modulated, but the beat is no less hot. So far it seems like the Bixel Boys are content to edit and sample their way to perfection. That sounds just fine to me.

Chris Schlarb - Psychic Temple

This album will change your life. Forget any early-2000s “indie rock” associated with that whole change-your-life label, I mean literally you will be a different person after hearing this music. And not just in the sense that you will have aged half an hour, either. This album alters perception, it changes your sense of time and space. It relaxes while it invigorates. Chris Schlarb and his myriad of collaborators have tapped into the subconscious and figured out a way to open new pathways into human experience. They’ve bridged the gap between modal jazz and Eno-style ambient perfectly and they’ll rewire your brain in the process. Every human on earth needs to enter the Psychic Temple.

Araab Muzik - For Professional Use Only

This mixtape contains wall-to-wall block rocking beats. It’s a good mix of tear-the-roof-off EDM and instrumental beat tracks with the occasional soul sample. There’s more than enough bass and “you’re now listening to Araab Muzik” samples spread throughout that your speakers never get a rest and you never forget who you’re listening to. And it’s always nice to know that the destructive beats you’re hearing are played live, not computer generated.

genderdeer:

NEW RELEASE

monument XIII

honestly

http://www.sendspace.com/file/vo5ef0

Mining some of the same earth as other nostalgia-traders like Boards of Canada (woozy, VHS-quality) and The Go! Team (the only band in recently memory to do mournful harmonica and saxophone well), Monument XIII manages to stay subdued and melancholy. The relatively ambient twenty minutes of this album approach some of the save-room feel of music from Kosumo Notto while pushing your emotions like some manipulative VCR-dubbed anime soundtrack.

James Ferraro - Cold

The only thing I can think of as I listen to this is Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, minus Kanye. James Ferraro has taken that digital break up R&B and stripped it of Kanye’s pop pretension and self-consciously clever wordplay, leaving only the dark feelings, the digital clicks and beeps, the hollow sound, and the emotive auto-tune. Burying his vocals deep in the mix and overlaying the tracks with noise and what sounds like bleed-in from a nearby rap radio station, James Ferraro approaches the feel of The Weeknd or How To Dress Well but with their sound turned inside-out.

Scholastics = 30,000 is the new 8

I launched Melodic Expectation two years ago this month. My posting volume has definitely diminished since I started, to the point that I have taken the entire last two weeks off. I’m not dead, though. 

This is a mix put together by a good friend of mine, who goes musically by either Scholastics or Ramona Quimby, Age 8. I’ve posted a mix of his before, but this one is different. Taking inspiration from the BBC Essential Mix radio program, he’s put together a 2-hour dance party mix covering his “favorite pop, krautrock, nu-disco, etc. jams”. It’s an excitingly diverse two hours, guaranteed to blow your mind and leave your head nodding at least twice. Tracklist is below, download/stream link is above.

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Helado Negro - Island Universe Story One

Returning for a brief respite from his offworld and cross-universe exploration, Roberto Carlos Lange has brought something more agressive but no less beautiful back to his recordings. The music still floats through your memories like his older Helado Negro recordings, but this time it’s a bit loopier. The rough edges haven’t been buffed out this time, providing a staticky counterpoint to Lange’s smooth Spanish half-whispers. 

Giraffage - Needs

Having dropped a very hot debut album full of bass and glitch and sex—like a horny Los Angeles Burial—it’s exciting to see that Giraffage has progressed in his sound on this new album. The pitched-down slow jam vocal samples are still there as well as the slinky vintage beats, but the music is colored by the late-90s computer music texture that I’ve been enjoying lately in my favorite corners of the Internet. He has highlighted and emphasized different elements on Needs than on Comfort. Glitch is clearly still present, but the stutter and ducking artifacts are less prominent in favor of a better grasp on melodic hooks and head-nodding, nearly singable choruses. The elements at play on this album are still present on the debut, but they’ve been reevaluated and refined in a way that puts Comfort into context and makes the greatness of Needs all the more obvious due to its progression. I will be listening to this one for a while and honestly can’t wait to hear how much better Giraffage can get.

[[alternate download]]

MEISHI SMILE - mYSTERIOUS sUMMER vACATION

Despite the amount of anime I watched in college, I’ve only been a fan of Japanese pop music in a peripheral sense. I appreciate j-pop when it fits the context of a show or a film but, with the exception of mid-90s shibuya-kei and 2000s noise, I’ve never really paid much mind to Japanese pop music. Though knowledge in this area could provide some context with MEISHI SMILE’s just-released collection of j-pop remixes/reworks, based on the release notes, it seems like an appreciation for OVA OST music may be all that is needed to enjoy this album. I can’t tell you what the original tracks in this collection sound like, but enough digital tracking has been pressed into them that they are molded into the hyperreal amiga dance-pop that made LUST such a fun listen. If you’re curious where the increasingly digital and international focus of 2013 dance pop music is headed, download this immediately.