Summer time means

Bumping in your car to the new Sleigh Bells CD. The debut album by the Brooklyn duo mixes harsh angled guitar riffs, finger-snaps, hi-hats, and deep round bass into beats that would make the biggest clowns on the commercial rap scene blush.

Track for track the album is straight fire. The heavy beats mix perfectly with the candy-sweet vocal stylings of MC Alexis Krauss. The duo takes old-school big-beat tracks (think Clipse's "Grindin'"), adds a layer of fuzzy, dirty, noisy guitar blended with vocals to create truly unique jams perfect for playing at high volume in a residential neighborhood.

Try out Infinity Guitars, Crown on the Ground, Kids, and Rill Rill for a taste of what I mean.

Preview the album HERE and buy it if you like it!

Summer is here...

SOAK IT UP!

Here are some albums that I have really been digging recently. I've had a lot of time to listen to a plethora of music over the past week due to finals studying and these next few albums are the cream of the crop of the past few weeks.

The National have been quietly making great music for quite some time now and their sophomore album finds the band keeping in key with their songs for the broken-hearted, the alienated and the disillusioned. The album is solid all the way through, listen to "Anyone's Ghost", "Afraid of Everyone", and "Conversation 16" if you need a starting place to get into the album. I wasn't blown away by the album until these tracks struck a chord within me and caused me to listen carefully to the work as a whole. Then I was hooked.

Preview the album HERE and then go buy it, the album dropped today.

Another great album that came out recently was the new self-titled Crystal Castles.

These dudes are so damn hip they don't even waste time naming their albums (indie as fuck!)

Crystal Castles' newest album is the stuff of dreams. Sick, electronic, entrancing dreams. The album departs slightly from the din of unpolished grime towards the direction of truly unique dance tracks. Their first album was good, but it seemed like it was a collection of tracks that were hashed together for the sake of having a release. There were some amazing tracks rifled throughout but you had to suffer through some noise if you were to listen to work as a whole.

The newest effort finds the duo relaxing into their unique blend of rave/8-bit sounds/haunting vocals and creating an album that is great from front to back. There is still a good bit of noise that fans of the first album will recognize but the piece as a whole seems much more calculated and pop-conscious. Alice Glass trades in a lot of her harsher vocals for a smoother approach (relative to Crystal Castles) that work really well among the rest of the electronic storm happening in the background.

If you are new to Crystal Castles do yourself a favor and get the album below and listen to Baptism, Celestica, Empathy Suffocation, Pap Smear.

Recommendation: Crank up with the windows down while making an airplane with your hand outside of the window. Then, hand-fly to the beat.

Preview the album HERE and if you like the album go out and buy it!