Metro Zu – Mink Rug (2012) [Self-Released] // Grade: B

The first thing I noticed about Florida group Metro Zu’s newest mixtape Mink Rug is it’s cover. Two chicks making out something fierce. It’s pretty hard not to notice that. And like the cover suggests, this is a mixtape full of sex raps. No, not every song on Mink Rug is about sex, just most. And, truthfully that’s not a bad thing in the slightest given the talent behind it and the fact that’s going through the Raider Klan’s nostalgic/futuristic filter.

Metro Zu’s two emcees Ruben Slikk and Lofty are super witty, creative and hilarious guys so they pull off the “dirty rap” thing great. Their swag is awesome because you can really hear the fun the dudes are having rapping. The third member of Metro Zu is the producer Mr. B whose beats are pretty diverse from track to track. Some are very solid southern trap beats, some are soulful more “hip hop” and some are straight electro dance jams.

An example of the varying sounds on this mixtape happens right away in the difference between track one and two. The tape opens with one of the tape’s most trap-sounding songs “Sell Ma Ho” which sounds almost like a Future song minus the autotune. It has the pretty funny nonsensical hook “First thing first Imma sell my ho…second thing first: Imma sell my ho.” I don’t’ know exactly why I find that funny. I think it’s because they say “Second thing first.”

The next song is the title track (and probably the mixtape’s best song) “Mink Rug” produced by freebase and featuring SpaceGhostPurrp. The “Mink Rug” beat is like a throwback to oldschool UGK. The hook/concept of the song is ridiculous just like most of this tape’s tracks “Bitch, sit on my mink.” What I see is a 70s porn going down. The hilarious porn imagery Metro Zu and SGP conjure up of having sex party with “four bad bitches” on a mink Rug is great. Plus, the song is phonky as hell.

Later in the tape we get “RobotSlorBetch” which is like the sort of track LMFAO would make if they weren’t solely trying to court 14 year olds. It’s a pretty goofy electro party song, but unlike LMFAO it isn’t obnoxious in trying to be a bar mitzvah hit. Also: One of the first lines of the song is “this goes out to my Android 18s.” I’m a Dragonball Z fan, we’ll leave it at that.

The tape’s last track “C.O.D” is another track that walks the line between being humerous and serious and again pulls it off really well. With a title referencing Call of Duty and a chaotic epic, swirling orchestra beat featuring gunshot noises, I would expect this to be a song about shooting people. But nope. The hook is “Cocked back, target locked I’m bust to bust a nut up on her crotch.” So, I guess it is about shooting per say…

Mink Rug is mostly fun raps and cool beats. But, to me, that’s good hip hop and  a bit of  a lost art form in the scene. I’m sure Uncle Luke would be very proud to see these guys carrying his torch for Florida.

Download Metro Zu’s Mink Rug (Click Here)

I told you when I last did a post about this crew it wouldn’t be the last. I’m not quite sure what the hell they are talking about, but I’m sure it’s tripped out and full of swag per usual. “#BEEST” as a video takes a journey into the typical morning of the men behind those SweetTeam masks that we know and love. It’s also the newest installment in the musical journey from #TeamPanini.

“Got Damn” is far more hype including dubstep and grime elements to smack your eardrums with that swag straight from Antwerp, Belgium. Go rep #TeamPanini on twitter and follow the mastermind behind it allhimself, #SWEK!

No matter how awful they are, anthology films are always fun. If one story sucks, it won’t be long until you’re onto the next one. They always make good party films when you have some friends over. They have a special place in my heart – I wrote a fairly extensive look at horror anthologies for Topless Robot a couple years ago. The Theater Bizarre, the first film bankrolled and distributed by our friends at Severin Films (Bloody Birthday, The Baby), collects some diverse horror legends and craftsmen to weave together six tales or terror. Six tales with lots and lots of blood. So much blood.

The frame story involves a girl with runny makeup going into a closed-down theater where a slightly horrifying, robotic Udo Kier delivers esoteric intros to all six stories. It’s not really a frame “story” as it is an excuse for Kier to be a creep. I liked some of the tales better than others, one I hated so much you’ll get to read me bitch about it several times within this review.

Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) kicks off the bizarre with a mash-up of Celtic paganism and Lovecraftian mythology called “The Mother of Toads.” A young anthropologist and his annoying girlfriend are traveling through rural France when they stop at a market. The girl finds some classy pewter earrings which her man instantly recognizes as being in the shape of Lovecraft’s Elder Sign. The leathery old woman selling the earrings says her family has a copy of the Necronomicon (if you don’t know what that is, it’s over) and she’d be happy to show it to them.  It’s horribly acted and the story isn’t particularly shocking, but it does feel like a Lovecraft tale: a young student thinks he knows his shit and his thirst for knowledge of the unknown leads to his demise. And it’s super slimy!

Things pick up a bit in the next short, “I Love You”, a tense, blood-stained look at a doomed relationship directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock). A controlling boyfriend foaming at the mouth with jealousy tries to convince his lying whore of a girlfriend that no matter what how much she spreads her legs, he still loves her. The ending is a bit of a head-scratcher, but still enjoyable for Giovinazzo’s raw style and use of people who can actually act. Despite its violent nature (or maybe because of this) “I Love You” felt like the most personal of all the shorts.

Next up is horror make-up god Tom Savini‘s “Wet Dreams.” Thank god for Savini’s short. It’s super fun and the least serious of all the shorts. It features the goriest string of gross-outs of all the shorts, but the least substance, which is fine on this playing field. A douchebag keeps having dreams about a weird toucan-vagina monster thingy, his therapist (played by Savini) talks about raping his mother, and then a girl goes “This is my dream, bitch!”

Douglas Buck (Sisters) delivers the worst of the shorts, “The Accident.” It’s all about life and death through the eyes of a child and bikers hitting deer. It’s artiness just comes off as incompetence. Thankfully, it’s the shortest of the shorts.

Karim Hussain (The Beautiful Beast) brings a pretty interesting story to the table with “Vision Stains.” A girl gets her rocks off by stealing other people’s vitreous fluid with a needle and then injected the fluid in her own eye. Through this she gets to visit their memories. Shit gets weird when she experiments with an unborn baby’s memories. I really like the idea of Hussain’s story a lot, but after watching a needle go in an eye for about the 10th time, I got kinda turned off.

The final short is David Gregory‘s “Sweets” – a hypercolor, ultra gory tale of people who love eating. “I just love masticating!” one girl exclaims. Gregory, who directed 2008′s Plague Town, took the crown with this short. It’s super creative visually and a spot-on mixture of comedy and horror. There’s lot of detail everywhere and it just feels like he took the most time with his segment and didn’t spend all his time making a fake penis, like Savini did.

I feel like there should have been one less short in The Theater Bizarre, and that short is Buck’s “The Accident.” It feels really out of place here and sort of drains all the fun out following Savini’s wacky blood stomp and Stanley’s Frog Whore. It’s like the sober kid at a party where everyone else is wasted. So besides that small buzzkill of a short, the overall film is pretty damn fun. You can tell no cigar-chomping studio suits had anything to do with it – it was made completely outside of the studio system by horror fans for horror fans. It’s like Midnight Madness Heaven!

The Theater Bizarre is in a limited run right now. Don’t miss it if it’s playing near you or Udo Kier will crawl in your room at night and tickle your feet.

What can I say, we have patience issues, especially when it comes to bringing you all brand new threads. As I hope you’ve seen, we’ve been previewing all kinds of dope items from our Spring 12 collection over the past few weeks, and we know a lot of you are itching to get your hands on them. Though the Lookbook and full official release is still impending (very impending) we couldn’t help but start up a little presale for the NYC faithful.

If you head over to the 350 Broadway store, you’ll see it’s stocked to the brim with select items from the first delivery of our Spring 12 collection, and they’re available now! G’damn! This means all kinds of new tees, fitteds, snapbacks and sweaters. Some personal highlights, if you’ll allow me, include the Lamour Keep Watch duo of New Era, and Tee/Tank, and the Blunted Tee & Crewneck. So what are you waiting for? Get to 350 Broadway right now!

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725

J/M/Z to Marcy Ave
G to Broadway
L to Lorimer

After two years, a fame increase of about 1000%, a few false starts, a few million dollars, some controversy, some investigative journalism, profiles in the nations largest publications, feuds with his mother, conspiracy theories, twitter campaigns and more, the mysterious Earl Sweatshirt appears to have finally emerged from Samoan Boarding School (or wherever he was) and is ready to start rapping again. In fact, he’s already started.

Starting with the video above and followed quickly by Twitter and tumblr pages, Earl announced his return to the world. Sure looks like him in the video, and definitely sounds like him in the song playing behind it, “Home.” Speaking of which, Earl promised to release the track when he got 50,000 followers. Quickly jumping well above that, he dropped the predictably lyrically dense track here. New Earl Sweatshirt song! For real! Tyler recently specifically announced, seemingly out of nowhere, that Earl would not be on the new OF tape, which especially now probably means that he is. So there you have it. 2 years of trying to #FreeEarl, finally over. Yay us.

Lindstrøm – Six Cups of Rebel (2012) [Smalltown Supersound] // Grade: B+

Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s last album was a collaboration with Christabelle unlike anything he had done before. It led him to explore a brand new realm of music making: there were vocals, and the songs had to be short. His usual 15 to 20 minute running times just were not suitable for the pop ambitions of Real Life Is No Cool. And I think that Lindstrøm learned a lot from that experience. Shorter lengths do not necessarily mean less creative space (as the actress said to the bishop) and on Six Cups of Rebel he made each song on this album a movement to what could really be considered a 53 minute song which begins and ends with organ arpeggios.

He also decided to add some vocal parts – his own vocals. So the changes are fundamentally fundamental. But this is the same Lindstrøm who has been steady delivering space oddisseys in the last few years. This one is not just an epic, it’s an opera. Flowing through disco to funk to prog to acid house through fields of drum meteors and into the deep deep dark corners of the Church of the Hypnotoad. Who knew that Sun Ra and Robert Fripp had a secret Norwegian dancehall lovechild? By the time you reach the end of ‘Call me Anytime’ (arguably the weirdest track on this album) that lovechild might as well be a reality.

The result is pretty convincing if you ask me. It’s groovy but not crass, with an extraordinary new-age vibe that would be off-putting in any other situation. But he makes it work with just a touch of psychedelic tribalism – but again, tasteful. It actually seems to me like the vocals pull their tracks out of any hypothetical abysmal ditch. They’re treated just like throwback disco vox: not always sensible or audible, but definitely adding relief and lifting the mood. That’s something else which is striking in this album by the way: for all the dancey-ness and glitter, the atmosphere is not all smiles – even rather oppressive sometimes. Track two repeats “can’t get no relief” over and over again; track four “all I want is a quiest place to live”, over and over again as if these were an ode to depression in a cartoon directed by Werner Herzog.

There are many moments on this album that make you think: is this a synth or a guitar? is this a beat or a tweaked out snare? Is that a clavi or a bandoneon on Magik? And what kind of magik do YOU do? How many people are on this album exactly? Just one. It’s one fair skinned man and his machines, in a studio that probably doubles as a bedroom. And so I ask: what kind of audience will this appeal to? Besides Lindstrøm himself that is. Not that his audience was very wide already, but he won’t gain very many fans from this one. Also: did he just invent chamber disco? (Google says no, somebody else used the term already. But they should give it up). The music is not fit for much else besides the bedroom. It would probably be great for an intergalactic diner, or some kind of VIP lounge in a hoverboarding skate park. Whoever is making that Jetsons’ movie NEEDs to license some of this. I find the album lovely, but it will probably not be everybody’s cup of tea. Short attention spans and optimists will be puzzled. Their loss.

Presenting the new video for G-Side‘s “Gettin It” off their album Island. Yung Clova, of course, had the ill verse on Babe Rainbow‘s ”Greed”, and since we did the remix EP G-Side has been on repeat hard. Plus y’all know Stalley, who’s gone from Lincoln Way Nights to Maybach Music Group like a boss. Pretty dope.

The video for “Gettin It” has some really interesting symbolism used to illustrate the lyrics as they spit. Their braggadocios, effortless rhyme style is a great example of what the Dirty South sounds like now. I suggest paying close attention to their lyrical content, as they have some interesting, intelligent metaphors and content. Intelligent Trunk Music as Stalley coins it.

Whether it be on tumblr, dump.fm, in The Whitney, or MoMA PS1, internet art has really made it to the big time now. Which is why, obviously, it has to be commoditized. Who’s ready for some tee shirts with exorbitant price tags? You are, you little #seapunk you. Aww c’mon, don’t hate me internet, I was just kidding. I love you and your ever-repeating geocities style of artistic expression. Never leave me.

What’s that? Oh right, the shirts. Yeah, so internet artist Sterling Crispin commissioned some of his favorite frendz including Pictureplane, Ryder Ripps, and Laura Brothers to create these krazy kewl all over print shirts. They’re on sale now here, but act fast and furious because they’re limited to ten each! Oh yeah, and they’re $147. Buy yourself a place in internet art history! Hack the planet!

Yarrow Slaps is a hustler for sure. He’s been blessin me with plenty links lately, and the more I peep the more I like. Dude is just a guy alive in life makin raps. He paints pictures, like with paint. Although I don’t have much qualification to speak on visual art, I’d say much like his raps, his paintings lean towards impressionism. Most rap is impressionist. It gives you a vibe to experience. Of course details and stories are peppered throughout, but I’d say one of the most common types of rap to find is probably impressionist rap. But it’s not like there’s a reason to call it that. It makes more sense to just call it rap.

So call it rap we do. And it feels like right now there is a new rap album coming out every three days, and I find out about at least one new group or artist a week. It’s a great time for music in the United States, and one result of this wild proliferation is an incredible diversification. It’s great to look around and see so many different kinds of artists putting out incredibly developed work, and understanding how to present themselves. Or, understanding how not to present themselves. That certainly seems more accurate. It feels like a new sound emerges at every turn. And it’s not just some halfway facade that unfolds into a trite and predictable album beyond cursory listening. With the proliferation of the tools, and the demystification of the means of distribution, music is revealing itself to be intertwined with the lives we live as young Americans. And not intertwined in the ways we previously understood it to be. In fact intertwined is not so accurate. Interwoven would me more accurate because you cannot create the fabric of our reality without the fibers of music. Be it music that we create, or music that we listen to, our generation’s relationship to music is much deeper than we’ve yet recognized.

We know that Rap is one of the chief dialects, but all of the sudden we have found ways to understand rap dialects at a much smaller and more personal level. All of the sudden rappers don’t have to speak in pre-ordained dialects. They’re free to reveal their own. In the midst of rappers speaking freely, these dudes Dior Sentai from Orlando hit me up. Oddly enough I wasn’t surprised by what I heard on their debut Raw Cartoons, but it was on no account of the music. Their sound is an odd amalgam of anime soundtracks, post-OF (kinda nuts that this is aready happening) malevolence, and tumblr distilled Three 6 Mafia. That wasn’t the expected part, that was the unexpected part. They really own the sound, and while they’ve definitely got some work to do they’re off to a great start. The expected part of Dior Sentai actually came on account of geography, and not the music itself.

Orlando was where I went to college, and where I started rapping. I was fortunate to be in a vibrant scene that actually was not too dissimilar from what’s happening at a national scale on the internet. And as soon as I turned on Dior Sentai I could hear all the same things I used to experience at weeklies, and shows, and cyphers. It reminded me of all the time I spent not just recording, or playing shows, but living amongst a community of amazing artists. I’m grateful that the internet has given a lot of that to me in new ways, but some of it just can’t happen over computers. So on that note, next Monday is going to be the first installment of Slap City, a weekly hip hop party at SOM in SF. There will be more info to come shortly, but for now just know that the Wave is about to hit the Bay, and you should too!

Last Friday night we partied hearty at Santos Party House with Bad Rabbits, Party Supplies, and World’s Fair. Where you there? Aw, you weren’t. Unlucky duck you. Don’t worry. We captured that shit for perpetuity. Or at least some other people did. We were too busy dancing and imbibing and generally making merriment.

Shouts to Forthethrill for the photos, the rest of which you can see on there site here. As you can see, everyone had a great time and Action Bronson was there and rapping happened and then some funk n stuff too. For more rapping, check out a video of World’s Fair performing their track “Float” as captured by Brook Bobbins. Thanks everyone for a great time!