There are more things “vintage” about this track than the fact that it reminds me of my childhood experiences with 90s rap.  First of all, the talk box, which Big Boi brings in later to help him sing an outro, is a far more elegant fuck-you to T-Pain than Jay-Z’s frat boy chorus on “Death of Autotune,” recalling classic funksters like Zapp & Roger rather than resting on the laurels of a bloated modern ego.  And then there’s the Soul II Soul quote in the middle of a verse to bring things firmly back to the other side of 2000.  But as much of an eye as Big Boi has on the past, he’s no geezer—Storch’s bass sounds more like an alien invasion than any talk boxes from the last century ever did.  And a final, telling detail: that line in the chorus is “throw the deuce up in the air just for the shutterbugs,” but the word “shutterbug” is given a computer-y misspelling in the title—a 1940s term updated for the internet age.  “Blog me,” Big Boi seems to be taunting.  “Blog me.”

Big Boi’s official solo debut (not counting his side of 2003′s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below), Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, is due July 6^th on Def Jam after much delay.  Check out another great track from the album (featuring a now-imprisoned Gucci Mane) here, and be sure not to miss Big Boi’s slick appearance on Janelle Monáe’s wonderfully anachronistic “Tightrope” here.

So when Matt Berninger sings lines like “The floors are falling out from everybody I know” they sound wise and not just brooding, proverbs from a dark place but a place with some depth to it.  And the band, the full notes and the ever-fresh drumming (really, give it a listen), is there beneath Matt’s baritone to keep the whole thing buoyant.  Forgive the vagueness of the term, but there’s something so knowing about The National’s music, how it asks for your trust and then pierces you with things that ring true.  Luckily for us, they’re still doing it here.  And what’s a bloodbuzz?  I think it’s what you feel when you hear this song.

The National’s new album, High Violet, is due May 11th on 4AD.  Go to the album website to download a high quality MP3 of “Bloodbuzz”.

And so I think it speaks to more than my emotional state that this seemingly joyful summer anthem paralyzed me the first time I heard it. “Each secret you keep keeps me a bit far,” the lyrics begin; it’s actually a song about longing, happiness just out of reach even as it appears to drench us. The rest of the album fails to hold my attention, its emotional intensity wearing thin along with the lead vocals (for the most part, a Panda Bear/Liam Gallagher hybrid), but for its unrelenting unison of bliss and letdown, “Stay Close” stands alone.

Subiza is out on June 8^th on Matador/True Panther Sounds.  The video for “Stay Alive” is splashing about over here.

Stuck on Nothing is about youth in the classic/classic rock sense, and its cool verses and catchy hooks hit on predictable topics such as “tonight,” “who you are,” and generally carpe­-ing the diem “before we’re tired and too slow.”  The only thing that’s really indie about this rock is the mode in which the lyrics are delivered: not ironic, really, but with a slight vocal offhandedness that shows that Free Energy doesn’t take itself as seriously as its too-cool-for-school predecessors did.  And that’s what makes the album a good listen, an earnest but ultimately honest attempt to make sense of being young.

So even when the lyrics are silly, which is often, the whole thing is unassuming and good-natured enough to make the songs enjoyable.  This is good because the music is great; Free Energy is a pretty tight band, and their rock is melodic and wonderfully juicy.  Stuck on Nothing is brimming with charisma and light on its feet, and uplifting enough to make me light on mine too.  “They need a song to tell them it’s going to be okay,” Sprangers sings as the album winds to a close.  I believe the kid.

Stuck on Nothing is out now on DFA.  Check out the lead track (and its dumb hipster video) here.

It pulses, it builds, it meditates.  Sometimes it samples Lionel Ritchie.  But it got me through many a Directed Studies paper, and that’s what counts; googling “field sublime mediafire” will get you a download link.

But the music that Ali Farka Touré made with Toumani Diabaté in the years before the former died in 2006 is the kind that makes my ignorance irrelevant; 2005’s In the Heart of the Moon was a masterpiece by any measure, and upcoming release Ali & Toumani, a compilation of their final recordings together, is likely to join it.  You may have heard of Touré and Diabaté if your parents were of the National Public Radio set, or if you listen to Björk (Diabaté made an appearance on 2007’s Volta), or if you listen to Dirty Projectors (Touré’s signature guitar style informed just about every pluck on Bitte Orca).  If you’re an indie kid, this is the least esoteric African stuff out there besides The Very Best.  But that doesn’t matter, because it’s amazing music.

Touré and Diabaté both hail from Mali, where Diabaté’s family has been playing the kora for (apparently) 71 generations and where Touré played a style of music often referred to as “the desert blues” for its role as a root of American blues music.  Both musicians are masters of their instruments, Touré’s guitar playing unmistakable and Diabaté’s kora always sounding like many instruments playing magically at once.

It’s not the virtuosity that makes the music what is it is, though.  On their collaborative work, it’s the ease with which they play that makes the spell work; it’s beautiful to hear, it draws you in, it builds to something sublime, and then, unassumingly, it ends.  These guys can record in a single take, and to listen is to be hypnotized.  I saw Diabaté perform this summer and was floored by his solo performance (he was playing with Béla Fleck, who is great but different); from the crowd I watched him play his kora as if he were praying to it and I felt close though I was rows and rows away, and it’s the same thing to listen to these recordings.  It’s immediate, and consuming.  It takes you by surprise.

Ali & Toumani is out tomorrow on Nonesuch, and I expect it to be wonderful judging by the first two singles, “Kala Djula” and “Sabu Yerkoy,” which are floating around the blogosphere (try searching them on Hypemachine).  In the Heart of the Moon is a desert-island album that you should download right away; Googling “heart moon mediafire” will do the trick.

One time I wrote this about Untrue: “Distorted vocals, usually female and often sonically androgenized, form the melodic basis of Burial’s work—dub thumps soaked in lonely reverb, sampled women singing love songs to a city that isn’t listening.  ‘I can’t take my eyes off you,’ someone croons adoringly on a track from Untrue, but the soundscape merely threatens; the sad, clever ways in which he joins those voices with his beats make for music as beautiful as it is hopeless.”

Now I’m going to write this about Untrue: it’s brave and you should hear it.  Burial retells love stories without writing a single lyric, playing only with voice and backdrop and exploring where the two meet.  The melodies are gorgeous; there are tracks that bump and tracks that just hover but it all washes over you like the same beast of a project.  And it’s good for studying, so tonight’s the night!  Just Google “burial untrue mediafire” and you’ll be plugging away at that work in no time—with the sound of a heart-sunken city in your ears.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

The road runs both ways, though, and especially in the case of Gil Scott-Heron; his 1971 spoken-word anthem “The Revolution will not be Televised” is just about as proto-hip-hop as they come, earning him “Godfather of Rap” references and the like.  But all godfathers get old, and two decades later, in proper geezer fashion, Scott-Heron released a finger-wagging track entitled “Message to the Messengers,” which encouraged rappers to get educated and respect their elders.  “They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don’t really see inside the person,” he said in an interview.  “Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.”

On I’m New Here, Scott-Heron’s first album in sixteen years, there is no posturing.  The territory is pain, and the pain is plainly visible.  If his project is for his audience to see “inside the person,” he has succeeded magnificently, and the unsettling soundscapes that producer Richard Russell has created to accompany his songs and poetry give the whole thing an edge it wouldn’t have with traditional musical accompaniment.

The feeling here is one of things unraveling.  On the opening track, Scott-Heron speaks of his upbringing in a “broken home” over a string loop from Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights” that never gives way to the beat: all tension, no release.  The chilling second track, “Me and the Devil, is occasionally punctuated by samples of that sound glitch you hear when you’re listening to an iPod in a car and someone’s iPhone rings.  (Do you know that sound?)  And the lyrics: “You may bury my body down by the highwayside / so my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.”  It’s an unforgiving blues.

There is, however, something about how the album is presented that makes me a bit uncomfortable.  The 20-second interludes of Heron speaking evoke not hip hop sketches but rather documentary segments, as if this album belonged to Russell and Scott-Heron himself were a mere piece of audio art trouvée.  But the success of the project is not the artistic juxtaposition of wise old Gil and these “cutting-edge” sounds; the success is Scott-Heron’s own.  Russell’s unstable musical world, where there isn’t always a brass section to tie things up nicely, serves to highlight Scott-Heron’s continuing refusal to yield any comfort to his audience.  The revolution will, still, not be televised.

I’m New Here will be released tomorrow (Tuesday, 2/9) on XL recordings.  Watch the creepy black and white video for “Me and the Devil” here.

I liked January.  Vampire Weekend charmed the hell out of me, Beach House filled that dreamy-druggy niche, Gucci Mane got the hipster treatment we’ve all been longing for…I downloaded a lot of stuff that I’m going to listen to a lot of times and enjoy a lot.

But the “this” that I want you to “Download” is not an easy listen, or one that’s going to amass too many plays in your iTunes anytime soon.  It’s an opera, it’s an hour and a half long, and it’s based on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.  A significant amount of it is dedicated to discordant sounds, and you’ll have to sit through more than a couple minutes of simulated bird calls.

It’s not perfect, but it’s worth it.

Swedish brother-sister duo The Knife, who in collaboration with Mt Sims and Planningtorock are responsible for Tomorrow, in a Year, are among the greatest and certainly the most inventive artists in recent years.  It’s not accurate to say they don’t sound like anything else, because they do sound a bit like Björk, but the universe they’ve created for themselves is new and whole and takes you in right away.  You may have heard their single “Heartbeats,” but they’ve gotten much weirder since then; besides making political and otherwise zany acceptance speeches at awards shows, they mastered a chilling otherwordly tenor on their 2006 masterpiece Silent Shout and on vocalist Karen Dreijer Andersen’s well-received solo effort from last year, Fever Ray.  Their latest work spreads that mood across a bigger canvas, and its grip stays firm.

Tomorrow’s territory is often a cold and sharp one–melodically brilliant with the sensibilities of a sequencer.  But The Knife sound organic just as easily, something that was always obvious even through their drum machines—they flourish in beat-freed ambient sections, and their songs are beautiful even when they move in alien lockstep.  In fact, where synthesized drums are replaced with real ones, an influence is unearthed that had been hiding below the electronica all these years: centuries-old European music.  No wonder they use so many medieval intervals (for the musically-minded: these guys like perfect fifths); no wonder they chose an ancient art form for their latest project. As for Darwin, the modern aspect of the opera, we’re all going to have to wait for a libretto before it starts making any sense.

If you don’t have time for the whole thing (released last Thursday, easily torrented), download “Coloring of Pigeons” or at least watch the seven-minute trailer for the opera on YouTube.  Check the unexpected grooves at 3:10 and 5:53.

Every week, guest blogger and Herald A&E editor Michael Liuzzi will recommend a track he thinks everyone should have in their iTunes library.

Dystopia version 400.6:

Warpaint, three woman and one lucky guy (that’s right, this army’s gender neutral), makes your ears frown sadder then that time your mom told you about the milkman.
With a voice sung through murky grit, warpaint will break your heart as if you’d loved a shadow your whole life.

Noise is so vogue.  Warpaint makes tantalizing use of the modern day deus-ex-machina, the electric demons of fuzz and static and chaos that our generations music can’t help but be preoccupied with. And rightly so.  It  is, for all of us, the terror of a world we can’t see.

Ain’t it pretty.

http://cdn.stereogum.com/mp3/Warpaint%20-%20Elephants.mp3