The ‘and ever onwards to prudery’ 2011 mixtape

Artwork by Aishling Costello

Another year’s end, another selection of some of the best music of the 12 months just past. This took a while, apologies. For two weeks three tracks lay queued up sadly on my laptop, waiting to be joined by their peers, but I didn’t cop on properly until yesterday afternoon, putting in a marathon session in front of the screen as tinsel, wrapping paper and a growing mountain of Roses wrappers wilted at my feet. From a personal point of view we lost some musically this year – Gil Scott-Heron, Hubert Sumlin, the Small Hours and Altered Zones to name a few – but did pretty well out of the gains too. Has 2011 been a ‘good year for music’? Is that a relevant question?  What is good music? Hopefully this will help you decide.

and ever onwards to prudery 2011 mix

Download, share and most importantly, listen. Tracklist after the jump.

An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum – Featuring 2011 Rap & R n’B

Prelude – Winter deepens, we pass the solstice and turn quietly. Bears continue in hibernation, hungry-looking foxes can be seen in fields and hedgerows as the scent of roast root vegetables, mulled wine and turkey wafts low across the countryside. People are friendly, catching up with old friends, and merriment and goodwill creeps up from the cracks in our broken society.  No newspapers for a day, the radio hums agreeably with the story of Bethlehem and Wham. Bloggers sit in dark rooms squinting at laptop screens and making lists.

I intended to do some sort of list with all my favorite albums of the year, but it quickly turned into an absolutely unholy mess and I’m a bit too late with it now anyway. Not wanting to throw all this out, I decided that the best way to proceed was to post on some of my favourite rap and R n’B releases of the year, because rap kicked indie’s arse in terms of exciting releases this year and I listen to a lot of it but feature hardly any on the blog. The post comes complete with an incomprehensible amount of links and pictures and videos in an attempt to mask the fact that this is an extremely poorly conceived ‘list’. End-of–year mixtape to follow. LOADS OF LINKS TO DEADLY FREE MUSIC BELOW. 

Danny Brown – XXX (Fool’s Gold Records)

Danny Brown – XXX

Detroit rapper Danny Brown turned 30 this year, so he named his new tape XXX. Thirty is supposed to be some sort of seminal age, right? So Danny raps about income tax (“that income tax swag”), he raps about growing up in industrial Detroit. He raps about drugs – dealer turned dealed (“I use to turn these drugs/Now these drugs turn my life”) and his various substance abuse problems. Oh, and he raps about his sexual preferences in toe-curling detail too. And by ‘raps’, I mean snarls, growls, yelps and croons, and all with skinny jeans and a half-shaved head of hair. Turning up on any number of guest verses and generally getting himself out there, it’s fair to say that Danny Brown was indie rap in 2011.

Danny Brown – Fields

Quelle Chris Ft. Danny Brown & Roc Marciano – Shotgun

 - Download XXX for free here.

Shabazz Palaces – Black Up (Sub Pop)

“Black Up – the film”

On the third verse of Wu Tang Clan’s seminal ‘7th Chamber (Part Two)‘, Inspectah Deck pronounced ”my rap style has the force to leave you lost, like the tribe of Shabazz…” Eighteen years later, the tribes of Shabazz have been well and truly found. Today, if in some sort of bizarre and values-inverted alternative reality, should someone back me into an uncomfortable corner with an unpleasant-looking implement demanding an album of the year, there’s an excellent chance the words ‘Black Up’ would crawl their way from my mouth. It’s a triumphant celebration, with bongos and other strange percussion, hooks, growls, compelling lyrics and absolutely immaculate production. It’s sort of Bedouin, it’s a movement, deserts and oases, goats’ shit cracked in the dead heat and soaring trumpets. It’s a feeling.
Shabazz Palaces – Swerve

Big K.R.I.T. – Return of 4eva (self-released)

When people talk about this guy, the phrase ‘real southern rap’ gets thrown around a lot, which was something of an alien concept to me until I saw Ludacris casually eating chicken in this video. Return of 4eva has some very rewarding moments, not least on the powerful ‘Dreamin”, which samples ‘Dream‘ by the Brothers of Soul and shows that the premise of ‘southern rap’ is a shifting paradigm. 

 - Return of 4eva was originally released as a free download but it seems to have been withdrawn since. You can download a ‘chopped and screwed’ version for free here.

Death Grips – Exmilitary (Third Worlds)

When you listen to an album that opens with Charles Manson spitting some mad shit about “dealing the cards” and “rolling in nickels”, you know you’re onto something pretty special. This is aggressive Sacramento punk-rap accompanied by live percussion and screams and if you don’t like it, just keep listening to Drake’s new one.

 - Download Exmilitary for free here.

Cities Aviv – Digital Lows (Fat Sandwich)

Cities Aviv is 22-year-old Gavin Mays who, on his breakout 7″, ‘Coastin’‘, boasts that “by the time I’m 25, the world is mine”. An indulgent  claim perhaps, but judging by the quality of the tracks on his May album Digital Lows, not one that I would be entirely opposed to. Not only did he produce one of the smoothest tracks of the year with the aforementioned ‘Coastin”, but the guy admits to having experimented with sampling My Bloody Valentine and increasingly crops up in the same sentences as ‘RZA’. Need any more reason to pay attention? Just listen to ‘Fuckeverybodyhere’.
Cities Aviv – Fuckeverybodyhere

 - Download Digital Lows for free here.

Lil B - I’m Gay (I’m Happy) (self-released)

Ok, ok, ok. Let’s be clear here. I’m Gay is hardly ‘album of the year’ stuff. Far from it. For most of the 12 tracks, Lil B sounds like he has no idea what he is rapping about. While this is ‘positive’ Lil B – ie, he isn’t ‘rapping’ about eating Wonton Soup or being Bill Clinton – some of the wisdom proffered here is purely childish. Capitalism and greed has detrimental effects on how we live as a society? Wow, never thought about that particular theory before.
HOWEVER, I’m Gay did produce one enormous tune in ‘Unchain Me’, a Clams Casino-produced, ‘Cry Little Sister’-sampling groove that genuinely is probably one of the best things Lil B has ever done. Sure, yet again, the lines are somewhat contradictory and naive – he raps “Man the rap game is the slave trade/No time for meditation/Turn into robots/The Devil is money/It’s not even human/The people die for a piece of paper/It’s so stupid,” before stating “Man, just live, however you do it” – but you just know the intention is good. Good intentions alone would not suffice for almost any other artist (can you imagine having the same patience with a new ‘electro-indie’ act? The reek of pretentiousness would be too much), but with Lil B it’s different. ‘Unchain Me’ and ‘Game’ took some heavy plays on my iPod from June on, and by September it was clear that the former had gained an exclusive spot on my soundtrack to summer 2011. I did some seriously mad funking out to that track in the kitchen while eating breakfast on those wet July mornings before cycling the 13 windy and raw kilometres to my unpaid work placement. ‘Unchain Me’ will forever remind me of walking past Tuam livestock mart on lengthy rambles around the town during my lunch-break. If that isn’t ‘rare’ and ‘emotional’, what is? Below is the song’s video – shot in classic Lil B style (poorly), and licence from the man himself to grab the whole thing for free.

http://www.mediafire.com/?o4z4ebht1gettlh CUZ I LOVE YOU IF YOU DONT HAVE 10 DOLLERS TO BUY MY NEW PROJECT HERE IT GOES FOR FREE- Lil B :+)—
Lil B From The Pack (@LILBTHEBASEDGOD) July 02, 2011

A$AP Rocky - LIVELOVEA$AP (self-released)

Yeah the whole $3m debut record deal and the ‘Sound of 2012′ tag means that the 23-year-old Harlem rapper has all the ingredients to a classic backlash/meltdown/disappointment situation round about April next year, but that doesn’t change the fact that 2011 was a very good year for those subscribing to the motto of ‘Always Strive And Prosper’.

A$AP Rocky – Bass (prod. Clams Casino)

 - Download LIVELOVEA$AP for free here.

Frank Ocean – nostalgia,ULTRA (self-released)

When Odd Future started to blow up in stratospheric fashion sometime around late February, their oldest member, Frank Ocean, got little of the attention. Around the time that Tyler, the Creator and Hodgy Beats made their break-out debut on TV, the New Orleans ‘singer-songwriter’ (a term he prefers to ‘R n’ B artist’), quietly dropped nostalgia,ULTRA, an album that had originally been intended for a Def Jam release but was shunted online for free download after Frank tired of the label’s lackadaisical approach. Initially it seemed to be overlooked beneath the growing, growling wave of OFWGKTA’s march on the music industry. The ‘Yonkers’ video arrived, SXSW came and went and finally Tyler’s Goblin came out in early May. The peak of the wave. And then, for Tyler, and some other members of the crew, there was an eerie moment of deafening silence before a barely perceptible dip in public opinion. Listening to Goblin at first was great, largely thanks to the enjoyment that fans got from the bombastic resumption of the personal saga that started with Bastard. After a few listens however, it became clear that Goblin was not the album that had been expected. Not long after, I downloaded nostalgia,ULTRA and spent a day moping around the house eating stuff with lots of salt in it and blaring songs with titles such as ‘Lovecrimes’, ‘Songs for Women’, ‘American Wedding’ and ‘Dust’, and instrumentals from the likes of The Eagles, Coldplay and MGMT. Put like that, it sounds as though it could have been a contender for one of the most depressing days of the year, but the reality was different. It was great and this man is going places.

Frank Ocean – Swim Good

 - Download nostalgia,ULTRA for free here.

The Weeknd – House of Balloons (self-released)

It’s possible that this was my most listened to album of 2011 and if you had told me last December that particular accolade would go to a fucking Rn’B album thick with narcissism, sex and cocaine, I would have laughed and called myself a loser. House of Balloons and everything The Weeknd touched in general was an internet sensation this year. Within the space of a few months, Abel Tesfaye had gone from underground Tumblr crooner to collaborating with Drake and apparently providing every single YouTube browser with their favourite heartbreak ballads. Anyway, this is a very cool album. Don’t be fooled by the glib or washed-down connotations of the genre either – House of Balloons is a glorious nod to that nasty feeling of acute self-awareness and disgust that comes over the room at 5am when the sun flickers off stained walls and the first stabs of a crippling headache rise from the sticky sea of empty cans on the floor…

 - Download three 2011 mixtapes from The Weeknd here, including House of Balloons.

Others;

Kendrick Lamar – Section 80 (Top Dawg Entertainment)

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib – Thuggin’ EP (Stones Throw Records)

Curren$y – Weekend at Burnies  (Jet Life Recordings)

Mr Muthafuckin’ eXquire - Lost in Translation (Mishka)

Short but not at all sweet – Budget shuts disability group

Pretty much all of the posts on this blog between now and the first day of the Last Year of All Time (New Year’s Day) are going to be heavily music-based. However, last week’s budget did raise some prickly social injustices, not least the closing down of the People with Disabilities in Ireland group for good. This is a development that has been lost beneath talk of VAT increases and cigarette levies, which is a real pity. The group was run on a voluntary basis and needed less than one million euro a year to keep going, just over ten times the annual take-home pay of a minister for state, or a minuscule fraction of the $1 billion that the government paid out to private Anglo bondholders a month ago. The below is a short piece that originally appeared in last week’s Galway City Tribune, but I thought it was sufficiently note-worthy to warrant re-posting here.

 

Cuts included in this week’s budget mean that one of Galway’s most active disability groups will be forced to shut down for good on December 31st.

People with Disabilites in Ireland (PWDI) has had all of its annual €900,000 in funding withdrawn for the coming year, meaning that the voluntary organisation will be forced to cease all activities at the end of the month. Chairperson of the Galway branch Adrian Reidy says that the group had only been informed of the complete cuts to their funding in a two-page letter from the Minister for Justice and Equality Alan Shatter at a meeting last month. “The news really came as an enormous shock. We have been working with disabled people for 15 years and have been very active in Galway during that time. We invest about €1 million worth of volunteer time in the organisation every year. We have done everything right and have been punished for that,” said Adrian.

He added that while the group accepted that cuts had to be made, disabled people were “a vulnerable and easy target” who had no one to speak on their behalf. He said that there had been added disappointment that no attempt had been made to merge PWDI with another disability group. It is thought that between 400 and 500 people with disabilities in Galway used the local branch’s services in the past year. The Galway branch has a committee of 15 members, including local councillors, and is based in the offices of Galway Bay FM.

“We acted as a voice on behalf of disabled people across Ireland, and now that’s all gone. We had so much more planned, like the opening of a new mobility centre and courses in sign-language, but none of it can go ahead now,” said Adrian. He also revealed that while PWDI will no longer exist in its current format, he will be attempting to launch a new replacement charity for people with disabilities in Galway in the coming weeks, an outlet which he describes as “vital”.

In a statement released in response to the budget cuts, PWDI said that they believed that the disability agenda in Ireland had been set back by 15 years with the news. 25 other PWDI branches around the country will also be forced to close as a result of the budget cuts. PWDI is the only umbrella group for people with disabilities in Ireland, and included members affected with physical, intellectual and sensory disabilities.

- www.pwdi.ie

- PWDI statement on announcement of the closure of the organisation.

And it’s good night to the Small Hours

Last Thursday night/Friday morning saw the broadcast of the last ever edition of the Small Hours on Today FM. Since 2004 (and since 1997 in a different format) Donal Dineen’s graveyard shift show had been the best and most exploratory music show on Irish radio. Years of late nights spent zoning out to the weird jams presented by the softly spoken Kerryman were an introduction to a wider musical world for many Irish people, including myself, over the years. All day you’d have the chart drudge, the ‘rock classics’, news-and-weather-on-the-hour, gimmicky PR-driven giveaways and then, the other side of the witching hour, DJ Shadow kicking off the show’s intro and a sudden swerve into the deepest and most fertile undergrowth of music new and old. Reggae, UK garage and regular garage, blues, hip-hop, funk, folk, every type of electronic music…Donal didn’t discriminate. Four nights a week you’d have music lovers all over the country drifting off to sleep with new sounds washing through their room. Then, on the cusp of sleep, the tranquility would be shattered by an arm flailing wildly through the still night in search of phone or paper with which to take down the name of a track. I often woke up to a jumbled mess of letters indicating some act to check out in the drafts folder of my phone, and sometimes those acts turned out to be the producers of my favourite music. It wasn’t uncommon either to wait anxiously for days after a show for Donal to update the playlist details on his blog. The advantage of listening to a DJ like Dineen is that the osmotic process of soaking up new music is involuntary. While skimming through blogs, it’s not really practical to hit play on every single widget, so eventually you start to just click into the familiar names and genres. At times, the information overload is just too much. When Dineen joined ‘Radio Ireland’ (as Today FM was originally known) to present the Small Hours’ precursor, Here Comes The Night in 1997, the concept of music blogs and downloading was still very much in its infancy. That’s why the show at first was such a revelation for Irish radio, and Dineen managed to keep up the appeal and incentive to listen well after the proliferation of the Irish music blog scene, Twitter and the spreading influence of international music sites. And while Dineen’s DJing peers on other stations (particularly 2fm) offered little beyond conventional guitar rock, the Small Hours consistently brought new genres, particularly electronica, to Irish airwaves.

You couldn’t get a more atmospheric show than the Small Hours, with Dineen’s whispery commentary bubbling over the keys of some contemporary classical composer or German techno artist as rain lashed the windows and cars streamed past outside. Doing Leaving Cert biology homework to the Small Hours was an intense experience. It was nice to think of people all across the country, from the narrow rural roads of Buncrana to those looking out on yellow streets in central Dublin from tiny apartments all tuned in to the same vibes, as the finer details of the photosynthetic process or lymph system winded into memory. And as beats from the likes of Flying Lotus, Pantha du Prince, Burial, Boards of Canada and Four Tet piped from radios in cars, bedrooms and fuel stations across the country, the night grew late and quietened and listeners chilled hard.

Last week’s four shows were a pleasure to listen to – a particular highlight came in the first hour of Wednesday night’s show with Moths’ live set (some tracks cleverly reworked with vocals) –  as Donal brought in musicians such as Patrick Kelleher and Solar Bears to perform and talk about music in the last days of his Today FM residency. While Dineen has a number of side-projects – notably Parish Records – he really belongs on the airwaves. With luck, he will not go unnoticed for long and the chance now exists for some station to prove its seriousness in the business of Irish radio and offer Donal a slot. Time for Lyric FM to make a brave stand perhaps? In the meantime, 504 of Donal’s shows over the past three years have been archived here. Do yourself a favour and tune in to the last ever show to see what a unique broadcaster Donal Dineen is and was. Be warned though – if you start listening, you might regret what you can no longer have. Onwards and upwards Donal.

Four Tet/Burial – Moth (Parish rework)

The mid-November randomiser

Last week The Field came to Galway with his Kompakt labelmates Walls. Both acts are touring off the back of excellent new albums and The Field is probably the finest electronic producer to visit the west of Ireland in a very long time. I had been salivating over this gig for about a month. His latest album, Looping State of Mind, has been lighting up diodes and frying circuits in my brain since it leaked nearly three months ago. I listened to the first album, From Here We Go Sublime, about 382 times in the space of a week, including, mildly embarrassingly, once on the bus when my headphone jack wasn’t inserted properly and the mild-mannered woman on the way to the hospital beside me was unwillingly treated to an earful of Sweden’s finest minimal techno. I had decided that I was going to try to approach Axel Willner after the gig and do something cringeworthy – such as tell him how much I enjoyed his music or the like – before blitzing him with Swedish idioms read phonetically from the palm of my hand. Maybe then, in the cool, yellow air of the Roisin Dubh smoking area, he would reveal to me the looping secrets of his enormous tunes. I fretted about him not playing ‘Everday’ live and the possibility of a power-outage. I was so worried about all this that I started drinking just before 5 pm on Friday evening. I have been telling myself since that I will see The Field some other time.
The Field – It’s Up There

Meanwhile, as the youth get drunk and zone out, the nation continues to lilt eerily up along the ever-narrowing passage of public austerity. The passage is coming close to its most treacherous pass yet – Budget 2012 – and it’s uncertain whether anyone is going to survive. The rotten timber boards of the Republic will scrape slowly against the stony and unforgiving bank, and after some panic, the whole sorry thing will go down in a broiling fury of gnashing and back-stabbing and pensioners found frozen dead and stiff in their bedsits. Monday marked the first anniversary of the IMF bailout and one year on, the country is suspended in a strange two-tiered wedding cake. The top-tier is still fresh and spongy – the politicians proud of being in charge of the country’s ‘model bail-out’ and granting themselves the right to drive in bus lanes. This tier is good and covered in tin-foil. Beneath it lies hard, semi-stale lumps of rank, crumbling raisin-crud. It’s soaked in flat Heineken and there’s saliva and bite-marks everywhere. It’s going nowhere apart from the bin, or to be used as food-fight fodder by the Coke-addled kids whose parents are drunkenly waltzing in the bar and are now free to tear up everything. This part of the cake is everyone else. The children are fascists. Soon the lights in the function room will go off and as the adults’ muffled laughter tinkles through from the next room, these violent brats will descend on the buffet and cake and fuck things up. Much like the freaks in I Am Legend, they’re getting bolder and braver all the time. Yesterday one of them stuck his head above the parapet entirely, although he was a bit too early yet. The Fine Gael mayor of Naas, Darren Scully, seemed content to dismiss an entire race of people live on radio – but of course he wasn’t a racist.

“When you look at the word racist in the dictionary you could probably say it’s wrong of me to make that decision but I’m only going purely on experience and every single case I’ve had that’s been the outcome of it,”

he said, speaking of every black African of all time, ever. He’s stood aside as mayor now, but stays on as a public representative and member of our largest government party. Here comes Kristallnacht.

The Depravations - Old Love Song (Live)

Some good news did emerge over the weekend though. Galway band The Depravations apparently started recording their debut album this week. Posting their EP on the blog last March garnered one of the greatest responses I have ever had to anything on this cyber wasteland, so I presume regular readers (all two) will be pleased to hear this. On Saturday the band did a live set thing for 2fm in Eyre Square. The sky was grey and the Toulouse fans visiting for the city’s biggest rugby match ever were somewhat obnoxious, but the set was as good as ever. This forthcoming album is definitely one to mark down…and buy.

For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to post Nicolas Jaar’s new two-track EP, Don’t Break My Love. Normally a release consisting of just two tracks could hardly be labelled an EP, but this breathy, clicking wonder embarks on such a ridiculous electronic journey that by the end of the second (last) track, it feels as though you’ve passed through a series of futuristic eras. On the subject of Jaar, it’s interesting to look at how his year has panned out alongside that of his British counterpart James Blake. Both had massively anticipated and critically acclaimed albums at the start of the year, but diverged strongly as the year went on and the hype grew. Blake’s style verged sharply into the realms of those still vocals, culminating in his latest (and God awful) EP, Enough Thunder, while Jaar maintained a lofty distance behind his laptop and ends the year with something completely manic like the last minute-and-a-half on ‘Don’t Break My Love’, or the drop on ‘Why Didn’t You Save Me’. The EP is available for free download.

Next month the blog is hopefully going to publish a detailed series on the music of the year. There will be more mixtapes, although my laptop has been dead for a week, rendering my rudimentary mixing software and large swathes of my music library inaccessible. I’m sure my effort to hoover the keyboard and carefully put the machine back into its bag will do the job, but I amn’t going to check for another week yet. In the meantime, make room on your hard-drives for a proper jaunt through some of the shadier lanes and more resplendent avenues of 2011′s musical estate. A sample of what is being touted as the world’s first ‘trance hip-hop instrumental’ album, and some incredibly rare collectible based music. Wisconsin dub and if the Beach Boys had grown up drinking cans in the Phoenix Park and learning Irish in school. Honey-glazed Rn’B and colon-rattling bass. Add some exuberant, vitamin C-packed House and indie heroics and this will absolutely go off. Stay tuned.