Silky - Andre Williams

Andre Williams is one of the badassiest badasses in all of badassdom. If you need proof, just read some of the Black Godfather’s song titles: “Pussy Stank”, “Only Black Man in South Dakota”, “Pasties and a G-String”, “Humpin’, Bumpin’, & Thumpin’”, “Bonin’”, and his very own country-western classic, “Pardon Me (But I’ve Got Someone To Kill)”. It seems necessary to point out that Andre Williams is a product of Detroit, MI, and how could he have come from anywhere else? This man is a legend – originally starting out as an old-school R&B singer with Fortune Records in the 1950’s, he returned to recording in the 1990’s as a fiendish, bitter, and downright dangerous “punk-blues” singer, playing with many of Detroit’s local garage rock heroes, including Mick Collins of Gories/Blacktop/Dirtbombs fame. This album is pure garage-punk with a little bit of blues and R&B thrown it. It’s pretty standard gutbucket roots-punk, with the spectacular advantage of Andre’s freewheeling insanity. Here he sounds like R&B’s dirtiest old man, ranting and raving on grinding cuts like “Agile, Mobile, & Hostile”, “Bring Me Back My Car Unstripped”, and the marvelous story-song “Car With The Star”. Elsewhere, he even tackles country music on “Only Black Man in South Dakota” and the oddly touching “Country Western Song”. If you’re tired of hearing skinny white boys tryin’ to play the blues (and who isn’t tired of that, after four decades of listening to it?), maybe it’s time to hear a nasty ol’ black dude trying his hand at punk rock. Fuckin’ killer.

People would come from miles around to see this black boy gettin' down.

Mr. Hood - KMD

Believe it or not, there was once a time when MF Doom did not rule the seedy, befuddling world of underground hip-hop. Those were the days when Prince Paul reigned supreme, and his production work with De La Soul inspired beatmakers the world over. MF Doom was still kickin' it back then, though not under the same moniker. Back then, Doom went by Zev Love X and spit rhymes in the long-vanished style of early-90's jazzy rappers like A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde. Doom's crew was called KMD (Kausing Much Damage), and consisted of Zev Love X, Rodan, and DJ Subroc, Doom's younger brother. Not exactly foreshadowing Doom's more recent work, Subroc's production style sounds like a virtual replica of Prince Paul's best shit with De La Soul - snappy, eccentric, built entirely on breaks, a seamless, meticulously-arranged collage of diverse samples. In fact, KMD sounds so much like De La Soul that it's nearly impossible to distinguish them from their more famous "plugs". But hell, that's no complaint - Mr. Hood is a lost classic of the jazz-rap era, and belongs right up there with The Low End Theory and The Jungle Brothers' Done By The Forces Of Nature. Tragically, DJ Subroc was killed in a car accident in 1993 and Zev Love X left music until 1997, when he reinvented himself as MF Doom and changed hip-hop. This might not please lovers of MM... Food or Vaudeville Villain, but it's a totally dope example of old-school turntablism and early socially conscious hip-hop.

Take your choice, but the voice you choose should be more than fat, 'cause the noise is thick.

1999 - Cassius

Take yourself back to the tail end of the 1990's, that magical time when a significant portion of the population was convinced that the global infrastructure would collapse come Y2K, and another sizable group was starting to feel the effects of an entire decade's worth of non-stop raving. The naïve futurism of the 90's had reached its fever pitch. Retro style was irritatingly en vogue, but pop culture in general seemed to be pointing towards some vague spacey future. It would only be logical for a decade like the 2000's to follow: a decade in which each successive short-lived cultural trend would hearken back to a dead era. Electronic music's advent in the 90's was one of the most noticeable aspects of a popular culture obsessed with the new, the unknown, the extraterrestrial. Ecstasy-fueled rave and big beat claimed most of the hype, but lurking in the shadows of the dancefloor, waiting for its moment, was "French touch" house music. Nowadays everybody's familiar with French touch: Daft Punk and Justice are the most recognizable names in dance music, while Euro-house megastars like David Guetta and Bob Sinclar have adapted the sound to fit their own populist idiom. But back in 1999, French touch wasn't purely synonymous with everyone's favorite house-wreckin' robots. Two of the pioneers of the sound, Zdar and Boombass, had already been killing crowds with their repetitive, sugary beats for nearly a decade. But when they teamed up to form Cassius, the French touch sound made a conscious transition to the retro-ism of the new millennium. Daft Punk's debut, Homework, referenced acid house and disco with a sly smirk, but the robotic appeal of Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter were always more concerned with invention than adaptation. Cassius, on the other hand, were content to simply rework euphoric underground disco and early electro to charm the late 90's club scene. In this way, they actually suggested dance music's future far more accurately than Daft Punk (Daft Punk themselves would adopt a decidedly retro disco style on all of their following albums). Cassius's 1999 sounds like Studio 54's cocaine glamour transposed to the neon-colored ecstasy chic of the end of the millennium: non-stop four-to-the-floor kick drums, congas, primitive drum machines, and fractured diva-esque vocals abound. It's a real head trip, as none of the tracks here are designed for radio appeal, but rather recall an era that ended around 1978 when dance tracks were designed with only the dancefloor in mind. But dayummm, this record is easily as impressive as Daft Punk, though not quite as immediately appealing. "Foxxy" is a definite highlight, colored with a deliciously wah-wah'ed out guitar lick and the kind of percussion that would make David Mancuso swoon. "Planetz" and "Nulife" are both ace disco-house hits, while an urban electro influence is apparent on the eerie "Crazy Legs", which owes as much to Detroit techno pioneers like Juan Atkins as it does to Giorgio Moroder. Electronic music in the 90's ended with this record.

Cassius in tha house!

Roots - Sepultura

Because I thought the Vágtázó Halottkémek album I posted about a month ago might be getting a bit lonely, I am proud to post another ethno-metal classic. Replace VHK's Hungarian folk motifs and screeching heavy psych approach with clattery Brazilian percussion and pummeling thrash metal, and you've pretty much got Sepultura. Granted, metal fans won't need any introduction to Sepultura or this album, but it's no secret that soul/funk/jazz/psych fans and punk/metal fans don't usually swap tunes. Anyway, Roots ain't your typical metal album. It hits as hard as anything Metallica has ever recorded, and its sparse yet brutal approach to thrash at times even recalls Korn (which I suppose isn't necessarily a bad thing), but Sepultura also brings a well-thought out element of finesse to the extreme violence of their sonic palette. Many of the tunes here are almost dirge-like, abandoning the ferocious speed of Sepultura's earlier stuff for sludgy, heavier-than-heavy bombast. Max Cavalera's inquiry on "Attitude" ("Can you take it, can you take it, can you take it, can you take it??") is pretty valid in the face of such intense stuff, but when you, our cerebral musical taste-tester, hear the berimbau and tribal percussion of "Attitude" and the magnificent "Ratamahatta" (truly one of the best metal tunes of the 90's), you might start to wonder if maybe there isn't a seed of impressive eclecticism behind Sepultura's wall of uncompromising noise. Sure enough, Roots brings exactly what its title promises: an intense, personal, and totally hardcore interpretation of Brazil's native music. I'm not expecting that everyone's going to dig this, but give Roots a good listen and I'm sure you'll find that there are some excellently artistic gears grinding behind Sepultura's collective scowl.

No one cares if you live or die.

Gather Round - DJ Design

Sample-based turntablist hip-hop can essentially be divided into two camps: the arty, futurist camp populated by perfectionist beat maestros like DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, and Flying Lotus, and the minimalist, out-for-a-good-time group made up of chilled-out productions from the likes of J Dilla, MF Doom (in his instrumental jams on the Special Herbs series), and Madlib. DJ Design, a turntable wizard from the same stomping grounds in San Francisco as Peanut Butter Wolf, indisputably belongs to the latter camp. While Shadow, Chemist, et al craft sampledelic symphonies out of tiny tidbits of music, DJ Design relies on simple, friendly soul samples to build up his groove. If Endtroducing..... is the perfect accompaniment for a late-night toke, then Gather Round must be the equally appropriate companion for a spontaneous late-night dance party. There's nothing dark or mysterious about this music; it sounds like a crafty edit of all your favorite R&B tracks of the 60's, 70's, and 80'. Perhaps it's not as creative as, say, RJD2 (who relies heavily on similar sample material), but it's just as groovy and danceable, perhaps even more so. Unfortunately, Gather Round will never be looked upon with the same reverence as Dilla or Doom, but the twitchy funk of "Hey Man" and the warm, scratchy vibes of "Rum & Coke Life" stand up on their own, while the stuttering breaks of "Puma Vs. Adidas" and "Fudge" certainly warrant repeated listening. Plus the old-school album art is totally dope.

I demand you do something about these creatures outside my house!

A Világösztön Kiugrasztása - Vágtázó Halottkémek

Well holy sheeeeit. Now this is something special. From the magical land of Hungary, we have Vágtázó Halottkémek, one of the most bizarre and terrifying metal bands of all time. The band, who also go by the English and German translations of their name ("Galloping Coroners" and "Rasende Leichenbeschauer", respectively) have been channeling the spirit of Attila the Hun since 1975 and perfecting their own brand of ass-kicking, ancient-Magyar-gods-invoking, Rome-sacking extreme punk/metal. The band has a veritable cult of followers back in their homeland of Magyarország, and I use cult in the most freakish sense of the word. It's not hard to see why, however: the Galloping Coroners' ferocious tribal metal could make a fiendish barbarian out of a nun. The band cites the culture of the ancient Magyars as its inspiration, and gee, what a surprise! Half of the songs on 1990's A Világösztön Kiugrasztása ("Jumping Out The World-Instinct") sound more like the Butthole Surfers attempting a demonic invocation than contemporary metal bands like Van Halen (but that's certainly not a bad thing). Opener "Halló, Mindenség!" comes roaring out of the gate like a wild boar with a red mist in its eyes and quickly establishes itself as one of the most awesome punk/metal songs of all time! After that, it's total fucking insanity.

Not for the faint of heart.

Baader Meinhof - Baader Meinhof

Luke Haines is one of those pop pariahs that almost seems destined to fail before the public eye. Pop music and megalomania are uneasy bedfellows, and no one seems quite so determined to marry them as Haines. Best known for his cerebral roles with The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, Haines is a perfectionist with a fractured sense of beauty and harmony. His timeless Britpop recordings with The Auteurs on albums such as New Wave hinted at an uncomfortable cynical melancholy, but this is where Haines lets his witty dissatisfaction bubble to the surface. Loosely based around the story of the German Red Army Faction, an extreme-left quasi-terrorist group from the 1970's, Baader Meinhof is naïve socialist propaganda viewed posthumously with an invigorating dose of funk. Haines abandons the pop classicism of his earlier work for a sparse, Stevie Wonder-meets-Karl Marx platter of fractured dance music. Funky clavinets, Arabesque strings, and fuzzy guitars soundtrack a manifesto of daring, incendiary propaganda as Haines embodies the PLO-backed amateur revolutionaries of the Baader-Meinhof group on buzzy death disco groovers like "There's Gonna Be An Accident", "Mogadishu", and "...It's A Moral Issue". In all honesty, revolution has sounded more fun than this, but Baader Meinhof is a funky and fascinating interpretation of one of the most bizarre manifestations of counterculture of the early 70's, eyed by the most crotchety tunesmith of the 90's.

You're goin' home in a fuckin' ambulance.

Mexican R'n'B - The Stairs

The entire Britpop movement of the 90's was just one big ass-kissing party, with bands like Oasis, Blur, and Pulp just lining right up to bow right down before previous Brit masters such as The Kinks, Roxy Music, The Jam, and The Smiths. Like most other Britpop bands, The Stairs were largely content to simply tread the same ground as their vaunted forefathers had in decades prior - unlike their NME-beloved contemporaries, The Stairs didn't sell any damn records. The trio came tumbling out of Liverpool in a cloud of cannabis smoke, released one album in 1992, Mexican R'n'B, and returned to the earth, never to be heard from again. The band's sole offering doesn't sound remotely Mexican, nor does it sound like R&B (unless, of course, we're talking R&B of The Pretty Things' "Rosalyn" variety). It does, however, sound brassier and ballsier than all of The Stairs' soon-to-be-stars Britpop compadres. Edgar Summertyme groans and growls like The Pretty Things' Phil May (seriously, The Pretty Things' influence is all over this album) over a band trying desperately to play 60's psych through their stoned stupor. This is classic stoner rock: "Mary Joanna" and The Who pastiche of "Weed Bus" are as blatant as ganja jams get. Elsewhere, the band gets scuzzy with "Woman Gone & Say Goodbye" and just plain weird on "Russian R'n'B (The World Shall Not Be Saved)". Clearly this is not groundbreaking stuff, but it's way more fuckin' fun than Oasis.

Gotta get on that ol' weed bus!