mixtape maestro (2.0)

Call us losers, but since “Meet Me Halfway” started getting endless spins through our earbuds, we’ve been scouring the World Wide Web daily hoping to come across some amazing remix that’ll only deepen our undying adoration towards the Black Eyed Peas single.

There haven’t been many to emerge (which is strange, seeing as though “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling” inspired what felt like a million revamps between them both), but we did come across a couple that earned at least a couple repeat listens:

Rokuro’s Tidy Club Mix:

Helmed by Japan’s DJ Rokuro, this one follows a relatively simple remixing formula, accenting the original track with some catchy synths while giving that vocoder-assisted bridge (the track’s best non-Fergie moment) a well-appreciated repeat spin.

DL: “Meet Me Halfway (Rokuro’s Tidy Club Mix)” (alt)

Anna & Ruby’s Intergalactic Booty-Shaker Remix:

This second (and sadly, MP3 link-less) one was created by the same girls who delivered that cutesy acoustic cover of Drake’s “Best I Ever Had”. And like that treat, this one is equally impressive in a lo-fi, “let’s throw something together during a sleepover” kind of way, replacing Fergie’s laborious wails with a surprisingly effective Cassie-like featherweight vocal while it’s beat bypasses state-of-the-art Y3K-aiming production complexity for a simple electro throb.

Uncategorized black eyed peas, cover song, donna anna & ruby, electro-hop, electro-pop, remix, the e.n.d.

As if having every other form of entertainment be usurped by an obsession with everything vampire-related wasn’t enough, Timbaland looks to Twlight, True Blood, and the like as a major influence on “Morning After Dark”, the official first single from his Shock Value 2 album.

Part Anne Rice-inspired sex tale, but mostly a run-through of Timb’s usual bag o’ dizzying polyrhythmic tricks with the he say/ she say treatment that’s defined most of his popular output, “Morning After Dark” sees the mega-producer enjoying a “3P” of his own with pipsqueak-voiced duo Nelly Furtado and newcomer/ Mosley Music protogee SoShy playing bob and weave to the track’s restless drum shuffle and synth sprinklings.

Unfortunately, despite the trio’s best efforts to muster up some nocturnal heat amongst themselves, none of it really lands as anything all that especially exciting or even necessary (sort of like another A-list-affiliated SV2 album leak), but we’ll at least admit to it’s Euro-goth sizzle latching onto a competent club fizz, while the spiraling hook (where Tim tackles an interesting Bootsy Collins-esque yowl) eventually needles it’s way into your brain.

“Morning After Dark”:

As an added bonus, check out this house-y remix of “MAD” from the Serotonin Thieves: “Morning After Dark (Serotonin Thieves Remix)” (alt)

One recently revealed Timbaland-produced number that is worthwhile (without the aid of repeated listenings) is “Skycap”, a Mary J Blige-led number that was originally conceived for, and eventually denied placement on, her 2007 Growing Pains album. A foolish move, we might add, since having this amongst it’s tracklisting could of easily scored that set a second major hit beyond “Just Fine”.

Atop a hypnotic beat of lively percussion/ drums and what sounds like a swarm of evil goblin children chanting “I’m falling” while being flushed down a toilet (oh, how our imagination makes us giggle sometimes), Mary J starts off throwing down like she used to back in her pre-”No More Drama” days, as she looks back on a couple of old relationships gone sour (“The first love I let inside my life/ Had me afraid to fly/ Had my head in the clouds/ And meanwhile he let me crash…”).

But before you get a chance to seriously worry over (or celebrate, depending on your stance) the soul diva regressing back to a previous era of endless tear-stained, no-good-men-littered R&B melodrama, Blige is rescued from her depression by a knight in shining armor, one who isn’t easily scared off by all of her “baggage” and brings with him “a first class love” so great, she feels like she’s soaring through the clouds above. “I don’t even wanna land/ Got myself a helluva man,” she sings, an infectious joy just beaming off her every note.

We’ll never understand why this one was left on the cutting room floor.

DL: “Skycap” (alt)

Uncategorized dance remix, electro-hop, mary j blige, nelly furtado, serotonin thieves, shock value 2, soshy, timbaland

Making it almost a week before it’s due date, Kid Cudi’s major label debut Man On The Moon: The End of Day has officially leaked to the ‘Net, and take it from us…after one quick run-through it unquestionably legitimizes all the anticipatory hype it’s frothed forth since “Day N Nite” first began it’s slow trickle into inescapable pop smash seemingly forever ago.

Of it’s many featured highlights sure to garner much play on iPod playlists and mix CDs well into the future (and by “many” we mean damn near the entire thing!!), Moon’s “first favorite” to us (read: the first one to inspire some replay button action) would have to be the mid-album/ “Act III”-closing stunner “Enter Galactic (Love Connection Part 1)”.

“You’ve never done this before and that’s cool and all/ But I want you to try this with me,” intros Cudder here, an invitation to some babe to zoom away with him on an drugged-out erotic trip. Rocking a near-whispered conversational flow, the Kid titillates with requests “to kiss you on your space below your navel-ette, the place that you keep neat-so moist like a towelette” before urging girl to have “just one more stem” so they can keep their psychedelic sex-perience at it’s “highest” potency.

And what a trip it is thanks to beatmakers The Illphonics, an on-the-rise production duo who bring the journey to vivid life through a gently insistent electro-disco groove that’s giddily tickled with starry-eyed keyboards and so gripping in it’s comprehension of the sleek and futuristic, you could almost believe it to be a sex-jam construction that has somehow time-travelled it’s way back from the Star Trek age (and Jay thought he knew how the future would sound).

Sample the track below, but make sure to cop Man On The Moon when it truly arrives on September 15th (we know we will!!), if only cause the last thing we need is an amazing talent like Kid Cudi threatening to retire early (yet again) because the industry hasn’t figured out how to keep their product locked up tight.

DL: “Enter Galactic (Love Connection Part 1)” (alt)

Uncategorized electro-hop, kid cudi, sex jam, sex-rap, the illphonics

Ever longed to pop-lock to Vampire Weekend?

Yeeeaaah, can’t say we have either. But that surely hasn’t stopped Winnie Cooper contributor Tristan Orchard from adding a little Breakin’ B-boy energy ‘neath the band’s sunny Vampire Weekend album track, “One (Blake’s Got A New Face)”.

Somehow, it kinda works…

DL: “One (Blake’s Got A New Face) (Hunk The Drunk Edit)” (alt)

Uncategorized dance remix, electro-hop, hunk the drunk, vampire weekend

Can you believe that “Boom Boom Pow” is currently celebrating it’s seventh week atop the Hot 100? That when the record books sum up the biggest single successes of 2009, this joint may actually be the one atop the heap? Now think about this frightening notion: we’re starting to get the feeling that it won’t be the last trip to the top of the Pops that the group makes this year, and even more scarier, we might not even mind the next record to possibly get there.

Recent album cut leakage “Imma Be” is basically a sequel to “Boom Boom Pow”, dipping into the same recipe of club-friendly electro-hop production and dumb-to-the-infinite-power dialogue that The E.N.D. lead single brought to the table, but while it took us a minute to come around to “BBP” (with it being played like twelve millions time a day, wasn’t like we really had a chance to escape it), on first listen, “Imma Be” is actually…not…that…bad.

Of course you have to mentally delete the accompanying lyrics (more silly gibberish about being “next level” and “futuristic”) and the “A Milli”-styled stutter hook scheme should have really been retired back when Beyonce adopted it, but when the passable marching band thump of the first halve suddenly transitions into a frenzied Euro-dance thingamajig mid-way through, “Imma Be” immediately morphs from an eye-rolling “why can’t they just disapear” to a brow-raising “I think I might need to hear this again!”.

If this turns out to be the second single, and not the rumored-to-be official “BBP” follow-up (and truly atrocious) “I Gotta Feeling” that’s also making the blog rounds right now, the Peas may actually have a stranglehold over the Summer just as they did in the Spring. This time with nary a complaint from us.

Uncategorized black eyed peas, dance pop, electro-hop, the e.n.d.

The Black Eyed Peas‘ latest single “Boom Boom Pow” hasn’t even been on radio for two whole months yet and it’s already devoured the airwaves, become one of the biggest downloads of the season and is currently spending it’s third week atop the Hot 100. Didn’t take long for the quartet to reclaim their position as one of pop music’s most ubiquitous entities, did it?

But as much as we all enjoy taking another trip back to the party-centric electro terrain of “Planet Rock” (even if it is attached to vapid rhymes about HD screens and being “so 3008″ here), is anybody else out there suffering from futuro-pop fatigue and all of it’s Auto-Tuned “next level” promises right about now? Hell, will we ever reach that “level” so we can move onto something new, or would that “new” basically consist of a return to backwards-focused exercises in old Beatles pop/ Motown soul again for a few years before the pendulum swings back to every one attempting to rock what Y4K-circa music will be? How will that even sound?

While you sit on those thoughts, catch the (somewhat underwhelming) clip for “Boom Boom Pow” below, than snatch up the incredibly…um, next level (?) B Flat remix afterward. The kid is only 18 and he’s a remixing monster. Need proof? Head on over to his MySpace to hear his amazing dancefloor re-works of Raheem DeVaughn’s “Customer” and Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal’s 80’s R&B classic, “Saturday Love”.

“Boom Boom Pow”’s parent album, The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies) , drops June 9th.

DL: “Boom Boom Pow (B Flat Remix)” (alt)

Uncategorized 80's, b-flatinum, black eyed peas, dance remix, electro-hop, party rap

Taking a cue from Daft Punk, Kanye dares to go “harder, better, faster, stronger” on his futuro mind-meld of a new single, but for all it’s over-blown theatrics, “Stronger” proves that with each new album, Kanye seems more annoying than amazing.

It was felt with Late Registration too, a bold(er) second album that found West turning to rock producer Jon Brion for a bigger sound. Registration bulged with production genius and fantastic one-liners but compared to his flawless debut, the cracks of his amateur mic skills were a bit more obvious and the strength of his internal diatribe wasn’t as potent. This left his out-sized ego vulnerable and therefore him as a person much less irritating.

“Stronger” continues that concerning downward spiral, all the while pushing the man’s producer alter ego to new levels. Timbaland is miles better at Y3K digital funk, but Kanye does an okay job playing with samples that aren’t necessarily part of the oldies bin yet. Like “Diamonds of Sierra Leone”, “Stronger” won’t hit you initially as a bona fide hip hop jam, but as it goes on (and that repeated vocal loop has fully marinated into your brain cells), the clashing of ominous strings and Star Trek-sleekness can provoke a subtle head nod or two by the third chorus.

Where “Stronger” ultimately fails at falls on Kanye’s penmanship. The occasional rewind-worthy line pops up (“Heard they’d do anything for a Klondike/ Well I’d do anything for a blonde dyke”), but for the most part “the Christian in Christian Dior” seems like he’s meandering around aimlessly. The expensive-looking Hype Williams-directed clip (an anime-influenced question mark with Cassie striking poses and Kanye doing…something) gives off the same energy. All pizazz with no heart. If West’s previous albums couldn’t snag the Album of The Year Grammy when they deserved it, I doubt Graduation will finally get him that trophy if this is what we have to look forward to from it.

Uncategorized daft punk, electro-hop, graduation, kanye west