A few months ago I wrote a review of Jackanory and the Ball‘s rather excellent debut E.P, an E.P which despite its quality I couldn’t help but mock its utterly pony name; The EP.
If you didn’t catch this review then you can read it by clicking here, or if you can’t be bothered with that then why not just take a listen to the E.P for free by following this link to the artist’s bandcamp page? It won’t be free for much longer so if you don’t get it now, you’re simply a moron.
The video below is there should you need a further nudge to go and get this record. The clip is taken from their E.P launch in London last month.
So it’s finally over. If today’s gloomy greyness is anything to go by it’s fair to assume that the summer has been and gone. As someone who finds summer massively overrated I’m totally okay with this. I appreciate I am in a minority group here, and with what looks like a wet and cold weekend looming towards us and preventing any kind of outdoor activity I’ve searched this here internet for some audio treats that will not only entertain you’re simple minds but also get some knowledge into your bonce.
Educational Rap is an American organisation that is trying to tread that all too familiar (and usually desperately embarrassing) ground of making education cool for young people. I went in thinking I was going to laugh and cringe my way through their SoundCloud page, but to my immense disappointment I actually enjoyed the music and learned something I had previously been unsure about regarding grammar.
Have a little listen to the embedded examples below and if you like what you hear give their SoundCloud page a visit, there’s plenty on there to keep you going for absolutely hours.
Big Boi’s new track is getting some interesting reviews at the moment. This track is You Ain’t No DJ and its from Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty which is available now and it’s most definitely one of the best hip-hop albums this year.
Hello RouteNote readers. Once more we find ourselves together on a Wednesday. Would you like some new music to entertain your ear drums? Today I’ve got two new artists for you to listen to and enjoy, or ignore and hear of again. It’s entirely up to you.
If you would like your music to be featured in future posts then please get in touch; luke@routenote.com or on twitter @monkeyhotel
Cutthroat Convention are a band I’ve become slightly obsessed with over the past few days. I don’t know if I particularly like them or not, but they’re not that much like anything else I’ve heard before. Normally if something is sold to me as ‘Experimental’ I expect it to be very boring and very much not experimental. Cutthroat Convention are an exception to this. They seem to have a good sense of humor too, if this quote from their website is anything to go by “You’re experimental, we’re boring c*unts”
Please listen to the song below and if you’re in anyway tickled, then please download their album for free here and visit their MySpace page.
My other little suggestion for you is a BIG M.C by the name of Status Reign. He’s already quite well established in his home town Minneapolis (yes, my contacts reach that far, what of it?) and I can’t particularly see any reason that he shouldn’t become a stinking success elsewhere. He reminds me a little bit of Brother Ali, which can only be a good thing. Listen to the track below and visit his MySpace and Bandcamp pages.
Here’s something fun to settle you into both your Monday and indeed your week; a rap battle between two people who seem confused as to what a microphone is.
Astonishingly this was filmed in 2005, which makes one wonder what the hell kind of equipment these jokers were shooting their production with and who on earth was funding this obvious community project.
This is one of the most absurd videos I’ve ever seen, and hope it brings you as much joy as it did for me.
I was once told that reviewing something you hate is a lot easier than reviewing something you love. I think that’s probably true – anger will take you a long way when talking about anything, whereas sycophancy seems harder to correctly articulate. That probably explains why this review has taken me basically forever and a day to write.
Jackanory and the Ball’s creatively titled The. E.P is one of the most compelling and complete records from a new artist that I’ve listened to in quite some time.
The duo consists of producer and general urban magician Michael Rendall aka Jackanory, and Bath born M.C and singer Tom Skelton aka Ball. Both have relatively decorated musical pasts, of which you can find more about on their website.
This E.P is the result of something that began as a passion project. The record is aiming to create a legitimate and credible cross between Hip Hop, Jazz, Pop, Soul and anything else that they happen to have been inspired by.
I’ve been aware of these two for a long time now and first heard some of the tracks featured on this E.P around 3 years ago. This is actually the source of my only complaint with this record – recycling of very old material, but it shouldn’t affect first time listeners in anyway whatsoever.
Opening the E.P is a song I plugged in a blog earlier this week. ‘Audio Precision’ is a perfect introduction to the band, it’s fun, has a great opening and is superbly produced. When I first heard it I thought it was probably what Lily Allen would sound like if she and her entire band had a car crash with DJ Shadow and his record collection.
It’s actually not that typical stylistically of the rest of the record or from what I’ve heard in live shows the rest of their material, but it’s so damn catchy you’ll probably not be able to stop listening to it for about a week.
Next up is another brilliantly produced number ‘Not The One’. This song has one of the smoothest swing rhythms you’re likely to hear from a British act which is complimented throughout the song by some excellent and perfectly timed tight, rhythmic punches. The verses are possibly a little to full in this song and I would have liked to have heard them stripped down to just bass, drums and piano. Half way through the first verse an organ of some description crashes in with a staccato quaver rhythm that totally drowns out and negates the excellent swing I earlier championed. This is however made up for by some seriously slick musicianship in the second verse.
The standout song is by some distance the E.P’s sign off ‘Come Away With Me’, which feels the most authentic as both a Hip-Hop and Soul track. It’s in this song we best hear the versatility of Ball’s voice, intimately rhyming into our ears in the verses before soaring atop the elegant musical arrangement for the chorus.
This is honestly a great record and I strongly urge you all to listen to it now by scrolling down, then download it for free by clicking here. You can find out everything you need to know about the band by visiting their website. A full album will be released soon and they will be gigging throughout the year.
If you would like to be reviewed then please get in touch; luke@routenote.com or on twitter @monkeyhotel
Do you have an iPhone or iPad? Do you have between 10 minutes and an hour to kill? If the answer to both of these questions was yes, then might I suggest that you download the free app Baby Scratch?
This free application is a perfect way to pass the time on a bus or train journey and despite it’s rather toy-like appearance, actually affords the user a degree of creative freedom.
The app comes as standard with a couple of standard backbeats and a “vinyl” full of generic hip-hop samples for you to play with whilst the backbeat runs.
If you have an iPhone you will be able to record your own samples on the “vinyl”, allowing you to manipulate whatever sounds you want. I have so far had the most fun with recording the built in backbeat into the sample section, allowing for very realistic beat juggling.
Here is a video of someone who has mastered the interface far better than I;
And if you’re really stuck for things to do on a rainy day/have no real friends you could hook it up to a mixer like this guy;
Yesterday Dr. Dre confused the world’s music press by announcing that he was working on an instrumental concept album. He told a reporter “I want to call it ‘The Planets’. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like, I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.”
Sorry, Dr. Dre releasing an instrumental concept album on what he thinks the planets sound like? What the hell, is this some kind of joke? Who does he think he is – some kind of street Gustav Holst? What happened to you Dre? You used to be so cool, this has to be the most tenuous concept for an album I’ve ever heard.
Having said that, Dre is a genius and I am a poxy blogger who wishes I could make music like Dre. The album will probably be brilliant and I’ll be exposed as the moron I certainly am.
In case this album does turn out to be the bowl of toss I’m expecting it to, let us all remember that Dre is beyond real criticism and be thankful that one so great chose to walk amongst us. Here he is at his absolute best in 1993, laying down some G-Funk for a certain Mr. Dogg, who I expect one or two of you will be familiar with.
I used to like BeatBoxers. I used to like them a lot.
In my final year of university I would waste at least an hour a day watching videos of BeatBoxers before sharing them with fellow enthusiasts, my housemates, anyone who might care, anyone that didn’t care… I should probably have been doing coursework or something, now I think about it.
I then inexplicably stopped watching BeatBox videos for a reason I couldn’t remember, and left them well alone for over a year. I remembered that reason this morning when a friend of mine sent me a video, a video of a song I had obviously quite deliberately erased from my memory.
By their nature BeatBoxers are all (and without exception), show-off, attention seeking, flamboyant, assholes. They must be; they get up on a stage and go out of their way to “wow” people. It’s a circus act more than it is music.
When I first heard this song all that time ago, it opened my eyes to this side of an art form I once thought noble and envied those capable of it. I even had a crack learning to BeatBox myself.
This isn’t a song, it’s a back beat with a moron showing off over the top of it. Rahzel became famous for winning a BeatBoxing competition with a genuinely brilliant and impressive act. What did he do with this fame? Accept the first record deal some tosser threw his way and ignored any sense of taste he might once have had. The reality is that any BeatBoxer would do this too, they couldn’t resist the attention.
Happily this has less than 20,000 views on youtube. Sadly, I’ll never be able to forget it, ever again.
Hip hop legends Public Enemy have been trying to raise $250,000 through fan funded platform SellaBand, but it seems as though that amount was unrealistic! Now Public Enemy is only after $75,000 for their new album.
“We have learned that the fan funding model is still not fully developed and, as a result, a $250,000 fund raising effort, while possible, will take too long to accomplish,” explains a new post on their SellaBand page. “We now believe that a $75,000 fund raising target will fulfill the needs for a new recording project and is much more appropriate for the strength of the existing SellaBand model and the current economic climate.”
They have removed sales and marketing expenses from the budget, which I find a little strange. Public Enemy are now 74% on their way to reach the $75,000 they require. Services like SellaBand seem to be getting a huge amount of hype in the last year or so, but no one has come up with actual results. Some of these new music revenues models seem to be just all talk!
A few months ago I wrote a review of Jackanory and the Ball‘s rather excellent debut E.P, an E.P which despite its quality I couldn’t help but mock its utterly pony name; The EP. 
Yesterday Dr. Dre confused the world’s music press by announcing that he was working on an instrumental concept album. He told a reporter “I want to call it ‘The Planets’. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like, I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.”
