This Is Book's Music

If you are looking for a nice mix of Philadelphia hip-hop, Kil889 has created one called Chicken Cheesesteak Mix #1, and has made it available free for download. You’re welcome.

PLAYLIST
Greatest Man Alive – Three Times Dope
My Parta Town – Tuff Crew
Kick the Ball – The Krown Rullers
Brand New Funk – Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince
Saturday Night – Schooly D
Serious (BDP Remix) – Steady B
Down to the Gristle – Cool C
Funky Dividens – Three Times Dope
In Control of Things – YZ
PSK – Schooly D
Glamorous Life – Cool C
Girls Ain’t Nuthin But Trouble – Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince
Ugly People Be Quiet – Cash Money and Marvelous
Juice Crew Dis – Cool C
Rock the House – Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince
Crushin n Bussin’ – Three Times Dope and Cool C

Download here (99.65mb)

It is safe to say he is the opposite of Lou Dobbs, and that’s a good thing. Kottonmouth Kings drummer Lou Dog has been named Assistant Director for the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also known as NORML. Dog, 34, said in a statement “”I am proud of the appointment and I am prepared to continue lending my energy and resources towards the advancement of the cause.” The band has been very active over the years in the hopes of legalizing marijuana in the United States, by getting involved in public meetings to participating in demonstrations in California.

Lou Dog and the rest of the Kings will be heading out on a tour that will feature 311 (if you’re a 311 fan, they are heading out on tour but not all dates will feature the Kottonmouth Kings, click here for more 311 concert date information). Here are the confirmed dates where you’ll be able to see and hear both bands together.

Nov 13 – Loveland, CO @ Budweiser Event Center w/ 311
Nov 14 – Council Bluffs, IA @ Mid America Center w/ 311
Nov 15 – Kansas City, MO @ Uptown Theater w/ 311
Nov 17 – Des Moines, IA @ Val Air Ballroom
Nov 18 – Chicago, IL @ Aragon Ballroom w/ 311
Nov 19 – Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore w/ 311

After the tour, the band will head into the studio to record their next album, tentatively titled Long Live The Kings.

The new album by Amerie marks her debut for Def Jam after a three album stay with Columbia Records (Def Jam’s former home), with one of them never being released in Amerie’s home country. Has the move made an improvement in her music in anyway? Depends on your expectations and demands, and there lies the problem.

Half the time it’s hard to tell if In Love & War is an album she wants to make, or just something that meets the expectations and demands of what producers want from her. Do these songs show respect to Amerie as a singer, is it just a way to catch-in on current trends, or does someone wish to keep her doing constant revisions of “Why Don’t We Fall In Love”? To be honest, it’s a mixture of all three. That doesn’t mean Amerie is a bad singer, but don’t expect a drastic improvement over her last three albums. It’s Amerie as you’ve come to expect, someone who can carry a note decently and does it in such a way that she’s a lure and you’re going to be hooked. All of her songs are hook-savvy, whether it’s “Swag Back”, “The Followers”, or the love lost melancholy feeling of “Dear John”. What really hurts this album a bit is that it sounds like someone else. You can hear a bit of a Beyonce vibe here, maybe a sliver of Ciara‘s sexiness there, an attempt to outdo Rihanna around the way, and maybe in her mind she feels that that’s the way to gain the fans of other artists, try to manipulate them into thinking it’s them and not Amerie. If one wants that classic, back-in-the-day feeling she may have provided before, you can hear it in “Why R U”, featuring her and her background harmonies layered over a familiar breakbeat.

The one song I found to be exceptional is “Higher”, which has a funky rock edge and she takes it on and comes out like a champion without trying to sound like everyone else. I love how raspy her voice can get, one could argue that maybe she’s trying to crossover in a way that Rihanna has, but there’s a grit and groove in Amerie’s voice that Rihanna just doesn’t have. If she did more of this for the entire album, I think her older fans would cry sell-out, but it’s also a style that Nicole Scherzinger abandoned years ago when she collaborated with Days Of The New, and a style that Dawn Robinson did not have much success with as a solo artist.

Maybe the title of the album suggests that you’ll find everything you loved about her music here, but there’s a bit of a tug of war with what people want to hear from her and what must be done to take herself out of the limitations people have created out for her. The album as a whole may not be the breakout she may be looking for, but the seeds are being planted here.

The excitement in the music of Moshiach Oi! is as exciting as when I bought my first punk rock records and found myself understanding the power and ugliness of it all. I hear the urge to fuck shit up in Better Get Ready (Shabasa/Modular Moods/Shemspeed), and what makes this album better than most is the excellent sound quality. It’s understandable when a hardcore punk band goes lo-fi and it sounds like a demo cassette, but here it’s done in a professonal manner and you get to hear all of the nuances, from the strength of Yishai Romanoff‘s screams to the Jewish spiritual themes in their songs. It sounds like a mixture of Black Flag and Diddly Squat, but with a level of Jewish pride that is sure to go crazy in a live setting. It’s very intense, and even if you’re not Jewish or of any particular belief system, you’ll want to put faith in what Moshiach Oi! does.

Maybe the term “fuck shit up” isn’t appropriate for this band or the music, but the equivalent of it can be heard in the way they do things.

If you are a fan of Motown and its history, you’ll wan to pick up Motown: The DVD, which comes out today.

With the label celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, it’s the perfect time for the label to celebrate and what better way than to do it with a new DVD compilation, right? RIGHT?!?!?

Anyway, the DVD consists of 18 classic and often rare television performances from 1965 through 1971 featuring some of the label’s greatest artists performing their biggest hits. Most of these have not been released in the DVD format or anywhere, or if you have seen them on television, the quality on this surpasses it. What they did as a collective on Motown will most likely never happen again, so watch the magic and feel the greatness of these artists and songs. Don’t forget Motor City.

Makalei are a new Hawaiian duo to my ears, but it was a pleasant surprise to receive this CD and see something with a very old school feel. The album cover looks like something from a Sons Of Hawai’i album circa 1971, right down to the lettering. But for a serious old school feel, you must listen to the music.

What I like about Pehea Ka Lawai’a (Makalei Music) is that the songs come from times long gone, from the musicianship to the styles to the vocal harmonies. This isn’t Kam School Glee Club-style singing, but you’ll hear something in each of these songs that will make you say “wow, I remember when Hawaiian music used to sound just like that.” Is this a throwback album, maybe the Hawaiian equivalent of Amy Winehouse‘s approach to soul and ska, in a small way maybe. But as with Winehouse, what Stew Kawakami and Mike Judd are doing is simply revisiting those old Hawaiian music vibes and looking to see what was good and perhaps what we’ve lost in the race towards what we feel is modern. It’s a vibrant music, and the thirteen songs on this are proof.

Makalei are accompanied by a number of musicians, and the album begins with the slightly sly title track, where they speak about going to the ocean to catch some fish, maybe a squid or two. They replicate the squid by playing guitar as if the squid jumped on the instrument and started going crazy. Then you have to wonder: are they really talking about aquatic squid? If you’ve ever gone fishing in Hawai’i early in the morning in total darkness, making sure to get to that special spot before the sun comes up, you can sense the approach to this song and the metaphors it may or may not have.

In “The Graduation Song” they speak to those who must leave Hawai’i for school, the anticipation of new experiences and the anxiety of leaving home:
I feel my heart beating cause I can’t believe I’m leaving
All of the word I know but its time to go so I’m on my way
Time is so deceiving, my plane departs this evening
It all feels like a dream, time is not what it seems
When it’s yesterday

The Charles E. King composition “Lei Aloha Lei Makamae” sounds like a mixture of Country Comfort mixed in with a bit of The Brothers Cazimero, especially the vocal harmonies that are really sharp, sounding like a generational mix that you rarely hear in today’s Hawaiian music since no one is really doing it like this. If you want to get chicken skin and start tearing up, then “Ka Lei Punahou” will be the song to provide it, as they come up with the sweet falsetto, the dual acoustic guitars, and the ipu that makes it feel as if you’re listening to the good ol’ days of Krash Kealoha, Honolulu Skylark and KCCN all day every day. “Lifetime’s Too Short” is an original song by Judd that has that Peter Moon Band/Sandwich Isle Band feel from the late 70′s/early 80′s with that style of guitar playing made famous in America‘s “Ventura Highway”, when Hawaiian artists were exchanging ideas with the California sound. With drums, this song could be reinterpreted into a Jawaiian jam, but I like this rendition as is. The song has Judd singing about looking for love, and how if you feel something, don’t let life pass you by.

The loungy-sounds of “Oceans Away” goes back to the late 50′s/early 60′s when people like The Invitations and Arthur Lyman were adding a jazz touch to the sound of the islands. The highlight of the song is when the vocal harmonies are going on during the line “A jillion stars in a rainbow” and it goes up a notch, catching you by surprise and perhaps making you smile. The exotica continues with their take of Sammy Cahn & James Van Heusen‘s “Come Fly With Me”, and one may be able to revisit the glory days of Waikiki when it was the swinging part of Honolulu.

By ending the album with Jack DeMello‘s “The Wonderful World Of Aloha“, you then realize you’ve just taken an incredible tour of Hawaiian music of the last 50 years, the time it has been a part of the union. It is indeed a retrospective, but in the hands of Makalei it shows how powerful and timeless these songs are. They’re not old, it isn’t dated, although by hearing the strings or a style of percussion you may remember a time in your life when these styles made you proud to be Hawaiian or made you want to visit the islands for the first time. These guys show an incredible amount of respect for Hawai’i and its music, and whether you’re still on the rock or trying hard to make it back on/to the rock, you’ll understand why.

Dave Tucciarone also deserves recognition for not only being a co-producer, but as the engineer who captured these sounds, and also being involved in the mixing and mastering phases, and on top of that being one of the contributing musicians on the album as a guitarist. What I like about Tucciarone’s approach is that it doesn’t sound forced or brickwalled, it’s a warm sounding album. Tucciarone has worked with everyone from Amy Hanaiali’i Gilliom to Sean Na’auao, Sistah Robi Kahakalau to Weldon Kekauoha, and now you can add Makalei not only as a group with the Tucciarone touch, but as an addition to a group of artists who add to the fabric of music, language, and culture of the islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hana hou.

Tunto may call themselves “weird jazz”, but it’s just jazz music wit a chemical imbalance. They are a three piece band who enjoy the anchor of jazz but want to take metaphorical pictures of it from any and all angles to see what develops. Lempi (Aani) is a continuation of the experimentation they did on Kevyt, where they blended their musicianship with electronic-based production in some of the tracks. What this does is create a very dense and laid back backdrop for what they play over it, where they may incorporate the ‘ukulele, flutes, mandolins, or cello and percussion from guests who sit in with the band. “Eyelash Music” sounds like trip-hop as it enters a marketplace where their merchandise is unknown. “Yearning Music” could be an outtake from the “Heart Beat, Pig Meat” recording sessions, and what I like about this track is while you have a repetitive drum beat going through the entire song, the addition of horns and other percussive sounds (both real and electronic) help to give the song a bit more color, and then the scenery changes about a third-way in when you realize it’s going to turn into a minimalistic dance track. It reminds me of what 808 State tried to do with “Pacific”, where you have sounds in the song moving at three different speeds but all moving at the right tempo.

The first time you hear a human voice is the yodeling in “Caressing Music”, although the credits state they are samples. You interpret it as someone (or something) that guides the band along from one point to the next, and when it reaches its destination, one is not prepared for what will happen on the next seven tracks. Tunto are a group where you do not expect anything but quality music, and you put faith in them to deliver in the exploratory fashion that they have become known for. Trust in their sound means you will be rewarded immensely.