Lefse Records artist Julian Lynch enjoys a hearty breakfast.
Classic Wu-Tang, hip hop from Togo, feline murderers and, ugh, even more Michael Jackson fanfare populate the latest look at the world of free and legal online music.
Raekwon – Memory Man Presents: Cuban Revolution
Regular Radio Silence readers will no doubt be aware that the only thing receiving more coverage in this column’s pages than my undying man crush on Wale is the highly anticipated and exhaustively delayed release of Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II. With the (hopefully legitimate) release date of September 8 creeping ever closer, upstart producer Memory Man sure picked a fine time to put together Cuban Revolution.
The mixtape is essentially a collection of Raekwon songs, most of which were culled from his post-Cuban Linx I solo career, that have been beefed up with new production. In doing so, Memory Man has effectively given these songs new life and conclusively shown that it wasn’t Rae who was the problem on most of his forgotten middle years, but his producers. What’s more, Memory Man’s beats don’t try to shoehorn Raekwon’s rhymes into late 2000s hip hop trends where they would sound out of place. Instead he painstakingly recreates the classic, mid-’90s Wu-Tang sound, right down to the paranoid soul and the samples from old kung fu films, making Cuban Revolution sound like a newly unearthed classic from those halcyon days of 1993 to 1996, when the Wu-Tang Clan had the Midas touch. High praise.
Various Artists – Rock the Mic Vol. 1
Rock the Mic Vol. 1 was originally put together in 2005, making it decrepitly old by Internet standards, but it only recently came to my attention and is too good not to mention. The mixtape is a compilation of hip hop from MCs based out of Benin, Togo and Cameroon. After nearly a year of readying beats and training, the album was recorded in one marathon eight-hour session and the finished product captures an understandable rawness that bristles with energy and obvious passion. Musically, Rock the Mic alternates from recognizable soul cuts to sounds most North American listeners won’t be used to hearing underneath their rhymes —which the five MCs on the album deliver in a dizzying mélange of French and English.
Cat Killer – Words to Remember
The rise of lo-fi, scrappy slacker rock in the last year has been unavoidable (on the Internet, at least). No Age, Wavves, Best Coast, Girls, Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls and the list of names —with and without the word “girls” — goes on and on. Words to Remember, a free EP from Cat Killer, slips nicely into this movement, offering four songs of fuzzy, laid-back lo-fi with a sense of detached cool that — like with most of the bands listed above — would get annoying if the melodies underneath weren’t so damned irresistible.
Those who can’t get enough of Cat Killer-like sounds would do well to check out the free Lefse Records Compilation (download here) which features the likes of Julian Lynch, My Summer as a Salvation Soldier and Calico House. Lynch also shows up on Chum Onah (download here), a treble-heavy and tape-hiss-filled album of Michael Jackson covers put together by BUTTERxFACE that would have been discussed in greater detail if this writer wasn’t so tired of hearing about Michael Jackson.
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