Well holy crap. A few months ago the only thing we were hearing from the Sufjan Stevens camp was that he didn't know what an album or a song was anymore and that his 50 albums for 50 states project was all a big farce from the get go. It certainly didn't seem like the man who, according to pretty much every music critic in the Western world, recorded the best album of 2005 with Illinois was going to be releasing anything soon. Yet today he surprise birthed onto the world a brand new eight song, 60 minute "EP." It's currently only available digitally, but also only costs five dollars. Go.

(Via Pitchfork)

Back in 2008 Washington D.C. rapper Wale The Mixtape About Nothing, which, despite the fact that it's a hip hop album based around Seinfeld references and soundbytes was one of my favourite albums of the year. Many others agreed with me in regards to the quality of the mixtape and it quickly skyrocketed Wale up to the uppermost reaches of blog love. Naturally, Wale tried to channel his online successes into commercial success with his label debut Attention Deficit and, this being the post-millennial musical landscape, failed spectacularly. Not only was Deficit unable take any money out of consumers' wallets, its attempts to woo radio listeners made it nowhere near as good as the stuff he had been giving away to the Internet … Read More

This will be brief as there are far too many things going on today to spend too much time writing blog posts, but it bares mentioning that Bjork and the Dirty Projectors have a digital collaboration out called Mount Wittenberg Orca. You might remember hearing that the two creative forces got together about a year ago for a one off acoustic set about Dirty Projectors' Amber Coffman seeing a family of whales. Mount Wittenberg Orca is a studio recording of that initial collaboration. The EP is available with a donation to the National Geographic Society that will be put towards helping create protected marine areas.

About a week ago I was unable to resist the pull that Television’s routinely dismissed sophomore album Adventure exerted on me from the shelves of Hot Wax. Even though I had recently come home with a 50+ haul at The Inner Sleeve’s all you can carry sale and had sworn to lay low in terms of dropping more money on records, the appeal of Tom Verlaine and company’s guitar theatrics was too strong. Sure, Adventure is widely considered a disappointment in the wake of the band’s debut Marquee Moon, but Marquee Moon is damn perfect, so of course Adventure would appear the lesser in comparison.

Adventure is about to get some much deserved attention though with the release of L’Aventure, a song-by-song covering of the album by Los Angeles … Read More

My last post was about the artist behind my second favourite album from last year, so it's only fitting that today I'm here to do a quick drive-by about Raekwon, who's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, pt. II was the only album I liked more than DM Stith's Heavy Ghost in 2009.

Continuing to issue quality material at a dizzying rate more befitting some 20 year-old kid desperately courting fleeting blog buzz than a 40 year-old veteran from one of rap's most influential groups, Rae has floated another mixtape, Cocainism Volume 2, onto the Internet. It's hard to believe that a guy who broke in 1993 could be enjoying the most prolific run of his career in 2010, but that seems to be the case with The Chef. The insane Wu-Tang money from the '90s might have … Read More