Fader

No one in grime bothers with pirate radio sets anymore, which is maybe the reason why the scene has been so boring and lacking life this year. So, just as the music press were penning another round of obituaries and preparing to make way for a new electro-influenced, chart friendly replacement, along come Boy Better Know and friends with a stupendously good studio set (the next best thing to a radio set) to bring back all the naysayers. It's got classic old beats, amazing new beats by people like Rude Kid, excitement, brand new bars, energy, Jammer screaming and making retarded noises—everything that is good about grime. I don't see why MCs continue to put out rushed mixtapes, when they could much more easily bang these sets out with all the best new beats and their best bars and sell them as downloads. They'd be a lot better quality and probably sell a lot more too.

Download: Boy Better Know, Microphone Champion
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Last night Schnipper and his friend went to see No Age and High Places at Bowery Ballroom. it was fun! Gchat interview about the show between Schnipper and J after the jump. more...

Every week resident FADER selector Eddie STATS runs through dancehall riddims and other artifacts from the ghetto archipelago.

You need look no further than the pages of the current issue of FADER to know that Demarco is straight caning it back a yard right now, both as a producer and as the reigning auto-croon singjay. So it seemed destined he was finna get his own column and it seemed doubly destined it was fittin to start out with a run of the “Shoot Out” riddim which he a) produced and then b) killed by voicing the biggest tune of the set on "Duppy Know Who fi Frighten." more...

Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it's Soiled Mattress and the Springs' Springtime!. Download "Tidal Wave" for free here (which is actually from Honk Bonk Bonk! which isn't out on vinyl yet so I don't have that shit because I don't really fuck with CDs too much). Buy Springtime! here and read about it sort of after the jump. Sort of read about it I mean. You definitely are gonna read after the jump. Look it's been a long couple of weeks. more...

Traum have long been one of my favourite German techno labels although I have to confess I’d pretty much forgotten about them recently. Maybe I put too much store in the blogger who told me that Traum had gone off the boil and it was all about Liebe*Detail these days. Or perhaps I was put off by that Dominik Eulberg album cover where he looked like Mike Flowers. Anyway, Traum’s anniversary compilation (ten years, one hundred releases) turned up this week and reminded me exactly why I’d fallen in love with the ecstatic, enveloping sound of Traum in the first place. more...

That's right. Get used to it. We didn't think there was such a thing either, but when a young lady sitting behind us, wearing a perfectly fine outfit, belched a guttural YESSSS! when Leslie Feist played the first notes of "1, 2, 3, 4", it became evident that her music has inspired this new class of American music fan. We didn't see what this girl was doing when she bellowed but we'll pretend it involved two arms raised high, the fingers on each hand twisted into lowercase f's. The Hammerstein Ballroom, a pretty massive NYC space, was gorged with girls on the first of Feist's two nights, and for the first time in a long time, we didn't have to go to a Hannah Montana concert to witness total, unequivocal feminine jamming. When Feist whispered "Honey Honey", there was respectful silence. When she shredded (yeah, shredded) "I Feel It All"—total eruption. We couldn't see from the balcony (dubbed "The Titanic" by Leslie), but there had to have been some epic shoulder rubbing going on down on the floor. People were excited! Trust, there was crazy air-pianoing and almost constant sing-along, but the sea of people was also glassy and cooperative. It was weird. Where else does that happen? Catholic churches?

All we're saying is that—and this is no revelation—Feist pwns Lite Times. She's become more popular than we ever would've bet, and we're not totally sure how. It's kind of the same way Barack Obama has overcome his bad demographics by attracting so many new voters into the mix. Where have all these women been? Why don't they come to more shows? We're sick of dudes. They stink and don't dance. They were at the Feist show not singing along. And you know what, dudeguys, you don't get to crank our "Mushaboom" music box or wear our Feist t-shirt or put shit in our Feist canvas tote or listen to our Feist vinyl. See Feist this summer all over Europe and North America.

I don't mean to underwhelm but the above is the most exciting thing that has happened in grime this week. Yep, Boy Better Know have enlisted the help of 80s children's TV presenter and vicar's son, Timmy Mallett, to promote their all-singing, all-dancing non-phenomenon, the Rolex Sweep. The reason for using former TV favourite Timmy (I would guess) is as a substitute for any actual telly coverage the crew will be getting for the dance. The whole situation is reminiscent of the era when grime DVDs became really popular. The grime scene, frustrated at the lack of TV coverage it thought it deserved, released a load of documentary-style DVDs featuring in-depth interviews with incidental, yet painfully deluded MCs. The DVDs didn't last very long and neither did most of the MCs. more...

Every week resident FADER selector Eddie STATS runs through dancehall riddims and other artifacts from the ghetto archipelago. This week, guest columnist and selector extraordinaire Walshy Killa of the mighty, mighty Black Chiney Soundsystem test drives the Drumlane riddim.

Ever imagine yourself in church, like one of those real Roman cathedral looking ones, and then just jumping up, breaking the shit out of everything in sight? Well, the Drumlane would be like the background music as you do it. more...

Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it's Deerhoof's Reveille. Download "Holy Night Fever" from the album here (right click, save as), buy it here and read about it after the jump. more...

By now we already feel like festival warriors, and no matter how many showers we take we still have festival dirt caking our bodies, but we soldiered on in anticipation of Prince as well as the kajillion other great bands that were playing (and unfortunately scheduled at the same time as each other. Shouts to MIA and Dwight Yoakam, who we missed but were probably great.) Check out our rundown of day two after the jump, and keep an eye out for the final day later on. more...

The last time we saw Portishead live was when we watched the Roseland New York DVD. The time before that was when watched the Roseland New York DVD for the first time. The time before that was never, so it was with great stokedness that we went to LA's Mayan Theater to watch Portishead play in the US for the first time in years. YEARS! Taking the stage to Fairport Convention's "Who Knows Where The Time Goes," they announced that this was a rehearsal performance to try out all their equipment before for their big show in the desert this weekend. Indeed the show had a "last run through before the dress rehearsal" vibe—there was no moody lighting, no projections or backdrops, Beth Gibbons wore flip-flops. Surprisingly, the set pulled heavily from their first two albums, which came out last decade. Yes it was great to hear the subaquatics of "All Mine," the powerful simplicity of "Wandering Star," and a take on "Sour Times" with a J.B.'s-style backbeat that made it sound like a actual dance track, but probably the biggest thrill was watching Geoff Barrow recreate the industrial thwack of "Machine Gun" on the drum pads. Of their new songs, the first single from the upcoming Third is most likely to inspire a genre unto itself and set the mood when another band takes the stage twenty years from now. We didn't have a camera, but a lot of people were holding up theirs and recording video for the entire performance. The video up top has like ten minutes of the show.

Watching Kano progress as an MC reminds me in some ways of a time-lapse video of a decaying apple I once saw at the Tate Modern. (Note: the video I linked to is not the same one, but I do believe it portrays equally as vivid an image, nonetheless.) In case that is too complex a metaphor for some readers, what I'm saying is he's getting worse. And very quickly. At the start of the week his new mixtape, MC No. 1, arrived in the post. It makes for painful listening. There are pointless versions of stuff like "My Name Is" and "Crank Dat"; his slowed-down flow sounds lazy, and he does this weird screechy ad-lib thing that makes him sound like Scooby-Doo.

Last week on an episode of My Super Sweet 16 UK an aspiring WAG (that is the wife or girlfriend of a soccer football player, Americans) called Lauren had a special guest performer at her birthday. Rumours among her party of annoyingly rich but infinitely tasteless young guests were that Kanye West was to be the act performing on this most special of nights. It soon transpired that the surprise performer was in fact Kano, who was greeted with a wave of apathy by the horrified and underwhelmed guests. Listening to the opening bars of Kanye West's "Stronger" on MC No. 1 and then hearing Kano, not Kanye, come in I could genuinely sympathise with how those poor children must have felt. Check out some of the tracks from the mixtape on his MySpace page. more...

Everyone's been swooning over that Last Shadow Puppets album recently, and with good reason. Alex Turner's knavish tales go well with a dollop of orchestral elan, plus he and Miles look dashing in turtlenecks. However, the boys would be the first to admit that their record's a fairly considered Scott Walker/ Jimmy Webb homage, albeit a handsome and effective one. Whereas the amazing debut album from the Lake District's Wild Beasts, which dropped into my lap yesterday, bars no holds whatsoever in its mad, quixotic pursuit of a bawdy English kind of melodrama, making the Last Shadow Puppets seem a bit tame and calculating by comparison. more...

We ended the Fool's Gold tour last Saturday night in San Francisco (just in time for 4/20 duuuuuuuuuude!) and spent a few days decompressing, catching up on natural human sleep, editing videos and pics from the second week of the tour (Chicago/Vancouver/Seattle/SF) which you can ogle after the jump. See you at Coachella! more...

DJ Craze is a record-setting, three-time DMC world champion and is widely accepted as one of the best scratch DJs on Earth. He just dropped a mix for Fabric’s DJ series, Fabriclive, and since MySpace tourdates never lie, is also apparently Kanye's new DJ, which means he will be even more famous in about three seconds. After the jump, read Craze's VA from FADER 53 in which he recalls and recounts the very first Miami Bass tracks he heard growing up in MIA. Also, since it's the internet, we've added some multimedia-ness to the whole thing. more...

Last year I wrote about how the conglomeration of Kings Cross nightclubs (The Cross, Canvas, The Key) had all closed down to make way for something that means you’ll never have a good reason to go to Kings Cross again. At Easter another semi-legendary club, Turnmills in Farringdon also shut. It hadn’t exactly been an essential stop-off since big beat was the in-sound, but at least it was somewhere. One-off warehouse/basement parties are all very well, but London does also need small-to-medium clubs that have things like flushing toilets and proper sound systems and enough money and stability to attract decent DJs rather than some local herbert with a stack of 128kbps MP3s. What I’m asking is: where can you go in London these days to hear some decent European house music and maybe not have to step over the corpses of K victims to do it? more...

As you might have heard, the first half of the Fool's Gold x Dim Mak "Screaming Bloody Murder" tour - starring A-Trak, Sinden, Steve Aoki, Sammy Bananas and guests - kicked off last week with dates in NYC, Toronto, Montreal, and Philly. It was an unbridled ravestravaganza - but don't take our word for it, check the pics and video from the FG crew after the jump. And come party with us on the rest of the tour dates in Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco. more...

Every week resident FADER selector Eddie STATS runs through dancehall riddims and other artifacts from the ghetto archipelago. This week, FADER O.G. And guest columnist Max Glazer of the internationally known Federation soundsystem runs through the “Dem Gal Sittin” riddim plus some other current 45s from female DJs

Since the weather is finally starting to break and Summer is right around the corner, I figured it would be appropriate to spend a little time with some of the lovely ladies of dancehall. While at least a third of all dancehall music is dedicated to the hot gal dem (the other two-thirds being devoted primarily to guns and ganja) there have traditionally been only a handful of female DJs. 2008 looks to be a promising year for female talent with a new crop of ladies representing for their sistren and even going toe to toe with the fellas. On to the music! more...

When I fell into a career in music journalism, I expected to be showered in limited edition deluxe triple vinyl packs of every piece of good music ever made. Unfortunately, as I have soberingly come to find, this could not be further from the truth. All I get are pathetically poor CD single promos by people like Hadouken!, which annoyingly upbeat and excruciatingly persistent botherers are then paid to pester me about until (they hope) I submit and write something about them. The problem is I am far too proud and stubborn to ever give in, which can lead to a lot of mental anguish, but more commonly just quite a few unanswered emails. What's worse, though, is when they get your mobile number. Then there really is no escape from them. They're like paid stalkers.

So it's nice once in a while when some good stuff arrives in the post. This week, that good stuff was in the form of Rinse's newest mix CD, Rinse 04, mixed by Skepta. To keep you interested before "the jump", wrap your ear lobes around this little clip of Skepta's "Tingles", taken from the aforementioned mix.

Skepta, "Tingles" (excerpt)
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