Girls Play ‘Fallon’

Girls made their first ever TV appearance last night with a late night performance on Fallon, rocking out with a live rendition of Father, Son, Holy Ghost opening track “Honey Bunny”. They also stuck around for a web-exclusive encore performance of power-ballad “My Ma”, also a cut from the band’s new album. Check out both below.

“Honey Bunny”:

“My Ma”:

Father, Son, Holy Ghost was just released on September 12th via True Panther and has already garnered praise from a wide range of sources.

Listen: Drake – “Club Paradise”

“Dropping this for our boy Avery…this was his favorite shit during the recording process. 2 more songs coming tonight as well. ovoxo”

Only one month to go until October! After hopping on The Weeknd‘s “The Zone”, we now have another track from Drake. The new cut, titled “Club Paradise”, just dropped on Drake’s October’s Very Own blog and is from the Take Care recording sessions. No word on whether or not it will appear on the album though, which is set for release on Drizzy’s 25th birthday, October 24th.

MP3: Drake – “Club Paradise”

“Club Paradise” is produced by Noah “40” Shebib and the download file provided by Drake himself has the song listed as “01 Club Paradise”, a possible hint that the song may be the opening track on Take Care.

Listen: Foster The People – “Pumped Up Kicks (DJ Reflex Remix) (feat. Kendrick Lamar)”

It’s always fun when an indie jam is sampled and flipped into a beat for someone to rap over, something made popular recently by Chiddy Bang‘s talented producer Xaphoon Jones. This time, Power 106’s DJ Reflex gives Foster The People‘s summer anthem “Pumped Up Kicks” the remix treatment and enlists the help of none other than the extremely skilled Kendrick Lamar. Even though the Compton emcee sounds slightly out-of-place, his two bars are a quick and enjoyable listen over Reflex’s laid-back beat. Expect the blog world to jump all over this track, especially with Kendrick fresh off the release of his album Section.80 earlier this year.

MP3: Foster The People – “Pumped Up Kicks (DJ Reflex Remix) (feat. Kendrick Lamar)”

Video: Das Racist – “Michael Jackson”

“Michael Jackson, one million dollars. You feel me? Holla.”

How’s that for a hook? Those lyrics are from Brooklyn rap trio Das Racist‘s “Michael Jackson”, the first single from their soon-to-be-released debut album Relax. The music video has now been released by MTV, featuring a Michael Jackson impersonator, some old white people, and a tribute to MJ’s 1991 video for “Black or White”. For a song that is so incredibly random, it makes sense that the video is equally as (or perhaps even more!) random. Bizarre as always, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from Das Racist.

Relax is out now on iTunes via Greedhead. You can purchase it here.

The Second Coming of College Rock: Nu-Gaze Edition


Presented for your consideration today: two fine New Bands whose aural tendencies echo the past, specifically that magical decade or so stretching from 1985-1995, when College Rock was actually a Thing. Good times, those what with talented and possibly drugged up students spinning everything under the sun that would never see the light of day on Top 40 radio.

Jangly arch-country from Camper Van Beethoven rubbing musical elbows with imported British takeover applicants The Charlatans UK (the appended UK gives it away). But first and foremost, atmospheric shoegazer epics drifted across the lower ends of the FM dial, carried by sparse megawattage that nearly allowed the signal to escape the surrounding parking lot.

This was before College Rock morphed into Alternative Rock (aided by MTV), which soon transformed (via the arrival of Nirvana and about a million bandwagon-jumping A&R men) into various shades of grunge, which a half-decade later got drunk and passed out in tattoo shop, awaking only to find itself the inadvertent caretaker of Helmet and Dr. Dre. Once it was discovered that talent skips a generation, this malformed child was christened “Nu-Rock” and abandoned in the care of a million frat boys, each of whom assumed growly yelling was a viable form of artistic expression.

BUT! These two tracks have nothing to do with a decade-long run of strangely earnest guitar wrangling in which louder always = better and melodies were something for the girls to enjoy along with their roofie-laced drinks. These two tracks bring back the “alt” in “altrock,” summoning up the swirling, hazy guitar anti-heroics of a short generation of pedal-pushing geniuses who operated under such unlikely names as My Bloody Valentine, Yo La Tengo, Catherine Wheel and Sonic Youth.

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