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Sometime last year I found myself in the rare situation of driving a car and with that comes the inevitable listening of top 40 radio. “Tik Tok” came on like I’m sure it has millions of times over the last year and I immediately thought two things, “Holy shit, Uffie has a new song” followed by “Holy shit, Uffie is getting paid.” The chorus made me second guess my initial reaction, but it wasn’t until the DJ came on and told us listeners this was a new track by Ke$ha that I was fully convinced otherwise. “Who the fuck is Ke$ha?” was my next thought. (I obviously said it without the dollar sign in my head, because I didn’t realize her name was that awful at the time).
Before Ke$ha was even dreaming of ruining the morning of commuters all across the United States, Paris-based Uffie was the queen of quirky, mostly party-related rhymes with an electro foundation. She hit the scene in early 2006 when French electronic label Ed Banger Records released two of her most recognized tracks, Pop the Glock and Ready to Uff. After a couple more EPs released, Uffie found her way onto Justice’s debut LP † on the track “Tthhee Ppaarrttyy”, which as far as the vocals go sounds fairly similar to “Tik Tok”.
Well, Uffie is back! With her full-length debut Sex, Dreams & Denim Jeans scheduled for this spring, she hits us this week with the 12-inch release of MCs Can Kiss produced by Mr. Oizo. It contains the original, which you can find on her MySpace, and the Starkey Re-Did, which you can find here. Two mixes by Zombie Disco Squad are also on the EP. The re-did is missing the instantly classic saxophone breakdown she performs at the end of the original, but it still may be my favorite of the tracks. Oh and she’s totally cuter than Ke$ha.
Lighthouses, islands, pirate ships, and what looks to be like some crazy Nintendo video game sequence complete this visually bizarre trailer for the Gorillaz new album Plastic Beach.
Don’t spend all that A&SB Video of the Week money in one place, fellas.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It was a snow day yesterday. the blog was snowed in
Getting pummeled by snow here in the Northeast makes me want to do one thing: buy things. It’s my goal to bring you down with me. Below is this week’s list of new releases in music and movies that get our full approval. If we’ve missed anything you loved, share it with us in the replies.
I used to make jokes about wanting to do heroin. It amused me because I didn’t know any junkies and I liked to see how far I could go before my friends called my bullshit. You’d think watching Requiem for a Dream as a teenager would be an effective deterrent, or maybe after seeing Trainspotting last year in my Edinburgh apartment (where the film is set in the late 1980s). Not until seeing Candy, a 2006 independent film from Australia, did I put the brakes on this jest.
Candy is not as sleek or inventive as its heroin-movie predecessors. What it lacks in luster it makes up for in a pair of gripping performances. Neil Armfield’s directing debut—based on the novel by Luke Davies, who co-wrote the screenplay with Armfield—is a poetic no frills look at how smack can derail young love. Heath Ledger plays Daniel, a selfish dispassionate slime ball who is in love with Candy, played by up-and-comer Abbie Cornish. The chemistry between Cornish and Ledger is electrifying, sparks which eventually burn as they nosedive along the spiral of addiction.
Unfortunately for the filmmakers, the main attraction in Candy is the chance to see Heath Ledger in one of his final roles. This was right before playing one the Bob Dylan iterations in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, and two years before his celebrated interpretation of The Joker. It can be seen as a sort of a villainous warm-up for Heath. It’s painful to watch Daniel take advantage of Candy’s admiration, pulling her into his pathetic life of petty crime and indifference. Cornish often steals the scene, giving a harrowing performance that does much more than compliment Ledger. Geoffrey Rush is excellent as their functioning junky benefactor, an organic chemistry professor who makes his own pure grade heroin.
So, technically, I didn’t watch this, but my roommate did!
This is not a new thought, but it is a thought nonetheless: People, in the stands, used to sing the national anthem. Now they politely watch some celebrity do it. Probably with live autotuning.
Is this a problem?
Anyway, here are some American minstrels. Are they good? Let’s find out:
Charles Bissell – It Ends With A Fall
This is a little gimmicky in its lo-fi-ness, but there’s some meat underneath.
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And a Nigerian. But Nneka was on the TV, just like football! I’m not really a fan of this song, but she rocked out on Letterman:
Helen Earth Band is the latest incarnation of brothers Marc and Adam Allen, who previously played together in the criminally-underrated San Diego band, Counterfit. Counterfit was known for its unique blend of Southern California pop-punk and midwestern emo, drawing comparisons to bands like Mock Orange and Braid.
With Helen Earth Band, the Allen’s have built upon their old sound, drawing on new influences and instruments. Their latest single, “(We All) Talk With Knives,” is a pitch-perfect example of this progression.
The song swirls in a complex web of guitars, vocals and keyboards. The guitar lines feed off of one another in increasing complexity over ever-changing time signatures, all the while retaining a subtlety that prevents them from ever getting in the way. The vocals are similarly complementary, passed between the two primary vocalists and regularly augmented by the inclusion of a third vocal line. What they may be talking about in terms of content, I haven’t the faintest idea, except that its with knives, which can’t be a good thing. In any case, it’s not what they sing, but how they sing it. And damn they sing well.
I’m not going to lie; when I saw a link to a Diggy Simons freestyle on VladTv.com, I clicked on it thinking it’d be good for a laugh. But I must say, the lil man sure can rap and apparently I had missed the boat on the release of his first mixtape, The First Flight, which was released on December 2, 2009.
If you’ve ever seen Run’s House on MTV, then you know who Diggy is. If not, all you need to know is he’s the 14-year-old son of Run DMC member Rev Run. He actually spit a song on the show, but he’s improved much since then.
I had two major doubts about Diggy: 1.) While he undoubtedly has rap and hip hop in his blood, his older brother JoJo is less than impressive on the mic and 2.) Adolescent rappers just aren’t always impressive. They still have that whiny pre-puberty voice. See Lil Twist, who actually appears on the “Make You Mine” track. Diggy’s voice sounds pretty mature and his rhymes are actually pretty slick.
I’m not going to lie; when I saw a link to a Diggy Simons freestyle on 
