Vadim and you don't stop

When James Brown sadly passed away, his title as the hardest working man in music was inherited by a one DJ Vadim - at least in hip-hop circles. This Anglo-Russian beatsmith simply must be an insomniac such is the volume of his output and the incessant touring he embarks on. This was underlined late last year when he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer of the eye. Yet following an operation, here he is barely six months later with a new single - and a fricking excellent one at that - and yep he's still out there touring. Check out the fantastic video above. The release date is unclear for this but I'll add a link to buy it when it's available.

The National - New Songs

The new National album isn't due until 2010 but if you're a fan, and i know i am, here's a couple of new songs that they played at the Carnegie Hall in NYC back in February. They're live recordings but the quality is alright. This band mix a beautiful melancholy with with some sort of uplifting energy so effortlessly it's staggering. It always makes me want to chain smoke cigarettes on an overnight train somewhere (see picture from Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 for better description). Bryan Devendorf is also the best drummer recording today: discuss.

The National - Karamazov

The National - Wake Up Your Saints

Buy The National albums here

Dylan - Beyond Here Lies Nothing

It's a good time to be a Dylan fan. Well, maybe if you're a casual best-of-buying fan then you wouldn't agree, you're probably out there saying how Dylan's voice is awful and how you preferred him when he was a folk singer or when he was a wandering mistrel or some other such pre-prescribed notion of what you think he is. Personally, i gave up ideas of what i wanted him to be some time ago, and just enjoy watching the many different masks and personas come on and off, evolving all the time. Especially since his creative output remains at such an incredibly high level. So for me it's a good time; i got tickets to see him at the Roundhouse in London last week and today i get a brand new track from the upcoming album Together Through Life called 'Beyond Here Lies Nothing'. It's got a slight creole lilt to it, slightly garagey production (read about Dylan and the loudness war) and a wry, mystical vocal and suggests that the current golden period is not dark yet.

Read Dylan's interview about the new album here.

Download 'Beyond Here Lies Nothing' here.

Pre-order the album here.

Take time for Tom Brosseau

The idea of the slow burner - an album or song that does not immediately knock you off your feet but takes weeks, months or years to infiltrate your nervous system - is a dying concept in an age where we're becoming increasingly accustomed to having every song ever recorded at our fingertips. It is hard to invest time in the awkward when you have Spotify's entire catalogue to get through and only an infinite amount of time before you die.

But we must fight the impatience that technology instills in us and return to those albums that we dismissed too quickly because sometimes (only sometimes, but isn't that enough?) the reward is extra special. For me, the perfect example is Tom Brosseau's Cavalier which took quite a few listens to finally reveal its full beauty to me, but now - a year and a half later - I still listen to it about once a week.

Ahead of the release of his new album, Posthumous Success in May, Mr Brosseau will be in the UK in April supporting PJ Harvey and John Parish (who produced Cavalier) on tour. He will also play a handful of smaller venues including London, Brighton and Glasgow (see here for details) and I strongly urge you to go along as he is a fantastic singer and storyteller.

Download: Favorite Color Blue - Tom Brosseau (from Posthumous Success, forthcoming on FatCat)

Damn, Doooom

Jeez, there are some literal-minded motherfuckers in the world. Barely a week goes by that we don't we receive a message via one of the myriad forms of 21st century communication informing us that this blog doesn't contain enough beats or enough poetry or both. Well, we would argue that Beat Poetry in 2009 means a lot more than a well-thumbed Ginsberg paperback or some tedious chin-stroking backpack rap. This is a place where we bow down to drums and metaphors in all their forms, sometimes on their own, sometimes in combination. A perfect example of when they collide is BP hero Q-Tip, who was oustanding at the Roundhouse here in London on Saturday night.
All of this brings me to MF Doom - a rapper who has carried on the spirit and innovation of A Tribe Called Quest. His King Geedorah album is probably one of my top five rap LPs of all-time and his new effort on London's Lex Records - Born Like This, which is released on March 24th - promises to be one of the muscial highlights of the year. Kanye West posted this track Ballskin on his blog, and it sounds hottttt.

Download: Ballskin - DOOM

Heroes: Q-Tip

'Q-Tip is my title, i don't think that is vital, for me to be your idol, but dig this recital...'

'Back in the days when i was a teenager, before i had status and before i had a pager...'

'I'm the cherry on the top of your ice-cream, i'm the piece of thought inside your dream...'

So, welcome to the first installment of our Heroes feature. First up is Q-Tip, aka The Abstract, aka Jonathan Davis, aka Kamaal Ibn John Fareed. He's a fitting person to start with as he was hugely influential in shaping how i think about music and in setting me off on the journey of exploring influences that never ends. As a teenager i spent hours staring out the side of minbuses after football games listening to Tribe albums on my walkman, pouring over the lyrics and wondering about places like Lyden Boulevard, Queens and El Segundo and how different they were from the pebbledash suburbia that i knew. He is a great rapper but more importantly for me, he a great lyricist. I loved Ali Shaheed's beats and jazz samples and Phife's energy but Q-Tip showed me that music could be about ideas and philosophy, about poetry and wordplay. As a huge Dylan fan, i can't help but think that it was the Tribe's influence that set me on that path. I love the 'Daisy Age' hip-hop-meets-hippy mentality and sheer positivity he's always had, a track like 'Go Ahead In The Rain' is a good example, a song about staying positive and ambitious despite the depressing aspects of life, a pretty useful influence if you live in grey, rainy England.



Tomorrow night i get to see Q-Tip live for the first time and i'm pretty excited. His new album, The Renaissance, is the best thing he's done since Beats, Rhymes & Life (although The Love Movement is massively underrated).

Q-Tip - Johnny Is Dead from The Renaissance
A Tribe Called Quest - Excursions from The Low End Theory
A Tribe Called Quest - Luck of Lucien from People's Instinctive Travels and Paths of Rhythm

Prodigy sample-spotting

Everyone's favourite firestarters return with their new album this week and although in places the Justice/Pendulum rip-offs threaten to turn it into a cringe-fest, it is A LOT better than their last two records. I will not hear a bad word said about the Prodigy after witnessing the best gig of my life at the Brixton Academy two years ago. They redefined the expression "ripping the roof off" and there are at least three tracks on Invaders Must Die (buy it here) that would fit perfectly into their epic live-show. Go and download Warrior's Dance NOW.

Liam Howlett also samples one of my favourite ever songs on the album, Manfred Mann's One Way Glass. He doesn't do it justice really on Stand Up, although I always wondered what it would sound like with a thudding beat under it, so here is the original for your listening pleasure.

Download: One Way Glass - Manfred Mann Chapter Three

And while we're on the Prodigy samples tip, you should check out this awesome mix by London DJ Huskii made up entirely of beats and pieces used by Mr Howlett, including the Breeders, Nirvana, Ultramagnetic MCs and Lee Scratch Perry. A spotter's delight.

Photo of Keith Flint taken by Jae Donnelly, the Sevenoaks Chronicle's finest.

Dark Was The Night

Charity compilation albums are always going to be patchy affairs, the limits of diary space mean that they're often rushed and lacking cohesion, but when i heard about Red Hot's Dark Was The Night i had high hopes. Not only is it the brainchild of Aaron and Bryce Dessner - The National being one of my favourite current bands - but it also features a real era-defining collection of artists: Arcade Fire, Beirut, Dave Sitek, etc, the list is like a Pitchfork afficionado's wet dream. Now, having had it on permanent repeat for the past week or so, i can say i'm not disappointed but neither am i blown away, the quality is very high and everyone should go out and buy it, if for nothing else than the trippy way that Antony covers Dylan. But it's still patchy. The highlights for me are the efforts by The National, Yo La Tengo, Arcade Fire (give it a few listens...) and The Dirty Projectors & David Byrne. It's not quite the stake-in-the-earth for independent music that i was hoping for but then again, why was i hoping for that in the first place?

Yo La Tengo - Gentle Hours

Arcade Fire - Lenin

Buy Dark Was The Night here.

Find out more abou the Red Hot Organisation here.

Bon again

At the risk of this blog turning into one long love letter to Justin Vernon (AKA Bon Iver), the winner of BP's album of the year 2008 this week releases a new EP. It's a fantastic collection of four new songs which carries on exactly where his debut LP For Emma, Forever Ago left off. The title track, Blood Bank, is a beautiful soaring song which Vernon told emusic was inspired by cult nineties TV show Northern Exposure. The show was based in a fictional Alaskan town and dealt with isolation and the struggle to find your place in the world. So, Bon Iver's a fan, eh? Could have seen that one coming, I guess.

Download: Blood Bank - Bon Iver

Buy the EP at Rough Trade.
The above photo is from Muzzle of Bees.

Happy Obama day

Today is a great day. I am very happy, like pretty much every right-minded member of the Western world, that Barack Obama is to be inaugurated as president of the United States. Woo. Progress etc. Anyway, another man for whom this represents a monumental day is Mr Saul Williams and to celebrate, he has released this track, Government. It comes on like TV on the Radio jamming with Fela Kuti's band. In other words, great.
Download: The Government - Saul Williams

The top 10 albums of 2008

Oooh a list. On a blog? At the end of the year? With Bon Iver at No1? It's all unheard of, I know, but that's the reality, so deal with it. These are our 10 favourite albums of 2008. The list features Cambodian pop, 8-bit screamo, Balkan folk and electro hair metal but the album of the year is without a doubt, hands-down, number-one-with-a-bullet Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. It has topped quite a few best-of lists this year (including Rough Trade and Observer Music Monthly), but we've been going on about it all year - we named it best album of the year so far back in July. You can listen to tracks from most of these albums in the player on the right.

1. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
2. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
3. Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel
4. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
5. Beck - Modern Guilt
6. The Shortwave Set - Replica Sun Machine
7. Headless Heroes - The Silence of Love
8. Devotchka - A Mad and Faithful Telling
9. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
10. Dengue Fever - Venus On Earth

Winter Listening

It's cold and dark. You've made your end-of-year lists and you find yourself in a musical vacuum, not one place or another. Alcohol and lack of sleep are making you fuzzy around the edges and you're not quite sure what you feel about anything. So, you need some new stuff to keep you going, to give you directions. Here's a couple of things i've been listening to over the past week that are going down well. The first is taken from Mumford & Sons' recent EP and shows why they're getting the hype they are. The second is Cat Power covering Creedence. Not a lot more you need to say about that. Listen and enjoy.

Mumford & Sons - Little Lion Man Download Buy

Cat Power - Fortunate Son Download

Forward Thinking

Before we get into end of the year lists, i want to cast half an eye into the future and think a little bit about what's coming in 2009 and a couple of acts i'm pretty excited about hearing more from.
Up first is Empire of the Sun, one half Sleepy Jackson and one half PNAU this is sheer genius in an electro-Fleetwood Mac way. Combine that with great costumes (see below) and the promise of "theatrical extravaganza" live shows and it's pretty exciting. Bound to invite lots of MGMT comparisons but in our book that's a good thing.

Empire of the Sun - We Are The People

The next is Alessi's Ark, the newest addition to the London nu-folk scene. She plays psychadelic, rustic songs with an innocent, child-like wonder and with rich, expansive production from Bright Eyes producer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis. Think, Alela Diane, Joanna Newsom and Conor Oberst but with a very English slant.

Alessi's Ark - Magic Weather

Alessi's Ark Myspace

The last is South East London band The Invisible. They play intricate songs that feel both raw and complex, somewhere between TV On The Radio, Battles and Plantlife. This is a band that has sprung out of the experimental jazz scene but brought to their skills a punk-funk sound that creates delights like 'London Girl' below. Watch this sub-genre-bending space.

The Invisible - London Girl

Oui oui

Ah Paris. Don't get me started on Paris. Simply, the best place on the planet. But this isn't a travel blog so I'll stop before I launch into a nostalgia marathon about the best time of my life blah blah blah. What stirred my emotions about this amazing city was hearing this remix of Friendly Fires' song Paris by Belgian duo Aeroplane. Now, the original is good enough to send me into a full-on Gallic daydream but this version, which replaces the punk-funk jaggedness with cascading synths and a beautiful female vocal (from Au Revoir Simone), makes me feel like I'm knocking back Leffes with Emmanuelle Béart on the Eurostar - tearing through the French countryside. At night. In the snow. With the lights of the city slowly emerging on the horizon. And then the Sacré Coeur comes into view and... Christ, I think that's enough don't you?

Download: Paris (Aeroplane remix) - Friendly Fires

Buy Friendly Fires by Friendly Fires here.
Ally

Headless Heroes

You might think that it being monday morning, combined with it being windy, grey and rainy and there being just too much hangover still left in my head would get a person down but actually it's set me up to be in the right mood to discover Headless Heroes. Jesus and the Mary Chain's 'Just Like Honey' (aka 'the one from the end of Lost In Translation') covered by Alela Diane with beautiful plaintive, dreamy production, all echoey and the-world-is-not-a-bad-place inducing. I'm picking up the album from Rough Trade on the way home; it's a covers album featuring reworkings of tracks by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Daniel Johnson and Vashti Bunyan among others.

Headless Heroes - Just Like Honey

Buy album from Rough Trade here

Rest In Peace Mr Smith

Elliott Smith is five years gone today. Rest in peace Mr Smith. This is my favourite song of his.
And this is an awesome tribute...

Wrongtom in the disco

We are getting very excited over here at BP about our next party at Gramaphone on Friday 3 October. It promises to be our best yet and the main reason for that is the headline performance by the one and only Wrongtom. Hard-Fi's tour DJ and the remixer of Roots Manuva's new album, Wrongtom is a fantastic DJ who we are proud to invite down to Beat Poetry. To give you a taste of the man's talents here's a disco/new wave mix he did earlier this year. It features the Clash, John Lydon's Public Image Ltd and Phil Daniels (!?) and shows that he is a DJ with not only top-notch mixing skills but also a phenomenal knowledge of music.

Download: Dumb Down The Disco - Wrongtom

Glaxo Babies/Dj Wrongtom - Wrongtom Meets The Disco Dinosaurs
The Clash - Radio Edit (Wrongtom’s Disco Dub)
Rip Rig And Panic - Take A Don Key To Mystery
Coco Beware - Tropical Depression
Fad Gadget - Make Room
Public Image Limited - Death Disco (Live In Tokyo)
Orange Juice - Lord John White And The Bottleneck Train
Pig Bag - Getting Up
Boots For Dancing - Hypnotize
Return Of The Panthers - Crown Of Thorns (Wrongtom’s Disco Dub)
Au Pairs - Shakedown
Blank Students - I Want To Be Happy
Phil Daniels + The Cross - Kill Another Night
The Beat - Too Nice To Talk To
Penetration - Movement (Wrongtom’s Disco Dub)

Photo courtesy of Mark Carnaby

Radiohead - good (BP approved)

You know that band Radiohead? They're good them. Are you bowled over by my astounding insight yet? OK OK, a blog post singing Radiohead's praises is never going to be a beautiful and unique snowflake in the unending icestorm that is online music criticism, but I just wanted to draw your attention to three reasons why Radiohead are so great - and two of them are preformances by other bands.
In the days before the internet, Radiohead fanatics (and those of any other 80s/90s band) would have to trudge down to Camden market to pay 17 quid for hooky bootleg CDs of them doing stuff like Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better. Now, there is such a wealth of stuff available online that it's hard to keep up. NB: This is also due to the fact that the band has embraced the internet wholeheartedly - apparently they gave their album away for free or something, but I don't know I must have missed that. Supposedly it was a big deal.
Anyway, if like me you crave any Radiohead-related sound snippets then your prayers have been answered. Here is an MP3 of Californian band Cold War Kids covering OK Computer track Electioneering and a clip of Beat Poetry favourites Gnarls Barkley doing Reckoner from In Rainbows. Radiohead covers have a tendency to be totally crap, derivative and vastly inferior to the original, but these two are fantastic. At the bottom I've also included Radiohead's version of The Rip, the stand-out track from Portishead's latest album. Enjoy.

Download Cold War Kids - Electioneering



Ally

Get sexual

Download: Hot 8 Brass Band - Sexual Healing (Me & You re-edit)

Holla! Check this out. The Hot 8 Brass Band from New Orleans cover Marvin Gaye's signature tune and have so much fun with it. This re-edit from Brighton's Me&You extends it out into a nine-minute horn epic complete with a long breakdown perfect for boozy singalongs. This has got last-tune-of-the-night stamped all over it.
The original features on the Hot 8's album for Tru Thoughts. Buy it here.
Ally

Blowin' Up

Things are pretty exciting at Beat Poetry at the moment as our next club night is beginning to take shape and looks like being quite a special night. We've got DJ Wrongtom doing a headline slot for us; made famous by his work with Hard-Fi, he's fresh from remixing Roots Manuva's new album and his DJ sets have impressed everyone from XFM's Eddy Temple-Morris to rap royalty Pharrell Williams.

This post is dedicated to two tracks i've been playing out for years and still can't get enough of. The first is US69's 'Yesterday's Folks' - big drums, big dirty vocals and a slightly psychadelic edge. This is a crate digger favourite and original pressings of the lp are worth a lot. The second is an understated Northern Soul gem that makes up for is slightly plodding instrumentation with a killer vocal from The Exciters' lead singer Brenda Reid. "Dynamiiiiite, and nitroglycerine..."

US69 - Yesterday's Folks Download Here
The Exciters - Blowin' Up My Mind Download Here