Fader

So you know we've loved No Age since they were born basically—our first mention of them on this blog coming way back in February of 2007, then a weird one-off profile on the label that first put out their singles Teenage Teardrops, then a Gen F in FADER 44, then a full-fledged feature in FADER 48, a million blog posts, FADER shows, and finally the coup de grâce… a hat. Yep, No Age designed a New Era fitted for us (don't worry we'll be giving some away soon), and we were so stoked on it that we threw a party the day before they unleased the Pitchfork 9.whatever-scoring Nouns upon the world. And here is a somewhat crappy video of the dudes playing a song from that album, "Here Should Be My Home", in full technicolor SCHNIPPERVISION.

Yesterday we posted about Helen Storey's Wonderland, a fashion project involving water-soluble materials with a video consisting of a lot of dyes floating in water. And today White Williams came out with a video of of him wearing fashionable clothes and dyes floating water. Coincidence??? Actually probably, but whatever, have you guys read Gladwell's article in the New Yorker? Good ideas float around everywhere.

How is it that we ride past Grand Army Plaza like 19 times every day and NEVER get to be in a rap video? How is that even possible?! Whatever. Get the mp3 of this song here if you like rappers who are too good to have us in their videos.

The reason we're most excited to hear Kid Cudi's mixtape and/or album is precisely because of the spaced-out hippie rap of "Day N Night" as well as the mixtape cut (WITH HARPSICHORD) that ends this video. What's next, a song about riding a dragon to find a scroll? JUST KIDDING! Sort of, we'd actually be really into that, especially if there was a video where Cudi rode the dragon from Eureka's Castle to the moon and the moon had visible strings attached to it. Whoa, did we just conceive of a Kid Cudi puppet show? Don't steal our ideas. Check FADER 54 for a Gen F on Kid Cudi and check Fool's Gold for more info on the mixtape, which might be released at the end of the month unless they want to hold off and do our puppet movie first.

We came to the Rubies backwards. Simone Rubi designed Feist's The Reminder. Then we heard Studio's remix of "Room Without a Key" (which you can listen to on Rubies' MySpace. Then we caught this video for "I Feel Electric." It's got a Quincy Jones meets the Runaways meets Hot Chip vibe. And then we found out that this vibe has been withheld from us in the US because they only have a label in Japan, Europe and Australia. So we will just live in the warm rainbow of this YouTubery and wait for them to come stateside. Maybe Ashlee Simpson can get them to write a song? Or the Malouf Brothers need a new project? Help, someone.

"Oh no," I can hear you screaming at the 17-inch screen of your MacBook Pros, "not more fucking 'Rolex Sweep' this week." Yep, like Marmite on a sheep skin rug, it's proving very difficult to get rid of Skepta's "Rolex Sweep". Ministry have just signed the song for a July release so it will be around for a lot longer I'm afraid. And maybe, just maybe it might catch on.

The above video was taken at Radio 1's Big Weekend—a two day celebration of mediocrity in music frequented by the kind of people who are members of the official fan clubs of both The Hoosiers and The Wombats. It shows 1Xtra DJ MistaJam—a cross between Fatman Scoop and Rik Waller—and Radio 1 presenter Zane Lowe—a man so annoying that the Virgin Mary would happily pay money to see him slowly boiled in a giant cauldron until his unnecessary constant squealing stops—doing what is being called the ghetto Macarena in front of the crowd of Philistines. Enjoy. more...

Yo, what if you woke up one day and had a boom box for a head? Sheffield producer Toddla T explores this possibility in his new experimental film "Sound Tape Killin," a touching meditation on the trials of a boombox head and the struggles and prejudices he faces on a day to day. NO WAIT! It's actually just the video for Toddla T's awesome white-label banger "Sound Tape Killin," whose non-complacent electro acumen is haunted by dancehall's ghost. We are jamming it hard.




Download: Toddla T, "Sound Tape Killin"

In case you did not believe Esau's claim to be the "Phil Collins of Africa" watch these videos from his Last.fm show at the Old Blue Last in London. Dude's voice is like if God or whoever said Hey you know what? Billy Ocean is kind of sweet, but kind of whatevs. I mean "Get Out of My Dreams"? That shit was unforgiveable. Let's try and get it right this time. And POOF! Esau Mwamwaya. And beyond that, the video above, which is less about Esau singing than him riding Radioclit's insane new "Secousse" instrumental, confirms that Marina, formerly of Bonde do Role, is totally essential. Make the jump for more videos of "Warm Heart of Africa" and "Tengazako" (<-- still the best). more...

While perusing our usual pre-release digital music haunts for a copy of Bun B's II Trill (relax, just cause we absolutely need to hear it this second doesn't mean Best Buy won't have fifteen of our hard-earned American dollars next Tuesday) we noticed that a Greatest Hits collection for fellow Texan Devin The Dude just dropped. And who on this green (wink) earth is more deserving of such a compilation, even if it's just a quickie single disc cash-in from his former label? One of the greatest storytellers of the past 15 years! Star of the best/worst FADER cover combination of all time*! But why is Devin's single "I-Hi" nowhere to be found? DJ Domo's wheezing double-time beat sounds as fresh as it did in 2002, and - come on! - the song is The Dude's gotdamn superhero origin story (Adventures of Cougheeman, Issue #1!). Rap-A-Lot, can we do an mp3 Iran-Contra and swap the Sean Kingston song off Bun's album for a new Devin tracklist? Arms for hostages!

We spent two nights in a row seeing Ladyhawk last weekend (where's the graph Kuo?). They were good at Mercury Lounge and awesome at Union Hall. The hugest bummer about Ladyhawk is when you go to see them and there aren't as many people there as you'd imagined and everyone walks around saying Why aren't there more people here? And then they get on stage and totally shred, and you feel worse because so many people are missing out. But the best thing about Ladyhawk is that, when they are on, they can make brothers and sisters out of strangers. In fact, by the end of the extra-long set of Ladyhawk classics and even a couple new songs, we found ourselves in a weird group bro-down with the rest of the audience and then we bought a t-shirt and some Hawk shot glasses. Check out a video by Joe Angerone of their most recent single, "I Don't Always Know What You're Saying" from their Union Hall performance above.

Are we blogging about Portishead regularly now? Apparently so. We totally weren't planning on it, but then this video popped up and reminded us of when we took an eastern European animation class in college. We had to watch large blocks of earth-toned cartoons for like 4-5 hours at a time that were about the trials of living in a city and how the bus was terrible and everything was Too Crowded. Also, how did we never notice that this is basically a straight up folk song? We're not mad.

In case you hadn't yet figured out what this song was about this sneak preview of the video and remix with Yeezy, Lupe and Push makes it real obvious. (from Kanye)


Download: NERD f. CRS & Pusha T, "Everyone Nose (Remix)"

After we went off on our fantasy-rant about Miami we started thinking about what the polar opposite of that would be, and it turns out that it would be Philadelphia where it is cold and no rapper can succeed ever, no matter how much we want them to. Here's a video from Black Deniro featuring lots of Philly rappers that we either care a lot about or care only a little about—a lot of these guys have almost gotten popular but then...didn't. Luckily this song gets by on the charming beat, and—as usual—Peedi Peedi.

There are very few artists who can put out a new video for a five or six year old song and get us to post it. Ariel Pink is one of them. "Gray Sunset" is a song off The Doldrums, an album which Ariel explained as "really weird in the sense that I don't know of anything—historically speaking—that is predicated on a generation of mistakes that led the course to a final product," in Issue 27 of The FADER, and we gotta say that it still sounds as strange and mistakenly great as the first time we heard it. The video was shot and edited by Travis Peterson in LA last week on a 1983 Sony tube video camera and debuts Ariel's new androgynous look which oddly looks like a genetic splicing of a couple people in this office.

How did we never post any of these videos before? They are all actually fairly old, but for whatever reason amid all our TTA gushing we've only posted a live version of "First Class Riot," where you can't really see anything except maybe some shots of a guy in a cape. Here's the real video, which makes us appreciate that dolphins are really weird if you think about it and also What the hell we saw The Tough Alliance live and it was one of the most epic concert performances we have seen and this video is the closest we've seen to anything capturing that. Check out a bunch of old TTA videos that we've been watching for a million years that we never posted. more...

See, this is what we miss most about Dipset. We don't even have to explain what's going on here. Coogi cardigans and Swag Splashes. Pure entertainment. Courtesy of SmackTube via Smarten Up Nas.

Did you know we put Love is All on our cover? (Issue 37!) We gotta be honest and say that they never really took off like we clearly hoped, but they did gain a cult following (especially among FADER-staffers. "Busy Doing Nothing" is our shit on Saturday mornings when it's raining and cold but we still want to wake up and not feel like we are wrapped in like seven blankets of gauze). Annnyyyyywayyy, We thought the band fell off the face of the earth for a minute, but it turns out they didn't! After a date in DC, they're hitting New York for a show at Cake Shop on June 12th, then hopping on over to Philly for a night before coming back to NY on the 14th for a show at the Market Hotel. Both New York shows will be stifling hot, but we'll be there regardless because we love Love Is All. Check out a video of them performing for Hand Held Shows outside with a really loud keyboard above.

We can pretty safely file this one in the Things We Should Have Paid More Attention To folder (thanks to Daniel Arnold for making sure we didn't overlook this one any longer), because Pepi Ginsberg is making some excellent Joni Mitchell-esque piano folk that also sounds like Dr Dog with a female singer. That's probably not even a coincidence considering they are on the same label and have done songs (including this one) together. Seriously though, this is music for summer morning subway rides to work and walks in the park, both things that we plan on doing constantly. Happy Times dudes!