{"id":4699,"date":"2009-02-11T14:44:20","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T19:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=4699"},"modified":"2009-02-11T14:44:20","modified_gmt":"2009-02-11T19:44:20","slug":"listening-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=4699","title":{"rendered":"Listening To..."},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><b>MGMT - Oracular Spectacular<\/b>. It took me a little while to get into this one, but after putting it in my car's CD player for a few weeks, I've grown to like it. It's shiny modern alternative electro-pop, very much in the same league as the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UtUI5MC9tVM\">with retro-echoes<\/a> of things as anachronistic as the Pixies and early Prince.<br \/>\nFour raquos : &raquo; &raquo; &raquo; &raquo;<\/p>\n<li><b>Q-Tip - The Renaissance<\/b>. Another trial in my eternal quest to find hip-hop that I like which wasn't made in 1992: a new record from the guy who made his name as part of one of those early-90's groups (A Tribe Called Quest). Q-Tip is still as fun as he was back in the day, but the music is much more modern - even being so modern as to pick up on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=E-moJ8otY7c\">the same early 80's revival vibe<\/a> as MGMT mines. I like it much better than most of the other modern hip-hop I've been sampling, though I'm afraid a lot of that's because it's so similar to ATCQ.<br \/>\nThree raquos:  &raquo; &raquo; &raquo;<\/p>\n<li><b>Rokia Traor\u00e9 - Tchamantch\u00e9<\/b>. I don't have a lot of experience with music from Mali. I have a little <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=FwSZM1QT1yU\">Boubacar Traor\u00e9<\/a> (no relation, AFAIK) and some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GNJ_FegXViQ&feature=related\">Ali Farka Tour\u00e9<\/a>, and what I have is all bare-bones and hypnotic guitar with repetitive lyrics. You can tell this comes from the same place where those two, older, musicians came from, but this has a much more polished and contemporary production - the recording is better, the sounds are much more balanced, and the songs don't do that heavy repetition. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3DydY8bHTyg\">It's quite good<\/a>. Except for a deconstructed version of Billie Holiday's \"The Man I Love\", I don't understand any of the words (I think she's singing in French, <i>sometimes<\/i>) but she has a fine voice and the music is great, so it's still a nice listen.<br \/>\nFour raquos : &raquo; &raquo; &raquo; &raquo;<\/p>\n<li><b>Andrew Bird - Noble Beast<\/b>. I'm still waiting for this to grab me. It feels low on hooks and high on mellow. I can't bring myself to rate it.\n<li>Update, also: <b>The Fratellis - Flathead EP<\/b>. Do you like the new punk-esque sounds of the Hives, the Vines, Artic Monkeys, etc? Well, you might like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pKQK8rYZNHY\">The Fratellis<\/a>, too.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MGMT - Oracular Spectacular. It took me a little while to get into this one, but after putting it in my car's CD player for a few weeks, I've grown to like it. It's shiny modern alternative electro-pop, very much in the same league as the New Pornographers and Broken Social Scene, but with retro-echoes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-listening-to","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}