Bonde Do Role

Bonde Do Rolê – With Lasers

DJ’s who crisscross the globe, inevitably open their ears and wallets to the local flavors. On a trip to Brazil, American DJ and producer, Diplo, witnessed and soon championed Brazil’s baile funk scene, which harness its energy as much from Miami bass and funk as its own musical heritage. With backing of his own label, Mad Decent, Diplo has brought teenage youngsters Bonde Do Rolê to a world stage. Delivering a sound that owes as much to early electro Hip Hop as well as hair metal, it’s a weird amalgamation that seems unlikely to be entertaining. But remember the fierceness of early Run DMC? This too is built upon playful rhymes (though mainly undecipherable if English is your only language) about sex, partying, and boredom that builds on call and response lyrics either sung or rapped. The beats that pound out are bass heavy and charged for the dance floor. Every summer needs a dance anthem, and this is primed with club-inducing fun.

Feist

Feist – The Remainder

With inclusion in the art-rock collective Broken Social Scene, and residing and touring with foul-mouth electro-vixen Peaches, you’d imagine Leslie Feist’s recording output to favor the outside boundaries of acceptability. Instead, she aims and hits the bull’s-eye center of elegant pop sentiment. With a rich tenor that can switch from charmingly playful to heart achingly emotive, it’s the slow burning jazz underpinned numbers, where feeling, not power, puts her voice on clear display. “The Water” saunters with brushed drums, soft piano and the deep thump of a slow walking bass line, all minimally arranged so the singing can capture all the attention. But before such mellowness can induce a yawn, out burst numbers like “1234” and “My Man My Moon”, alive with pomp and toe tapping bop. Feist fits somewhere on a line connecting the kooky pop embellishments of Bjork to the sultry jazz vocals of Norah Jones. Not a bad place to be at all.

Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith – New Moon
Post-humous releases always get eyed fishily, as if monied interests rather than artistic gold weight the hook of the vault clearing. Besides, Elliot Smith recorded six gorgeously melancholy albums, withholding from his perfect canon anything resembling second rate. But distrust not, what has been bound together on the two disc of New Moon is twenty four tracks from Elliot’s golden era: the acoustically rich period between 1994-97, before he nervously set foot upon an Academy Award show stage, a time which saw the release of his self-titled album and Either/Or. With little more than a guitar, an 8 track recorder miked closely, and his layered double lead vocals, Elliott composes waltzes (“Going Nowhere”), accusatory admonishments (“Georgia, Georgia”), and a tender re-interpretation of Alex Chilton’s “Thirteen”. There's a torture in New Moon, like the remembrance of your inability to assist a now-deceased friend, a dark brood where the night seems ironically too dark and too short. The beauty is in its sadness, and how much it can sound like yours.

Arthur & Yu

Arthur & Yu - In Camera

So much is owed to the Velvet Underground. In this instance, Arthur & Yu, a boy-girl duo, re-produce the hazy dream pop effort of VU’s “Sunday Morning” across ten tracks. With vocals washed in reverb, as if you’re hearing them by way of a glass positioned to the wall, their sonic arrangement lick the softer side of folk-tinged psychedelia. The weaving of their voices - the hearty, anchoring masculine and wispy, dainty feminine - recalls the efforts of Serge Gainsbourg and Bridgette Bardot, or stateside, Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, where the interaction hinted at more than the lipped lyrics. However, the sexiness of Arthur (Grant Olsen) & Yu (Sonya Westcott) is limited to mostly charm though the reckless hearts in “Lion’s Mouth” do become flirtatiously naughty: "My fingers in your buttons/are like/ kissing cousins/making fabrics come undone." Signed to Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman new Hardly Art label, Arthur & Yu have released a gem of a debut.