Album Reviews

Beat tapes. That’s just a sentence unto itself. Linafornia, from Los Angeles, has created YUNG. YUNG is a beat tape. It is meant to invoke the herky jerky head nods of night spent enveloped by heavy sound. It’s the kind of thing you can’t really explain to a person just out for a night on the town. It’s a kind of religion, a kind of devotion. It's akin to taking an egg beater to the soul and liking it.  To make a beat tape, it takes the kind of intuition that makes musicians, like the real ones that went to college and hear pitch changes on the fly, cringe. There are no charts. There are no notes. No complex theories. What there is, is a beat tape. It is wet with satire like a high-five between Funkmaster Flex and Ronald Reagan, like thanks for the crippling economic...

Wolfmother are kind of super fucking important in my growth into the music fiend I am today. When I was 23 or 24 years old, I was considering quitting my full time job and in its place becoming a full time gigging musician. I was filled with bar chords and pentatonics and all the potential potential in the world, there was just one thing. Being a musician was fucking impossible. My dream since I was a kid was playing sold out rock shows the world over, with screaming fans, big hair, leather vests, panties falling from the skies, whipping out the hot face during solos, windmill chord strikes, smoke, lasers, drum kits the size of a luxury SUV... My dreams weren't my dreams unless they were fucking huge.  After dropping out of college and moving to LA to chase my dream, I went broke and...

I’m about to take a trip up north. If you haven’t figured it out or are new to Syffal and haven't been hazed in a vat of honey and chin stubble by writhing dad bods, I live in Los Angeles. I also rap and teach. But fuck all that because I’m going up to the Bay for a couple of one-off rap shows and a music education conference. One of the fucking perks of that shit is that it’s also Valentine’s weekend.  And I’m in fucking love.  In addition to rhythmically and excitedly rhyming words to complete strangers in the middle of the night, I’m going to see some great friends, go to a music class, and I plan on having a goddamned incredible time with the my sexy-as-fuck girlfriend. Daniel Ahearn’s new EP Safety First, might just be the soundtrack to this steam-filled jaunt to vacation...

James Supercave is about to blow the top off all this shit. And, look, I’m already reading these drawn out accounts of Joaquin Pastor’s perfectionistic genius; the collaborative rigor of James Supercave described as psych-pop lore. It was met with the kind of an eye roll you get when you write about bands and read what other people write about bands. But, after hearing their lead single, “Better Strange,” I emailed everyone I knew associated with the band including the band, and basically begged for an advance of the record. Luckily, I was obliged.   I’m lucky because I was treated to a fucking perfect record. Better Strange alternates between a stroll around the lake on a sunny day, to standing alone on the Sunset steps in the middle of the night. Joaquin Pastor’s falsetto...

When music instantly makes me feel like I'm a cartoon, I listen to it with a different ear entirely. Now I'm not one to just whip out and stick the label of "THIS MAKES ME FEEL LIKE AN ANIMATED CARTOON CHARACTER" on just anything, and it isn't something I take lightly bros.  While the feeling of being the hand drawn protagonist might actually "feel" light, I don't think these thoughts very often, and when I do, I do my best to fight against the shit because it's uncomfortable to exist inside a dream similar to (the movie) Waking Life for very long. Being an animated character means every emotion, every thought, every fucking feel, needs to be specifically and accurately conveyed at first sight.  When you're a fucking cartoon, everything exists for a reason. TW Walsh has somehow created a...

If Astronautalis and Mayer Hawthorne’s molecules vibrated to a frequency as to leave them forever combined into one gravely, soulful, hip hop letter home, you’d have something close to Shut-ins and The Colony. Solid raps, surprisingly good melodies, and solid, passionate production make for a easy listen. Mr. Lucas Dix, teacher and creator of this, and part of the whimsically hard, Jellyfish Brigade, has teamed up again with producer Ed Curtiss to give us this surprisingly heartfelt EP, Lo-fi Love Songs.  “I’m a sorry excuse for an angler / my smooth hands have seen little hard labor / but I’ll whittle down a branch and pull a cane pole out / sit upon the banks and catch a rainbow trout, for you.”  Coming in at only four songs, the listen is extremely doable and the...

Tiger Waves.... These trippy assholes from Austin submitted some music to us in October, but only one killer track called 'In Retrograde'. I e-mailed them back and told them that I'll publish the track, but warned them: "don't play 'just the tip' with me; YOU BEST contact me when you have more songs OR WE'RE DONE!" Ohhhhhh, I warned them so hard (cracks knuckles) but only because I loved 'In Retrograde' so hard. That song made me want to lay on my water bed all day and stare at the clown on my Stephen King's IT poster taped to my ceiling through a kaleidoscope. It was creepy and dreamy and trippy all at the same time.  Then, this morning I woke up to another e-mail from James (co-songwriter in Tiger Waves) and he tellz me that their album is ready. It's called. wait for it, wait for it...

I know nothing about Daughter. I know only what I've recently heard. But I know I know all I needs to know to know that they're all I've needed since the earth decided to turn my habitat all tundra on a motherfucker. The cold has been fucking incessant, and if wasn't for a few dozen random hours above freezing, we've been in the frozen food section of hip hop for forever it seems. (HASHTAG HIP HOP) But I'm not complaining. I don't necessarily need to feel my fucking toes anyway.  One of the things that's been keeping my attention while the world waits to thaw is the new album from Daughter. While my extremities are numb, I don't think I've been this easily and uncomfortably in love with an album in forever. The beauty defiantly outshines the bleak on Not to Disappear. The...

My adoration for different type shit is very clearly documented.  Kid Advay, out of Greensboro, North Carolina, continues to make rap music that doesn’t give a shit about what you purists think. On Teal, his new EP with producer Carolina Fiend, Kid Advay gives us just that.  Advay’s flow is clearly influenced by some of the melodic, sing-songy elements of a Chance, the Rapper or Vic Mensa. Chalk it up to youth. But what the Kid’s raps also posses is painfully splayed open truth and vulnerability that I can’t help but admire. There’s no pretense or machismo. No false bravado. Only conversational raps woven in strands equal parts courage and skill. He even takes a stab and legit singing on, “Disturbia,” and, “Bur-Mill Park”.  At times the vocal effects can muddle the message, as...

Tommy V, on the heels of Travel Size Drawing Board, is back in Silence Speaks Volume One. It’s the first collaboration between boutique label Filthy Broke Recordings, and seminal indie frontrunners, Fake Four, Inc. It's the hoe-iest hoedown since we stopped putting hoes down.  As the title suggests, Silence Speaks is a largely instrumental record. Sans raps, Tommy V has painted a playful, danceable, and at times joyous ode to a life that’s worth living. I’d even call it happy. Real hip hop is a music of resistance. Even the classic party jams of yesteryear are rooted in the sensibility that even though we ain’t got shit, we ain’t gonna let it stop us from getting down. In that framework, happy can be a dirty word. But in a world where fear and anxiety and...