well i made you look, i made you stare

Ed Thomas – On My Own

I first stumbled across Ed Thomas when a DJ played “Blk & Blu” by Chase & Status one night at a small, sign-less bar. The vocals caught my attention and I added the track to several playlists. Fast forward and Thomas’s work under his own name is equally catchy. The lords of dance that comprise the video for “On My Own” are the icing on the cake. Thomas is offering the Outlaws EP on which the aforementioned track appears for free; visit his site to download it or listen to below.

it’s fall in brooklyn but i don’t see the change

Stone Cold Fox – Seventeen (Acoustic)

What plays as a nod to The Walkmen in electric gets new life when stripped down on Stone Cold Fox‘s “Seventeen.” Stomp and clap with the celeste and tambourine up top, then check out the original below.

the graft didn’t take

Duluth, Minnesota, home to Retribution Gospel Choir, is a cold, gray place. The natural expectation would be for art to reflect flat cold of the region, but RGC somehow channels the static into something beautiful and pulsating with life on 2.

The album carries a bass heartbeat throughout, ticking away the 34-minute sophomore release. Everything on the album sounds familiar, but with a few exceptions it’s hard to pinpoint any one influence, leading to something original. Counterintuitive, but trust me on this one. Fat guitars with gnarly solos, skittering, skipping cymbals that crash into expansive drum rolls, vinyl crackles and radio static populate 2, giving it the feeling of being tuned in from another time and place.

The front end of 2 is a little more in the straightforward, bar band-friendly vein, and offers up the best candidates for singles and new listeners, particularly “Hide It Away“. That’s not to say the rest of the album is lacking; the sounds and concepts build on each other, creating a thicker, denser listen as you go along, releasing in the last song with the band’s cry for a blessing, for RGC “put our hearts in the promised land / we buried ourselves in the arms of our enemies / so the last thing I need is a lover”.

—

2 drops 01/26/10.
Download “Hide It Away” here.