TV Girl and Monster Rally are two artists that have dominated sample-based electronic and pop music on the blogosphere since around 2011 and with “Average Guy (Blame)” they team up for appropriately sample-based pop bliss. ”Average Guy (Blame)” mixes the lighthearted, doo-wop innocence of TV Girl with the abstract and hypnotic loops of Monster Rally. Fair warning, you can’t only listen once.
-PK
It isn’t easy to live up to a comparison to sampling legend DJ Shadow but so far Mr. Herbert Quain’s How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Waiting EP, which was described as “taking the same path already experienced by the likes of DJ Shadow or Nicolas Jaar” doesn’t disappoint. Instead of capturing the beauty of a city at midnight or using empty space and weird noise to take us far, far away, Mr. Herbert Quain employs aged sounds and samples to take his songs somewhere older and warmly sentimental. Samples of what could be Scientology manuals or novels and poems pop up in a unique blend of the bizarre and familiar. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving the Waiting is a consistently exciting and surprising listen and works well as a cohesive package. Stream my favorite track from the release below and listen to the rest after the jump.
-PK
During my first listen of this track I had many stages of digging Ghost Loft’s ‘Seconds’. First there was the manipulated vocal sample accompanied by some great instrumentation which I was sure would be good enough to support a 3-minute track, then the real vocals came in and Ghost Loft won me over… then I kept listening and realized just how good the entire song is. ’Seconds’ isn’t the most revolutionary thing to hit soundcloud this year, but it’s a refreshingly traditional track with the strength of the vocals carrying the song. ’Seconds’ is the kind of track that’s good enough that even if it was getting press from Pitchfork or Rolling Stone I’d still feel the need to write about it.
-PK
