You Will Be Hazed, You Will Be Amazed

The Mae-Shi “Power To The People” – Spazzy art punk is such a tricky and underrated thing. It often seems that for every gem of the genre, there are literally thousands of other attempts which either don’t quite work or miss the mark entirely. This normally comes down to a lack of discipline on the part of the bands – they’re usually amateur musicians with limited technical skill who are just fucking around and aren’t totally concerned with songwriting so much as the physical and emotional release of performance. There’s nothing really wrong with any of that, but it definitely makes cherry-picking the best songs from art-punk records a somewhat tedious chore at times. The Mae-Shi are definitely above-average in this respect. Several tracks from their album Terror Bird click, but “Power To The People” has just the right balance of song structure and physical momentum to make it the obvious highlight of the record. (Click here to buy it from Buy Olympia!)

Air “Alpha Beta Gaga (Mark Ronson vocal mix)” – Against all odds, a celebutot DJ (Mark Ronson) has remixed a lite pop tune best suited to being the background music at a boutique (Air’s “Alpha Beta Gaga”) with vocals by one of the most unfortunately named rappers of all time (he’s called Rhymefest! for real!) and the results are actually quite good; a definite case of the sum being greater than the parts. Rhymefest makes up for his intensely lame moniker by delivering a strong vocal performance similar in style to that of the GZA and Kool G Rap, and Ronson reshapes Air’s original arrangement into something falling halfway between contemporary mainstream pop and old school hip hop. (Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)