Any knucklehead with DSL and a laptop can now make an electronic track. With a half hour of clicking and fiddling, you can sample enough cheesy beats and mashups to clog arteries from here to Berlin. Simple dropdown mouse maneuvers can transform electro tracks into progressive house tracks (from dry and synthetic to wet and gushy), rhythm tracks can be tempo-tweaked with an upward toggle to change a Timbaland beat into a Chromeo one. Add some T-Pain-esque pitch-correction vocals to your between-
The Gutter Twins
Maybe Rocks Off spent a lot of 2008 with his head in the archives, but he was paying attention to new stuff too. Occasionally. It's as easy as satellite radio, channel 47's (Ethel/Alt Nation) weekly new-music hour Submission/Transmission. Monday night, S/T happened to be playing its picks for the past year.
One thing is immediately apparent: the '90s are back, big time. The Black Keys' "Strange Times" is total Soundgarden, the Kills' "Tape Song" almost out-Breeders Kim Deal
Truth be told, we envy N.A.S.A.'s bumptuous production acumen almost as much as we envy principal astronauts Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon the depths of their Rolodexes - even if, somehow, they couldn't rope Lil Wayne into their genre-mashup free-for-all.
Seriously - as you'll see below - N.A.S.A.'s debut, The Spirit of Apollo, is on some profoundly next-level Judgment Night-soundtrack shit. It's not all amazing, of course, which is why it's the subject of Rocks Off's inaugural "The Distille
Photos by Kim Douglass
Puff-paint, splatter-paint, welcome to the hospital - the sterility of a trash heap greets you. Santigold = the moment hipster-embraced globalism became a commodity, and why globalism doesn't matter anymore; i.e., we're all the same.
Seeing her at House of Blues is like trying to wash away your sins with a loofah made of mud-splattered porcupine. Is this some kind of joke? It's Socrates on the set of 90210, papier-mache pigs flying in a platinum-dipped sky.
