smoooooth breasts

It's the weekend! Here, enjoy a goddamn classic.

This track still, still, still will kill.

oh yes

I didn't know about Ultimate Thrush until ten minutes ago, and now they're a band I HAVE TO SEE LIVE LIKE MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. Luckily they're playing the Glasgow School of Art on Friday with FLFD faves Holy Mountain and some band called Mr Peppermint with no easily located Myspace page.

Download their self-titled album HERE and whet your appetite at their Myspace.

no raditude on there YET!

On last week's FLFD my compilation of the week was a collection of Weezer covers by 8-bit record label Pterodactyl Squad. It's exactly what you imagine a Weezer tribute by a bunch of video-game inspired bands would sound like (i.e. gimmicky but fun).

I Fight Dragons - Why Bother?

Download Weezer: The 8-Bit Album HERE. It's totally free and everything!

i sold my soul for management

Turns out that there's some new A Wilhelm Scream coming out. So why the picture above?

REVOLVER MAGAZINE: Which part of ["Bullet Proof Tiger"] did you come up with first?

TREVOR REILLY (vox): Mike Supina, our new guitarist, actually came up with the musical arrangement first, and we tinkered with it from there. It was the first thing Mike brought to the band alone, and that was inspiring in and of itself. I was originally gonna base the lyrics on the character McNulty from The Wire, incidentally, but that didn’t quite pan out, thankfully. [Laughs]

Well then - you think you know, then you know.

A Wilhelm Scream - Bullet Proof Tiger
(via Revolver)

Off the band's upcoming S/T 7", out next month via Paper and Plastick. Find out more about Steve Lieber (and more Wire-inspired drawings) over HERE.

beach, bedroom, bliss

Jeans Wilder's put out probably my favourite song of the year, "Tough Guys", a sad-sack five minute dreampop masterwork that sounds like the movie Judd Apatow's Funny People wishes it was. Listen to it down there and try and catch on to what I'm on about.

Jeans Wilder - Tough Guys

Oh, and there's a new track on dude's Myspace called "That Glow" - it starts off pretty badly if I'm being honest (there's a wince-worthy note in the first thirty seconds) but like all his material, you fall under the charm of it pretty quickly.

Jeans and Jen Paul have a split 12" out now on Last Station Radar. I've not bought it yet because I'm lazy and want to save money on the new batch of Lost DVDs.

no phoebe, don't call it a comeback

God, since I got back at uni I suck at updating this thing. Anyway, here's a new band called Kudrow - and yes, that's Jeff from Bomb The Music Industry! singing. So, immediately brilliant, non?

The Steal, those pretty good UK pop-punk/hardcore noiseniks, split up this year. To make the ache easier, here's their entire discography for free download.

Start getting into these songs, then kick yourself now that they're gone. Real talk.

"dj one drop is the greatesssst..."

Walking back from last night's FLFD (click HERE to listen to it again, tracklisting up soon), I ended up listening to this amazing mix by DJ One Drop. It's a cluster bomb of funky and you'll be hit by very danceable shards in every single direction you turn. You should listen to it right now:

DOWNLOAD DJ ONE DROP'S "WHAT DO YOU CALL IT? VOL.2 LET'S GET DEEPER" HERE

Tracklisting as follows:

01. Intro – Monday is Bongo Day!
02. Skepta – Sunglasses At Night [DJ Naughty Funky Mix]
03. Ill Blu ft. Hoodzee – Rider [Special]
04. Perempay & Dee – Buss It
05. Fuzzy Logic – Twiss
06. Attacca Pesante – Sparta 09
07. Zest – Jump In The Middle & Skank
08. Free – Tribal Skankers
09. Gracious K – Migraine Skank
10. Coldsteps & Hector – On Dis Ting
11. Sweet Boy Candy – Bongo Boy
12. Lil’Silva – Seasons
13. OneDrop & Unknown – Funky Strings [Sample Rebuild Remix]
14. Sweet Boy Candy – Tipsy Talk
15. Dotstar – Stick Up [Special]
16. Lil’Silva – Burning
17. Funky D – Funk It
18. Kid Cudi – Day & Night [Danny Scrilla Electro-Funky Hybrid Remix]
19. N.B Funky – You
20. Funky D – Overdrive
21. DJ Naughty – Quicktime
22. Sweet Boy Candy – Rodeo
23. Geeneus – Yellowtail
24. Hard House Banton – Sirens
25. Emvee – Glitch
26. Danny Scrilla – Fuzzy

Shout out to MashUp Crew!

FLFD

the rushes

The folks at Sonic Router just upped this, and it's definitely worth checking out. Trust me, this is good shit.

SBTRKT - Kaoss

Follow SBTRKT on Twitter and Myspace. And don't forget to listen tonight (11pm-1am), I'll be playing this!

embed the shit out of this

Armand Van Helden x A-Trak x bellbottoms

BEST BUDZ

My pal Carl has a blog, see, called Hear New Music, right, where he takes all the legal downloads he can find, alright, and puts them in a mix that you can then fling onto your iPod or a CD-R or whatever, okay? Well, he made another mix on Wednesday and I forgot to let you guys know about it then so... You can get it here.

Audrey's "Big Ships" is my favourite off the comp, if you're wondering.

GUCCI!

That cover > _____

I've been playing a badly tagged version of this since yesterday, but DJ Drama shouted out a trusted link on his Twitter account after I brought it up last night (probably not but whatever). We are alive in amazing times.

Gucci Mane - Frowney Face
(via Noz @ Cocaine Blunts)

Download The Burrprint: 3-D Edition from the Dram-approved link HERE.

compilation procrastination

So on last week's show I played a couple of songs off the compilation Barnyard Soul!: Greasy Gritty Groovy Southern-Fried Soul for this little feature I've got by the name of Compilation Procrastination. The idea is to find a compilation record that I love and showcase it to the listeners, and you-know-what made it onto last week's FLFD.

There's not much detail online for this comp, but let me guarantee you that it's got a wide array of massive jams on it - imagine awesome James Brown-style funk and soul but with some more, well, primal urges attributed to the vocals! It's a great ride. There's another take on it HERE and you can find it on sale HERE - it's totally sold out anywhere else though, so hassle Deep Groove to press it again or get to digging already!

B.B. Brown - Low Down Dirty Tramp

Willie West - Fairchild

"he stole my irn bru"

So, I heard Detektivbyrån for the first time today - at their best, the music sounds like Sigur Ros' more lighthearted moments and at its worst, it sounds like a synth-lead score of Howard Blake's score for The Snowman. Decide for yourself.

Detektivbyrån - E18

vamping it up

So, late pass time again but if you haven't heard it, that new Vampire Weekend soundtrack sounds exactly how you'd imagine: great!

Vampire Weekend - Horchata

Side note: anybody wanting to buy me a balaclava, get me one of these. Awww yeah.

goddammit

I haven't blogged since my show on Monday, have I? Bad call. Here's what I played, if you haven't seen it on my Myspace page or Facebook group (search "FLASHING LIGHTS + FLASH DRIVES" in FB to join), here's what I played on Monday nizzight:

MIIKE SNOW - Animal (RCD LBL)
PARETO - This is Where I Draw the Line (self-released)
TEENAGERSINTOKYO - Isabella (Backyard)
BRENDA HOLLOWAY - Til Johnny Comes (Motown)

firsts - NITE JEWEL
WARREN G - ...And Ya Don't Stop (Def Jam)

FUCK BUTTONS - Surf Solar (ATP)
RAEKWON - Surgical Gloves (Ice H20)
CALVINBALL - No Matter How Hard You Try (self-released)
MAYER HAWTHORNE - Just Ain't Gonna Work Out (Stones Throw)

compilation procrastination! (part one)
100 PROFF (AGED IN SOUL) - Somebody's Been Sleeping In My Bed (Edsel)

NITE JEWEL - You Said, "Let's go, the Two of Us" (Italians Do It Better)
BLK JKS - Lakeside (Secretly Canadian)
LLOYD feat. LIL WAYNE - Pusher (self-released)
CEYLAN ERTEM - Gonul Dagi (self-released)

firsts - THIS TOWN NEEDS GUNS
LIT - My Own Worst Enemy (RCA)

THIS TOWN NEEDS GUNS - Lemur (Big Scary Monsters)
S.C.U.M. - Visions Arise (self-released)
DRAKE - Sooner Than Later (self-released)

compilation procrastination! (part two)
STEREO TOTAL - Touche-Moi (Disko B)

KINGS OF CONVENIENCE - Boat Behind (EMI)
GOROD - Splinters of Life (Listenable)

tom waits song of the week
TOM WAITS - Anywhere I Lay My Head (Island)

BIG BOI feat. TOO $HORT & GEORGE CLINTON - Fo Yo Sorrows (Def Jam)
T-PAIN feat. SHAWNNA - Dope (Nappy Boy)
LOS CAMPESINOS! - Frontwards (self-released)

If you missed the show, you can listen to it at Air3 Radio until this Monday coming - and while you're there, go listen to At the Pictures as well (Tuesdays 3-5). As for the compilation of the week, here's a post I did on it back in August. A little post about last week's compilation of choice, Barnyard Soul! is coming up.

reconcile the violence in my heart.... vampire baseball

Muse, then. They must have written this song for the New Moon soundtrack because, damn, it sounds perfect for soundtracking some human/vampire/werewolf (delete as applicable) lovin' on the dancefloor at the gym-hall prom. So I'm gonna throw this on while I put on my Edward Cullen wig and do my Teen Wolf dance. It's pop music time, everyone.

Muse - Undisclosed Desires

I will never get sick of using that Thom Yorke picture.

PS. Now I dislike Glenn Beck as much as, well, me. However, bad views or no, asking your fans to stop liking you makes no sense, Muse.

odd how this stuff turns out...

It's funny - I was going to post about Chapel Club the other day after coming across their muscular, polished indie on Fucking Dance but for some reason or other, I didn't get round to it. Except now, they've requested me as a friend on Myspace! Like I said, funny.

Chapel Club - Into the Flood

If this has proven anything, it's that I check my friend requests on Myspace, so if you want me to check out your music, you know where to go.

smooooth

So somebody must have caught onto that post on Francis and the Lights from a couple of months back, because Newday hit me up on Twitter yesterday about their remake of ol' Frannie boy's "A Modern Promise". It's embedded below for you to check out, so, yeah, go for it.



If you haven't added me already, my Twitter page is HERE. Read all my inane shit to your heart's content!

that soul music? that soul music.

I was listening to an old Gilles Peterson podcast on the way up to uni this morning - it was the Mayer Hawthorne podcast, click here to download it - and heard some stuff that absolutely knocked me out. For me more than anybody else, check out these songs... they're just... wow. Check 'em out, then subscribe to Gilles. He's my dude. You already know.



Mayer Hawthorne - Just Ain't Gonna Work Out

Brenda Holloway - Till Johnny Comes

"22s on my golf cart"

I don't trust people who don't like T-Pain. At all.

T-Pain - Take Your Shirt Off

T-Pain feat. Shawnna - Dope

R. Kelly feat. T-Pain & Keyshia Cole - Number One (Remix)

Shakira feat. T-Pain - She-Wolf (Remix)

NAPPY BOOOOOOOOYYYY

A new Scrimshire podcast! Shit, I can't wait to get into this one, it's all strings-laden. Will probably be great.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

if i get caught, then the search is through...

I know nothing about Pavement. Well, I know that they're 90s indie heroes and they had that music video about the haircuts, but that's about it. So I don't get that furore about them reuniniting, even though I would like to.

Well then, thank goodness for Steven at Letters Have No Arms, as he's decided to put together "Pavement For Dummies", with ten songs to download by the band to get you on the way. It's a neat idea and, well, have a good time with it. Check it out HERE.

ps. Okay, I lied about not knowing any Pavement songs - I'm kinda familiar with "Frontwards" through a Lost article on A.V. Club (not recommended if you're not caught up fully with season five, but if so, click away) and it's great - here's a Youtube video with the song, off Slanted & Enchanted.

Oh, and here's a sweet cover of the song by Los Campesinos! played at twice the speed, the way they play pretty much all their songs.

Los Campesinos - Frontwards

It’s taken me a while to type this up – it was going to be up on Monday but the computer I was working on crashed and I didn’t save this, which kickstarted a very stressful evening. But I figured it would be worth checking out, so better late than never eh? I now present to you FIVE QUESTIONS WITH… FUCK BUTTONS

1. So why Fuck Buttons as a band name?

ANDY (jokingly): We really like the word “fuck” and it had an incredible resonance at the time, we just enjoyed embellishing it with the word “buttons”. The word “buttons” with “fuck”, it kind of turned into… it excelled the word, in a way.

FLFD: Did you have any other contenders?

BENJAMIN: Piss Witches. (everyone laughs)

FLFD: Alright, now we’re rolling!

2. Listening to the new material tonight, it sounds like ideas piling on top of another, creating this really dense feeling – it’s akin to reading a book with various subplots running alongside one another. Is there an intention to put together music that feels especially layered?

ANDY: I think we were really conscious in embellishing our sounds from the last record. With Street Horrrsing, there was definitely a prominent singularity to the components of the music but this time round we were extremely conscious of not repeating those steps but also in learning from them. You’re right though, we’ve definitely moved towards becoming a more multi-faceted prospect this time round.

FLFD: The new songs are a lot heavier - I heard elements of rave and industrial music that weren’t prominent before.

ANDY: I guess these are words attached to specific aesthetics but it’s not something we can turn ourselves with or at least have an intention with. I can see why you hear elements of dance and metal in the new songs, but it’s certainly not a conscious decision to contain these sounds.

3. How does a song begin in your writing process? Does it start with an idea or a certain riff or…

BENJAMIN: We never have any set agenda when we sit in a room to start writing music together, like wanting to use particular chords or wanting a song to evoke a certain emotion. We literally just sit in a room with as much equipment as we can get our hands on and try to extract sounds from them. Once we hit upon a sound we like, we jam it out and then work on structuring something around it. We never come in with ideas and that leaves us constantly surprised with what we come up with. That keeps us happy.

FLFD: My friends’ old band used to write really technical songs that I imagined took up to a month to finish writing. How long did it take to write “Ribs Out”, for instance?

ANDY: “Ribs Out” actually took two hours. Our perspective and sensibilities are really important when it comes to writing – I mean, it can take a few days to experiment with sounds until we hit on something but the actual structuring of those sounds don’t take too long at all.

BENJAMIN: Some tracks will take two hours to write, some tracks will take two months.



4. With the wide array of different equipment you use, would you consider yourselves an analogue or digital band?

BENJAMIN: All of the signal processors we use in the first instance are analogue, but there is some digital manipulation in there. A lot of the stuff we use are things picked up from car boot sales and things like that, but it’s a mixture – we don’t have a set idea as to what we’d use to create a song. Whatever goes, really.

5. How do the lyrics play into the music? Unless there’s some secret Dan Brown code hidden in the artwork to Street Horrrsing that I’m missing out on, I know nobody that knows the lyrics…

BENJAMIN: There’s no lyrics. For the most part, it’s improvised.

FLFD: Really? Can you tell me just one line that you usually use?

ANDY: “Be awesome to each other”.

BENJAMIN (sceptically): Yeah.

ANDY: The reason behind improvising the vocals is because they don’t function as a narrative tool.

BENJAMIN: They’re like another layer of sound. (pause) There are some lyrics we use, but we’re not going to tell you. I’d probably have to kill you. (him and Andy laugh)

Fuck Buttons - Surf Solar (Album Version)

[Thanks to Andy and Benjamin for rocking Stereo last week/deafening my girlfriend/doing an immortal drop that I can never use for my show ("You're listening to Flashing Lights and Flash Drives: eat a dick, motherfucker") and being sound. Their new album is called Tarot Sport, it's out on ATP Recordings and it just leaked. Be a nice person and take it home with you on October 12th instead of downloading it.]

"ya mother's dick"

This is guaranteed to (A) make your day better or (B) make your day grimier. There is always the possibility of (C) both at the same time.

Just-Ice rules. I wish I had his famous Gucci hat with his name on it.