Best New Music: Daft punks and bluegrass pioneers Video
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Daft Punk: "Harder Better Faster Stronger"
The first single from the album will be a live version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" from Daft Punk's 2001 album Discovery, accompanied with a video directed by Olivier Gondry (older brother to acclaimed film director Michel) that features live footage shot by fans. The video will be included on the enhanced cd. The album version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is currently enjoying a second life and a surge in digital sales thanks to being sampled by rapper Kanye West on his current Top 5 hit "Stronger". The Daft Punk robots, in their signature retro-futuristic robot gear, also appear in West's "Stronger" video.
Best New Music: Chemical charisma
Spoon, the Chemical Brothers, and DJ Babu are the Download Music crew's picks this week.
Daft Punk: "Electroma" (movie trailer)
Daft Punk's Electroma is an odyssey of two robots (played by Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich) who journey across a mythic American landscape of haunting, surreal beauty on a quest to become human.
The Presets: "Girl and the Sea"
With enough range that they'll appeal to fans of class acts like Nine Inch Nails, The Faint, Soft Cell, and Daft Punk, The Presets' sound is equal parts invention and dance-floor friendliness while retaining a special flavor of their own.
Para One is one of the leaders of the French new school. Known for his killer track "Dun Dun" (remixed from MSTRKRFT) and remixes of Agoria, Krazy Baldhead, Ellen Alien (with Tacteel) and Daft Punk, among others. His musics been played by a wide array of the dance floors elite from Feadz, Erol Alkan, Diplo, Modeselektor and Justice to Laurent Garnier, DJ/Rupture, Team Shadetek and Michael Mayer. "Dun Dun" is both the hardest, most ruthless and loveliest, most idyllic techno track in a long time. These tracks are tailor-made for the club, the dancefloor, the moment when the world dissolves into strobes, heat and sound, when the dancers move whether they like it or not, barely breathing machines operated by way of drugs, snares and synths.
Billy Joe Shaver, Little Brother, Dirty Projectors
Texas country outlaw Billy Joe Shaver, North Carolina hip-hop group Little Brother, and the Black Flag-inspired Dirty Projectors are the Download Music crew's picks this week on Crossfade TV.
Interview with Hilly Kristal, owner of CBGB
At the August 31, 2005 CBGB Forever concert in New York City, Download Music caught up with a legendary figure in punk-rock history, the late Hilly Kristal, founder of CBGB.
Prefuse 73, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Cool Kids
Crossfade TV this week checks out the latest hip-hop/funk/chop-rock smarts from Prefuse 73, new music from indie-rap duo Cool Kids, and the great new collaboration between bluegrass chanteuse Alison Krauss and Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant.
The Juan Maclean: "Give Me Every Little Thing"
"It's been a bit of a sore spot," laughs Juan Maclean, "sitting on this album and seeing this robot stuff pop up all over the place. I have serious robot credentials that go back years and years. Like, a decade! But Daft Punk beat me to the punch." He may be joking, but the man's right. If anyone's earned the right to call their debut album "Less Than Human" and imagine a love triangle consisting of a man, a woman and the man's gay robot friend (as in "Shining Skinned Friend"), it's Maclean. He was guitarist and synth player with acclaimed but obscure, gonzo electro-punk band Six Finger Satellite, who began formulating their blend of rigidly mechanised disco beats, oddly sumptuous synth melodies and razor-shredded guitar work in the early 90s. The brutish but groovy result suggested a cross between Devo, Kraftwerk and Big Black. Then, America was mired in grunge, the famous French robots were still in short pants and the "punk-funk revival" was in the unimaginable future. Six Finger Satellite were just too far ahead of their time and perished accordingly. With "Less Than Human" Maclean has created a precision-tuned rekindling of his love affair with everything from Kraftwerk to Juan Atkins and Derrick May, Funkadelic to Giorgio Moroder and Lipps Inc, DAF to Talking Heads and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It's full of tics (sin drums, cow bells, Bootsy Collins bass lines, Moog Liberation motifs) borrowed from dance music history, but refuses to engage with retroism, nostalgia or any notion of "the classic." Opener "AD2003" tracks back to Kraftwerk via Orbital, buoyed up by bubbles of percolating glitch. "Give Me Every Little Thing" rewinds through Underworld and Talking Heads en route to Studio 54. "Tito's Way" contrasts acid-house synth squelches and rave whistles with clattering, tribal percussion. There's a constant, though. Even the LP's euphoric epic "Dance With Me," is poignantly subdued, touched by a melancholy that reflects Maclean's own world view. "It doesn't seem incongruous to me to have a lot of that stuff in there," he says of the album's sadness, "because I made a big effort to make an album, rather than a collection of tunes with just one good track that everybody knows. So I never really set out to say, "this is a song that will played for the dance floor," or whatever. "When I started on it, I don't think I had any pre-conceived notions at all, except that I knew I'd always be operating under the same aesthetic principles that I'd held in making music my whole life."
Bad Brains: "Give Thanks and Praises"
The seminal Washington, D.C., act started off playing jazz, then proceeded to out-thrash punk and out-riff metal. All while focused on reggae. The group's Adam Yauch-produced latest brews up all these. It ends up a sludgy but ethereal cross of dub's echoes and punk's guitar-driven grime. Visit music.download.com for a free MP3 download of the song "Give Thanks and Praises": http://music.download.com/badbrains/3600-8709_32-100004566.html
