Sounds For Sore Arms

Took an unintentional extended break, been taking it easy over the past couple days as I rode out the side effects of my vaccine. It's not been too bad from other accounts I've heard, worst I've had is the feeling of being decked in the arm real hard (and I think it might be making the spot where I broke my elbow a few years ago ache too? Hard to tell, I've been putting it in all kinds of weird positions to ease the ache so I might have just shifted something, or it could even just be me being more aware of it.

Marjorie Srider - My Jeans (1971)
But anyway, I thought I'd just chuck some thoughts and tunes down real quick to make up for it. Some Hip Hop stuff first of all, somethin' old and somethin' new. Deltron 3030's self titled debut first from the year 2000 - Deltron is a hip hop dream team of Del The Funky Homosapien, Dan The Automator and Kid Koala. It's a fantastic album throughout, Del really shines on the lyrical front throughout and he has a lot of fun with the album's concept and themes (It's set in the year 3030 you see). The content isn't quite as dated as some other high-tech themed stuff from around the time, but you might still get a grin or two when Del starts bragging about his Modem. Curiously you can't buy this on bandcamp for some reason, but it's definitely worth checking out in full regardless.



On that same line we have a new single from Aesop Rock. I'm not super up to speed on all his work but in my experience it's always been super high quality, and in cases of tracks like One Of Four - incredibly raw and real in terms of content at times. Enter Long Legged Larry - for as much as I admire Aes for putting out tracks like the one I mentioned that deal very candidly with mental health issues, I also like that in recent years he's started to make stuff that's a bit more... whimsical, for lack of a better term - be it a song about his cat, complete with a video starring a puppet version of himself to this one right here, it's becoming a bit of a theme. But just because the tone is more lighthearted doesn't mean that Aes compromises his trademark complex lyricism, there are some incredible rhymes and flow on Long Legged Larry - and the whole thing is completely PG too, there's a real gap in the market for rap that's appropriate for all ages that isn't oversimplified I think.

And I also can't stop thinking about this being included on a PaRappa The Rapper reboot either, though maybe that's just this one reminding me of Prince Fleaswallow's rap from the first game!



To that end, the other thing I'd been doing was playing a bunch of the many many indie games I'd picked up on Steam over the years. One of them I went back to was OlliOlli 2, a chill (if at times frustrating) skating side-scroller. Much like the Hotline Miamis before it, the two games have a whole heap of great indie soundtracks in them, and some surprisingly big names in the sequel too. And much like Hotline again, it has a distinct aesthetic it's shooting for that it achieves very, very well indeed. "L" is just one of the many tunes that set themselves up as immediate earworms - echoes of west coast Hip Hop past and present throughout (especially FlyLo's work, compare this to The Offbeat that I posted a couple weeks back), filtered through a Parisian lens to make for a smooth and groovy number that's tinged with a hint of nostalgia.



And of course like so many soundtracks before it, it's done a great job of showing me stuff that would have passed me by otherwise. Another artist to chuck on the 'incredibly hard to search for' pile, Tobacco is Thomas Fec - frontman of psychedelic rock band Black Moth Super Rainbow. And that Psychedelic streak certainly transfers into his work under this alias, to the point where I'm actually surprised a tune like this didn't pop up in Hotline Miami.

There's a lot of analog synth and tape machine work going on throughout his solo work (as evidenced by the title here too), this decidedly non-digital approach is very easy to hear in that very rough-'round'-the-edges sound that is fully on display here. It's a record that I could be really into if I was in the right mood, and at the minute I really am - it's been on my wishlist for ages as is, partly because I'm super lazy and you can't preview all the tracks on the BC page. Maybe it's time to take that deep dive sometime soon, and expect it to make an appearance again provided I can find tracks that are allowed to be previewed!



And that'll do us for today - again a little more variation than my standard fare but that's all right, I do need to remember to check out the BC pages before I do a post next time, the Deltron album being unavailable to buy and not all the Tobacco album being available to preview could have tripped this one up something fierce, wouldn't have stopped it mind, but I've grown to love the BC players, they work real nice and are fairly painless to implement and just general look good too compared to like a YT embed. Anyway, I'll wrap up here, might be a while before I post again as I've taken this week off work so I'm gonna try and take it easy, but I'll be back soon enough with more!

And as always, stay safe and enjoy the music.

-CVF