Its been a while since a song made me laugh out loud. Thankfully, The Deli Boys dropped me their track PR Girls, Inspired by the chicks in public relations that they know.
Is it reinforcing the stereotype of PR girls as nothing more than dumb, gold-digging sluts that are into lattes, brunch and fashion? Definitely. But that’s what makes it good.
From their blog post about the track:
“It talks about the large boot, small dog, fancy bag culture that has taken over the city streets across our nation. We recognized a type of girl that was repeatedly emerging from the deep jungles of urban culture. Owning the street with their over-priced bags, they developed their own language of terms by using weird melodic lisps and slurs. These women, no matter if they were in the Public Relations field or not, were dubbed “PR Girls”. This term catapulted the idea of writing and producing this song. We hopes you like.”
If you’ve been in Toronto for the past years, you’ve probably noticed that the city has some serious electronic talent.
Part of that talent includes some of the city’s finest music blogs:
Salacious Sound posts some great party tracks on a very regular basis, and they’re often the first place I read about tours coming to Toronto. A recent post they wrote stakes the claim that Toronto might just be the Remix Capital of the World, and I think the might just be right.
Here’s a couple of choice tracks from Toronto artists they posted recently:
ElectroTO is like a shrine to the city’s finest electro. In their “What’s Good Wednesday,” posts the blog’s writers Trackson and The Vamp give everyone a good heads up on the city’s best parties. The image at the top of this post comes from them (thanks, guys), and is one of the better redesigns of the Jay’s logo that I’ve ever seen. Close seconds are the one where the Blue Jay looks like an uzi and one I’ve seen of the Blue Jay wearing headphones.
Torontette has been blogging her little heart out for the past couple of months and while her tunes of choice aren’t always the pumping electro I prefer, she’s still got a feel for the city.
I especially like the Van Schie tracks she had up recently:
Finally, this blog post is dedicated to the memory of The Curb Crawlers - the first music blog I started reading (single tear rolling down my cheek) and despite having folded up shop, still one of the internet’s finest pieces of HTML and CSS.
What are your favorite T-dots artists or blogs? Hook me up with some new stuff to listen to.
The Girls Can Hears Us! (conveniently shorted as TGCHU) have the sort of self-aware hilarity that I like in my electropop-rap, and the catchy beats also make for pretty good gym music.
Now, just in time for summer, TGCHU are going to drop their debut album and all of the songs sound pretty good. Even better is that the boys are fans of giving some of their tracks away for free, and hooked me up with a couple for posting here.
To stay posted on when their album comes out, hit up TGCHU.com. Bide your time until then with a couple of other TGCHU tracks I’ve posted here and here.
Its the beginning of March here in Toronto (actually, its probably the beginning of March in the whole world) and the weather is unseasonably warm. To celebrate, I ate lunch on a patio.
Is this the beginning of summer? I hope so, and to get in the mood I’ve been listening to these smart Beach Boys remixes.
The tag line on the movie poster (via) is “IN THE 31st CENTURY MAN FINALLY CREATED A MACHINE…With Feelings” and its going on my must-watch list.
Speaking of machines with feelings, you can’t go wrong with remixes of Florence + the Machine’s You’ve Got The Love. I wrote about the XX remix of that track a little while ago (damn, I love golden robots), and I was glad to hear Adam Smith’s take on it.
The Secret Galaxies remix comes courtesy of T-dot ballers Borracho, who were kind enough to post it on their Myspace page. Its a little more mellow than some of their other stuff, and I definitely like it.
You can’t go wrong with a little Ellie Goulding, and when the theme of the day seems to be galaxies and robots what better than a space-disco track about getting starry-eyed (I’m just going to assume she’s singing about looking at the stars and dreaming about space). These Monarchy cats have done some other mixes, and I dig that they called this one the Horses Head Nebular remix.
Anyways, if you’re in a galactic mood, give ‘em a listen:
This song is from the Junior Boys’ newest release, Begone Dull Care, which is in my opinion the best thing they’ve done so far (which is saying a lot, because it’s all been great). It’s a very smooth and low-key electro track with a powerful groove. It’s obvious that these guys are terrific producers.
DJs have gotta play Jay-Z, right? Well, this one combines a great Ratatat backing track with Jay-Z’s signature flow. The line between rap and rock is nowhere to be found here.
I came across Dragonette in a UK magazine “Watch Out For…” section, and I was super-happy when I listened to them. It makes me think that there’s hope for pop R&B. Their allmusic page calls them “new wave revivalists” and “bouncy electro-pop”, but that doesn’t give them nearly enough credit. Oh, and I just discovered (after about a year) that they’re Canadian.
This song is a few years old, but I can’t help playing it regularly. It’s got a great rhythm, it’s upbeat, and it fits with a lot of musical styles—it’s a great bridge track. Bonus: I just discovered that the chorus melody is stolen from here.
Well, soul music hardly gets better than this 1967 track, especially from Motown. Can you believe that it wasn’t released as a single for two years after it appeared on an album? That album must have been pretty darn good to have the label not consider “Tears of a Clown” as a single. No surprise it’s so great: the music was written by Stevie Wonder (with Hank Cosby).
Speaking of Stevie Wonder, this is an obvious choice. My friend Derek once told me a story about DJing a party where a lady came up to him when he was playing Stevie and asked, “Can you play something we can dance to?” That person was wrong.
ELO never really tried to hide their pop, did they? And we should be happy about that, because they created some terrific disco-pop songs like this one. Of course, these songs mostly sounded pretty similar to one another, but I think they’re still well above the “throw-away” threshold.
Eventually, I’ll put together a proper DJ mix for 199x, but until I’ve got the time and the gear, this will have to do.
Or at least that’s the way it comes across in this re-work of Britney’s 3 by Toronto’s own Scotty Dynamo. Give it a listen, then catch him where ever you go. He’s ScottyDynamo on Twitter, MySpace and YouTube and he is going to be what you’re telling your friends about when they ask if you’ve listened to any good music lately.
Well, I’m pretty sure that summer is over here in Toronto. Those lazy afternoons of sneaking into the pool area of sweet condos are over, but they’ll be back again next summer.
Do you remember when the Sci-Fi channel used to show anime every Friday night? I do…and I especially remember being super-creeped out by the movie Akira.
I mean, all the posters make it look like it’ll be classic cyberpunk: bad-ass bikes, tough Tokyo gang kids, that sort of thing. Then bizarro anime hell breaks loose and the movie just gets weird.
Anyways, Dane Jah ras is a Canadian poet/freestylist and he has put together a concept album based on Akira. From Dane’s blog:
“Each track features at least one sample from the film. Samples used include Japanese dialogue, the re-done English dialogue and segments from “The Akira Suite” (The film’s score). The mixtape was produced and recorded by myself. The concept, mix and master are from KnowSomething’s DJ D-Mass.”
