Some Thoughts

So it’s been over a month since there’s been anything of interest on here. We dropped the ball on our up-to-the-minute coverage of 808s and Heartbreak the week it came out. We all sort of concurrently decided that our interest in blogging and music criticism had faded.

But, it’s been a month of reflection for me (not really), and I’m on vacation, and I’m back in America, where I have been doing music criticism for the last four years in some capacity, so I’ll still be on that grind somehow. From here on out, I’ll be resuming my music editorial duties for The Carl, so you can probably catch the odd blog post from me over there at their website.  I guess it’s bizarre to keep blogging on here, but I plan to start updating at least a little more frequently because all my unexpressed opinions need a home. I’ll also try to link to stuff I write elsewhere. And this way Greg and Gabe have a home if they ever want to come back. So welcome to the New Everything All of the Time, more commonly known as Some Stuff Occasionally.

The point of this is that I want to make a shout-out to my cousin Hannah, who I recently discovered has a good hip hop blog that you can now find on our blogroll.

Also, here’s some music I’ve been listening to lately:

The Foreign Exchange – Leave It All Behind: Laid-back R&B from Phonte of Little Brother. You can lounge to this all day.

The Very Best – Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit Are The Very Best: Classified as Tropical/Dance in its genre column, this mixtape is worldly and dancy, references the entire spectrum of bloggable music, and is fun as hell. Also it’s available for free download here.

Blu & Exile – Below The Heavens: I’d been meaning to listen to this for a long time, and I wish I had done so earlier. Blu is a great MC: expressive, autobiographical, funny, and emotional, and Exile’s beats are gorgeous. This is one of the best hip hop albums I’ve heard in the last couple of years, and it deserves all the praise it’s gotten.

Black Milk – Tronic: It’s past imitating Dilla and on to its own legacy for this collection of great beats and hard-hitting raps from one of Detroit’s finest.

Those are my notes for now. Welcome back. Oh, also that Greg’s not writing anymore, I’m not putting up those social bookmarking links. Nobody used those.