Bike For Three!

andy — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:44:14 +0000

Bike For Three!, aka Canadian rapper Buck 65 and Belgian electronicist Greetings From Tuskan, have never met in person, but they aren’t letting a little thing like that get in the way of creating one of this year’s most intriguing albums so far, ‘More Heart Than Brains’. Having carved out a niche for himself by crossing country music with hip hop, this is Buck’s first album to feature all electronic production, but he takes to it like a duck to water, as Greetings From Tuskan absorbs his voice into her cool, trippy soundscapes, which have tones of Boom Bip and Modeselektor running through them. The lone track up on their MySpace page, ‘All There Is To Say About Love’, is a perfect example of this, but the track that really blew our socks off is the album’s title track, which you can download for free by clicking here.

www.myspace.com/bikeforthree

Themselves get escapological

andy — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:33:18 +0000

Prolific hip hopsters Doseone and Jel have dusted off their Themselves project and created a new mixtape, entitled theFREEhoudini. As the title sort of suggests, it’s a free download (although there is a CD version, too. More on that in a sec).

But what would a mixtape be without guests? Nothing, that’s what. So it’s lucky theFREEhoudini is packed full of them. Pretty much anyone you could name from the Anticon family is in there, including a very briefly reformed cLOUDEAD, as well as Buck 65, Aesop Rock, Busdriver, Lionesque, Slug Of Atmosphere, D-Styles, DJ Baku, Pedestrian, Sole, and Serengeti. And it was all mixed down by Odd Nosdam too, which was nice of him.

The download version is 40 minutes long and features no real surprises for anyone who’s familiar with Themselves, cLOUDDEAD, Subtle or any of the myriad projects that have involved Doseone and/or Jel in some way, but that doesn’t make this any less worth listening to. Their sound isn’t the only thing recognisable about them – the endless attention to quality control is in there, and each and every guest turns in a storming performance, with plenty of rapid fire rapping to warm up your ears.

All in all, it should be more than enough to convince you to part with your cash for the deluxe CD version of theFREEhoudini, which features an extra 16 minutes of music and some more guests – Passage, Alias and Fog’s Andrew Broder.

Go and download it from www.anticon.com/thefreehoudini/

Buy Themselves stuff on Amazon

I Eat Music » Buck 65

Bike For Three!

Themselves get escapological