Anitek – Mind Express (2011)

Flowing and glowing, Anitek brings to the surface a smooth and colorful mixture of jazz, trip hop, downtempo where classy sounds and modern textures are overlapping and completed each other. Dave Nunez aka Anitek is a Trip Hop Producer from Morristown, New Jersey. He has been playing piano for 15 years, along with cello, clarinet, guitar, bass, drums and is also a scratch DJ. His main influences are Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, Medeski Martin, DJ Krush, Bonobo, Amon Tobin, DJ Shadow, Rjd2, Bonobo, Photek, Danny Elfman, John Williams and Fat Jon. He often incoperates genres such as Orchestral, jazz, funk, Electronica, Lounge, Ambient, and Underground Hip hop into his music, creating a lush, melodic Soundtrack for either lyricists, commercials or film, but also writes classic music as well. Read more Anitek – Mind Express (2011)

Echofikibausik – Addicts of chillout (2011)

Echofikibausik comes from Kraków, Poland and mixing dubstep, dub, downtempo, raggae, jazz, chillout, trip-hop, ambient and nu-jazz into an exciting sonar cocktail. You can grab for free his latest release from his Bandcamp page for free, this smooth and groovy five track album entitled “Addicts of chillout”.
I didn’t manage to dig out any background information about Echofikibausik, but the music is quite enough. “Addicts of chillout” is a slow glowing, sparking material with smooth jazz perfume and nice electro and ambiental textures. Read more Echofikibausik – Addicts of chillout (2011)

Proyecto Mirage – Slaves Of Capital (2011)

Reminds me of Atari Teenage Riot and their latest release, “Is This Hyperreal”, “Sleves Of Capital” is the 6th full-length album by this duo from Madrid, Spain, consist of Alicia H. Willen and Francisco Planellas. Proyecto Mirage was founded in 1990 and took off from the sound and style of the classic electro-pop bands of that time. Influences comes from bands such as Esplendor Geometrico, Whitehouse, SPK and in the journey to found they own sound, Proyecto Mirage merged both pop and industrial orientations of industrial music with drum´n´bass, techno and Rock elements delivering harsh, hard electronic music.
Once again, the spanish duo delivered an excellent album full of noisy, extremely explosive techno-industrial, complemented with classic ebm, hardcore techno, 80’s electropop and contemporary electronica components. Read more Proyecto Mirage – Slaves Of Capital (2011)

The Odd Trio – The Odd Future Sessions (2011)

Groove-centric, fluid and dynamic, The Odd Trio plays classic jazz in modern style, merging classic-like themes with the freedom and grooves of modern, improvising jazz remaining classy and fresh simultaneously. Three technically gifted and inspired musicians: Matt Tavares on Piano, Alex Sowinski on Drums, and Chester Hansen on Bass .
The Odd Future Sessions Part 1 is a tribute to Odd Future classics, including “Bastard,” “Orange Juice (Lemonade)” and “AssMilk.” Part 2 is made of three songs straight from the latest Tyler the Creator album “Goblin”: “Untitled 63″, “Nightmare” and “Yonkers”.
This is absolutely groovy and smooth, good morning! Read more The Odd Trio – The Odd Future Sessions (2011)

Omega Lithium – Kinetik (2011)

“Kinetik” is the second full length album by this four piece Croatian band and they melt down dark, epic metal into the Rammstain masterd, so-called Neue Deutsche Härte industrial metal while the band is fronted by female singer Mya Mortensen. Her band-mates are Malice Rime – Guitars and Synthesizers, Zoltan Harpax – Bass and Torsten Nihill – Drums, Percussion. The band was formed in 2007 in Umag, and is signed to Drakkar Entertainment, a part of Sony BMG.
The band’s debut album, “Dreams in Formaline”, was released in 2009 and its first single, “Stigmata”, was played on the MTV rock chart and peaked to the 4 place on the MTV Adria Rock chart, receiving a constant airplay for more than 2 months. The video also appeared on other European and worldwide TV stations in their daily charts. On YouTube Stigmata received more than a quarter of a million views, which is the highest viewing number for a debut song in this genre. Read more Omega Lithium – Kinetik (2011)

August Burns Red – Leveler (2011)

Being quite skeptical ’bout everything labeled lately “metalcore”, songs such as “Internal Cannon”, “Cutting the Ties”, “Carpe Diem” and “Salt & Light” from the fourth studio album by American band August Burns Red, convinced me to give them another chance. State that they have been inspired and influenced by bands such as Between the Buried and Me, Misery Signals and Hopesfall, their powerful, technical, filled with heavy breakdowns and groovy riffs and not at least some nice, acoustic or slow passages which offering release and an exotic flavor, is quite the essence of what actually metalcore means now days. Merging some almost traditional heavy metal riffings with intense modern metal with roots back to death metal and adding raw, extreme vocals, August Burns Red comes crushing and this combination of melodious themes with blowing brutality, I had to admit, it’s quite efficient and have some charm. Still, when a million plus one bands are begun doing the same kind of thing, using the same schemes and cliches, don’t really matter how intense they doing it, all the excitement is gone and the thing becomes pretty boring. Some Pantera lyrics came back haunting: “be yourself, by yourself…” Read more August Burns Red – Leveler (2011)

8in8 – Nighty Night (2011)

This is an ambitious project gathering together Amanda Palmer – performer, she was the lead singer, pianist, and lyricist/composer of the duo The Dresden Dolls, Neil Gaiman – author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, etc, Ben Folds – singer, songwriter, musician and Damian Kulash – vocalist and guitarist of OK Go, for an exciting experiment. Monday, on April 25th, the four musicians joins in Boston at the Rethink Music conference to explore/re-conceptualize the entire notion of artistic creation and its mechanical dissemination and human reception in these topsy-turvy modern times of ours. The original goal was to write and record eight songs in eight hours, after then play a concert and forther release the album. The effort resulting in 6 songs in 12 hours, entitled “Nighty Night”. In addition, the entire process was streamed live on Youtube, lasting from 4 pm on April 22nd to 4 am on April 23rd. Read more 8in8 – Nighty Night (2011)

Ok Go – 180/365 (2011)

Ok Go – 180/365 (2011)

Ok Go – 180/365 (2011) In my list of “10 best albums of 2010” one was “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky” by OK Go. These guys rocks. They wrote some great songs, they are funny and full of life. Made a few killer videos. Not too many bands have now days their energy and ability to deliver quality stuffs. Actually OK Go were the exception, as I said, I’m pretty sick lately of anything labeled “indie” or “alternative”. Damian Kulash (lead vocals and guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass guitar and vocals), Dan Konopka (drums and percussion) and Andy Ross (guitar, keyboards and vocals) delivered a new package consist of the album and a volume of gorgeous OK Go tour photos taken by Nathaniel Wood. 180 gigs in one year, resumed in 15 great songs. Read more Ok Go – 180/365 (2011)

The Nightwatchman – Union Town (2011)

During an interview in October 2010, Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha allegedly confirmed that a new album is in the works, with a possibility of a 2011 release. All the fans waiting this since 1999 and obviously most of us hoping for more killer tracks such as “Killing in the Name”, “Bullet in the Head”, “Bulls on Parade”, “Testify” and “Guerrilla Radio”. It’s not a big secret, RATM are one of the most activist and lefty rock band of the scene, extremely involved in politics, maybe too involved. Well, growing up “behind the iron curtain” in a so-called communist system, I have a quite different experience and implicitly a totally different view about what “left” actually means. On the other hand, the troubled times we’re living in and the obvious failure of the capitalist system I thought will somehow release and satisfy these guys. Well, it seems not. It seems they wanna “slayer the dragon” right till the end and dance on his grave. Some things I can understand, others not, everybody must be aware of his own limitations. I know that the United States has had a two-party system for over a century and well, it’s not quite the “free world” we dreamed about and democracy is only an illusion while all the information we received are filtered, censored and distorted, but still, I will never ever waving a fucking red flag knowing at least what guys like Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Ceausescu and Kim Ir Sen did.
The Nightwatchman is the alter-ego and solo act of Rage Against the Machine, Street Sweeper Social Club and former Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello. It was formed in 2003 as an outlet for his political views – while some claim Audioslave was playing apolitical music, still, they played on May 6, 2005, a free show in Havana, Cuba and became the first American rock group to perform a concert in the socialist republic of Cuba.So… Read more The Nightwatchman – Union Town (2011)