Putting them ears to good use.

Something something something and then I listened to a whole smorgasbord of good music. There you go, there's my one sanctioned use of "smorgasbord" for this blog, for this lifetime perhaps. I mean, you use it once and people raise an eyebrow and think "hmmm, smorgasbord's a fun word." Use it twice (or, heaven forfend, more often than that) and people start to think that smorgasbord is the only trick you've got up your lexical sleeve. In fact, do yourself a favour and look up smorgasbord on wikipedia (I'm not going to do it for you), that way you can see the official accenting and an awesome photo of what might actually be a real smorgasbord.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, sports.

Themselves, to me, sound a lot like Subtle, the other band from Jel and Doseone, but I guess more hip-hop. Subtle have developed into this kind of electro-rock-hop-dance five (or six) piece, while Themselves (who... probably get up into my top ten gigs I've ever seen now that I think about it) have been on the backburner. There are plenty of surreal hip-hop references on this record (check out the Suge Knight one in this video) and I suppose it is a hip-hop album, but like nothing else on earth. It is what it is:

And what it mostly is, is awesome. Doseone, by the way - totally on my gay-for list.

The new Chuck Prophet was a two-step grower; in that on the first listen I thought it was pretty good, then it clicked on the second. The first half is stronger for me at the moment, and his delivery on the line: "I went to see the doctor, he said 'you should be dead', I said 'I was doc, but now I'm back'" is just hilarious. Here's a three minute documentary about him making the album in Mexico:

One of the coolest men in the world.

The new Converge album is, according to "fans" something of a departure. In a way I can see it - they've taken their foot off the accelerator in order to write some slower songs that sound like THE END OF ALL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE instead of only doing fast songs that sound like THE END OF ALL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. For me, the effect is remarkably similar, except that I can see myself listening to this one a lot more than their previous albums, fantastically skull-crushing as they were. There's an official video for this song, but I kind of like this sans-vocals rehearsal tape:

Muscular!