I'm trying hard not to smile though I feel bad.

g.man wrote:

If I had a million dollars for every time I've heard that...

You’d have an Irish Mans stately home?

It's @Roujin again tomorrow, then Gav next week, as per the order of requests.

First of all let me just extend my apologies to Jon and Moot, I will post my thoughts about Ozomatli and Mr Ritter at some point tomorrow and will post my pick tomorrow evening. 

Soz, been busy either doing nothing or sorting mortgage shit, a thousand apologies!

it's not quite true that I disliked the rap metal sound, because I did and do love the Judgement Night soundtrack, but I just never got on board with RATM. I think the closest I got to liking them was a track on the Matrix soundtrack and b side Tom Morello did with The Prodigy.

Aye, it's an absolute banger that.

Maybe it wasn't before The Matrix, both came out in '99 anyway.  



Nostalgia wallop, miss the good old days.  Worms Armageddon would've been next.

Okay so catching back up with thread. 

I really enjoyed Ozomatli, thanks for selecting them Jon. Not an a group I've listened to before. I think Dos Cosas Ciertas was my favourite of the three tracks listed, really just made me feel like I should be relaxing somewhere, enjoying a drink on a summer evening. The first track had a really great driving beat as well, found myself subconsciously nodding my head and tapping my foot throughout. 

I'm going to be the voice of unpopular opinion and say that although the last track was good, it was my least favourite of the three. I just found the voice really distracting over the backing track, I constantly found myself trying to listen past the lyrics because the music was just way more interesting than what was being said!

Onto Mr. Ritter, I like to dip my toe in the shallow end of the country pool from time to time, but I tend to enjoy the more downbeat type stuff, so to the surprise of no one the last track bone of song, was my favourite. I see what you mean about his narrative style though Moot, that really came through in Galahad, and as a fan of storytime I was proper into it all the way to the end. 

Get Ready to Get Down was good, but I think it falls into that category of song that you know is good, but if you were going to listen there's be other tracks you'd reach for first. Caveat - probably if someone played it at a wedding and I'd had a couple I would 10/10 be throwing shapes like an idiot.

Right, getting this thread back on topic, here are my selections for this week's Friday Sampler!

Continuing on from last time, it's time to hear from the under appreciated 'yute of the UK once again. Also the timing for this one is a lot better for Dave than the last one was for Cadet. 

I present to you Dave, or Santan Dave, take your pick. Dave is 20 and is the best young rapper in the world, hands down. It's not even close, I think back to what I was like when I was in my late teens and early 20s and I have no fucking clue how Dave does it, he's like an old man trapped in a young guy's body. He often writes about his life, being young, his family, where he grew up and just stuff that's happened to him generally.

Anyway, his debut album came out the other week and went straight in at number one, imho, richly deserved. But I'm not going to link any videos off that album, cos you can go and listen to it later, these are 3 tracks from last few years to set you up to go and listen to his album, Psychodrama.  

Here is extra young Dave from 2016 ruminating on his future. By contrast when I was 17 me and my friends were trying to beat Goldeneye on 00 Agent difficulty.


Fast forward a couple of years and in the wake of Grenfell Tower he had some stuff to get off his chest.


And finally we have Hangman, which released I think last year in between his EP and his album this year.


If you enjoyed these, the great, you're all set to go enjoy his album, which is really really good, nice variety of subject matter in his tracks, plenty of clever wordplay, I think all the piano stuff in his tracks is him as well, the talented bastard. All around good guy Dave, I hope he goes a long way. 


Oh also since we had Dear Black Son earlier, deffo check out Dave's track Black for similar vibes but from the perspective of the person Brother Ali was talking about!

Picture Me really is extremely impressive you such a young man, probably my favourite of the three sample tracks. 

I can pick stand out tracks from Psychodrama but as it's such a cohesive album it's all or nothing for me so far. 

This one has some top drawer wordplay + beats, not sure if it's on an older album or an EP/mixtape etc.  



'It's funny how them man are psychos but their p's are silent'

Youtube comment I liked: Its like on career mode and you see the potential except Tielemans is Dave

71 is a decent listen, definitely. Good pick. 

I know what you mean about the wordplay, with Dave I agree with you that it seems to fit really well into his songs most of the time. Streatham has a couple of good lines in it.

Compare it to like Wretch, where there's wordplay flying around all over the place but you have to take out a fucking notepad everytime you actually want to listen to one of his songs. No disrespect to Wretch, he's pretty much THE wordplay guy.

Looks like I'm up. Expect angst and guitars and emo type stuff. Fair warning if it ain't your thing.

Tried to plan things out in my head for this and go for a certain angle, trying to make sure I made points I'd thought of previously. But then I thought I was thinking about it too much cos I'm nervous and I don't know why. I'm just gonna freestyle it, always feels more natural for me to do that when I talk about something I love.

Manchester Orchestra - Album Openers.

Formed in 2004, they released their debut (I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child) within two years, and it catapulted them to almost mythical status among emo-shoegaze circles. The lead singer/guitarist, Andy Hull, was only 19 at the time, and was coming out with lyrics way, way beyond his years. He could go from whispers to soaring beautiful melodies to screams and yelps and back again at the drop of a hat. And whilst that album is a scene hall of famer, there's a touch of filler, and it can't sustain its greatest highs (go find it after this). But they held so so so much promise for the future.

That arrived in 2009 with Mean Everything To Nothing. What can only be described IMO as a complete refinement and continuation of the sounds and themes of Virgin, it saw them go from a band you could see tear apart a hip coffee shop, to a stadium sized sound, whilst keeping their vulnerable yet raging themes and sensibilities. It was the album I found them with, after spotting them on Live At Abbey Road on More4, completely blown away by the beauty and terrifying force of Hull's voice, crashing away with the guitars and cymbals. (they are fantastic live)

So track one, we begin with the opener from METN. "The Only One".



The reason I'm going for openers is I love the idea of Albums. How they can be looked at alone or from a step back, showing a band/artists progression. At a face value, I love the journey an album can put you on, and feel that album openers are extremely important as they set out the stall for the rest of the 'journey'. Here, I'd say its a bit more frenzied than the rest of the LP but it hints at the slightly sinister anger behind some of the lyrics (something that'll happen a lot as we continue with Hull, I feel) and just a hint of the vulnerability you'll find later on ("I Can Feel A Hot One" is not a song you want to hear when you're grieving, trust me). Still, it's an absolutely solid 8/10 for an album packed full of 9s and 10s.

But you can tell by the end of the first two albums, this was a band yearning for a bit more. They had lived in the shadows of their genre mates Brand New as they went on to success after success. But MO were always a different beast. I think it was time for them to show it.



In 2011, they released "Simple Math" and straight out the gate here I'll just say, I fucking love this album. Love love love it. Love how it adds a ton of strings to the recipe but still sounds oddly futuristic in places. Love the extremely sinister sounding lyrics in places. Love how it's more streamlined. You can tell this was a band who knew exactly what they wanted to do, and did it.

It actually has a small musical interlude for track one, where Hull addresses the fact this band is now bigger than he ever thought, and how that fits into his life and growth as a person. So I'm discounting that. The first "real" track is the stunning "Mighty".



The album continues much in the same vein although even the curveballs, coming from a band who now will begin to be known to think a little outside the box, are simply brilliant. The title track near the end, along with the janky, nervous "Apprehension" are for me, their pinnacle here. But it opens so strongly. And just keeps going. Had the vinyl on the last few nights and I'm still finding things in the mix. A defining record.

Okay so here we're gonna skip their next one, 2014's "Cope". It's good, don't get me wrong. But for me it's a bit messy in the production of it. Mixes are a bit over the place. The direction of the band seems to be a more "back to basics" approach. A good album to tour, plug in and play. And fair enough. I still like it, I just know this band is so much more capable of amazing brilliant things.

Moving on to the now..

Their most recent album, 2017's "A Black Mile To The Surface" is maybe my most listened to LP in the last 5 years. A concept album of sorts (something I feel is a product of Hull's involvement in scoring for films, something he done in Swiss Army Man in 2016) about a mining family in a mining village, and the frailties of man and childhood in that environment. It also ties in to his recent real life development of becoming a father, and songs here deal with that. More focused, more honest, more angry, and again, sinister.

It opens with a beautiful almost-lullaby to his newborn. Again, it's on the short side. More of an interlude. So I call this the opener to the mains, "The Gold".



Adore the soaring melodies here. The brutally honest yelps into the silence. The whole atmosphere.

It's just a morsel of the feast that follows. Each song seemingly getting better, building with peaks and troughs through the three-piece combo in the middle where each song goes into one another all building to the utterly devastating album closer "The Silence", which is like a sledgehammer to the heart. A truly astounding piece of work I can't get enough of.




The idea here has been to show some kind of growth that the band has been on. Each track is entirely of their time, I feel, and act as a great entry point into three albums I hold very dearly to myself. I know they're not to everyone's taste, that they're just a combo of Brand New & Biffy Clyro or whatever because its a man with a guitar wailing about stuff that makes him sad. But seeing and hearing the talent Hull held at such a ridiculously young age makes it a bit unfair to dismiss it completely. He's grown up in these albums, and it shows.
So have I.

Anyway, enjoy. Will probably edit.

afgavinstan wrote:

I'm just gonna freestyle it, always feels more natural for me to do that when I talk about something I love. … Anyway, enjoy. Will probably edit.

Dude, don’t edit that. Stick to your gonzo guns. Freestyle is the best style.

It’s a good read and I’ve bookmarked the songs to listen later. I’m intrigued.

Cheers lads

100% not surprised by this development. All good!