I’ll admit: The title track from Chinese Democracy didn’t wow me, so I put picking up the album a little lower on my must-have list (Wall-E won the top slot for November, and rightly so), but now Chuck Klosterman has forced me to kick Axl Rose’s 13 year opus up a few slots. How can you not get a little pumped from reading a view like this:

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom? I’ve been thinking about this record for 15 years; during that span, I’ve thought about this record more than I’ve thought about China, and maybe as much as I’ve thought about the principles of democracy. This is a little like when that grizzly bear finally ate Timothy Treadwell: Intellectually, he always knew it was coming. He had to. His very existence was built around that conclusion. But you still can’t psychologically prepare for the bear who eats you alive, particularly if the bear wears cornrows.

Read Klosterman’s entire review here.

Funk up the cube farm a little with some Monday beat madness courtesy of hobnox’s Audiotool, a face-meltingly awesome Flash doodad that’s chock full of kickass that hands you the reins of some old-school sequencers, mixers, and pedals.

Oh man, but this is going to just destroy my day.

Check it out: Audiotool

Get a mega dose of awesome with a truly kick-ass mash of The Temptations’ ‘Land Ball of Confusion’ and a handful of Rolling Stones’ tunes.

Check out Rolling Confusion

Created by Mark Vidler (aka Go Home Productions), who has put his mashup album Spliced Krispies up for free download. Hot damn, it’s good stuff.

Via Mashuptown, which so just earned a spot on my RSS list.

Courtesy of Dick Fundy:

Your summer-slamming, face-rocking, flag-waving dose of kick-ass.

Guaranteed to kick your weekend into high gear (and squar’ly in the squishies)

“What happens if you put three professional musicians in a recording studio and … have them watch porn movies?”

Well, apparently if you’re Forbidden Ensemble, the result is sonic awesome drenched in skeezy 70’s wonder. (And yes, the site is safe for work)

The gentlemen in question explain the project thusly:

Let me tell you a bit about the project. We have been obsessed by the sleazy picture quality and sounds of these old porn flicks, like Emanuelle and stuff. Being guys and all (and lots of belgian beer) we were having a ball and were joking about us getting a career in the porn business. Not as actors (well, the drummer would love th�t!), but as musicians creating the background tracks to those flicks. Well, long story short - the idea grew on us, and so one day we blocked out our schedule, rented (ok, downloaded) a couple of old Emanuelle movies, muted the sound on the tv screen and started following our male instincts. Before your start to picture strange things - we just laid down some cool instrumental vintage-ero-lounge tracks. Played on real instruments with a lot of post-production afterwards, as we wanted it to sound as old and abused as possible.

Most of the people outside the music industry just loved the idea. Ok, some where offended by us calling it “Porno Soundtracks Volume 1″ - but in general people would absolutely love to buy the cd. So we began our usual round of giving our so-called “friends” at the record labels a call. Boy, were we surprised by the amount of rejection and insults we received! Absolutely no-one at the big record labels wanted to pick this up. Reason? Well, you would think porn is not a taboo anymore in this modern world, but apparently lots of these labels only want to sell cheap r&b tracks with half-naked chicks in video-clips - as if that is different? No wonder those greedy bastards are still with their heads in the sand!

So we’re just gonna toss it out in the wild. No middle-men, no typical promotion campaign - just letting people decide for themselves. And what better way than to use the world’s most advanced distribution network? So here we are - weeks of hard work let free on “the pipes” of the internet :) It feels liberating! If you would like to help us reaching more people, would it be possible to spread the word a bit? It’d be cool to prove “our friends” that we don’t need them after all and that internet distribution is a viable distribution method ;)

All in all, a pretty sweet idea. You can download a torrent of the album (complete with artwork and CD press) for free, or do the cool thing and buy it from iTunes or AmazonMP3.

Check it out - The Forbidden Ensemble’s Porno Soundtracks Vol. One

Travis Satten hit upon a novel way for drummers and percussionists to keep their unused beats alive: The Beat Meet Project, which allows beatmakers to upload and share their creations as public-domain works that can be adapted for whatever purposes your kick-snare-tom heart desires.

Here’s Travis’s own contribution:

That’s certainly a cool idea, and a neat use of Tumblr.

Check out The Beat Meet Project.

Once again a nod to Sam Reich. Jeez, man… I’m beginning to think that ‘Hardly Working’ is more than a clever name.

Sweet flibbity jibbity! LastFM has made the new (!) Portishead album available online for your pre-release listening pleasure. DO IT.

Holy crap…it’s been 11 years since Portishead released an album of all new material, and I tell ya… Dummy and their self-titled release have never dropped out of my rotation of awesome in the time since.

So far I’m about halfway through it as of this writing, and I’m certainly digging the low-key / low-down vibe. It’s both new and familiar at the same time. Nice!

Update: Well, that’s that, and I gotta say… were someone to to ask me to sum up this album off the top of my head, it’s like a drunk rhino shuffling a wobbly soft-shoe across a crowded room. You’re gonna get knocked down, and you might as well stay on the floor. Good stuff all around.

If you’re itching for it, Third releases next week.

Last week, Eric dusted off this vintage Scene-Stealers gem of a Top 10 and gave it a shiny new sparkle and the attention this list always deserved. Check out Eric’s list here. This Tuesday it’s J.D.’s turn to spruce up his list and although he’s made a few changes, have no fear, the dragons are still making the cut. Read J.D.’s “Top 10 Movies that Prove the Future Will Suck” here. There’s also a new On-Camera review of the Judd Apatow misstep “Drillbit Taylor” right here!

Easily the best dissertation of a song wholly misunderstood and misued:

“It Doesn’t Matter Which You Heard”: the Curious Cultural Journey of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”

This clever paper traces the ubiquitous montage song from it’s humble beginnings as a little heard Leonard Cohen tune to the cliche shorthand emotional cue we’ve come to know it as.

‘Buddha pals Bacon Shoe need your love: Urb Magazine has tapped them as part of their Next 1000 contest, and it’s your vote that’ll make the difference. Vote for ‘No Jelly’ and keep some Kansas City pride knee-deep in bacon.

Vote! Vote now!