Treat Me Like You Did the Night Before

The writing of this post is going to stretch over the next few hours as I wade through today's shipment of tomorrow's music. The folks at Matador were nice enough to sneak me advances of the upcoming Devendra Banhart and Cave Singers albums, but there are more immediate concerns at hand as I whip out the ol' exacto knife and quietly slice into this week's new releases, starting with-

Animal Collective- "Strawberry Jam" They sound more like Panda Bear's band than ever, which is a good thing. Not as spacious as "Person Pitch" but with hints of that spaciness and the whooping and yelping one expects from an Animal Collective effort. This is the one I've been looking forward to and have studiously avoided listening to advance tracks. Feels like "Feels" a little in its overall consistency, none of the dizzying highs paired with almost staggering lulls of "Sung Tongs". I think they might have resurrected Vincent Price for the mildly "Thriller"esque voice over on "Winter Wonderland", paired up with Panda's looping high vocals. If all of this week's stuff is this good (one imagines it couldn't be), I'll be a happy little store-jockey.

Various Artists- "Wattstax" I've heard most of these recordings before, but it's nice they've been given the deluxe treatment. Sound quality is great, better than I've ever heard and the packaging is lovely, sharp, crisp, iconic. Plus it's four hours of music, which is an assload of Stax. Makes a nice counterpoint to their 50th anniversary collection, painting a deeper, less broad picture of the label in 1972. I especially appreciate the inclusion of Jesse Jackson's intro to the festival and bits of Richard Pryor's stand-up, which flesh out the festival as being about more than just music.

Kanye West- "Graduation" Conversely, the packaging for the new Kanye sucks. Unless you like semi-retarded looking anime bears. Which maybe you do. "You can be my black Kate Moss tonight"? Actually, that's some pretty clever stuff, but to quote Tom Petty, I don't hear a single. And man, that voice modulation crap that Cher invented bugs the hell out of me, which is not to knock Cher or any of her scientific advancements. Did you know she invented the fishnet stocking? Okay, we all know I don't have anything halfway intelligent to say about hiphop, so on to...

50 Cent- "Curtis" Wait, this is hiphop too. I think I'm rooting for 50 in the sales battle, just cause I don't imagine Kanye would quit the busines over such a minor thing. Maybe there will be a tie? 50's definitely got the allstars on his side, but the album feels disjointed and anyway, Steve Gollnick could probably get Timbaland to record a track with him at this point. That'd be hot, I'd buy that.

More to come later...