Review: MC Breath – The Mysterious Stranger

a3428065905_10MC Breath is from Providence, Rhode Island, and his third album The Mysterious Stranger is a good introduction to his rapping and sampling skills — and not just because it’s available for free download. MC Breath has a great flow, but is amazing at sampling.  He’s great at recontextualizing the samples, and making them feel natural.  While an artist like Girl Talk can sometimes feel like a parlor trick, MC Breath’s samples are there to serve his songs — and they’re woven in perfectly.   Continue reading →

Review: Anamanaguchi – Endless Fantasy

Anamanaguchi and I have a history.  They are, officially, the Band I Keep Missing. Twice I went to one of their frequent local (Brooklyn and Manhattan) shows, and got there after they had played.  Once I showed up and saw a whole set, but they hadn’t gotten the video working, and I got the idea that their 8bit videos are a critical part of the concert experience.  Plus they only had like 5 songs at the time.  Then I missed them a couple times after that. I did, however, buy Dawn Metropolis at that first missed show, and rocked out to it.  I didn’t, like, subscribe to their list or anything, so I didn’t know they had produced a new album and funded its wide release on Kickstarter and released it themselves pretty much immediately.  I just saw the “leak” and went “HOT DAMN, NEW ANAMANAGUCHI.”

Continue reading →

Review: Man of Steel

Superman-Man-of-Steel-poster-new“What’s wrong with me, Mom?”

Superman is an icon of comic books. Superhero comics, and arguably comics in general, are what they are today partly because of him. Had he not come along, comics as we know them would be something altogether different. What they would be exactly and how different they would have been can’t be determined. But they would be different. Superman is significant for that alone. Continue reading →

Review: Making WET

WETI guess I have a soft-spot for weird, short-lived magazines.  I’ve talked about how much I love RAW here before, and now I’ve just read Leonard Koren’s book Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing about, well, making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing.  That was probably pretty obvious. Unlike RAW, though, I’ve never seen a copy of WET — but I was hipped to it when MetaFilter ran an incredibly interesting piece on it.  Once I read the articles linked, I knew I had to have this book.

I wasn’t disappointed. Continue reading →

Review: The Idea Factory

Cover of The Idea Factory by Jon GertnerBell Labs was awesome, and Jon Gertner’s new book The Idea Factory sets out to prove this simple fact.  The Bell Laboratories (funded by AT&T when they were a government-sanctioned monopoly) was the place where vacuum tubes were improved and ultimately replaced by another Bell Labs invention, the transistor.  The labs went from creating ways to treat wood so telephone poles would last a very, very long time without needing to be replaced to figuring out how cellular telephony would work.  It’s not an exaggeration to say that Bell Labs created the future. Continue reading →

Review: The Voice of Midnight

Cover of "Voice of Midnight"
Cover of Voice of Midnight

So, we’re stealin’ the idea from the Sparks Project and doing one with probably even more records out there — The Residents!  And this time we’re changing it up a little bit — we’ve got two hardcore Residents fans in me and Rich, but Aila is, at best, a casual fan, who will be hearing about 99% of these records for the first time.  DANGEROUS!  So, enjoy, THE RESIDENTS PROJECT! Continue reading →

Crush On Brilliant Garbage!

Janelle Monae
Janelle Monae (Photo credit: thomyboecker)

I was gonna call this post “Crush on Janelle Monáe“, but really, who doesn’t have a crush on her.  She is super rad.  But anyway, this week’s show we talk about the passing of Ray Manzarek, the new Daft Punk album, the importance of lyrics, remastering, songs about kitties, psychedelia, androids, and Paul Williams!

This weeks picks: Janelle Monáe, Pink Floyd and Primus!

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Review: “Q.U.E.E.N” by Janelle Monáe feat. Erykah Badu

Cover art of Q.U.E.E.N. singleWe will create and destroy ten art movements in ten years.

That’s what’s being typed in the new video for Janelle Monáe‘s brilliant single “Q.U.E.E.N.”, with Erykah Badu.  And if anyone’s going to do it, it’s Monáe and her cohorts at Wondaland.  I’ve loved Monáe since Will Johnsen hipped me to her Metropolis EP, and I bought Arch-Android the day it came out, and I can’t wait for the new album The Electric Lady.  And with her releasing this single a little over a month ago, the wait has gotten much harder — it might be the best thing she’s done to date.  Continue reading →

Review: Any Similarity To Persons Living Or Dead is Purely Coincidental

Any Similarity To Persons Living Or Dead Is Purely CoincidentalI think I’ve mentioned before that Liquid Television was both hugely influential on me and kinda turned out to be an animated version of RAW.  And it was Liquid TV where I first saw the work of RAW and, later MAD contributor, Drew Friedman.  He had a few “Uncle Louie” shorts, featuring the titular character travelling through the sewers to save on travel expenses.  I loved the stippling style of the artwork, the amazingly detailed and photorealistic characters — a mix of the perfectly normal and the strangely grotesque — and the cutout animation.   Continue reading →

Crush On Moms

8 Tracks cover art
8 Tracks cover art (Photo credit: ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓)

It’s a special Mother’s Day episode of Crush On Radio!  What makes it so special?  EVERY ONE OF OUR PICKS HAS BEEN LISTENED TO BY A MOTHER.

Presumably.

We also talk about the idea of the New Michael Jackson, Sunn O))), pretentious and terrible band names, dance punk, pop, Timbaland, Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane, racism of the allegedly ironic variety, Track 8 (the app, not the track), Pink Floyd, and Andy Ithnako.  Whose name is really hard to spell.  Did I do it right?

Picks this week: !!!, Justin Timberlake, Wax Fang.

Subscribe on iTunes!  Or follow us at CrushOnRadio.com!  Or on Facebook!  Or Twitter? Continue reading →