"I'm honestly trying. I act like I'm here. It's really hard to care. For there's a thin line between your wit, and your whining."

New Music Tuesday

Now, here's where I would tell you all about the sheer amazingness that is Aimee Allen's new album, A Little Happiness, which was released today after a slight delay. The key word there is would. As in, I would tell you had the workers at Best Buy #307 not been complete morons and had their bosses above them know how to run a store.

Suffice to say, their website said it would be at the store, their website still says that it's at the store, but, apparently, everybody in the Joliet metro area had rushed out to buy an album from an artist that, when brought up to every worker in the store, only I had heard about and I was out of luck. Though, they said they'll probably get more in, probably this week.

*Insert Jerk-off Hand Gesture Here*

Whatever guys. I'm an expert when it comes to working retail and I'm well versed in the get the hell away from me, I've got my own problems to deal with answers. I will get the CD by the end of the week though, it's the principle of the matter now.

So, in its stead, I bring you another great, albeit completely different, album, By the Throat by Eyedea & Abilities.

Purchase:
Fifth Element, iTunes, Amazon

This is rap, thrown down over crunching guitars, which are then taken to a turntable to be intricately scratched. It's a welcomed relief from auto-tune, excessive sampling, and anything else that one would consider main stream crap. It's also a welcomed, and slightly strange, divergence from their last album, E&A.

What once relied on home-made beats and traditional hip-hop instrumentation, is now experimenting with the piano, guitars, and an amount of distortion that could make Jack White orgasm. And, that's only half of what these guys do. The other half, the lyrics, are a dramatic departure as well.

When one would listen to E&A he could gather the belief that Eyedea knew exactly what he was better than everybody else in the whole wide world at and was left with the knowledge, not that he may be right, but that he was absolutely right about it. He made damn sure to let the world know that he was the best, but in a way that didn't make him seem cocky or douche-ish, but, instead, confident and refreshing.

On By the Throat, however, his lyrics have taken on a more personal and emotional touch, balancing the two in a way that will, now and forever, make every whiny new emo band sound impossibly more whiny. Now, he's less concerned with making everyone know what he does and more concerned with how he feels about topics ranging from heartbreak, to fame, to gun violence and, the most peculiar, doubt. One more refreshing departure from the shallow topics that have inundated mainstream rap for many years.

Because of the combination of both Eyedea and Abilities, the album doesn't ever seem to drag. When Eyedea stops rapping you become engrossed with what Abilities is going to with the turntables next and when he quiets it down, Eyedea picks right back up with a rhyme that you're going to need the lyrics sheets to follow, not because it's hard to understand, but because he throws a lot at you in a short amount of time. Which actually leads to the one minor detraction of this album; Some of the songs seem to end a little prematurely, and only slightly in the way that leaves you wanting more.

Below are some tracks that I must recommend for legally downloading if this sounds interesting to you, however I feel you'd only be cheating yourself if you didn't go out and get this album. It really works well when listened to as a whole.

Go Get:

Spin Cycle/Junk/Smile/By the Throat

For Free:

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I can't keep doing this. I can't keep on believing that my head will, one day, finally break through this damn brick wall.