Won't sell 'em no dreams, but the inspiration is free

So I had my whole post pretty much in my head, and then I may have stumbled onto my favorite album from the Oh Five so far.

Kanye West, "Gone" (feat. Consequence & Cam'ron) - I can pretty much guarantee you that if you don't like this song, you can safely take a pass on Late Registration entirely - everything good in this song may get one-upped elsewhere on the album, but good god, EVERYTHING great about this album shows up in this song. Actually, that's pretty much it in a nutshell - my biggest problem with College Dropout was that after you train your ears to appreciate the production, it all started to sound kind of same-y ("Hey, there's that sample", "Hey, there's the beat", "Hey, I'm going to go ahead and skip on forward to 'Two Words'"). This is, to say the least, Not A Problem on Late Registration; the production here is as labored and attentive to detail as anything on Hotter Than July, and it has the dual effect of eliciting great stuff from people I usually hate (wave hello to Killa Cam) and more subdued stuff from Kanye (well, subdued for him, anyway).

It would be easy to just say that this is all due to Jon Brion, whose involvement with this record is already taking on the status of legend (and whose payday will allow him to purchase a gigantic pillow to weep into over the Fiona debacle). I mean, it certainly makes sense to think of Brion when you hear the lush maximalist new-soul sound, but you run the risk of neglecting most of Kanye's contributions to the greatest hip-hop album ever - "Never Change" might not have been as warm and human as "Gone", but it damn sure had a pulse. I don't think it's an accident that both men owe a lot of their careers to the institution of soundtracks; Kanye's production philosophy consists largely of him raiding the soundtrack to his youth, while Brion, of course, has a fair bit of practical experience in the field. At the very least, it sure doesn't feel like a coincidence (and the first single sampling Shirley Bassey doesn't help me get shut of it, either).

I digress. My point is: this is dynamite shit, and you better believe I'll be buying this on the release day. So should you. (Click here to pre-order Late Registration from Amazon)

EDIT: Kanye in an interview with i-D, which I cannot find online:

i-D: "you mentioned portishead earlier in the studio. it sounds like kind of a wonky influence, but that was a huge hip hop album, right?"

kw: "it's my favourite type of music. i always thought that their music was a whole 'nother level from this average hip hop shit. we havce the same theory about what we want out of music ... i want people to be amazed over and over and over and i want this music that i'm making to be a soundtrack to their life."

w00t.

Royksopp, "Only This Moment" (Royksopp Hissige mix) - Ordinarily I'm not much for house music that sounds better suited to a catwalk than a dancefloor, but this is just too good to pass up. The key is to put yourself in a positing where you can actually appreciate the low end of this thing, because once you can actually hear all the cool little basslines going WAAAAY down at the bottom, the song stops sounding like a shitty third-rate Agent Sumo knockoff and starts sounding like a lost Phoenix b-side, ESPECIALLY when the vocals finally kick in (I know, I know, Erlend Oye in Phoenix-liking shock horror etc). They could have put this on the b-side of "Victim Of The Crime" and nobody would have been the wiser - I mean, yeah, the exact same people would have still been the only ones buying it*, but they'd have been happier for six more minutes.

*and wow, that's the most tortured sentence I've ever written

Also, for those of you with some time to kill and a jones for the inner workings of the music industry, Pitchfork has your sweet sweet her'on. I've been reading PFM for three years now and this article is only the second time I've been compelled to write to the author (although in retrospect I really should build a shrine of some sort to Nick Sylvester for his infamous Daft Punk review).