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The story behind local mixtape "GIVE" is ethically compelling, no doubt.

Tastemakers at Caffé Vita reach out to area musicians for old and new tracks, then compile a download-only mp3 release that's sold to benefit Arts Corps and food banks? Can't hate that.

But "GIVE" is also an snapshot of the current moment in local pop. That is, if you narrow your focus to three places: downtown labels Sub Pop and scion Hardly Art (nine acts represented), Seattle film/TV director Lynn Shelton's taste (four acts from her upcoming "$5 Cover" MTV show about Seattle music), and new-school hiphop (five acts).

Even though "GIVE" ignores whole genres—electronic music, jazz, heavy-sounding rock, etc.—there's a crash course appeal to it, and as a kind of subplot, the collection shows vocals-focused guitar rock and nontraditional hiphop competing. In the album's best track, they mix, hopefully suggesting a new era of cooperation.

On "Victim of the Modern Age," Champagne Champagne's Thomas Gray and Pearl Dragon rhyme in a spaced-out talk-rap style about Basquiat kids having baby Basquiat kids. It's free-associative without being alienating. Tattooed ex-alcoholic singer-songwriter Chris Mansfield (Fences) handles the hook with a catch in his throat, convincingly emotional and sounding as if he's on the other end of an echo chamber. Mark Gajadhar (aka DJ Gajamagic) takes a break from samplers and drum machines and turns in an exhilarating, athletic performance behind a traditional drum kit, and for those that know Gajadhar's work in Past Lives and Blood Brothers, it's like finally. The man is a hurricane. "Victim of the Modern Age" hits on several levels, and as an exclusive track to "GIVE," is the album's clear standout.

Mad Rad's jokey "Love in a Strange World" is British-accented Euro-pop rap, a weird invention. Fresh Espresso's "Gettin' Money" is music to drive really fast to, a distinctly melodic variant of hyped-up, smoothed-out synth-rap. "Go" may be the last song we ever hear from The Saturday Knights (the group has sadly broken up), pulling off the trick of bringing Soca, punk, and rap together. In general, the hiphop songs on "GIVE" push for sonic newness more than the rock ones.

Seattle's soft-rock mini-movement is summed up by Arthur & Yu and Grand Archives, who bring slow-core and posi-core Prozac to "GIVE." Fleet Foxes' song "Mykonos" shows up from 2008. Named after Greece's party island, the song sounds pivotal in retrospect, an early elucidation of the Foxes' ambition to mix classic rock with a medieval feel. The Blakes show up and sound British, scrappy, poppy.

Pearly Gate Music's "Big Escape" takes cues from The Beach Boys circa "Wild Honey" (the LSD years), with Zach Tillman (brother of Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman, also in Pearly Gate Music, also on "GIVE" with a solo track) singing just like Carl Wilson. The screeching noise-guitar solo at the end of the track brings welcome chaos.

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The dialogue between hiphop and rock on "GIVE" might appear a little differently when promised tracks materialize from Ben Gibbard, David Bazan, The Dutchess and The Duke, The Long Winters, Throw Me The Statue, and Unnatural Helpers. If you buy "GIVE" now at www.giveseattle.org, you'll eventually get an email explaining how to get those. But for now we have what we have, and it's 30 local tracks for $7. A lot of them are good. Some are great. Some, like Champagne Champange and Fences', might be the future.

Note: I originally had the Mad Rad and Champagne Champagne song titles oppositely assigned for the whole article. "Love in a Strange World" and "Victim of the Modern Age": similar, no? Anyways, it's my fault, and the error is fixed now. Rather than mar the copy with strike-throughs, I thought I'd add this note.

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Brand new beautifulness from Baltimore's Beach House. The way the guitar soothes but keeps gently going out of tune recalls Pavement's "Zurich is Stained," which I love, but the shoegaze-y heavy breathing vocals and overall shimmer-haze of "Norway" make it an obvious Beach House song.

Photo by Jason Nocito

Adam Swan (R) and Tyler Swan (L) with Foscil at BLVD Gallery

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Wildly inventive Seattle band Foscil works in a style that may or may not be commercially viable—sci-fi-sounding, movie soundtrack-y jazz-rock fusion—but the band doesn't care about that. It's all about the music, man.

Foscil plays songs from its upcoming December release "Residential" Saturday at The Crocodile. Three members will sit, one will stand, everyone will look like they're in a regular band even though they aren't.

Other things Foscil doesn't care about: appealing to hipsters, worrying about occasionally dipping into avant-elevator jazz, or sounding anything like Truckasauras, the popular electro/dance/hiphop concern three of its four members are also in. (Ryan Trudell and brothers Adam and Tyler Swan are in Truckasauras; Anthony Moore plays in local Gypsy swing/'60s rock group Raggedy Anns). Adam Swan calls Foscil "kinda self-indulgent."

"That's the luxury of Foscil," Swan says on the phone. "There's no press to do anything. It's all really comfortable and natural and doesn't feel like a job."

The members are all in their late-20s/early-30s, all from Kirkland, all purple kangaroos (the mascot of Lake Washington High School), and Foscil will probably never break up because nobody plans on stopping being friends.

"Residential" is named after Foscil's half-year-long residency at Belltown's now-closed BLVD Gallery in 2008, where the band forced experiments on itself in an urban contemporary art environment. One concert was played using only electronic instruments and samplers, another with traditional instruments, another with a rapper, and so on. Each made flexible use of material co-written by the group in a Greenlake house.

Finished in Fall 2008, "Residential" sat for a year while Truckasauras became the best band in Seattle. It'll be released on 7-inch records in an accordion-style book by boutique New York outfit Journal of Popular Noise—only 300 copies—and on iTunes.

Perhaps the most creatively sourced sound on "Residential" is the first one on the album, a bell-like tone used for a super-slow hook on "Danger." It comes from an old music box the Swan brothers grew up with in Kirkland. They took it apart, figured out how to slow it down, and isolated individual notes which they recorded and sampled. In the background of the track, slow suspense comes from a synthesizer, fading to the foreground; glockenspiel and marimba decorate the space and brassy trumpet notes arc over the whole thing (Anthony Moore has a degree in jazz trumpet). The song sounds like waking up in a planetarium.

"Filfy" is another oddity, a loose, instrumental cover of a song by Filthy Rich, a beyond-obscure local rapper. Foscil found out about Filthy Rich through old-school Seattle abstract-rapper Specs One, a Foscil collaborator who has a large collection of rap CD-Rs that never made it out into the world. When "Filfy" drops bass clarinets over a Tyler Swan breakbeat (he's a beast on drums), it's a warm, triumphant hit.

Foscil indulges in unnecessary moments sometimes. When Adam Swan's Radiohead/Tortoise-style guitar lines mix with Moore adopting a neo-mariachi trumpeting style, it's a bad combination from good chefs. On some songs, like the Mark Mothersbaugh-esque "Roy The Barber," the band sounds cutesy. Not its strong suit.

"Ran" is Foscil at its best, unhurried through a gorgeous rainy-night electro/acoustic song. Synths are used for depth, melodica for lightness, and Moore's trumpet/clarinet for overall lift-off. The arrangement is weird, but doesn't call attention to its own weirdness. It's mellow, sad, perfect.

Anthony Moore (L) and Tyler Swan (R) at BLVD Gallery

Live photos by Martin Collette, product shot by Jeremy Balderson

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Seattle superproducer Jake One recently released 40 minutes of hiphop with rapper Freeway, one of the most original voices in rap, on a free downloadable mixtape called "The Beat Made Me Do It." Get it here.

The compositions are simple: looped samples of funk and soul records Jake likes from the late '70s and early '80s. He made the whole thing in three or four hours, he estimates.

"I just grabbed some records and looped 'em up. [Freeway] wanted to do a mixtape and I didn't want to do what everyone else does, rap on 'A Milli' or whatever beat is hot at the moment."

Over the weekend, I went to Scarecrow Video and discovered "Rappin'," a musical movie made in 1985.

Directed by Joel Silberg—who also directed "Breakin'," a 1984 musical about breakdancing—"Rappin'" stars Mario Van Peebles as John Hood. Home from jail, Hood reconnects with his family and merry men (two of which are Eriq La Salle and Kadeem Hardison, of "ER" and "A Different World" fame) to find no small amount of drama in his beloved inner-city Pittsburgh.

The movie feels like it was made by tons of people, each of whom thought they were making a different movie, none of whom had ever actually listened to rap music.

Bad things about "Rappin'":

1. The acting. Pornographic movies have better acting than "Rappin'."

2. The overdubbing. All the dialogue is added post-production, none of it matches with anybody's mouth.

3. The raps. Everyone is off beat, which is crazy because they're rapping the simplest raps ever rapped.

4. The plot. IMDb says: "An ex-con and break-dancer helps save a neighborhood from a greedy developer while trying to win a rap contest." Throw in a romance and a gang war and you're almost there. It's a confuse-a-thon.

5. The sexual politics/misogyny. Eriq La Salle calls somebody "fag." Hood's love interest talks like she hurt her head in a car crash. All the other women are hysterically emotional or hooker-ish or wide-eyed in love with Hood. There's a rap called "Lady Alcohol" wherein alcohol is personified as an evil lady. She'll getcha.

6. The characters. Characters in musicals are allowed to be a little flat, but when you put a fat guy in a sweatshirt that says "I Love Food" and name him "Fats," that's going too far.

7. The age-inappropriateness of one of the kids' songs. "Golly Gee" by Tuff, Inc., a group of children in "Rappin'" for no apparent reason, is weirdly adult. It features a long spoken word section where a boy pleads for a girl to drop the zero and get with the hero. The whole thing has a latent sexual energy that feels like it came from some creepy old man songwriter/choreographer.

"Rappin'" is a spectacular disaster on every artistic level. The day I rented it, I watched it twice. If you like laughing and are in the mood for some good ol' brainlessness, definitely check it out.

This is why KEXP wins. The xx doing "Crystalised" live, now with video.

Previously blogged:

Falling in love with The xx.

Deeper in love with The xx, in advance of the KEXP performance.

Howard Silver is responsible for this charming feature about vinyl.

via Spence

Pixies at once excelled at traditional rock 'n' roll and made fun of it at the Paramount Monday, playing the entirety of its sexual, violent 1989 album "Doolittle." The sold out crowd screamed for every song and seemed to take the concert as a straight-up spectacle of sound and fury.

The band is credited with inventing alternative rock in America, and after years of limited appreciation is more popular now than it was in its heyday. The "Doolittle" tour is a nostalgic cash-in, but it's not The Beach Boys in the '80s. Today's Pixies do not disgrace yesterday's Pixies.

The band played "Doolittle" expertly and with all its intentionally psychotic-sounding wildness preserved, in fine playing shape if slightly older and fatter than before. It was unclear if the frothing audience cared just how complicated a record "Doolittle" is, or was there just to rock out. It was also unclear whether or not that mattered.

The star of the show was blank-faced, black-clad guitarist Joey Santiago. He strangled his electric guitar gracefully, just like he does on record, and in one extended solo, affirmed and confounded his badassness by not only showing how little creativity other guitarists put into their styles, but also how his own tools—that sound and fury—can be empty gestures.

It was during "Vamos," a furious rock song not actually on "Doolittle." The rest of the band kept a brisk, melody-less beat—Kim Deal on bass, David Lovering on drums, Charles "Frank Black" Thompson laying off vocals and rhythm guitar for a bit—when Santiago took the spotlight. Attacking his Les Paul in terse, bird-like flashes, he played pretty much the opposite of a fluid, scale-based blues-rock solo. Santiago manipulated feedback static buzz, hit his strings with Lovering's drum stick to make a clanging roar, and clawed at the end of his fretboard, creating a sound like a dolphin pod in mid-slaughter. After looking over to Thompson with an expression that seemed to say, "I don't know what to do next," for his finale, Santiago played a slow, seething version of the "Jeopardy" TV show theme song.

It was guitar solo as "guitar solo," an exercise in expression that avoided hitting any traditional sweet spots. By the time "Jeopardy" happened, Santiago had gone fully sarcastic.

But then he pulled out of his absurd spiral and it was right back into "Vamos," Deal and Lovering pumping along, Thompson screaming his head off in Spanish about moving to California and playing on the beach, as if that were a terrifying prospect.

With the exception of the fact that Thompson's guitar was too loud, Pixies' "Doolittle" songs sounded great. Album bookends "Debaser" and "Gouge Away" came off like sibling destroyers, the former gleeful, the latter ominous. Slow centerpiece "Monkey Gone to Heaven" was every bit as epic and heavy as the album version.

Through all the songs, Thompson followed Santiago's lead and replicated his tics and quirks from the "Doolittle" recording. The audience followed along with hiccup-screams and rhythmic heavy breathing. It must be noted Thompson's screams on "Tame," the most shocking part of "Doolittle," hit hard.

"Hey" was everyone's favorite song. The spare slow-dance number about whores in Thompson's head was greeted with a word-for-word sing-along from everyone in the Paramount, aided by selected lyrics projected on a screen behind the band. Of all Pixies songs, it has Thompson's most naked, muscular vocals, and the best bass line of Deal's career. Everyone's second favorite song was "Here Comes Your Man," a tune so rote in its pop jangle that Pixies almost didn't leave it on "Doolittle." The silliest song of the evening was "La La Love You," which seemed more celebrated for its catchiness than it's intentional stupidity.

The Paramount audience took Pixies as rhythms, riffs, and screams. And for a rock show, maybe that was better than considering what was happening on stage as some sort of conceptual statement-making. Really, it was and it wasn't.

After taking two encores and coming to the front of the stage to wave and bow for ecstatic superfans, it looked like Deal, Lovering, Thompson, and Santiago were happy to be happy, and smart enough not to ask why they were received so rapturously. They took the praise and walked away.

Renton High School

Last night I was at a listening party for Beacon Hill hiphop group Helladope's "Return to Planet Rock" album. Verdict: It's one of the Seattle's best hiphop releases for 2009. Tay Sean and Jerm rapping and singing on synth-funk makes other groups in town seem anal retentive. It's so good, it's almost British.

At the party, I met 10-4 Roger. He DJs Fridays at Baltic Room on Capitol Hill.

I'd previously blogged about his excellent remix of Helladope's already unimpeachable two-step masterpiece and "Return to Planet Rock" standout "Just So You Know," so we talked about that. Roger reminded me he also did beats on ex-local group THEESatisfaction's lo-fi Afro-psych odyssey "Snow Motion," a fact I'd forgotten or ignored after favorably reviewing it last August.

Listening now, I can hear it, the similarity between THEESatisfaction's Roger-produced "Cabin Fever" and the "Just So You Know" remix. Both songs have a downward movement in their synthesizer melodies, and rhythms that play with time, a little.

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Roger informed me he and Stasia Irons, the main rapper in THEESatisfaction, went to school together at Renton High. Dyme Def went there, too, he said. All three members: Brainstorm, Fearce Villain, and S.E.V.

Interesting that one class of students could produce 10-4 Roger's cartoony, dubby synth-rap, THEESatisfaction's weird/dark art project, and also Dyme Def's famous-sounding club bangers. The difference in approach to hiphop between songs like "Cabin Fever" and, say, "Pickupyaflow" is truly vast.

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There must be something in the water down in Renton.

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Brooklyn man Kyp Malone's band Rain Machine is not as famous as his other band, TV on the Radio, but with songs as good as "Smiling Black Faces" one wonders why.

Is "Smiling Black Faces" not TV on the Radio done better? It's lift-every-voice triumph rock, fronted by throaty, wounded-sounding, multi-tracked vocals. TVotR's bread and butter. But unlike most of TVotR's last album "Dear Science," (2008) "Smiling Black Faces" does not forcefeed any world-music funk styles or come off cloying.

Rain Machine opens for Pixies tonight, Nov. 12 at The Paramount. My preview of that concert is here.

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Two ghosts on one track: Michael Jackson on the vocals, lifted from his completely-erased-from-public-memory "Butterflies" (2001), and the late J Dilla on the beat, taken from his group Slum Village's "Players" (2000). DJ extraordinaire J Rocc is responsible for the beautiful confluence.

Funny how nobody was really giving M.J. any musical credit in 2001. The remix goes a long way to divorce M.J. the musician from M.J. the media splattershow, and makes one thing really obvious: Michael Jackson could sing.

The short version: The War Room is for sale. Even if it's purchased and run under the same name, the club you knew is all but gone. Full article here.

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This song is a minute-thirty of straight aqueous fire from Tay Sean, hiphop producer, rapper, and possibly the funkiest 22-year-old in Seattle. Its title is unpublishable by The Seattle Times' decency standards.

It's instrumental hiphop, and feels a little like West Coast funk with that talk box squiggling in the background, a little like Madlib/Dilla the way each beat breathes the rest of the track in and out. But it's the farting, bubbling synths that sell it for me. The tasteful deployment of a woman's orgasm noise is just icing on the cake.

I got it from his Twitter. More music from Tay Sean here and here.

Photo by Rabid Child

It's short notice, but I'd be remiss in not mentioning the Little Dragon concert tonight, Nov. 10, at Nectar. "Blinking Pigs" is a good example of the group's magic synth-pop. If this is your first time with the song, welcome to what you won't be able to get out of your head for the rest of the day.

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Matson on Music favorite THEESatisfaction opens the show.

Here's some hardcore hiphop from Seattle's Fatal Lucciauno.

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For those not familiar, Fatal was born in Chicago "Siamese with a handgun," meaning biologically connected to crime, and moved to Seattle young and flat broke. Growing up in the Central District, he gained the kind of knowledge you probably don't want to know about your city or people in general. He's 22, but in conversation seems at least ten years older.

Fatal's rap game is complete. He's got the tech-y stuff down—adept with multiple-meanings metaphors, famous for a no-wasted-syllables slow-flow—and his hyper-passionate live presence is a thing to behold.

"Gangsta" incorporates personal details, possibly, but the song is more rhyme-y than autobiographical. It's phonics-conscious, densely composed, and loosely about guns, sex and overall forward momentum through life. It's post-pain, barely on the other side of a personality divide.

"I blew through it
All the stereotypes
Sony, Panasonic
Whichever you like"

Everett representative MTK produced "Gangsta," and via text message would not reveal the source of its blaxploitation sounds. The samples feel Mayfield-y, though, and work well with MTK's pumped up bass and drums.

The gangsta rap song is part of the GIVE project, which benefits Arts Corps and local food banks. More on GIVE via post-jump press release.

Fatal Lucciauno plays Chop Suey Friday, Nov. 13. Doors at 9 p.m., tickets are $7.
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