Click to play

I introduced him earlier this week, and here we have more kaleidoscopic Grizzly Bear-ishness from 22-year-old Queen Anne multi-instrumentalist/bedroom producer James Cooley aka Mesita. As far as I can tell, nobody in Seattle is caring about him, and I don't know why.

"Living and Breathing" starts with a dense web of overdubbed acoustic guitar, then gives way to a thwacking groove with open-chord pianos stabbing and falsetto vocals floating like feathers from a recently exploded pillow. There's a shadow of Motown in the crisp/echo-ing electric guitar accents and the way the tambourine/snare combo sashays. It sounds like a band, but it's one guy.

Click to play

Though attributed to Capitol Hill rap group Mash Hall and featuring a verse from its largely unsung Filipino tough-guy sex rapper Ronnie Voice, this is basically a djblesOne solo cut. He did the chintzy electro-surf beat and most of the vocals, flavoring the track with breathy, highly mannered sexcapade lyrics that sound more like nursery rhymes than raps. The sing-song chorus is ripped off from LL Cool J's "6 Minutes of Pleasure," but it's not a bite so much as an homage. The song comes from a recent short, strange, electro-paced Mash Hall release called "UPGRAYEDD."

Click to play

You can sort of tell this is a Kanye West beat — the repeating "hey!" interjection bears a resemblance to his recent work on Drake's "Show Me a Good Time" — but it doesn't sound a whole lot like what he's done in the past, be it chipmunk soul, sample/synth hybrids or hazy R&Bemo. It's almost like he made "Live Fast, Die Young" in the yacht-rap style of Rick Ross' main production collaboration team J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, with dramatic strings and lounge/mariachi horns swelling and changing keys and oh-so-traditionally soundtracking lifestyles of the rich and famous. The track is co-produced by West's Chi-City mentor No I.D., so who knows which element came from which producer, although the layered drums in particular sound like both guys, electro-whip tones from Kanye, martial snares from No I.D. The fact of the matter is there's a lot going on here and it all works together in a blatantly digital and obviously organic mixture.

That's to say nothing of the verses, which find Rick Ross furthering his relatively newfound reputation as a lyricist — "young and radical, methods are mathematical" — and Kanye West in headlong plunge mode, "back by unpopular demand," mispronouncing stuff on purpose, doing wild impressions of ladies and fans, calling himself "Martin Louis the King, Jr." and dropping one super-memorable couplet that doesn't rhyme but whatever:

"My outfit's so disrespectful / you can go ahead and sneeze cause my presence blessed you"

Photos by me