Sad news: Local garage pop act Salmon Thrasher singer and solo artist Justin Ripley moves from Seattle to New York City this week. He'll no doubt post new material on the Internet from the far coast, but we'll miss his creative energy in the city proper.

Good news: Salmon Thrasher's new EP "Thrashin in the USA" is available now for free download at salmonthrasher.bandcamp.com. Preliminary listens reveal it to be in line with other Salmon Thrasher music — pop, but messed up, a little — and besides single "Bad Blood," "We Needn't Be Popular" is the immediate standout. Tough and staccato off the bat, the energetic number quickly hits some back-up ooohs turns into a pumped-up '50s rock song, with Ripley going for big vocal moments in angry/nerdy/sassy fashion, the rest of the band pounding behind his winning, compact melodies.

In "Go My Way," Columba City rapper Chev sketches an imagistic story that has him waking up from nightmares to run faster than a speeding bullet. He says he's been considered common street trash, and alludes to going through hard times, but elsewhere in the track he's almost above the day-to-day dealings of life, lost in thought, blowing his own mind with knowledge that, despite biological transience, the sun remains in the sky, day after day. Philosophizing leads him to poetic truths:

"I used to pick flowers for my mother real often / So thankful that she gave me this life to feel lost in"

The beat is by producer OneTwo, and features a calm, stuttering sample of the word "prayers."

So Kanye West and Raekwon's twitted-about remix of Justin Bieber's "Runaway Love" turns out to be a mash-up, the instrumental for "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F__k Wit" overlayed with Bieber's pre-existing yearning-child R&B vocals and new verses from 'Ye and Rae.

It's fun.

The highlights:

-Kanye brainstormed the whole thing on Twitter and it happened IRL in under two weeks. The number one teen pop star on an old Wu-Tang track with rap's king of cocaine slanguage. No one man should have all that power.

-Beyond its mega-pop WTFness, the song is also Kanye engineering his own lifelong rap fantasy. His verse is full of Wu-Tang quotes.

-Bieber's vocals reveal RZA's classic beat to sound like conventional 1993 New Jack Swing. When "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F__k Wit" came out on "Enter the 36 Chambers" in '93, it was immediately one of the hardest-core songs in the history of rap, a head-banger through and through. But with Bieber's bouncy melody replacing a bunch of screaming New Yorkers on PCP, all of a sudden the cymbal swings like a Skip-It and we're at the playground, hangin' with J. Biebs and the boyz.

Art by Justin Ripley; photos by me