Vladislav Delay - "Recovery IDea" (Semantica)
Delay is of course well-known among bedroom house-ophiles for the diminishing returns of his dancefloor-oriented Luomo project, which began in 2000 with the spare, spacey, and brilliant Vocalcity and continued through a regrettable process of half-assed pop-flavored sweetening to arrive at the gauche, neon keyboard noodles of 2006's Paper Tigers. A songsmith Delay is not; he's most productive when suspended between ancient house music call-and-response hooks and washes of crackly digital atmosphere. So how fares his most recent return (literal in the case of this hard drive offcut) to the instrumental dub-techno that first made waves across various IDM discussion hubs at the tail end of the '90s, the stuff that was all crackle and no hooks? Wrapped in headphones—the good ones, not the chintz that comes pre-packed with your media player—it's pretty damn compelling, a squishy symphony for doors slammed shut by the wind in a parking garage overnight or feet tramping blindly through the snow. "Recovery IDea" is the sort of Autechre-esque slurp and clang that becomes weirdly affecting when a producer (as Delay does here) layers an atmospheric hum behind it, like a murmur of Erik Satie strings tying the stray noises into something almost human. Dancefloor remixes from Andy Stott, Fibla, and others add some drive to that slurp and clang, but their traditionalist techno rhythms offer the unexpected side effect of dampening some of the track's strange magic by tidying up Delay's trippy timekeeping.

Vladislav Delay [MySpace; Hear the track here]

Blood On The Wall - "Acid Fight" (Social Registry)
Liferz, New York band Blood On The Wall's album of throwbacks to the bratty murk I sieved from indie-rock zine recommendations while in high school, has been out for a minute, and I did enjoy it upon the first few listens before the Times New Viking album made it feel somewhat redundant. It was only after I saw it lurking on Matos' quarter-of-the-year-gone 'round up that I replayed album-closer "Acid Fight" and I'm glad I did. The blogosphere has taken the easy way out en masse in constantly comparing singer Brad Shanks (rightly more or less) to a pre-maturity Black Francis, but I'm gonna be contrary and say the first thing to come to mind was Weird Al commissioned by Touch And Go to parody the Jesus Lizard's David Yow, minus the cock-swinging. (At least in the first minute, Shanks panting heavy about something being wrong with his face, the kind lines that've launched a thousand Flipper tributes.) The song's mostly a lugubrious goof—in case the non-sequitur title and the invocation of Mr. Yankovic didn't tip you off—but the grungy riff (in the "less Possum Kingdom, more Slay Tracks" sense) and Ibold-bass seesaw back-and-forth with more of those golden-age indie yuks than you'd find in a mountain of modern folkies.

Blood On The Wall [MySpace]

Mann feat. Sean Kingston - "Ghetto Girl" (Sony/BMG)

I burned through the above two reviews fairly quickly before coming upon "Ghetto Girl" and needing to take a break because I was rendered momentarily brain-dead by Sean Kingston and his utterly shameless producer/groomer J.R. Rotem's latest plundering of my sister's old 45 collection for hooks. (What's next, the Go-Go's "Vacation"? "Goonies Are Good Enough"? A "Little Critter" story?) The beat's got the kind of tinny, crappier-than-an-actual-ringtone quality that gives a bad name to good ol' fashioned cheap-sounding Southern rap; baby-faced L.A. rapper Mann is the bold-faced name offering the girl-crazy rhyming ballast on the verses; but typically for '08 the whole point is Kingston's balls-out interpolation, which had Maura wondering if his "father was really a Z100 playlist from 1985." Rotem's borrowing is even more crudely blatant than the Ben E. King lift on "Beautiful Girls," and perhaps not coincidentally, I'm 75 percent sure I despise this more on the fifth play more than I did "Beautiful Girls" on the fiftieth. (It helped that I found "Beautiful Girls" charming 'til overexposure set my teeth grinding with every "suiiiiicidal.") Then there's that niggling 25 percent that has me playing it again, laughing through the wincing, and thinking that if the song becomes as inescapable as Kingston's smash, we can at least console ourselves that no crossover teen hip-hop acts have discovered the ack-ack-ack-ack hook inside "Movin' Out" just yet.

Mann [MySpace]