Jams Dean – The Price is Alright

Jams Dean’s new video for “The Price is Alright” is like the Logan Square version of The Dove Shack’s “Summertime in the LBC” (or it is if you were watching a lot of The Box in the mid-nineties. Chicago is repped through elotes and paletas, Critical Mass and The Spire*, bike lanes and The Boulevard, hand painted signs on carnicerias and the Tastee Freeze, hot dog costumes and fuzzy man shoulders, with appearances by Sharkula, Moneyworth, Weed Wolf and my dude from West Town Bikes!

The cribbed Price is Right theme reminds me of Souls of Mischief’s cab fare, and you get to watch an anthropomorphic hot dog cannibalize a regular one. It makes me feel like the nineties and it’s everything a laidback Chicago rap track should be.

*It’s not “The Spire”, it’s the motherfucking Illinois Centennial Monument. Reckanize.

Check out the video below, download the Price Is Alright mixtape here, and check out some of the parties we’ve done with Jams Dean here

Pyyramids – Don’t Go

Cardboard sets! Cardboard props! Puppets! Toys! Recycled fabric! It’s like a checklist of my favorite things. Pyyramids is a collaboration between Drea Smith (of the awesome electro-pop duo that should have been He Say, She Say) and Tim Norwind (bassist for OKGo). The track is like Janelle Monae, filtered through Fiona Apple or Neko Case (or maybe neither, but one of those chamber pop chanteuses I always hear on NPR but forget to write down their name). It’s electropop with some very grounded elements, at times boozey, warbley, and twinkling, and the video is set to match, with a stone-faced moppet of a little girl, whose staged environment is being manipulated and rearranged around her by mostly-unseen figures; the hands and strings and sticks showing like some kind of analog green screen.

Willy Joy – Whispering Woods

Willy Joy’s new video is about as straightforward as a video that features magic wristbands transporting frilly raver babes from a grimy club to a sunny, wobble wonderland can be. “Whispering Woods” itself is a hotass dubstep track with some Sudamerican percussion and no lyrics, save for ominous whispers and a very clear “You don’t belong here!”, just before what I believe is known as “the drop” (did I use that correctly? I’ve never described one before)! Then it goes bwowwww shik shik shik buhwowwww and a disco beat comes in and the frilly raver escapes the hipster hatter and the cheshire dominatrix, and in real life everyone shakes their tits and dicks on the dance floor.

Check out the video below, and check out some of the parties we’ve done with Willy Joy here