THE DIRTY DIAMONDS – MONSTER BALLADS

In their first video, for the song “The Right Direction”, the Dirty Diamonds show how quickly a day of phone calls and pizza parties can degenerate into a Satanic, pansexual orgy full of drugs, violence and sex (is it redundant to add sex, since I already mentioned that it was an orgy, or is it important to clarify that I wasn’t using orgy as a quantifier?).

The track is the first single off their new EP Monster Ballads, their second after 2008’s fuzzy-and-canny-as-hell-sounding-but-superb “Meet The Dirty Diamonds”. On the surface, The Dirty Diamonds are throwback soul in the vein of Sharon Jones and Amy Winehouse, but then there’s all this other shit that comes up when you listen closer, there’s the electronic drums and this sometimes grotesquely distorted guitar, odd melodies and weird synth lines, and instrumentation that hew closer to the scuzzier parts of new wave and the clubbier parts of no wave (or vice versa, I forget).

While the music, if not the lyrics, of that first album, sounded relentlessly joyful, the tracks on this album are loaded with remorse. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a party album. It totally is, but it’s not a Tilly & the Whale/Matt + Kim/Andrew WK party album, so much as an picking yourself off the floor and partying again, of trudging through the bad shit to get to the good shit.

The band makes a point in their bio that, genre-similarities aside, they’re coming more from a place of The Velvet Underground than the Shangri-Las, and I don’t know if it’s because I’ve seen them and I know where they’re coming from, because there aren’t a lot of specifics in the lyrics, but I feel like the music is evocative of its time and place, of Chicago and Logan Square and the house party scene, and the imagery I pull when I listen to it isn’t wiping away tears and reapplying makeup in a nightclub dressing room, so much as a hungover walk of shame down Milwaukee Avenue.

Download the whole album at UR Chicago or buy a limited 7″ pressing here

BBU – FEAR OF A CLEAR CHANNEL PLANET

BBU’s long-awaited video for “Chi Don’t Dance” is finally here, existing as both a shorthand introduction to the group and a love letter to Chicago, with scenes of footworking under the the giant iron Puerto Rican flags that welcome you into Humboldt Park, and in another spot where a Pan-African flag, a United States flag, and a Chicago flag wave in the background, not to mention Clemente high school, Malcolm X college, a hot dog joint, a tank, and snow (this stood out to me for some reason, when do you see snow in a video?), plus concert footage from packed shows at Quennect Four and the Metro.

The video comes in conjunction with their first mixtape. Mixed by DJ RTC and hosted by Million Dollar Mano, Fear of a Clear Channel Planet bounces from the machinegun fire-fast party rap and juke found on tracks like “Chi Don’t Dance” and “C.H.I.C.A.G.O.”, and the more Dead Prez-styled backpacker political hip hop of songs like “I Do This For My Culture”, plus remixes and production by D-Wizz, Arlo, Tha Truth Tella, Supreme Cuts, and Shifty Tricks, and some old cuts that have been kicking around since BBU’s old myspace page, when in a live setting, the band could’ve been anywhere from the three to thirteen guys.

The whole album is available for free from foccp.com