Every action carries its own reaction- whiplash and backlash. These days we hear much malingering of two things mostly, ‘Chill Wave’ and ‘Drag’. The problem with these two sub-genres is that the materials and tonalities that define them are rather bare, and thus easy to replicate by any aspiring upstart with access to the technology. Low barriers to entry, which in other parts of the economy conduce to competition with well-known benefits for the consumer do, in the case of music, increase the signal to noise ratio, and eventually induce exhaustion and nausea. Themes become clichés, the kiss of death in the constant race towards difference and individuality.

20jazzfunkgreats hovers above the battlefield circumspectly, caring little as we do for the pendular movements of fashion and trend, whichever way the swing. We use Jimmy Chombo’s prototypical soul vision binoculars to detect that unmistakable fractal seal of goodness glowing inside a few of the skirmishing participants, slip into our Octo-camo suit and descend into the cultural killing fields, to reap their skulls with merciless love. We line them up in this blog, our trophy collection, for you to peruse.

Say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s ‘Happiness Only Real When Shared’ cassette, just about to be released by Impose Magazine. Superficially, one might associate his gentle cadences and dozy drones with the materials oft featured by some other blogs out there. But if you dive into ‘Duckfangs tickle my Ankles’ you will find a “coral reef shaped into a music-box at whose top stands a ballerina, spinning in a codeine haze to the muffled echo of a forgotten 2-step banger’ backdrop, the warmth and craft which is lacking from many a downsized animal collective clone clogging the airwaves of the underground.

We think he is great.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman- Duckfangs tickle my Ankles

The Masculine Dead is the bonfire music of droid cowboys escaped from luscious arcades where they were displayed for the amusement of the elite, soundtrack of a desert of Peckinpahian prosecution and existential despair, under a celestial map whose clockwork mechanisms are laid bare from the vantage point of a millennial lifespan. The excitement of a Mexican stand-off shines off when you know you can’t die, and the beauty of dawn turns sour when you know that the gates of heaven are shut for you.

This is the song you sing to the rattlesnakes in their burrows, and the silhouettes of grinning coyotes wishing you into carrion, always disappointed, to the lusty young homesteaders in the limbo between here and civilisation, loneliness fuelling the flames of a possible romance, never to be fulfilled.

Hostage Sex- The Masculine Dead

Edmund Xavier of Horrid Red fame has teamed up with vocalist Xhaan V. to, as Hostage Sex (soz, no link) deliver us a seriously cool slice of cold war Americana, think Blank Dogs pumped on Chris Isaak’s conflicted twangy swagger.

We would like to hear more stuff like this, cold wave and country might sound like unlikely partners, but they are not. Just remember the way in which Wall of Voodoo crowned Johnny Cash with a garland of electrified barbed wire. The chikka chikka hill-billy stomp echoes locomotive transits across barren lands, transmogrified by those so young, yet so cold into industrial resonances haunting the urban dystopia, discordant guitars channel the pain of hearts beating as one, infected by the longing for a past that never was, despair at the present that definitely is.