Music Library: Comets on Fire, Common, Condo Fucks, Conet Project, Congos, Connells

Comets on Fire - Field Recordings From The Sun, Blue Cathedral, and Avatar. Skronky psychedelia! Comets on Fire is one of the best bands going (they are still going, right?). Heavy Sabbath riffs with Blue Oyster Cult-like weirdness, Stooges-style freakouts, and moments of sudden and surprising delicacy. Blue Cathedral is their best, but Avatar is a very close second.

Common - Be. This is a pretty great hip-hop album produced by Kanye West. That's about all I can say about it, not because it makes me speechless, but because I'm sorta dumb about hip-hop.

Condo Fucks - Fuckbook. The Condo Fucks are a side-project of Yo La Tengo that feature all of the members of Yo La Tengo and no other musicians playing raucous covers in a style that one might call Yo La Tengo-ish with this, their only release somehow being a play on the covers-heavy Yo La Tengo album Fakebook. The songs are pretty great, though, and the covers spirited, so y'know, it's maybe even a little more accessible than the album Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics, which culls the best from their annual fundraiser for WFMU in which they play listener requests to the best (or worst) of their abilities.

The Conet Project. Yankee... Hotel... Foxtrot...

The Congos - Heart of the Congos. This is my favorite reggae/dub album. The bass is heavy, the singing divine. The otherworldliness of the regular reggae tracks is upped into hyper-weirdness on the dub versions. Perfect meld between the trippy Congos and their producer, one Lee "Scratch" Perry, the Eater of Worlds.

The Connells - Darker Days. Yep, that's Southern-fried jangle pop, all right.