Muffled Magnificence

These are the two words that came to my mind in order to describe The National - a band that exercise such an amazing restraint in creating such elegantly structured songs and somehow dont let themselves get carried away by the song - perhaps due to Matt Berninger's distincnt and sometimes melancholic baritone and maybe because the five piece band also has 2 pairs of brothers who probably understand each other well enough to keep it together...

its a Muffled Magnificence that makes Coldplay, sound like a loud American band - its like a giant pillow smothered over a nuclear explosion ...

Das Racist

speaking about Germany check out Das Racist (Ra ike the egyptian sun god) one of the uber coolest rap acts from Brooklyn - made of Himanshu Suri (" Im Hindu thug , Im Hindu kush" ) and Cuban Victor Vazquez... "these kids are gifted like a Christmas wishist" and" bright as alamp" , hyper -pop-culturally-referential, with so much happening in term sof beats, layers of music, and the most insanely wonderful, clever juxtaposition of words that rhyme though many times without reason - they tell you to "just pretend like you know what we're talking about ya know?"

on youtube you'll get rainbow in the dark an excellent intro to their style, spirit ( Pos-Vibes emanator) and their Sit Down Man album is like a multi-cuisine food fest that never gets boring from the marvellousy sampled and rhythmically African 'Julia' to the Oriental soundng smoothness of Rapping 2 U to the contagiously catchy poppy Fashion Party

references are as diverse as Illuminati, Neitzsche, Gandhi, Kalidasa, condenast, Costanza dicks like that show Seinfeld, the days of our lives, quarks and leptons, and so on and on... the album is also unique in that there are many collaborations going on..each bringing their own styleto the voice-scape and the feel of the song...

in the end an extremely clever, fun, critical band with some being true to their name happening .. deal with that later