House Playlist: Curren$y, the Fresh & Onlys, the Go! Team, & Jamiroquai

The Fresh & Onlys’s new album, Play It Strange, provides a trip back to the early 1980s.

House Playlist: Curren$y, the Fresh & Onlys, the Go! Team, & Jamiroquai

Curren, “Michael Knight.” Over producer Ski Beatz’s pairing of kung fu movie music and elegant G-funk, New-York-by-way-of-New-Orleans rapper Curren crams three casually intricate verses into less than three minutes—and finds a place for a delightfully absurd Knight Rider-referencing hook, complete with KITT sound effects. Filled with pothead punchlines (“I got high enough so I could autograph the sky”), wonky wordplay (“car windows” rhymed with “Carl Winslow”), and a few marvels of internal rhyming (“Everything with wings ain’t a plane, man” via his Southern accent becomes “Everythayng with wayngs ain’t a plane mayne”), this track from next month’s Pilot Talk 2 is more strangely beautiful, deceptively simple, chill-out rap from a guy getting ridiculously good at this sort of thing. Brandon Soderberg

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The Fresh & Onlys, “Waterfall.” The Fresh & Onlys’s new album, Play It Strange, provides a trip back to the early 1980s—but without the Reaganomics or those regrettable haircuts. The track “Waterfall” is an excellent Joy Division-R.E.M. hybrid: spindly guitars; chugging, hypnotic drums; and vocals that seem to have been recorded miles away from the music. It’s a song about the war between television and radio, and what each medium says about the other. While that may sound silly, the Fresh & Onlys makes it both poignant and heartbreaking. Even the Buggles can’t claim to have achieved that. Michael Kilpatrick

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The Go! Team, “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” The chaos that punctuates almost every track in the Go! Team’s back catalogue has effectively become their calling card, which allows the Brighton-based sextet to do whatever they like without being labelled sloppy or disordered. “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” is our first taste of their upcoming third album, and though it was purported to explore a darker dimension of the group’s boisterous breakbeat pop-hop, it sounds just as colorful as what we’ve grown accustomed to. A pulsating drumbeat underpins mariachi horns and Ninja’s lo-fi call to arms, perhaps the most frantic and frenzied two minutes you’ll hear this year. Huw Jones

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Jamiroquai, “Blue Skies” and “White Knuckle Ride.” Renowned for our stiff upper lip, the British are not exactly a funky bunch. So when Jay Kay and his merry men burst onto London’s acid-jazz scene in the early ’90s, they were welcomed with open arms and dropped jaws. Their latest album, Rock Dust Light Star, is spearheaded by two singles: the soulful “Blue Skies” and the electro-tinged, disco-boogie number “White Knuckle Ride.” The former reveals Jay Kay’s softer side, a ballad in which the singer flaunts his falsetto atop gentle acoustic guitar and warm strings. The latter, then, is nothing if not your emblematic Jamiroquai track: foot-loose, funky, and oh-so-infectious. Between them, these singles hint at the Jamiroqaui’s latest long player being an extremely interesting affair, rousing a more human and sober beast without ditching their enticing dance-floor sensibilities. HJ

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This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

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