YOUNGS TEFLON – WHEN THUGS CRY

First heard a couple of days ago on BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ Charlie Sloth's 'Fire In The Booth' slot, in which he enlists rappers to basically come and do their thing live, I think I just had to write about this guy. You know that feeling. You hear it, you like it. What more can I say?

So this is Youngs Teflon, a London rapper who "began writing bars in the playground", showing clear signs of creativity from a young age. I love his name – it's Teflon, I'm making an educated guess, bc nothing sticks to him. Rolls off like dewdrop spheres of oil after a fry-up. Water off a duck's back as they say. But whatever. Idiomatic references aside, his sense of humour, soft side and penchant for weed shine through in 'When Thugs Cry'.

Obviously a tongue-in-cheek nod to Prince's 'When Doves Cry', Tef (as he's also known) sets his bars against a backdrop of slow-jam style beats, delicious clicks reverbing in its low-key sway, dripping with a waterfall of muffled samples that glisten with sparkles of longing piano melody. It's a gleaming of emotion that burns hot and measured, perfectly reflecting the pining for lost romance in his lyrics. Which, by the way, are full of imagery: "After hours I fall back and I break buds / Thinking about you in French plaits without makeup" – "Cold days when I'm grafting / Flashbacks of you laughing" and with part of the refrain "I've been drinking / With the music low but Mary Jane singing," all amassing to paint pictures of a guy, Tef himself, "reminiscing" about a relationship.

It's pretty, it's personal, it's not grime as you know it but it's forward-thinking grime that takes the inherent beauty of songs about lost love and injects London attitude; an achievement for sure and something that deserves airtime and more listeners.

• Watch Tef's Fire In The Booth performance here (click dat)
• If you like his calculated, picturesque style, you may wanna pick up his recent album Renaissance.

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DIAMOND MIND – DRAGON EGG [FREE DOWNLOAD]

I haven't written about anything by a band like this for a while and I'm not sure why. I think it's because, not that it isn't good, but it just seems to fit much better with sunny days and this long approach to summer we call spring. So it's with happiness and hope for the warm weather days to come that I introduce Canadian band Diamond Mind. I was originally going to write about this Edmonton-based band's song 'Better Alone', which is a pretty slice of indie doo-wop flavours with hints of baroque orchestration in its strings and jaunty melodies… but then I heard 'Dragon Egg' and everything changed.

This track isn't very sunny, isn't very spring-themed, but it is instead a galloper of a track – a true sprint through zingy, energetic feelin and expansive guitar sounds that, sure, ok, may summon a little bit of sunshine, but if it were a film it would be more adventure-romance than rom-com – does that make sense? The sunshine is less a static thing and much more a thing that's almost followed, a hanging beacon in a sky above endless roads and exciting potential.

Well, a dragon egg is quite an exciting thing I suppose. And if this song is supposed to be an illustration of that fact, well, then it's done its job pretty much perfectly. It was the undeniably experimental intro that first grabbed me: frenetic drums and dramatic twists between full-noise and no-noise and chipmunked vocals thrown into the equation – it's full of wonder as to what's gonna come next. A dynamic shift, and we count into the lo-fi flutter of gleaming guitars – an ethereal riff. Smooth silky vocals, with a distinctive lilt, seem calm yet urgent as guitar chords stab and the drums judder excitedly, bass providing slices of groove beneath it all. A really super cool song that I can't get enough of right now. Wahoo!

And, getting outside of this song's clarion brilliance, it shows the brilliance of the band, able to doo-wop in coastal-pop fashion like anybody's business one minute – singing this indie rollicker about a dragon egg the next. I'm genuinely curious to see where they go next – is there an album or something or an EP? I don't know.

• And it's a free download, do you want anything else with that? Biscuits? Complimentary hot towel? Fries?

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Listen to Diamond Mind on SoundCloud

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CARPAINTER – FROZEN SKY

As juke continues to take over the world like the pungent smell of a freshly opened can of peach halves (gotta love em) or anything else fresh 'n' packaged that has literally just been opened, we are being taken along with it like a carpet ride in aromatic clouds. I mean you can call it ghetto house or footwork or whatever, but it is what it is and what it is is a fresh sound.

I once heard DJ legend Annie Nightingale talking about how pop music is always inflected with a particular overriding rhythm of the time – what you could call a kind of zeitgeistical beat I guess, like house, hip hop, drum & bass, garage/2-step, dubstep: all have had, are still or currently having, their allotted influence on the sphere of widely known pop music and now it is certainly set to happen with juke. It's still an underground sound, but these things end up surfacing some time or another and well, it could well be happening soon. I wish I could find the direct Annie Nightingale quote, but... alas and alack it ain't nowhere.

So it is with this that I introduce the heady bassosity and rhythmic delirium of Tokyo's very own Carpainter and his track 'Frozen Sky'. Ironically, this quite hard dance song comes from a place where a no dancing law is strictly enforced – establishments must have licenses to allow this very simple act.

Ridiculous and weird, yet it hasn't stopped dance music producers making music to dance to. The Yokohama-based Carpainter, taking his name I guess from Mr. Carpainter, the leader of "the Happy Happyist" cult in the game EarthBound, mixes a ghetto house rhythm with the syncopated intricacy of garage, percussion urgent and insectoid, introducing frenetic bleeping melodies that play their craziness over whirling stabs of synth chords heavy on the phaser – at other times, the chords play continuously, icy and textured, before dropping into these footwork-flavoured moments where the snare seems to be battling the very air for space.

This clearly-made-for-dancing track comes from a recent compilation, Trekkie Trax Japan Vol. 1 – curated by TREKKIE TRAX, a Tokyo netlabel run by Futatsuki, Andrew/Eiji Ando, DJ Bank, Saba (aka MSTNG), and brothers Seimei & Taimei Kawai (Carpainter himself) – released & promoted via Top Billin – the guys who "discovered and introduced" Club Cheval to the rest of the world. Label boss Semiei had these words to say in the description of the compilation: "In all honesty, club scene in Japan is getting worse, we think, cause of the strict enforcement of the 'no dance law'. So the circumstances ironically motivate us to try to improve Japanese scene with our music." And by spreading it across the world, countries where no laws impede any footwork of any kind will open up to Japanese musicmakers, feel their awesomeness, and help bridge the (to many) daunting gap between West and East in the music world.

• Go stream or EVEN purchase Trekkie Trax Japan Vol. 1 over here (click dis)

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EVY JANE – CLOSER [VIDEO]

This is the brand new video from Vancouver-dwelling Canadian duo, Evy Jane, comprising of Evelyn Jane, whose voice you will hear ghostly smooth throughout the track, and Jeremiah Klein, who provides the thicket of sounds through which you follow the vocals like faint lights in a pulsing gloomy forest. It's an awesome pairing, one which has seen a self-titled release on lovely Canadian label King Deluxe, and now one that has led them to London's Ninja Tune with an upcoming EP, Closer, from which this track is clearly taken.

I was hooked from the start: that rat-tat-tat on the snare & the instantaneous dive into this plunge pool of never-static sounds – it's always fluid, always in motion as if itching for action, as if in anticipation. The synths groan and intonate in languorous pitch bends as slow arpeggios fade in and out like patches of dappled sunlight through gnarled tree boughs; all the while the beat sways in slow-jam consideration, the languid metronome for this distorted subversion of R&B, where Evelyn herself is not a diva but a phantom of diva-essence, drawing you into the glowing mist of her voice.

A soaring yet sludgy post-R&B number, the video comes courtesy of Kyle Bowman, aka Strawberry Jacuzzis, whose vision for the track was one "seen through a kaleidoscopic lens of fuzzy hallucinogens". It fits the narcotic warpings and distortions at work in the music, lo-fi, garbled with static and uncontrollable glitching layers of itself. Beautiful, in tandem with the sounds.

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JAMIE XX – SLEEP SOUND [VIDEO]

You can always trust London's Jamie xx to plate up a solid serving of bass in each of his musical mealtimes, but here it's not only a feast, a banquet of bass, but also a crucial element to the video. What? Well, the people dancing, members of the Manchester Deaf Centre in the video are deaf – the only way they can get the rhythm is to feel it, literally feel it through the bulldozing bass that would make your hair stand on end and through the rhythm of shared movement. This was the dream of its creator, artist Sofia Mattioli, to explore not hearing rhythm, but also feeling and sharing rhythm.

It's an inspiring video that shows the danceable power in Jamie xx's music, his signature. 'Sleep Sound' is a rumbling giant of sound, blood-curdling bass juddering the whole way, draped with rhythmic, indecipherable vocal samples that play in patterns alongside the drums, which clatter in virtuosic garage style with muffled snares and pinching hi-hats to a house-flavoured pattern. The whole thing swings forward in luscious lilts of rhythm, something that strikes you almost instantly as soon as the beat kicks in, additional percussive loops and fills as well as increased waves of sampled vocals providing a heady lift as the track crescendos towards the end.

• 'Sleep Sound' is uh available to purchase along with another track – 'Girl' – on Young Turks, 5th May

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