A Few More Singles

I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been posting very much. So I thought I could at least mention some music that I’ve been enjoying recently. There are a number of new albums I need to listen to more before I can write about them intelligibly, but there are a few singles that have transported me lately…
-Kelis’ “Milkshake” is, I suppose, another guilty pleasure. Much more mainstream than “I Hate You So Much Right Now” (not to mention stoopid in its double entendres) but the insinuating dirty bass synthesizer hook (balancing the melodic fragment – it’s too minimal to be a full melody) gets to me. Production by The Neptunes, whose stuff I’ve gotten bored with lately, however here they, er, redeem themselves.
-Cee-Lo’s new single, “I’ll Be Around,” on the other hand, is yet another triumphant production by Mr. Timothy Mosley, aka Timbaland. This time with horns bouncing off the minimal off-beat. The lyrics are a bit tiresome (and old) in their bragging about the “dirty South,” but how can I not fall in love with a song that begins with Mr. Closet Freak intoning: “How could I possibly be inconspicuous/ When my flow is fuckin’ ridiculous”?
-I haven’t heard all of David Banner’s Mississippi: The Album, but “Cadillac on 22s” is gorgeously depressive, movingly desperate and passionate (“sometimes I wish I wasn’t born in the first place”), with guitar that really makes the connection from hip hop to down-home country blues; and the screwed and chopped version is also pretty amazing, slowed down, with a few touches of reverb and stuttering repetition, just enough to mess with the beautiful, lyrical flow of the song so that it sounds like things are even more fucked up than the original version suggested, since you no longer have the beauty to redeem the pain.