Kadhim's totally hot album of the week #1

Clams Casino Instrumental Mixtape 2011

Instrumental hip-hop is officially ‘it’. You can’t go more than a few hours in the day without some producer deciding that hip-hop would be infinitely better without an ex-parole officer pretending to be gangster over his beloved beats. Remove the distracting, tired clichés about having a big dick and you’re left with atmosphere, nuance, and the kind of music that will leave you rolling your shoulders hypnotically for hours on end.

Clams Casino’s free mixtape, released in April, is the perfect embodiment of this instrumental hip-hop ethos. It has emotion; it has syncopated drums rolling over each other like kids falling down a hill; and it has a sense of the epic, which hip-hop can usually only create with obnoxiously loud horns, a la Usher’s ‘Yeah’.

Towards the end of the summer term, when most of us have finished our exams (sucks to be you, Biologists/Biochemists), the Union sometimes has a DJ outside, floating music through the sun in the Quad. My little dream is that the DJ will turn off the bro-step, and stick on this super-smooth mixtape.

If you masturbate regularly on Pitchfork you’ll definitely know more about instrumental hip-hop than me. Tell me how much more by tweeting me @kadhimshubber. (Better still, tweet @NMEmagazine and tell them to give me a job.)