Kadhim’s totally hot album of the week #8

Searching out new music is not a lone pursuit and cannot be meaningfully automated. You can’t hope to get past the tripe on mainstream radio or last.fm’s “1+1 = U2” algorithm without a friend giving you a nudge and saying, “we literally won’t be friends anymore if you don’t love this band”.

There’s a lot of music out there. Enough to fill your ears a million times over for the rest of your days. As a single intrepid soul, you can’t possibly listen to enough music to filter the bad from the good. Music websites/blogs/magazines do most of the work for you; just as I’m hopefully doing in this column every week. But even then, you need to be terminally unemployed to keep up with all the music that a site like Pitchfork sends at you.

Ultimately you’re most likely to find an album you love the new-fashioned way: a friend posting music on your Facebook wall. Which brings me to 808s & Dark Grapes II by Main Attrakionz. If you listened to A$AP Rocky last week (which I know you all did) and thought “I’m gonna need some more of this” (which I know you all did) then Main Attrakionz is the heroin to your addiction. This is forward-thinking, groovy hip-hop; this is late-night, bedroom music; this is a roll-your-shoulders-and-shake-your-head-in-public album.

Jamie Fraser, who was kind enough to recommend this album, sadly doesn’t have Twitter. So say “Cheers” to his Scottish namesake instead @JamieFraser. Better still, tweet @JamieFraserFan and tell her hip-hop didn’t die in the 90s.