L.E.S. Artistes, Santogold, from Santogold (Downtown)
Coldplay's latest touring partner files a complaint about some of the pseuds she used to encounter in Brooklyn, and ends up with a compulsive dance tune. Santogold (Santi White) spent several years singing with a punk band, which may explain how she developed her wonderfully petulant vocal sound. Listen to them here.
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Fire — Ikuma, Tagaq, from Auk/Blood (Jericho Beach)
There's at least an album's worth of ideas in this dense collaboration with singer Mike Patton, violinist Jesse Zubot and cellist Cris Derksen. Tagaq's grunts and rhythmic gasps run through the track like a fever.
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The Boxes and the Bottles, Ghostkeeper, from And the Children of the Great Northern Muskeg (Saved By Radio)
The northern muskeg in the album title isn't a figure of speech: This band is from the Peace Country in northern Alberta. Shane Ghostkeeper's nimble displaced guitar picking and spoken-sung meditation on bottles, family and cold weather is the sound of privation streaked with joy.
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Mambo, Gustavo Dudamel, Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, from Fiesta (DG)
The best players from Venezuela's famed music-education "sistema" swing harder than most salsa bands, in this mind-blowing tear through Leonard Bernstein's exuberant Mambo, from West Side Story.
