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Atmosphere’s Lemon Aid
By Vish Khanna
Early reports about Atmosphere’s new record, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, suggested that Slug and Ant would explore the concept of fatherhood. An intriguing idea, but why would the Minneapolis duo focus on a dad’s life? “I’ll make it real simple; there’s a lot of rappers in my genre of hip-hop, and I fathered them all. No, I’m just kidding.” Slug chuckles. “Kinda. Kinda kidding.”
Revered and reviled for proudly possessing one of the biggest egos in hip-hop, Slug’s been an open book in Atmosphere, combining a startling storyteller’s gifts with an impeccable flow. Ant in turn has developed his own eclectic production style, not so much matching the mood of Slug’s narratives, but subtly accentuating it.
On Lemons, that familiar inwardness is tweaked; the music is dark and biting yet its first-person accounts about relationships convey more universalisms. In fact, the deluxe version of the album is constructed like a fairy tale for children, complete with the requisite illustrations, sharp plot twists, and moral conflicts and lessons.
Slug initially counters the “dark” tag, stating that Lemons is “pretty optimistic,” rather than gloomy. “I don’t feel that way either,” Ant says. “It was so fun to make that it wasn’t like some of our records in the past. I was depressed a lot of times when I’ve made certain kinds of music but I never felt that way doing this, so I’m kinda shocked when people say it sounds dark.”
“In my head, I feel like I was striving to offer as much resolution as I could in each song,” Slug adds. “Rather than just telling the story and offering the complaint, I also wanted to show that each story does have a means to an end or at least that there’s a reason to embrace that particular song.”
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No Age Find Eternal Youth
 “The whole idea is that we started a band to write whatever kind of music we wanted to,” says Dean Spunt, drummer and vocalist for noise rock duo No Age. “There are really no rules in how we write.” Along with No Age guitarist Randy Randall, Spunt previously performed in Wives, an experimental hardc...Read More
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Night Marchers
 “I'm really horny for wild sounds.” John Reis probably isn't exaggerating. As a driving creative force behind some of the most influential and diverse rock’n’roll bands of the ’90s and ’00s (Drive Like Jehu, Rocket from the Crypt and Hot Snakes, to name three), Reis has developed a reputation for me...Read More
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Justin Rutledge Ascends
 “A man descending is propelled by inertia. The only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy its passing scene.”
Guy Vanderhaeghe is this author of this particular quote, from his 1982 short story collection Man Descending, but that didn’t stop Toronto singer-songwriter Jus...Read More
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Jamie Lidell Gets Personal
 By his own admission, British technoid cum crooner Jamie Lidell is in a delicate spot. In nine years, he’s delivered three albums for Warp records that have seen him move from abstract techno-funk to an indie-soul troubadour who fits in somewhere between Beck and Wilson Pickett. Lidell broke out of ...Read More
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Foals’ Sound of Music
 “We tread a really awkward balance, it’s like a tightrope. Because what we’re doing — at least in our minds — is a contradiction between what we’d like to do and what we need to do. The band is schizophrenic.” A description of Oxford, England’s Foals couldn’t be any more accurate, considering this o...Read More
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The Confusing Side of Boris
 There’s nothing less cool than admitting to or aspiring to being cool. It’s something that Japanese outfit Boris have considered time and again over 16 years. As an amorphous force that continually snubs trends in order to expand their sound, if you ask anyone familiar with the band to describe them...Read More
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Check out the hottest new releases in the country this week, including: David Bowie David Bowie: Deluxe, Fear Factory Mechanize, Hot Chip One Life Stand, Watson Twins Talking to You, Talking to Me, Yeasayer Odd Blood...
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