Ah, the sopho­more album. Always a tricky nee­dle to thread. You can either do what you’ve done before, go in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, or evolve. As a big fan of Run­box Weath­ers, I was def­i­nitely inter­ested to see what route Dim­lite took here. I think it’s fair to say he mostly evolved…even if he did suc­cumb to the sub-branch of soph­more albums: add some guests! It’s easy to lis­ten this music and com­pare him to Prefuse 73, but that would be doing Dim­lite a dis­ser­vice, as they are both mas­ters of two dif­fer­ent sounds. This new one is fairly sim­i­lar to his debut, but the big dif­fer­ence is how much more com­plex and musi­cally evolved it is. There seems to be a lot more live sounds on this, more sound­scape focused com­po­si­tions, more space in the songs in gen­eral. This is a short post before Xmas®, since I’m furi­ously work­ing away on the year-end extrav­a­ganza that will go up some­time before Jan­u­ary 1. In the mean­time, enjoy!

Com­mon­wealth Kids is essen­tially about friend­ship, a project born of the meet­ing between two heads on either side of the Atlantic. Carlo from Mon­treal, Buddy from Britain. They bonded over records and hip-hop and hatched this dense, sprawl­ing, and psy­che­delic mix pack­age. It comes in a won­der­fully hand assem­bled plas­tic sleeve com­plete with toy style header sta­pling it shut. Inside is the Com­mon­wealth Kids mix CD done up in sig­na­ture Buddy art­work, the hand­writ­ten liner notes, and a spe­cial Carlo 45 con­tain­ing two brand new gems. Whoa! Took me about half an hour to fig­ure out how I wanted to open it. The mix itself is bro­ken into 7 parts, each han­dled indi­vid­u­ally but sound­ing like one clear vision. Unmis­tak­enly a hip-hop mix, this is fairly con­stant in the choice acap­pella over beat con­struc­tion depart­ment. Even when using some­thing like “The Ter­ror­ist” (an extremely pop­u­lar acap­pella in the last cou­ple years) cou­pled with a really min­i­mal beat, this duo cast the hip-hop mix in a whole new light. Com­pa­ra­ble only to Buddy’s own mixes, I’ve never heard any­thing quite like this one. Carlo starts things off with some­thing I don’t think any­one would really expect: Ying Yang Twins, before mov­ing off into Trou­ble­neck Broth­ers, Nas, Prince Po, and Ghost­face, all over beats and music they wouldn’t nor­mally be asso­ci­ated with. Buddy fol­lows with a bril­liant scratch solo pre­ced­ing fan-fave “The Nod Fac­tor” over Danny Breakz bugged out “Wind­screen Wiper,” wind­ing up with a gor­geous mil­i­tary style beat under­neath Orga­nized Kon­fu­sion. Alka­ho­liks and Molasses crop up in the next sec­tion, before lead­ing into one of the quickly infa­mous moments from the mix: LCD Soundsys­tem and the Nick Drake-sampling Penny giv­ing us a faux-folk sing along moment. How­ever, none of this pre­pares you for the insane fifth sequence, mas­ter­minded by Carlo. Being friends with Six­too cer­tainly has it’s advan­tages, as Six’s “Two Strikes” makes an appear­ance in an exclu­sive Carlo remix to kick the sec­tion off. Roots Manuva over Timba beats, Ludacris over TTC, and prob­a­bly my absolute favorite moment, a funky mix of gui­tar and drums under “Root Down,” bring­ing that track back with a vengeance. Not let­ting up from there, Carlo crafts a whole new and gor­geous beat for the immor­tal, untouch­able “Shook Ones, Pt. 2.” Buddy’s apoc­a­lyp­tic and atmos­pheric sixth sequence looks com­pletely dif­fer­ent on paper than it does com­ing through the speaker. Lift­ing Dead Kennedys, Onyx, Divine Styler, Diga­ble Plan­ets, Gravediggaz, Ice Cube, among many oth­ers, he makes some­thing that sounds like none of those, and winds up in a rap­ture of music. The short­est sec­tion ends the mix, with Carlo cou­pling Shadow’s “Meiso” remix with TTC, Dabrye, RPM, Z-Trip, Spank Rock vs. Cut Chemist. It’s an astound­ing feat, this mix, using sources from all over, hip-hop from all decades, and sound­ing com­pletely fresh at all times. It’s truly one of the best of this new breed of mixes, the dense, mashed, half pro­duced, half mixed vari­ety of mix­ing. More than highly rec­om­mended. Get it straight from B-U-D-D-Y at Ban­quet Records or Nin­jashop for more North Amer­ica postage-conscious buy­ers. Check out the streams linked to below for a taste.
Com­mon­wealth Kids — Excerpts (stream)

*I’m going to do one more review this week, and then the last week of the year will bring my gigan­tic year-end review, at which point all of the pre­ced­ing mp3s will come down to make room for the 20–30 tracks that will make up that post.