Best New Tracks - Pitchfork

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Death Grips: "Birds" Posted: 23 Aug 2013 10:10 AM PDT Photo by Tom Spray This thing's a mess, isn't it? "Birds"-- the first new Death Grips tune to arrive since they did not-- is a surrealistic madhouse, with synthesizers that suggest the Doppler effect, a hook manipulated until it sounds like a didgeridoo, and an instrumental impasse that puts Pops Staples' guitar in a blender. What's most conspicuous, though, is MC Ride's narcotized delivery of strangely elliptical thoughts. "I've got a black hat/ It might live," he half-murmurs, half-slurs. "It's got a black hat/ It goes big." He sounds tired but tough, fending off combatants with vague and hilarious threats: "One bird, two birds, three birds, four/ Fuck you think I fuck this for." The inscrutability fits the track's discursive structure. Death Grips mostly pushes aside its expected power quakes for drums severed from their source and guitars that lazily cycle through several little loops. In that way, "Birds" recalls the organized madness of Death Grips' debut Exmilitary, or before their square peg was somehow supposed to fit into a major label's round hole.

Roosevelt: "Elliot" Posted: 23 Aug 2013 10:04 AM PDT As the recent compilation We Make Colorful Music Because We Dance in the Dark proved, Greco-Roman has emerged in recent years as a leader in pop-inflected dance sounds, putting out records from such rising talents as Disclosure, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Tirzah-- and Cologne-based singer/producer Roosevelt, who previously wowed us with "Sea" and "Around You". Both those tracks appear on Roosevelt's debut EP, Elliot, which sees release this week. While those songs took headier shapes, Elliot's title track is Roosevelt's most direct pleasure offered yet, with an aqueous bass line that's heavily reminiscent of Caribou's "Odessa" and a tricky vocal sample buried under beatific waves of cascading synths. Roosevelt's voice is simple and winsome, taking the shape of someone like Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs' Orlando Higginbottom as he slides out of the distant fog his voice is cloaked in, letting the titular name beam during the song's radiant chorus. Roosevelt: "Elliot" on SoundCloud.