Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them

by Blu & Exile

Blu and Exile are fantastic collaborators.  Their first album together, Below the Heavens, was an instant underground classic, and neither of them have done as well on their own or with other artists since.  Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them has them working together again, with Exile producing and Blu providing some amazing lyrics.

This album shows that both artists have grown in the years since they first worked together.  Lyrically, Blu is a monster, best shown on tracks like 'A Man' and 'Maybe One Day', where his laid-back, laconic flow serves him particularly well.  Exile, meanwhile, has gotten both richer and a little weirder in his sound.  He often uses cartoonish or childish samples on one track (like 'Good Morning Neighbour', which samples Mister Rogers), and then gives us lush pianos and a Tom Waits sample on another (the sublime 'Seasons').

There are guest appearances by other Exile collaborators like Johaz (of Dag Savage) and Fashawn, as well as Homeboy Sandman and Black Spade.  Many tracks feature flutes by Randal Fisher, which helps add to the general wealth of sound.

I'm not sure if this album is going to capture new listeners the way Below the Heavens did, but it's definitely one to return to time and again.

Bad as Me

by Tom Waits

Basically, you either love Tom Waits, or you don't.  Anyone who has looked over the types of music I usually write about on this site would perhaps be surprised to see that Ol' Tom is one of my favourite musical artists, but there is something so appealing about most of his music, and I've been listening to him for close to twenty years now, having first been introduced to him by a co-worker in retail who often used Waits as a means of clearing the store of lingerers a half hour before closing.


Bad As Me is Tom's newest album, and he plays things safe within the context of his experimental roots/rockabilly/punk/cabaret mash-ups.  It starts off strong - in fact, the first few seconds of 'Chicago', the opening song, sounded more like the beginning of a Michael Nyman piece than Waits.

We get the usual mix of Brawlers and Bawlers, with just a couple Bastards (to use the classification system that Tom introduced for his songs with his triple-album Orphans).  My favourite song is the closer to the first disc (I picked up the 'deluxe edition', which came with a second CD comprised of three songs), 'New Year's Eve', which has Tom paint a scene of urban disaffection, borrowing the chorus from 'Auld Lang Syne'; it's a formula that worked so well for him years ago with 'Tom Traubert's Blues' (aka 'Waltzing Matilda').

It's terrific to see that Waits is still producing new music, and continues to do it the way he always has, with staunch individualism and little regard for radio play or marketability.  This is not Tom's best album, but it's pretty good.

Glitter and Doom Live

by Tom Waits

I recognize that Tom Waits doesn't really fit with the rest of the music that I write about on this blog (even if he did do some beatboxing on the last Atmosphere album and did a duet with Kool Keith), but he is, and pretty much always will be, one of the coolest artists that I listen to.

This album is a collection of live recordings from a variety of cities, covering a wide sampling of Waits's career. Strangely, he manages to include hardly any of my favourites, although I still love this disk.

Generally, the songs on here are the larger, louder, more performance-based pieces. Things like 'Such a Scream' or 'Get Behind the Mule' are designed to be sung in large venues. Waits's quieter, darker pieces need an intimate setting to be effective, and that's not what this album is about.

Included on the disk are a few examples of Waits's concert patter, which is as witty as it is occasionally surreal. A second, bonus disk, consists entirely of 'Tom Tales', more jokes and stories from a variety of concerts edited into a continuous monologue. It's funny once, but doesn't really hold up to repeated listens.

This entire package really only creates more demand for live Waits recordings. He has such a rich catalogue of songs to mine, I would love to hear more, especially as his voice continues to develop into something ever gruffer and more wonderful.

The Spirit of Apollo

by N.A.S.A.

'There's a party, and and we're all invited. Not just some of us, But each and everyone.' It's not just the chorus to the George Clinton/Chali 2na collabo on this disk, it's pretty much the album's theme.

Sam Spiegel and Ze Gonzales, two dj's representing the two American continents, have assembled a very mixed bag here. They've pulled together a virtual Live Aid hip-hop album, with tons of artists contributing to their electronic, hip-hop themed endeavour. This cd is the musical equivalent of the first day at a new school, where you get paired up randomly with people that you might get along well with, or not, but have to spend some time working together.

Thus, we get tracks featuring David Byrne, Chuck D, and Z-Trip, or Spank Rock and MIA. At times, it works wonderfully, while at others, the different styles are just a little too jarring. The high point of the album for me has to be the song 'Spacious Thoughts', which features Kool Kieth and Tom Waits. It's not the best track here by any stretch, but the concept is pretty damn cool.

This album has more successes than failures, and I imagine many of the tracks here will become favourites as they appear randomly on my ipod.