Downloads
Surfing the Web for new music, video and MP3 downloads can be a serious time investment. Tips from Times staff and contributors will help take the drag out of your click-and-drag. Some downloads may contain explicit lyrics. Except as noted, all items are free and available at latimes.com/downloads.
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“All in Good Time”
Ron Sexsmith
www.ronsexsmith.com/music.php
Musicians of talent, even genius, continue to go tragically unrecognized, and Sexsmith has played the Dickensian cherub for more than a decade, wandering like a modern Candide through a hostile world. This might have proven tiresome by now were he not such a brilliantly observant writer. This video fits the song like a glove, with cardboard-cutout, smarmy, ponytailed A&R; men and a glittering young diva who is revealed to be a hologram with vacant eyes. Produced with vision by Mitchell Froom (listen to the Ringo-style cymbal shimmer on the bridge), the album from which this single comes was released in Canada last May. It is now available domestically.
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“This Is Why I’m Hot”
MIMS
myspace.com/mimsfanclub
More strutting-peacock crunk rapped by a grammatically challenged egotist concerned only with impressing his posse or dissing his rivals. “I’m hot cuz I’m fly/You ain’t cuz you not” ranks as one of the worst hooks in recent hip-hop history, but ... here’s the rub ... a hook it is and MIMS, a relatively new arrival on the hip-hop scene, knows it. The song’s climbing Billboard’s Hot Hip-Hop/R&B; charts, up to No. 22 this week. MIMS is repping Washington Heights to bring New York back in the game, even though the track has a distinctly “Southern” flavor to it. But like a savvy politician seeking to win over various constituencies, he also says he can do it slow and easy like the Midwest, keep it spare like hyphy for the Bay Area, etc. (And he better hope he’s hot, so he can pay for that new Rolls in the video.) A remix incorporating ragga and dancehall input from Cham and Junior Reid is far more interesting but currently unavailable as a download.
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“Take Your Medicine”
Cloud Cult
www.cloudcult.com/takeyourmedicine.mp3
Along with Grizzly Bear, Of Montreal, the Decemberists and Michael Zapruder’s Rain of Frogs, Cloud Cult steps into the misty realm of indie chamber folk-pop. Like several of those bands, this St. Paul, Minn., group incorporates an extremely wide variety of instruments, including pots, pans and string sections, recorded on a shoestring budget. But principal writer-singer Craig Minowa has been in the woodshed with his cohorts for quite a while; the current album, “The Meaning of 8,” is their seventh. Maybe this is Cloud Cult’s time. Minowa has an unaffected but emotional delivery, and the band covers a full range of dynamics, often within one song, as in “Take Your Medicine.” Full marks to the CD art, painted by Scott West and Connie Minowa, echoing Edvard Munch and Thomas Hart Benton but filtered through the cover artwork from cut-out bin psychedelia circa 1967 (13th Floor Elevators, anyone?).
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