Estelle!

So, everybody's heard Estelle's big hit "American Boy," right? By my calculations, it was probably the song of the summer. Highly danceable, madly infectious, and featuring Kanye West and the undeniable charm of a British accent. Of course everybody loves this song! I love this song too! 

So I bought the album, Shine. I bought it! The whole thing! With money! On a CD! And you know what? It's really great. There's a lot more dub influence than I'd expected based sheerly on the sample of that one single. But it's got depth and surprising turns and a high and low and fast dance numbers and slower thinkers and I just love it. I keep being reminded of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill as I listen to it, but maybe that's just because everybody's been talking about that landmark album's 10th anniversary of late. Shine has a lot of high points that I think could work their way into my permanent iTunes library. Assuming that someday I actually fix my mac or get a new one and have an iTunes library again. My iPod has been in stasus since last October. Which is kind of ok; it's sort of encapsulating the 3 years that I was really cool and rabidly consuming new music, which is neat. Or maybe I haven't been rabidly consuming new music because I have nowhere to play it. Chicken! Egg! Anyhow, Estelle: she is awesome. You should listen to her. That's what I'm trying to convey here. 

Also wonderful: Lykke Li's Youth Novels. I've put up about a billion of her music videos here, but the album is really great as a whole. That high pitch swede sheen covers up a lot of brooding and darkness. I love conflict in art!