Nice Pants
Awesome.
If ever there was a great one-word description of an artist, "awesome" would definitely be applied to James Pants.
Why? Because to my ears, James Pants' music sounds like Beck did when I first heard Mellow Gold at the age of sixteen, and that was awesome. It just sounded so unusual and downright freaky, I barely knew how to process it - what is this? Where does this fit in with what I know? James Pants not only sounds a bit like that Beck of old, but feels just as unusual and un-categorizable, and thank goodness for that.
Pants' new album, Welcome, is a great crossbreeding of 80s-style synth and lo-fi sample-funk (plus indie rock weirdness thrown in there for good measure), yet it all sounds new and only-possible in the 00s - not quite Cameo, not quite Chromeo, not quite Beck, not quite Madlib. All those not-quite's end up balancing the equation towards the out-there side of things, thus it is fully appropriate that the album is being put out by Peanut Butter Wolf's Stones Throw.
Welcome comes out on the 27th, so be sure to pick it up at your favorite retailer then, or pick it up now via iTunes. Pants is going to have a lot of people talking him up with this one - he's already on the British press radar, and the bio for the record includes a quote from Busy P, so yeah, revel in the freaky and enjoy.
Plus peep the weird, out-there album art by Parra, which you can enhance with a sticker-pack by visiting this page over at Stones Throw. Awesome.