As we noted yesterday in our full review, “With Urban Turban, Cornershop continue with their welcome and unexpectedly prolific return to the record racks. Collecting the fruitful results of a batch of collaborative singles, this album should easily satisfy old fans, while its playfulness, intelligence, and range will help recruit new ones.”

“…Urban Turban’s best moments present a further deepening of Singh’s and Ayers’ pop ingenuity. If they’ve always successfully avoided the shallowness of pastiche, they also seem to have found a way to increase the frequency of their output without putting any strain on the level of quality.”

“Urban Turban…still shines as another exceptional collection of tunes from a consistently rewarding group of pop scientists. And it’s an album certain to only improve with increased familiarity.”

It’s true. We like it quite a bit and in tandem with the band and their label Ample Play, we’ve assembled one heck of a giveaway for two winners.

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You’ll be hard-pressed to find another producer today who’s risen to such prolific heights as fast as Danger Mouse. Arguably the best thing to emerge from the mid-00s “mashup” fad, producer Brian Burton hit it big on The Grey Album, his deft fusion of the Beatles and Jay-Z, and has since become one of indie rock’s most sought-after producers.

Since 2005, Burton has been the yin to Cee-Lo Green’s yang in the psych-soul duo Gnarls Barkley, paved the way for the Black Keys’ rock superstardom with his production on their 2008 album Attack and Release, made sharply nuanced indie pop with the Shins’ James Mercer as Broken Bells, and gave Norah Jones a sexed-up makeover on her newest release Little Broken Hearts.

Most recently, Burton has bestowed his magic touch on LA indie poppers Electric Guest, whose Danger Mouse-produced debut album Mondo was released on April 24 on Downtown Records. Mondo fuses the group’s MGMT-esque indie pop with a healthy dose of R&B – to speak in Danger Mouse terms, imagine a Beck-helmed Broken Bells with some borrowed Gnarls Barkely soul. Frontman Asa Taccone‘s infectious falsetto is put to good use, coupling with enormous hooks and hip-swinging funk to create a retro-tinged sound that’s entirely listenable.

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The first full-length LP from hardcore punk survival unit OFF! delivers more of the brief, scorching sound initiated on their four highly-regarded EPs. It’s a dandy listen, and it places Keith Morris and cohorts at an interesting place. Just where will they go from here?

When it first came to my attention that Keith Morris was going to be fronting a new band, my immediate impression was a mixture of sincere happiness for the guy and a complete disinterest in actually hearing the music. We’ll get to the happy part a few paragraphs down, but the apathetic aspect has been hashed out by quite a few others already; it has to do with both the age of Morris and his band members and the actual contemporary relevance of the whole hardcore punk shebang.

Methinks that hardcore is a perfectly fine genre to tackle in the here and now, but it is a form best served up by a band of fresh-faced upstarts like Trash Talk rather than promulgated by a bunch of certified oldsters. Unlike blues, jazz, and country & western, punk rock and hardcore in particular doesn’t ripen with age; it’s very much a young person’s game. Of course, plenty of old punks are still making high quality music. It’s just that very few are still working from within the confines of the style that originally spawned them.

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