And what’s even more exciting is that you can download this record from the official Kim Ki O website. There you will also find their first home-studio released EP and if you’re digging them as much as we do you can even get a T-shirt to show some serious respect!

We’re not going to bore you their bio because you can read it on their MySpace, but be sure to read it because it’s hilarious! Word on the web is that they might have a record deal with a Swedish label because ++favourite Jens Lekman supposedly really digs Kim Ki O’s music. And you know that if people like that back you up, there can’t be that much wrong with you. Top tracks off this six song Self-Made Home Record are ‘B Yuzunun Ikinci Parcasi’ and ‘Ne Yapsam Anlarsin?’

Gentrification is something every nice neigborhood has to face at one point. It has nothing to do with Gentlemens or Genetics, but comes from the verb ‘to gentrify’ which means according to our friends at Oxford: 1. rennovate and improve so that it conforms to middle-class taste; 2. make more refined or dignified. We might call it pimping the neighborhood or, as many politicians call it, cleaning up the neighborhood.

In Amsterdam I live in one of those ‘dirty’ neighborhoods, De Baarsjes. Five years ago nobody wanted to live there because it was filled with low-class religious people like our beloved Morrocans and Turks. But after some hip cafes and boutiques opened, I have seen the raise of those scumbag richy rich yuppie wannabe bums with their playfully torn Asics shoes, greasy American Psycho hair you want to wipe your ass with, Dockers pants and their annoying accent within no time. Of course like anyobdy else who isn’t part of their clique I wanted to smash their heads in with their annoying hockey sticks (in Amsterdam that’s field hockey sticks). Because I’m a chicken and am too scared of getting ass-raped in jail, I didn’t do anything, untill now!

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for a long time and truth is, it’s not the fault of previous mentioned Money-is-everything-that’s-why-we’re-greedy-like-Jews kids. It’s the fault of the creative and progressive thinking artist! What? Yeah, it’s the creative person that screws us over and makes a ghetto-like area turn into the new Greenwich Village (if that isn’t passe already). I’ll tell you how:

Take any slum that is close to the city center and has low rents. Put a couple of creatives who barely have money to pay high rents, but need a lot of space for their artsy fartsy thought explosions, in some of the empty spaces and you have the beginning of gentrification. What happens is that soon these ‘pioneers’ will talk to their very creative and cool friends about their new neighborhood and how it still is so raw, meaningful and not corrupted. Most of these friends will think that their ‘ghetto’ friends are crazy for living in an unsafe environment where ninetypercent of the people is on welfare. Nonetheless they will spread the word about these courageous and bit goofy friends who have moved to the dark side of town. Because people always want to be the first and want to be pioneers, out of all the people that hear about this (and remember, this rumour only stays in a select group) and soon you’ll have posers that have absolutely no creativity or talent, but have been wanting to be seen as creative for such a long time, and they will take the risk of moving to Gentrification Village. They know that in five years they can claim to know the neighborhood before all the famous people moved there, it got too trendy, and you couldn’t find a parking spot anymore. Because these wannabes are basically greasy hockey kids with parents that are so rich that they never have to work in their life and therefor could look for their non-existing creative side, their dads will buy an appartment block for them to live in and they will rent out the rest to make some pocketmoney.

Soon the rumour about this new ‘Brooklyn’ will spread like a fire and everybody will want to move there. Brokers will see the opportunity and renovate some buildings to sell them tenfold. Conclusion gentrification!

So you motherfucking wannabe slut, look what you’ve done did to my De Baarsjes. You raped it like a priest and now I can’t pay my rent anymore and have to move. At least the real creative didn’t MTV his crib. He really liked it and he found it inspiring. That’s creativity. You are the annoying guy who brags about the ‘nice’ bars and turn them into pieces of shit with overpriced drinks and gold-digging bitches who look for their life provider!

The solution is easy though: the real creative people have to shut the fuck up about how nice their neighborhood is and hide their canvases or Moleskine and MacBooks when they’re outside. This way nobody will find out, not even me, where the next place to be is! And tomorrow I will not spit in their already greasy hair. I will not yell ‘whore!’ at those annoying blond girls drinking rose who have a raspy bass in their voice. Nor will I pee on their stoop or kick in their carwindow of their trendy 80’s secondhand Volvo they got from their dad as a present. No I will do all of these things to the first not so-trendy failed wannabe creative that I see. So if you live in De Baarsjes you better watch your step faux-Van Gogh because I’m ghetto-ing the neighborhood again!

‘Bonjour Monsieur! Je voudrais le cool musique et plus de cool musique et un petit omelette du fromage avec une baguette! Ooh La La!’ So that’s what we thought ‘No Way Down’ by Air France was going to give us, but it turned out these French bastards were Swedish!! No baguettes, no monsieurs, but they gave us something a bit more important: an incredibly good EP!!

So these two guys from Gothenburg didn’t just make us happy, because at Pitchfork Media they are already given the ‘Best New Music’ rating, but don’t let that stop you! Imagine a new album by The Avalanches, but then with a bit more uptempo discopop and you get Air France out of your blender! Just listen to the title track and you’ll feel exactly what we are unable to describe here with words. It’s someting nice, so soothing and so exstatic. You just want to lick yourself! ‘No Excuses’ and ‘Collapsing at your Doorsteps’ are the other songs you have to listen to first so you know what all this commotion is about. We’d be really sad if you ignored our recommendations and would check out Last.fm or Wikipedia first to find out if anybody agrees with us!

With only six songs and 22 minutes in playing time, I think I speak for everyone hear at ++ that the only thing is that we really need more of Air France. Everybody’s dancing around the office and we’ve even decided to only fly with Air France from now on!

Vive la Sverige!!

Foals’ members united in Oxford (yeah, so we’re just guessing that there also incredibely smart!!) to make some nice math rock (whatever that might be). Now a couple of years later they have moved on to a bit more uptempo poppish rock with some electro elements in there as well. And it works the full 45 minutes!

Among the best songs are ‘Red Songs Pugie’, ‘The French Open’ (so freaking catchy!!!), ‘Olympic Airways’, ‘Balloons’ and the definite number one of the album ‘Cassius’!! Normally we would say just buy it for the four songs that are really good, but this time we’re telling you to buy the album (or steal it) and be sure to have the bonus disc as well. Another five brilliant songs on there so it would be pretty shameful if you would miss out on that!

The thing is that this inability to produce something creative is a fundamental problem in my life. And I don’t think I’m the only one. In writing these personal stories I hope that somebody will read this and be like ‘I’m not the only one! There is still hope!’ Because I think there is a group of people who are blessed with insecurities and a very negative perfectionism. If I would take the time I use on thinking about writing, designing the cover of my first novel or making up the speech for my first award,  and use this time on real writing, I might be somewhere. However I feel like I’m mentally blocked in putting myself to the test. I think so much about doing, that the only thing I really do is think!

And how to change? I mean, how do you change from thinking constantly to somebody who just does what he fantasizes or talks about? Should I read ‘The Power of Now’ or ‘The Secret’? Should I see a shrink? Try LSD to release my creative mind from its inhibitors? Or is this just who you are? A piece of my personality and will I die wondering what the answer really was to how I could change? I’m scared of that day. Not the dying part, but the part where I look in the mirror and see a fifty five year old guy with gray hair and bags under his eye, who is still working on his first novel, has never published anything except his blogs, has never developed his technique and is still waiting for that day when he isn’t that perfectionist anymore and just writes like he has done thousands of times in his dreams. I don’t want to be that guy. The letters that appear on this digital paper while I write is my savior from being that guy. It doesn’t have to be good or be big. I just want to have the feeling that life hasn’t passed me by. I don’t want to stand on the sideline and see the rest of my friends evolve and achieve their goals and happiness, while I stand and cheer for them but at the end of the night go back to my dream life. And I don’t mean that in the nice sense of the word. So this must be my therapeutic outlet and at least I can lie to myself and be like ‘Hey, well at least I tried to be a writer and gave everything I had’.

Having written stuff for a lot of artists including Rihanna (’Umbrella’), J.Holiday (’Bed’ well that is his only song right?!) and even for Usher (’Moving Mountains’ maybe isn’t something you would put on your resume applying to be accepted to the ‘artiste’ community, but still they did sell a lot of records!

And now Def Jam Records showed Mr. Youngdell that he could go ahead and chase his dream. We should be happy that this album came out, because maybe it’s not a masterpiece, but it has some great songs on it. And it’s something different than the indie rock, electro, whatever everybody that claims to be ‘artistic’ listens to!

The best songs are: ‘Luv Songs’, ‘I Luv Your Girl’, ‘She Needs My Love’ (not with an ‘u’ this time and sounds a lot like a Timbaland track!!). But the best two songs are the before mentioned ‘Shawty Is Da Sh*t!’ Ft. Fabolous and ‘Nikki’. So maybe the rest of the album isn’t that good, who cares? You get five good songs to pump in your car when you’re driving in the hood! That should be enough.

By the way did we mention that he’s an accomplished artist and has created many paintings and sculptures! Put that in your ‘Artiste’ community application!!

Of course we’re not trying to bitch but their voices sound so familiar to us that we hoped, before listening to this album, that they would give us something new with ‘The Age of The Understatement’. And they did! Because the whole album has this James Bond ‘From Russia with Love’ vibe with string orchestra’s, moody and gloomy melodies and a lot of dark lyrics! Just take a look at their first video from this album and you’ll understand what I mean. The best songs are ‘Standing Next to Me’, ‘Black Plant’, and ‘Calm Like You’.

If you have a Vodka bottle at home and you’re alone put this album on and start drinking your sorrows away!!

After her massive succes with her debut album ‘Victim of the Truth’ the expectations were that she couldn’t top her first album, but she actually managed to make something very similiar.

And that’s the thing with ‘No Longer At Ease’, it sounds exactly the same as the first one. So, you either loved the first one and are so happy that you have another 45 minutes of Nneka! Or you had enough of her ‘I’m African, God and Roots blabla’ and you hate this album. The other option is of course that you just listen to the music and like it or not. We liked some songs (’Come with me’, ‘Death’ and ‘Kangpe’) and didn’t like other songs (’Niger Delta’, ‘Running Away’ and ‘Suffri’).

The first single off the album is ‘Heartbeat’ and is already a pretty big hit in Germany! If you’re in to Jill Scott, India.Arie (you really spell it like that!) or Leela James you should definitely check this out!

We’re keeping it simple here at ++ and are just giving you the stuff you need to know about this movie: Justin Timberlake is in it and he’s doing an even worst job than Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘Talladega Nights’ pretending to have a French accent! The girl lead is Jessica Alba and she’s just really boring and we’re not sure if she’s a really bad actress or if she acted retarded on purpose because the movie is this bad. Then you have Romany Malco from ‘Weeds’ and he’s just there. Not really good, not really bad. Ben Kingsley really surprised us by showing up in the movie, but I bet when all the famous people who have cameo’s agreed to be in the movie, thought it was going to be the next big hit after Austin Powers. Well, were they wrong! And did we say that Stephen Colbert is hilarious, as usual!

The story is really bad, they didn’t care about the acting at all, but the worst thing is that the jokes are really not funny! And that’s just weird. This guy is the guy behind Wayne’s World, Austin Powers and a lot of funny SNL skits. But hey, if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. Don’t see this movie. Unless you’re really wasted or haven’t slept for a couple of days, because maybe the jokes will make you laugh then!