The Kleptones

The Kleptones do this very cool thing where they take music and combine it with other music to form music that some cool people call "mashups" but which record companies prefer to call "illegal".

The new album is called "From Detroit to J.A." and I'm probably missing many of the clever cross references between music styles, but I've still had it on almost continuously for the last few days. I think that at least some of it is a combination of Motown and synth-pop, for instance, "Close to My Girl" which is a very chirpy version of The Cure's "Close to Me" with the words from "My Girl" by The Temptations, but there are other things going on too. "From Detroit to J.A." is cooler than I've made it sound and you should go and get it before they get closed down. If you don't know already, you'll need to work out how to use BitTorrent, so check the info on the page.

I also completely recommend "A Night at the Hip Hopera". Some of the Kleptones' music is a bit of a mystery to me ("Yoshimi Battles the Hip Hop Robots" was not really my thing), but this album is very accessible, because everybody knows the Queen songs. And I do love their combination of Eminem and Queen: "Hi, my name is... Bicycle."