5 Albums to Stream for Free This Week: Danger Mouse, Gang Gang Dance

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We’re starting the week with another five albums that are streaming for free on the web, and there’s plenty on offer –- faux Italian film soundtracks, speaker-immolating, bitcrushed digital meltdowns, neo-Wildean fop-pop, jazz-inflected hard-bitten Scots cynicism, and a Gang Gang Dance album that defies categorization entirely. Listen after the jump.

Perhaps the most buzz-laden new stream this week is the new Danger Mouse record. The album, Rome , is a collaboration with Italian composer Daniele Luppi, who’s best known for his 2004 album An Italian Story; his AllMusic bio calls that album an “aural love letter” to Italian film music, a description that also applies quite nicely to Rome, as the name might suggest. The record’s clearly heavily influenced by the likes of Ennio Morricone, but it always manages to sound like a loving homage rather than a simple pastiche. It also features an… interesting choice of singers, namely the ever-more-vampiric Jack White and the still-somewhat-bland Norah Jones, whose vocals are probably going to be the point that divides opinion on Rome. You’ve got a choice of two places to listen and make up your own mind -– via The Guardian or NPR.

Also at The Guardian is a stream of the new Wild Beasts album, Smother . According to its press release, the album is apparently influenced by Fuck Buttons, Steve Reich, and Frankenstein, but to our ears it sounds like Oscar Wilde making a neo-synth opera with lyrical contributions from Brett Anderson and Antony Hegarty –- it’s witty, literate, danceable, and full of strange, slightly unsettling sexual innuendo. In other words, we like it a lot. Listen here.

If you’re still half asleep on a Monday morning, then this should wake you up –- Atari Teenage Riot‘s new album Is This Hyperreal? is streaming at Soundcloud via NME. Age has not wearied the recently reunited German noiseniks in the slightest. The new album starts with Alec Empire proclaiming “Music is a weapon/ Sounds like a threat,” and the band still sound like someone taking to a Casio with a chainsaw. Excellent. Listen here.

We were always very partial to a bit of Arab Strap, so we’re very pleased to report that former frontman Aidan Moffat has got a new record out -– it’s a collaboration with jazz pianist Bill Wells called Everything’s Getting Older . Wells’ accompaniment makes for music that’s less overtly seamy that Arab Strap’s squalor balladry, but Moffat’s lyrics are as world-weary and cynical as ever. Listen via Spinner.

And finally, the new Gang Gang Dance album, Eye Contact , is still streaming at Drowned in Sound. If you’ve not heard it yet, we highly recommend that you click here and rectify this oversight forthwith.