The Kleptones have a new album out! Strangely enough for a band of remix laptop audio pirates, it’s a live album. And there’s a bunch of asso­ci­ated A/V con­tent. I’ve never been a big fan of “musical expe­ri­ences” which couple music with other sen­sory aes­thetic plea­sures. Mostly I find the whole to be less than the sum of the parts. But that’s just me, what­ever. And the music is the music, and the music is there.

The Kleptones veer back and forth from a basic for­mula of lay­ering hip hop lyrics onto remixed pop and rock riffs, pep­pered with movie sound­bites. Formulaic or not, they do it real well.

Here’s the announce­ment.

Here’s the down­load site.

Warning: playing klep­tones on your home stereo system can give Mitch Bainwol a headache, even though he doesn’t know why it’s hap­pening. Dan Glickman too, for that matter.

Also, turns out Eric and Jim from the “band” have a radio pod­cast and asso­ci­ated music blog.

update: The album is a mix of old mate­rial thor­oughly reworked plus lots of stuff I haven’t heard before. And they really seem to have moved away from the cen­tral theme of recon­tex­tu­al­izing hip hop lyrics into a much freer flowing mix of mad­hat­tery. (although if you’re yearning for more too-black rhymes over more too-white guitar and synth licks, fear not, they’re in there.) Mashup music is rarely an emo­tional or oth­er­wise artistic expe­ri­ence. It’s more about fun and craft than art. It’s a cel­e­bra­tion of the masher’s expe­ri­ence of music — which all great music prob­ably is in part, but mashup mostly stops there and ‘great’ music keeps going. But for shear musical what the hell­ness, this par­tic­ular mashup music is hard to beat. And try sit­ting still through it. Go on. Try.