Nujabes - Metaphorical Music, and a special surprise for Tasty

I'd like to preface this album by acknowledging just how out of character and odd this is for me to like, but anyone glancing at my last.fm page for last week will clearly see how much I've been loving this album.

Nujabes is a Japanese, hip-hop, remix dj...guy. I'm not really very familiar with what you would call this kind of music, all I know is that a.) he mixes a lot of samples from various things into some pretty sweet tracks, and b.) he has rappers guest vocal-ing on a lot of tracks. The samples he uses are fairly diverse in that he doesn't, as far as I know, really use any pop music tracks from Japan or otherwise. He mostly focuses on Jazz for his samples which results in some surprisingly complex, yet insanely relaxing, mellow beats that you can also get some embarrassing private dancing on to. He even uses Tasty's favorite track from Yusef Lateef! (You remember, doo-do-dooo-doo-do-doo...)

The long and short of this is that I feel I should have hated this album on principle, and I'm almost sure that Tasty will abhor it in all respects, but I, in fact, love the end result of these tracks. Some of the lyrics are actually very fitting and enjoyable as vocal pieces, and for once I think I've actually begun to appreciate the rhyming and rhythm skills of good rappers; even if I still take exception to some of the lyrics (not that this is at all different from listening to most metal in that regard...).

Anyway, highlights for me:
3.) Think Different - My favorite lyrics of all the tracks, starting out with "...You fuck little girls, I make love to women...". I also really enjoy the the all the piano samples and whatnot.
2.) Lady Brown - I really dig the feel of this song, all the elements are superbly chosen, and it all feels strangely delicate, and beautiful. It's also a love song in which he praises the woman by saying things like "you look edible," "god's gift to man is you in a see-through," and "shes a compilation of my mind's representation of a representative representing an excellent revelation." That last one really blows my mind.
1.) The Final View - I tried not to, but I can't not put up the track with samples from my favorite Jazz artist, Yusef Lateef. The original is amazing, and this remix keeps it pure, but manages to bring a new angle to it. I know for me it just allowed me to enjoy this song all over again.
(Honorable Mention: F.I.L.O - because it has the most cliche dj record scratching, and features a Japanese rapper attempting to rap in English, and ending up sounding like that terrible Jimmy character from South Park.)

Enjoy!

Ok, now that that is out of the way, let's calm down Tasty with nice, cool, relaxing splash of Popul Vuh. I'm not sure if Tasty has this already, but I think its a genuinely good album, and don't mind sharing it with everyone at all, I just didn't want to dedicate a whole post to it because I didn't feel like doing any research on it. All I know is that this is the band that did the sound tracks for a number of Werner Herzog fills including Nosferatu, and Aguirre, and that this is their 3rd studio album. I hope Tasty accepts my apology for the first album in this. This album is called Hosianna Mantra by the way. I believe they are considered krautrock, though for the sake of cross-over appeal I will describe them as proto-post-rock. This album is also extremely relaxing and, and significantly more "beautiful" than the first album in this post. It has a very ambient feel to it, which I suppose you would expect from a band most well known for sound tracks in Herzog movies. The title track is without a doubt the best song on the album (a quarter of them are under a minute long and mostly skip-able and substanceless), though I also enjoyed Segnung for the almost crystalline vocals.