Today’s song: “Loose In The Knees,” Monarchs

I really liked Monarchs’ 2011 album, a pretty, lush, folk/country-style endeavor that was both of a kind with other Austin bands I like and an example of what that sort of music can be at its best. The singer, Celeste Griffin, has a brassy sound that I really appreciated — so many singers who make that kind of music play up their voices as hushed, fragile instruments, which sometimes wears me out.

But I was not expecting a lot from the press release I got a few weeks ago that declared that she’d made a hip-hop EP called Ft. Celeste. The “folky white girl goes hip-hop” thing is usually a gimmick that borders on cultural appropriation (think Karmin).

Anyway, those are two kinda negative paragraphs up there! Which is silly, because Ft. Celeste is a neat little record. (“Little” is a fair descriptor — it runs just over ten minutes for five songs.) “Loose In The Knees” borrows a beat from Javelin, and Griffin sounds really comfortable inhabiting it, riding the beat with utmost sincerity and treating hip-hop like something she is having a fuckin’ blastplaying with. The whole EP (available for free here) is like that — a bit tentative at times (three of the five songs are shorter than 90 seconds long), but an expression of love for hip-hop that is really delightful. I’ve listened to it a lot the past few weeks.