Daily Download: "Want Me," Aloe Blacc, single

Aloe Blacc is working up his own idiosyncratic version of R&B/hip-hop, making scattered, harmonically skewed music, complex to the point of disorientation and entirely through-composed. His singing and rapping is not all that interesting to me, and he seems to have put so much energy into making the music new and different that when it came to the lyrics all he could manage to grab at were the nearest clichés. But the keyboard part that opens this song and recurs throughout it is so strange and beautiful -- now burbling laptop electronics, now a bagpipe, now a clavinet played through a wah-wah pedal -- that I can't resist featuring it.