Urban Renewal Program: A renewal of any electronic and hip-hop-loving urbanist's soul

I fortuitously stumbled across this album after falling in love with the trip-electronic/Japanese transplant group Cibo Matto, the parent band of singer and fellow contributor Miho Hatori. If it weren't for the deterring shipping costs, I would buy all twelve of the15-cent used copies from Amazon.com and launch them off a skyscraper, with little parachutes attached. Like a humanitarian aid mission deploying food supplies to an underfed and at-risk population, I would be providing the needy masses with digital nourishment distilled from the New York City urban experience. 

"Urban Renewal Program"  is the sound of a late-night drive through New York, and combines a stellar list of hip-hop and electronic artists who have fused together to form a truly experiential program that, as a whole, cannot be separated from its host city. For example, the "city" which predominates Miho Hatori's even, slow-tempo contribution about feelings of urban anonymity and disconnectedness remains unspecified. But URP's collection and sequencing make her track, and the entire album, inextricably "New York."

Check it out.