(Editor's note:  I'm going to go ahead and use "we" for the whole first paragraph here.  It's not the editorial we, per se.  I also do not have a tapeworm.  The "we" below grabs my immediate social circle; I'm acting as their mouthpiece.  The Cultural Attache to Lake County, Left Coast Impresario, Dr. Marvin Monroe and all the rest almost certainly share my feelings on the Cleveland Scene.  So there you go.)

Like many of you, we have our problems with the Cleveland Scene (not the scene itself, lame-ass out-of-towners, but the free weekly that shares it's name.  Ian MacKaye will not catch me whining about my hometown scene in this forum, given that I'm still trying to get him to play a backyard gig for us).  They're vaguely out of touch (we'd argue), frighteningly paternalistic, a bit on the pandering side, and (perhaps worst of all), still running those "smoke weed, get paid" ads.  I think we'd also argue that the Scene has suffered from it's wholesale consumption of the Free Times; in this, as in so many other venues, competition is a decidedly good thing.  More than that, we considered ourselves Free Times readers, that paper having a scruffier edge, a deeper propensity for both muck-raking and the shining of lights on unknown yet praiseworthy artistic ventures.  You won't find coverage of, say, Prisoners in the Scene, but you would have found them in the Free Times.  

But.

I do love the Best of Cleveland issue.  It's consistently good at both confirming my opinion on things that I know are awesome (Music Saves, The Happy Dog, and Peyton Hillis all made the list this year, for instance) and turning me onto stuff that's happening in town that I did not know about.  The Scene certainly has flaws, but it gets the Best of Cleveland issue pretty much right every year.

The biggest thing that the Best of Cleveland issue hipped me to this year is Misterbradleyp, a local DJ who spins regular sets at The B-Side Liquor Lounge.  You won't be surprised to hear that I don't get to late-night dance parties very often, so Mrbradleyp is new news to me.  The reason that all of this is important is the fantastic Radiohead remix album that the cat put out recently.  It's an hour of consistently solid remix magic (the highlights (for me) are the track below and the "Pyramid Song" reworking, which has to be digested to be understood.  It's pretty sweet).  The messing about with "Just" is tremendous (in much the same way that some of the Prince of Ballard's stuff is good) because it takes and epochal track and re-imagines it as (more or less) a hard bop standard.  (Aside: Does it make me sound like a total contrarian if I say that The Bends is the second best Radiohead album?)  There's even a rap verse in this one.  You can download the whole mix (and several more examples of Mrbradleyp's work) here.  Enjoy.

Misterbradleyp – Just (Remix)

I like this song.  I don't have a lot to say about it.  I just like it.  I also like Canadians and the outdoors, so this one is a pretty big winner.

The Wilderness of Manitoba – Orono

In a perfect world, I'd be posting a twenty-minute live version of "Sister Ray" from 1972, but I didn't want either Lou Reed or Atlantic records to sue me.  The track below (from one of the bands that Kevin's been pestering all of us to listen to for quite some time) is a middling substitute.  It's not as good as the New Order version and (for some inexplicable reason) it's way too short (which kind of defeats the purpose, right?)  But, any port in a storm.

Woven Bones – Sister Ray (live, short, instrumental)