"I would characterize my music as some cross between Bjork, Three 6 Mafia, and Pinback," he said.

Jamie Radford - "This A Break-Up Song". It's a sad song but it's too reassuring to be depressing. There's a motion, a comfort, a lope. A man suffering through a break-up who decided to stay up all night and make a song about it; he didn't need something to help him through his heartbreak, rather he uses the heartbreak to help him through a song. This doesn't mean it's vapid - far from it. But the emotion in this hip-hop track (a song of late-night humidity, iridescent sweat, swaying Georgia fields) isn't knife-edge vulnerability. It's breathing and progressing, the Bjork sample sounding every time like a beginning, not a farewell. Radford's accent makes him sound most to me like Bubba Sparxxx and he also shares Sparxxx's ability to sound steady on unsteady ground. "I'm broken up / I'm choking up," he says. But he says it with clarity. He's on top of things. While the mbira is tender, Radford's got certainty. This is how I feel. This is it. It reminds me more of Notorious BIG's self-assured "Sky's the Limit" than it does The Streets' aching "Too Late".

Jamie Radford - "You're So Warm". Athens is a very good debut, Bubba mixed with The Eels, glimmer with beat. There are emo-tinged rap tracks like the one above and then there are sparkling instrumentals like this one. It burbles and blushes, flushes and flashes, but while everything ticks and rattles and swoons it's the perfect lasergun kid-voice sample that gives this track its glue. "Boow-boow!" Like someone pointing at you and firing off an imaginary ray. Like a meteor breaking up in the sky. Like the first glimpse of a true, true love.

Listen to more from Athens at Jamie's website. It will be available for purchase soon.