Essentials

What with all the costumes, masks, and other visage-obscuring efforts that have contributed to the mystique of Karin Elisabeth Dreijer, just seeing her face on the cover of her new album may be startling enough. Of course, just like the music on Fever Ray’s Plunge, the grisly nature of the image (seen above) demonstrates her determination to be something far bolder and more provocative than the more passive, pliable, and predictable female stereotypes on which the music industry so often thrives.Taking a plunge into Dreijer’s sound world can be as unsettling as it is exhilarating. Even though the sometimes brutal yet oddly buoyant electro-pop of her (now-defunct) sibling duo The Knife remains a fundamental element of the songs she creates as Fever Ray, the project continues to expose her broad range of influences, from dark metal to African music to the soundtracks of David Lynch and Miami Vice to the work of Meredith Monk and Kate Bush (two other women who’ve been similarly fearless when it comes to demolishing conventions and exploring the properties of their astonishing voices). And while the cumulative effect can be as chilly as a New Year’s Eve party in Göteborg, there’s always a charge—and sometimes even a warmth—thanks to the stormy emotions and vulnerabilities that exist just below the surface. Hit play on our mix to hear the music that’s inspired her and catch the same fever.

A kick drum? A tambourine? Foot stomps and spoons? One very tired Razeem? It’s impossible to imagine what hip-hop, house, and techno might have used for a rhythmic foundation block if not for the 808 beat.That’s why the impact that inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi had on the last four decades of music is incalculable. The news of the Osaka-born engineer and Roland founder’s death on April 1 at the age of 87 has prompted a deluge of grateful tributes from just about every music maker who benefited from his innovations, most prominently with Roland’s most iconic drum machine, the TR-808. One of the earliest programmable models, its sound was initially criticized as too synthetic when it was introduced in 1980. But with its tight snare and booming bass, Kakehashi’s contraption proved to be more adaptable than anyone could’ve dreamed.Since the fine 2015 documentary 808 tells you everything you could want to know on the subject (and way more), we’d prefer to let the music do the talking with a set that includes many of the most famous uses of the 808 (and its successor the TR-909) by early adopters like Arthur Baker as well as such present-day devotees as Kanye West, who transformed the beat into the sonic epitome of emotional desolation on 808s And Heartbreak. Roland developer Tommy Snyder said it best in his farewell: “He was a super funny, wonderful and gifted human being, and his contributions to the musical instrument world and music touched millions of people worldwide.” To which we can only add: let the rhythm hit ‘em forever more.

The only thing surprising about Mariah Carey’s residency in Las Vegas is that it didn’t start at an earlier point in the post-millennial extended-run boomlet, which was kicked off by Céline Dion back in 2003 and which had, before “#1 to Infinity” was announced in 2015, included retrospective shows by the likes of Britney Spears, Shania Twain, and Rod Stewart. One of pop’s premier divas skipping tour and beckoning her fans to come to her? Of course, dahling. Arranging the show so that it focused on her 18 chart-topping singles, an achievement that’s a rallying cry for her Lambs? [Whistle note here.]Mariah’s series of shows at the Colosseum in Caesars—the same theatre where Celine embarked on her extended run all those years ago—wrapped up last week. I caught one of the final performances, where she preened and belted through her biggest hits (and a couple of other notable tracks) while well-appointed dancers who could have been lured over from the Rio’s Chippendales revival flowed around her. James “Big Jim” Wright, a Flyte Tyme Studios alum who’s worked with Mariah since the Rainbow era, was the music director and, at times, the star’s soothsayer; Trey Lorenz, who became an MTV fixture when Mariah’s MTV Unplugged cover of the Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” hit big, sang backup. During longer set changes, a DJ would come out and try to hype up the crowd while running through megamixes of Mariah songs that had been hits, but not chart-toppers—hello “Can’t Let Go,” hi there, “Obsessed.” (Sadly, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was missing, but Mariah’s holiday Vegas residency, set for Caesars this December, will no doubt rectify that.)A Mariah Carey show in 2017 not only gives one a chance to see her sing while sporting a fuzzy purple bathrobe that resembles an overly huggy Muppet; it doubles as a tour through pop’s last quarter-century. When she started out, Mariah was presented as a diva in the Whitney mold, a Long Island-born glass-breaker whose ability to leap octaves in a single bound was often the guiding force behind her songs’ arcs. “Vision of Love” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry” (produced by glitter-master Narada Michael Walden on record) updated the torch song for the MTV era, which was easier to get away with in the era when pop gave women more leeway about acting (and being) older; “Someday” and “Dreamlover” bubble and fizz, allowing for ample room to embark on gravity-defying vocal runs. “Fantasy” is a caesura for Carey’s career, its “Genius of Love” sample lending her a lighter-than-air platform off which she could vault and giving a shot of somewhat recent history to pop radio; its remix upped the Tom Tom Club quotient and dropped Ol’ Dirty Bastard into the mix for good measure.In the immediate wake of “Fantasy,” Mariah kept her big ballad quotient high (the chart-dominating Boyz II Men duet “One Sweet Day,” the diva showdown with Whitney Houston on “When You Believe”) but the taste of youth-culture fame that song had provided resulted in the production of varying clones, each with different old-school samples that suspiciously echoed “Genius,” each with different MCs serving as Mariah’s foil. It worked for a while, and the template laid down by these songs—gossamer vocals from singers bedeviled by dudes who were either lusty or self-obsessed, or both—calcified into an R&B norm. The Emancipation of Mimi—Mariah’s 2005 rebound from a rocky early-naughts period that included the megaflop Glitter and her multi-album contract with Virgin Records being canceled—broke the mold once again, allowing Mariah to show off her subtlety on songs like the gently tut-tutting “Shake It Off” and the passionate “We Belong Together.” While she was still flaunting her vocal prowess, she also reined it in at crucial moments, allowing the bruised emotions to take centerstage.Since then, Mariah has released a clutch of quality singles that have given space to her slightly maturing voice, which can still soar but which also has a bit more body in its low end, sounding a bit similar to the huskier affectations of Christina Aguilera. However, the tribulations of the music business—and those faced by female R&B artists in particular—have, sometimes unfairly, aced her out of the mainstream. “H.A.T.E.U.,” from 2009’s tumultuous Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, got notice when it was remixed with Ghost Town DJs’ 1996 rollerskating jam “My Boo,” but received little pickup on radio. “#Beautiful,” her 2013 collaboration with the ever-omnivorous Miguel, was absolute candy, its simple guitar lick and swaggering beat seemingly adding up to a lock for song of the summer. That didn’t quite work out. (“Blurred Lines” hogged the headlines; “Get Lucky” got the nerds excited.)The setlist for Mariah’s Vegas show, as a result, halted at 2008; even the gangster-era throwback YG, who appears on her latest single “I Don’t,” was relegated to sitting on the bed that serves as a set piece during “Touch My Body,” Mariah’s most recent chart-topper. (That was one of two beds involved in the evening’s festivities, both of which were motorized so that she could enter while seated. Other modes of on-stage transportation included a jet ski, a motorbike, and a pink Cadillac a la Christie Brinkley’s big entrance in Billy Joel’s absurd video for “Keeping The Faith.” When a diva is given the choice between wearing arch-contorting heels and walking on stage like a common person, there’s only one real option.) It was mostly fine, with Mariah dipping into the audience to say hi to her lambs a couple of times; why anyone wants her to perform choreographed steps, especially given her choice of footwear, is odd. And besides, she was always more of a bop-along type, as her early videos show.While the retro bent of the show was in keeping with Vegas traditions, it was also a moment to wonder what might need to change in order to allow the pop world to allow women over 30 back into whatever mainstream exists in 2017. A splintering of the Hot AC format—so that one type of station explicitly caters to, and even at times programs new music by, grown women—might seem like a desperate solution, but it’s one that would have at least allowed “#Beautiful” and other recent, and more than decent, songs by Carey’s peers and immediate heirs to get a little shine.

The age of the rock ‘n’ roll shaman is nearly gone. As far as frontman archetypes go, David Bowie’s cool and detached postmodernism won and Jim Morrison’s fiery and passionate romanticism lost. The idea of rock as something sacred and visionary has gradually gone out of fashion. This makes a singer like Mark Lanegan, who just released his 10th full-length, Gargoyle, a dead man walking. But he wouldn’t have it any other way.Ever since the longtime cult artist was a young underground rocker—one clearly inspired by Morrison and haunted punk-bluesman Jeffrey Lee Pierce, whose performances were regularly described as séances and possessions—Lanegan and his dark, cavernous, graveyard groan have been evoking spirit images of archaic apparitions and the underworld. In particular, the singer’s rendition of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (which predates Nirvana’s) sounds like a transmission from hell. Meanwhile, his lyrics come littered with Jungian imagery and references to religion and altered states of consciousness: In the 2004 single “Hit The City,” a sublimely ominous rocker featuring PJ Harvey on backing vocals, he sings about darkness, the promised land, ghosts, and kingdom come—that’s some grade A esoterica.Shamans are loners, people who participate in village life yet largely live outside of it, and that’s Lanegan to a tee. While he spent a good deal of his early years with Screaming Trees—a Pacific Northwest band who were always more in tune with the otherworldliness of ’80s psychedelia than sweaty dude-grunge—he started his solo career way back in 1990 with The Winding Sheet. Since then, the 6’ 2” brooder has cut a labyrinthine path: In addition to a slew of solo gems blending mountain folk balladry, gothic-tinged blues rock, dream pop, and even electronic, he’s racked up short-lived collaborations with stoner rock gods Queens of the Stone Age, Scottish chanteuse Isobel Campbell, fellow alt-rock icon Greg Dulli, avant-garde guitarist Duke Garwood, and electronic producer Moby. Lanegan loves working with other musicians, he just never sticks around for very long. Perhaps that’s because the vocalist, like any shaman, ultimately feels more at home in the spirit world than our own.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.Martin Newell has been making brilliant, ‘60s psych-pop-inspired DIY music at a startlingly prolific pace since the early ‘80s, either under his name or as Cleaners From Venus or the short-lived Brotherhood of Lizards. But he doesn’t just make a lot of records—he makes a lot of great records. He has a shockingly high battering average; out of the dozens of albums he’s released, there’s nary a bad one in the bunch. Provided you view the lo-fi homemade sound of his output as a plus rather than a minus (as all of his admirers must), pretty much everything the British singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist touches turns to gold.Naturally, 2016’s Cleaners From Venus album, Last Boy in the Locarno, is no exception. And it makes an excellent entry point for a deep dive into Martin Newell’s world. But in addition to absorbing highlights from his own vast catalog, try soaking up the sounds of Newell’s fellow travelers, like XTC (whose Andy Partridge once produced a Newell album), Robyn Hitchcock, and R. Stevie Moore. And while you’re at it, take a stroll through some of his ‘60s influences, like Syd Barrett, The Kinks, and The Move. Then for good measure, add some extra historical context by examining the other end of the aesthetic family tree, with sonic descendents like Guided By Voices and The Clientele.

Mary J. Blige’s new album, Strength of a Woman, is unapologetically devoted to heartbreak. Chronicling the strains and inevitable tears in a relationship, the album is inspired by the recent end of her 13-year marriage. For fans who’ve followed her career for the past quarter-century—yes, it’s been that long—Strength of a Woman feels like a return to vintage Mary, or as she once called her former self, “sad Mary.”During those early years, she struggled with fame, substance abuse, and bad affairs, but made some of the best soul music in recent times, including the classic album, 1994’s My Life. But in the past decade or so, especially after 2005’s The Breakthrough, she’s recorded a sometimes-gratifying, often uneasy mix of self-help anthems and earnest attempts at recapturing the pop zeitgeist, regardless of her collaborators. Her last album, 2014’s The London Sessions, found her working with au courant chart-toppers like Sam Smith, Disclosure, and Emeli Sandé. For 2011’s My Life II... The Journey Continues (Act 1), she assembled a grab bag, including a cameo by Drake, a nostalgic look back at her Bronx B-girl days with Nas, and motivational tunes like “The Living Proof.”Strength of a Woman is remarkably consistent. It indulges our desire to relive the vintage, somewhat mythical, Queen-of-Hip-Hop-Soul sound that she did so well early on in her career. Many of its tracks find her riffing over classic soul arrangements, just like when she used to cover quiet-storm chestnuts like “I’m Goin’ Down.” As this playlist demonstrates, she included a few breakup testimonials in every album, though they didn’t have as much purpose and artistic flair as now. Sad Mary never really went away.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

In the 10 years that have passed since Annie Clark first emerged from the Texas woodworks as St. Vincent, her very essence has seemed to undergo a radical transformation. Though such evolution is natural for any artist over the course of a lifetime, it feels especially befitting for a performer such as Clark, whose work has always tugged at the tensions between constructed, elegant beauty and the well of animalistic chaos simmering underneath. She’s gone from a charming, low-key indie starlet to a full-blown art-pop maven, and looking back upon her marvelous catalog now, we can start to see how the hints at what St. Vincent would become were secretly hidden in plain sight all along.From her very first album, Marry Me, Annie Clark seemed to decorate her songs with a Disney-like sense of fantasy and wonder, constructing the kind of delicate, baroque pop that seemed as if it could’ve come out of a doll house. But her guitar work suggested something more contorted, tearing forth from her songs like the chestburster from Alien, and making it clear that despite how fragile her musical creations seemed to be, Clark was concealing something that absolutely needed to be freed.As she continued to release albums like the gossamer Actor and the surreal Strange Mercy, her penchant for discordant riffs, extraterrestrial synth effects, and danceable grooves only grew stronger, but it was her meeting with David Byrne that truly signalled a major shift in her approach. After collaborating together on the funky, horn-laden Love This Giant album, Clark took a little piece of Byrne with her, and her follow-up self-titled release saw her constructing an entirely new persona whose artifice and coldness came with some of the most hard-hitting rhythms she had constructed yet. Having completed the journey from a twee curiosity into a living, Bowie-esque art-celebrity installation, her latest material sees her embracing pop music more than ever before, without losing her taste for folding the provocative into the seemingly innocent.It seems that as time has gone on, Clark has become more and more comfortable with the violent undertones that even her earliest work had motioned towards, urging movement and release over quiet appreciation. With her latest album, MASSEDUCTION, coming down the pipeline, we took the opportunity to take stock of how far Annie Clark has come, and to ready ourselves for whichever version of St. Vincent will emerge from the chrysalis next.

As Miley Cyrus gears up to release her sixth studio album, Younger Now, she appears to have come full circle: from nepotistic wholesome country actress to culturally appropriating twerking pop star to experimental absurdist performer and back again. It seems like just yesterday Miley was apologizing for disappointing her fans because she took a bong rip of “salvia” on camera, the first in a string of rebellious acts that disintegrated Cyrus’s family-friendly image one TMZ headline at a time. Now Cyrus is engaged to her longtime on-and-off again celebrity partner Liam Hemsworth, and she’s infamously shed much of the “bad girl” image that defined her for the past several years.Miley’s look and sound have changed so much that it’s easy to forget her last album, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, was a strange collaboration with Wayne Coyne that featured Big Sean, Phantogram, and Ariel Pink. Miley released the album, which had no pop singles, online for free. The project represented the culmination of Miley’s personal and artistic experimentation, the depths of the “weird phase” from which she seems to have emerged unscathed.About a year before that album came out, Miley spoke to Rolling Stone about her relationship with The Flaming Lips. She claimed she had been listening to that band exclusively, as the two had been teaming up in the studio to record some Beatles covers. Miley’s work with Coyne and the rest of The Flaming Lips undoubtedly influenced her music and performance style during the buildup to Dead Petz, but it’s surprising to revisit just how strong her relationship with the band became.This playlist, which consists of the 10 songs Miley listed to Rolling Stone in that May 2014 feature, contains some unlikely choices. Miley doesn’t mention “Do You Realize?>” “She Don’t Use Jelly,” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” or any of the Lips’ more widely recognizable songs. Miley lists “Try to Explain,” from 2013’s The Terror, as her No. 1 choice, an understandably contemporary pick for a young fan. Yet she also digs deeper, citing Zaireeka’s “Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair” and Soft Bulletin cuts like “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” and “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” among her favorites. She also includes the rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Money” that The Flaming Lips did with Henry Rollins for their 2009 Dark Side of the Moon cover album.Miley displayed a thorough knowledge of The Flaming Lips’ discography in her Rolling Stone interview, and the songs she picked span various eras of the band’s work. The Flaming Lips have maintained an unusually lengthy musical career, due in large part to a constantly evolving sound and a consistently entertaining, always absurd onstage presence. Even if Miley’s sound shifts back from the strange turn it once took, the singer could learn a thing or two about longevity from her former collaborators. Either way, The Flaming Lips have obviously impacted Miley’s life in a significant manner, and all of us could benefit from having our pop stars be fans of one of the best experimental psychedelic bands of all time. And besides, listening to 10 good Flaming Lips songs has to be better than listening to Miley’s new album, right?

Miss Sharon Jones, who passed away from pancreatic cancer on November 18, 2016, may have not briefly conquered pop like the late Amy Winehouse, who famously used Jones’ band the Dap-Kings to make Back in Black. But unlike most of the unsung soul-blues world from which she emerged in 1996, when musician and producer Gabriel Roth plucked her out of a Lee Fields recording session, Jones eventually soared as an international headliner. Songs like “100 Days, 100 Nights” appeared on film and TV soundtracks and commercials. Her “Ain’t No Chimneys in the Projects” became a holiday perennial. She became the subject of an inspirational, award-winning documentary about her fight against cancer, Miss Sharon Jones! And she collaborated with Lou Reed, David Byrne, and many others. Jones served as an influential rejoinder to an increasingly formulaic and electronic pop and R&B environment, and led a small revolution subsequently called “retro soul.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Adele, Aloe Blacc, Joss Stone, Leon Bridges or any other revivalist flourishing without the woman whose first Desco 7-inch preceded Back in Black by a decade, mentored fellow soul shouter Charles Bradley, and is Daptone Records’ biggest star. Sharon Jones may have been taken from this world too soon. But she got her due.

When bands adopt an air of world-weary resignation, it can feel like such a pose. Have they really lived enough to earn the ennui so soon after high school? Can these sensitive souls really be saddled with such a heavy burden? For anyone who feels dubious about the extent of their anguish, one of Morrissey’s greatest lyrical putdowns seems pertinent (as they so often do): “You just haven’t earned it yet, baby.”In light of that, it feels significant that the members of The National—like LCD Soundsystem and The War on Drugs, two other revered alt-rock acts with brilliant new albums in 2017—had some road on them by the time the fates smiled in their direction. Frontman Matt Berninger and the band’s two pairs of brothers—Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf—all had played in a series of little-known bands in Cincinnati through the ‘90s before eventually convening in Brooklyn in 1999. Success was anything but an overnight phenomenon for The National either, the players maintaining their various graphic-design and personal-assistant gigs for years until the 2005 release of their third album Alligator sent the band above the proverbial parapet.All of which is to say The National do sound like they’ve earned it. And just as Berninger’s lyrics reflect on the sacrifices, compromises, regrets, and triumphs that color the experience of anyone who’s been in the world long enough to know the score, their music—whether ambitious or intimate, stately or urgent —points to a wider range of influences and elements than you’re likely to hear in musicians who’ve only just earned the right to buy their own bourbon. For this Family Tree feature, we reveal the music that helped form The National’s sound (i.e. the roots), along with songs by peers (i.e, the branches) whose artistic sensibilities also seemed to arrive fully grown. We also highlight The National’s impact on younger bands (i.e., the leaves) who are well on their way to achieving the same degree of maturity—albeit without getting prematurely tired, cynical, and dull. There is such a thing as aging gracefully, after all—hear The National’s latest album, Sleep Well Beast, for further proof.

THE ROOTS

Given Berninger’s capacity for elegant brooding, it’s hardly a surprise that masters of misery like Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave have long been his inspirations. His devotion to Tom Waits is just as evident, especially in the late-night, booze-soaked songs like Alligator’s “All the Wine.”But there’s always been more strident elements in The National’s songs—indeed, Berninger considers The Strokes the most significant band of the oughts, and songs like the early standout “Murder Me Rachael” boast a similar live-wire energy that offsets the music’s more morose tendencies. Likewise, Bryce Dessner’s background in classical music adds further unexpected and unpredictable elements, as do the electronic textures that have become more prominent over the past decade of recordings. Like R.E.M., Radiohead, and the Arcade Fire—all of whom have been cited as inspirations, too—The National have somehow managed to push themselves in artistic terms while maintaining massive followings. That feat gets trickier all the time.

THE BRANCHES

When The National emerged as one of the key American rock acts of the 2000s, they were thankfully not an outlier. In fact, they shared many of their most compelling qualities with a host of peers, many of whom had also spent the previous decade or so toiling in obscurity and waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with them. In regards to the lyrics’ more literary sensibility and the sheer scale of ambition, The National had a clear kinship with Sufjan Stevens, an artist who became a close friend and sometime collaborator. (He and Bryce Dessner are also part of the team behind the stunning Planetarium.) Okkervil River’s Will Sheff shared Berninger’s ability to thoroughly inhabit the characters in his songs. Of course, Justin Vernon’s Bon Iver emerged as a fellow inhabitant of countless long dark nights of the soul. And in the music of Grizzly Bear, Beirut, and Antlers (as well as less-celebrated faves like Crooked Fingers), there was the same fondness for the kind of creative curveballs that shatter expectations just when things threaten to become too familiar. That all makes for a new golden age of sensitive beard-wearers, this playlist’s inclusion of the mighty Sharon Van Etten notwithstanding.

THE LEAVES

The National’s ability to keep moving and tweak their own formulas makes them an exemplar as much as any single aspect of their sound does. Nevertheless, their flair for songs that balance the anthemic and the intimate is certainly a well-treasured trait for Future Islands. Moreover, the sumptuous songs of Natalie Prass evince the same eagerness to synthesize Americana, alt-rock, and orchestrally enhanced pop classicism and do it on a grand scale. Meanwhile, Berninger’s thornier side emerges in Strand of Oaks and Hiss Golden Messenger, two equally iconoclastic acts that followed in The National’s wake. Two of their strongest stylistic heirs hail from the U.K. Though Frightened Rabbit formed in Scotland in 2004, their strengths didn’t fully emerge until recent albums like 2016’s fine Painting of a Panic Attack, produced by Aaron Dessner. From Yorkshire, Grass House may herald a new wave of acts steeped in the aesthetic prerogatives and musical modes that The National has helped propagate over the past decade. They may still be young and relatively unscarred by life’s slings and arrows, but we won’t hold that against them.