Throughout 2017, we here at The Dowsers have used playlists to provide an alternate lens on the most talked-about albums of the year, breaking down the records to reveal their key influences, collaborators, and sample sources. Here’s your opportunity to chronologically revisit the top records of 2017 with fresh ears:
There may be no other contemporary player who’s logged as many miles, taken as many left turns, or made as many friends on his musical journey than Thundercat. The artist more prosaically known as Stephen Bruner began playing bass at age 15, absorbing the lessons of jazz fusion greats like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius. He soon joined his older brother Ronald Jr. as a member of Suicidal Tendencies, serving the L.A. thrash-funk-metal institution for the better part of a decade, while still making time to tour with Snoop Dogg and build a rep as a session musician for the likes of Erykah Badu and Bilal. Even after Thundercat established his own flair for spaced-out, vanguard R&B with his debut solo album The Golden Age of Apocalypse in 2011, he continued collaborations with Flying Lotus on the Brainfeeder label and forged a new one with Kendrick Lamar. He and brother Ron were also a part of Kamasi Washington’s formidable group for The Epic. The influence of these past hookups are easy to hear in the astonishingly diverse sounds of Drunk.
DAMN. is the sound of a young artist at the peak of his abilities delivering his music straight, no chaser. Each song feels as if it is coming from a different universe, be it the ‘90s slow ride of “HUMBLE.” or the futurist R&B of “LOVE.” or the absolutely bipolar “XXX.,” which travels between Metro Boomin minimalism, Public Enemy fury, and smooth boom-bap consciousness in the span of four minutes. Though Lamar’s influences are vast and easily traceable (the bassy Afrofuturism of Flying Lotus, the beat-poetry prophecies of the Last Poets, the self-aware party-rap of OutKast), on DAMN. he synthesizes them effortlessly, letting his own musical voice shine through more clearly than ever before.
The candor that Mac DeMarco display on This Old Dog—in which he reflects on a fraught relationship with his father—is one element that evokes his ‘70s singer/songwriter heroes, a pantheon that includes James Taylor, Paul Simon, and Harry Nilsson. Yet the music’s effervescence and spirit of playfulness demonstrate his deep devotion to mavericks like Jonathan Richman and Yellow Magic Orchestra just as clearly. All the while, he inches closer to his long-stated ambition to make an album as strong as his favorites, with Neil Young’s Harvest and John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band as a couple he often cites. Any way you slice it, This Old Dog is a shockingly mature effort for a guy who remains famous for interrupting a gig to stick a drumstick up his butt.
Though her existence has changed immeasurably since “Royals” broke her wide in 2013, Lorde has not lost the unabashed fandom that’s proven to be one of her most endearing qualities. Indeed, she’s continued to be a rarity as a young artist who expresses a keen understanding of a remarkably diverse array of new and old sounds without sounding derivative of any of them in particular. And while many of the most dramatic moments of her sophomore album Melodrama do suggest the influence of a few of her most-cherished touchstones—single “Liability” is a close cousin to Kate Bush’s “The Man With the Child In His Eyes,” for instance—the connection between her own music and the stuff she loves is more a matter of shared energy and attitude.
SZA has been upfront about her eclectic influences. She’s indebted to powerful vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Lauryn Hill, who grew up near SZA’s hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey. She’s professed love for Purity Ring, who produced “God’s Reign,” an Ab-soul song on which SZA appears. And SZA’s music exudes a calming effect akin to that of Little Dragon, blending elements of other genres to push R&B into stranger and more interesting territory. It must be difficult to be a singer on a Top Dawg Entertainment roster dominated by rappers, but a few years of background work seemed only to prime SZA for a stronger solo debut.
Flower Boy is Tyler’s coming-out party. It’s the point where Odd Future’s enfant terrible pulls off the bandages, and reveals a true(r), more mature self. He still has the same tools in his kit—he’s still ripping off the Neptunes, and he’s still a very self-conscious provocateur—but he does refine, expand, and, ultimately, negate his prior persona. It’s an exciting and unexpected transformation.
American Dream—an alternately moody, anthemic, inspirational, cranky, and expansive masterwork if there ever was one—sounds like it could’ve fit into David Bowie’s back catalog. If you’re looking for a precise location, it’d be between Low and Lodger, the point in Bowie’s Berlin tenure when he shifted from Krautrock- and Kraftwerk-influenced experimentalism into a harder rock and dance sensibility. Yet the most Bowie-esque element of the new album is its adventurous spirit, something that’s continually been part of the LCD Soundsystem aesthetic as Murphy refined and extended the hallmarks first heard in the dance-punk moment of early-‘00s New York.
Harmony of Difference is the soundtrack to a film by A.G. Rojas that premiered during the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2017, and it shows the growth and diversification of Washington’s sound. He already draws heavily from the often overlooked glory days of the early ’70s when musicians extended the jazz tradition into rock, funk, and African music. Deeper grooves power some of the tracks on Harmony, and the solos are more concise—where The Epic’s definitive tracks clocked in at longer than 10 minutes, the best music here often comes in under six. All of Washington’s stylistic advances are represented on “Truth,” which also provides a nifty recapitulation of what made The Epic so special, with its robust rhythms, a choir carrying a soaring melody, and a solo that would do John Coltrane proud. It’s jazz eclecticism at its best—music that is both inclusive and deeply artful.
Now 23, Archy Marshall has applied his inherent cool to two King Krule LPs, both of which feature an inimitable postmodern pastiche of blues, dub, lounge, hip-hop, jazz, downtempo, and experimental noir. His latest, The OOZ, is an itchy, bleary smear of atmosphere and attitude, swinging on saxophone and laden with songs about marginalized Bohemian existence, sung in Marshall’s tongue-swallowing Cockney twang. Given his lifelong exposure to off-the-radar music, it’s no surprise that Marshall’s stated influences—and the less obvious ones—comprise a sonic roadmap through the global underground. From ’80s New York no wave to golden-era hip-hop to mid-century country crooners to Jamaican classics to of-the-moment indie agitators, King Krule has swallowed it all and spit out something wholly unique and utterly captivating.
Taking a plunge into Karin Elisabeth 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. 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.
More than just a cobbled-together collection of songs, playlists can function as snapshots of a particular moment in time, and also provide crucial context for how that moment came to be. Through these playlists, we explored some of the dominant themes in music this year—be it paradigm-shifting innovations, the reemergence of dormant aesthetics, or slow-building movements that reached critical mass in 2017.
Flutes were everywhere in hip-hop in 2017. They provided a wistful counterpoint to the grizzled trap of Future’s ubiquitous “Mask Off,” propped up Drake’s throttling “Portland” with a snaking melody, and popped up on tracks from D.R.A.M. (“Broccoli”), Gucci Mane (“Back on Road”), Kodak Black (“Tunnel Vision”), and Migos (too numerous to list off here). This, of course, is nothing new, and this playlist from Okayplayer provides a quick history of the instrument’s use in hip-hop.
Jason Williamson’s air-hammer delivery and thick-as-marmite East Midlands accent contribute hugely to Sleaford Mods’ appeal, even if some non-Limey listeners may require the use of subtitles—and probably footnotes, too. He belongs to a proud counter-tradition of vocalists who not only defy the pressure to Americanize, but brandish accents that have traditionally been masked as markers of low class in British society. This quality creates a fascinating connection between an otherwise disparate series of singers, poets, and shouters operating not just in the punk and post-punk styles dear to Sleaford Mods, but in folk, electronic, grime, and even sound poetry.
The music of the Internet era has defined itself through diversity, and there are common, shared ideas that emerge from the ethos of digital art. Much of our recent experimental music finds inspiration in the uncomfortable merging of opposing forms—artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and QT spin fantastic new shapes through the juxtaposition of uncanny sound manipulations and inescapably alluring Top 40 mechanics. All of the artists on this playlist share a common inspiration: They pick apart the nature of society’s new favorite medium and the effects it has on our perceptions, memories, and experiences we subject ourselves to. Hit play to take a tour of the sounds emitted from our hyperreal, constantly connected world.
When members of Midlake, Franz Ferdinand, Grandaddy, Travis, and Band of Horses started exchanging ideas via email in 2013, they probably didn’t care that they were taking part in a long, if sometimes neglected, tradition in the music world. Nor should they—the idea of putting together a supergroup for its own sake is pretty dumb. That this particular congregation of musicians savored the chance to play together and socialize is reflected in the title they chose for the project: BNQT, pronounced “banquet.” And they’re hardly the only example of ad hoc all-star ensembles in recent indie-rock history that have redeemed the supergroup concept.
Within days of each other, Cam’Ron and Kevin Gates released tracks with unlikely samples. Cam’Ron’s romantic “10,000 Miles” has him singing “Lookin’ up out my Benz” over the familiar twinkling piano riff from Vanessa Carlton’s massive 2001 hit “A Thousand Miles,” while Gates’ more reflective “What If” utilizes Joan Osborne’s “One Of Us” to inquire if God is “Just a thug like one of us.” Adult contemporary pop is no stranger to hip-hop and it often lends itself to a variety of mood-setting styles. Rappers utilize its piano ballads and campfire-ready acoustic guitar lines, either reworking the lyrics or topping off familiar strums with harsher beats. The final product can yield some surprising results that often are friendly to radio.
Kevin Parker told The Guardian last year that he didn’t think there was such a thing as an Australian psych scene. It seemed an oddly Trumpian (i.e., easily disproven) thing for the Tame Impala mastermind to say, given the amount of evidence to the contrary oozing out of Oz in recent years. Though Tame Impala and Pond have risen the highest in terms of international profiles, they keep close ties to the likes of Mink Mussel Creek, The Growl, and GUM. Over in Melbourne, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have their own posse of like-minded travelers, such as The Murlocs, Pipe-eye, and The Babe Rainbow. Here’s a selection of songs by young Australian bands who may not constitute a scene per se, but who share an eagerness to take you on a trip.
Michael McDonald’s status as a pop-culture punchline is perhaps best epitomized by the 2005 comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin, wherein an electronics-store employee played by Paul Rudd squirms with annoyance as a McDonald live DVD plays on a loop at work. But these days, McDonald is about as cool as he’s ever been. The “yacht rock” sound with which he’s associated has become a renewable source of inspiration for dance and hip-hop producers. And over the past decade, McDonald has collaborated with a number of hip younger artists that appreciate the distinctively smoky grain of his voice, including Thundercat, who even reunited McDonald with longtime collaborator Kenny Loggins on his acclaimed 2017 single “Show You The Way.” This playlist charts McDonald’s transition from being your dad’s favorite crooner to your teenage cousin’s.
Over the past two years, there’s been such a remarkable abundance of great music by female artists in the overlapping territories of alt-country, roots, and Americana that it could fill this playlist many times over. From the folky, sepulchral sounds of Pieta Brown, to the Kitty Wells-style honky-tonk throwbacks of Rachel Brooke, to the raw and tender country blues of Adia Victoria, it’s a boom time all round.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the term “LGBT rapper” did not exist. Of course there were lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender rappers out there but, the truth is, they simply were not accepted by the mainstream hip-hop community. The fact that there are now enough LGBT rappers to fill this playlist (as well as enough bad ones that not all of them had to be included) shows how far the genre has come in a relatively short period of time.
When it comes to classic rockers who are revered by punks, alt-rockers, and indie brats, Bruce Springsteen may not possess the lofty stature of Neil Young, but the guy’s also no slouch. His influence tears across the first decade and a half of the 21st century like a ’69 Chevy with a 396. Adam Granduciel’s The War on Drugs–whose 2017 release, A Deeper Understanding, frequently nicks the gauzy, hushed heartache and mechanistic throb of Tunnel of Love—are just the latest in a long line of current artists who worship the Jersey legend.
What made the late Sharon Jones and her band, the Dap-Kings, so unique was their ability to feel unapologetically old-school, yet without any residue of weepy nostalgia. Anchored not just by Jones’ attention-seizing voice, but the group’s agilely stabbing horns and preternaturally metronomic rhythm section as well, their music pops, sizzles, and jumps with a sweaty, determined modernism. It’s a sound that has exerted a huge impact on 21st-century pop, pushing retro-soul into the mainstream while also seeping into the work of more left-field artists.
This is our track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates.What It IsIn 2017, at the ripe age of 26, Tyler, The Creator seemed a bit artistically exhausted. His teen-savant Southpark-lite provocateur pose was becoming a drag, and his last album -- 2015’s Cherry Bomb -- was a pretty-much unlistenable hodgepodge of N.E.R.D. retreads. For a second, it seemed like he was best suited as a fashion magnette -- his clothing line Golf Wang was pretty fresh -- with a side career as a sub-Hannibal Buress sketch comedian. The 2017 Flower Boy changed that awfully fast. Full of uncluttered, delicate melodies and surprisingly mature emotional themes, the album was ambitious without being pretentious. If his earlier work was intentionally distancing, Flower Boy felt subtle and embracing. Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN may have been the most important hip-hop album of 2017, but Flower Boy was the most enjoyable, and surprising. “Okra” is his first song released since that album dropped.So, which version of Tyler shows up on Okra?This isn’t exactly the adolescent Tyler of old -- nothing here seems intentionally provocative, per se -- but this also feels like a bit of a retreat from his more emotionally nuanced persona of 2017. He talks a lot of shit. He tells critics to fuck off. He brags about his cars. There aren’t a lot of pretty melodies here.Is that a bad thing?Not really. The track bangs. Beneath a bed of churning, speaker-busting sub-bass, Tyler simply raps his ass off. It features some of the most dexterous flows of his careers, and it also pushes forward a couple of Tyler’s personal uber-narratives. He’s sexually fluid (he calls out Tim Chalamet from last year’s LGBT-friendly indie movie Call Me By Your Name). Odd Future is over (“Golf Be the Set/No More OF”). It feels more like a low-stakes victory lap than a big next step, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
This is our track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far)for regular updates.What It IsAlongside Kendrick Lamar, Long Beach emcee Vince Staples is one of the most celebrated rappers of the past decade. But unlike Kendrick, who takes himself dead serious and occasionally smoothers his audience with sincerity, Staples is happy to play the part of the poker-faced jester. He recently started a GoFundMe campaign to support his retirement (he asked for 2 million to effectively disappear), and this single either supports that campaign or is the lead-off single to as yet-unannounced new album (or, alternately, it’s a combination of both, or just some loosey he had laying around).What It Sounds LikeIt’s really vibey, which is a bit surprising considering the track is calle “Get the Fuck Off My Dick.” The song pushes the idea from the promotional video that Staples is stepping down, at one point rapping, “Homie you can keep your money, it dont do nothing for me.” You should never take rappers that serious when they say they’re going to retire -- it’s an aspirational theme -- but Staples does seem sincere -- he describes walking through NYC’s MoMa museum (a pretty ideal retired person activity), relays some basic retiree financial planning (he’s going to spend the check from his Coke endorsement; save his Nike one), and takes some parting shots at the media (“NPR and XXL, man, I cant tell which is which”). The song is wrapped in an airy production, that has dusky like swirls of electronics over a slow, sludgy beat. Suggested Playlist PlacementBingo Night With B-Boys?
Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-’60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock. But, over the past five decades, it has morphed into so many different forms that its more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the surrealist pop of The Beatles and Caribou, the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix and The Jesus and Mary Chain, the dreamy reveries of Slowdive and Tame Impala, or the head-nodding beats of Madvillain and Flying Lotus, psychedelia is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering.In The Dowsers Psych 101 feature, well be exploring the psychedelic sound through a 14-playlist program that breaks down the crucial components of this mesmerizing musical kaleidoscope. This introductory mix provides an overview of what you can expect in your inbox over the next two weeks: the rock n roll radicals, the Afrofuturist freaks, the headiest hip-hoppers, the most adventurous beatmakers, the lava lamp–smashing metalheads. By the end of it, we hope youll see psychedelia less as a hippy-dippy 60s phenomenon and more as an endlessly renewable energy source that is forever fueling boundary-pushing artistry across all genres and eras. For now, we invite you to turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream—and brace yourself for the many weird and wonderful trips to come.
Chart the journey from the Fab Four to Flying Lotus through The Dowsers virtual box set devoted to all things psychedelic. Your trip begins in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
