As the lone R&B singer on the Top Dawg Entertainment roster, SZA has been the label’s go-to source for melodic contributions since she signed on in 2013. She’s loaned hooks and guest spots to most of her labelmates’ albums, appearing on Isaiah Rashad’s The Sun’s Tirade, ScHoolboy Q’s Blank Face LP, Ab-Soul’s These Days, and Jay Rock’s 90059.This month marks the release of CTRL, SZA’s long-awaited debut studio LP. While Rashad and fellow TDE rapper Kendrick Lamar return the favor with featured verses, CTRL demonstrates that SZA is more than capable of carrying a project on her own. If there were any doubts about SZA as a solo artist, she puts them to rest in the three minutes of album opener “Supermodel.” The track features skeletal instrumentation, allowing the full range of her voice to breathe over minimalist guitar and drums.The rest of the album’s production is similarly stripped down, with sparse samples accentuating SZA’s vocal work. “Broken Clocks” features a reverb-heavy loop of Toronto artists River Tiber and Daniel Caesar’s song “West.” “Anything” contains a subtle quote of Donna Summer’s “Spring Reprise” atop stuttering electronic drums. Even subtler still, SZA slips in a quick sample of Redman’s “Let’s Get Dirty” midway through the Kendrick Lamar-assisted, definitely dirty “Doves In The Wind.”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. Outside of her work with TDE, SZA has collaborated with several top names in R&B: She appeared on “Consideration,” the opening track of Rihanna’s ANTI, and she helped write “Feeling Myself,” Nicki Minaj’s collaborative track with Beyoncé.It must be difficult to be a singer on a label dominated by rappers, but a few years of background work seemed only to prime SZA for a stronger solo debut. Not every song on CTRL is perfect, but each is presented in SZA’s unique voice and refined style. With CTRL, SZA cements a place for herself not just as a collaborator or supporting act, but as a standalone artist.
Subscribe to the Dowsers Spotify account for all the best playlists from Tame Impala and more.Listeners across nearly every streaming service love putting together track-by-track comparisons meant to meticulously chart how one artist has influenced another. While the erudition displayed in these playlists is phenomenal, they almost always make for lousy listening. Thirty-four tracks bouncing between just Tame Impala and The Beatles gets really old really quick. I’m checking out after about six. What I’d rather hear is a playlist that maps out Tame Impala’s influences on a macro level, one that, in addition to The Beatles, spotlights Led Zeppelin, The Flaming Lips, and Air. After all, what makes Tame Impala unique isn’t the fact that they’re inspired by any one classic rock group, but that they manage to synthesize an absurdly diverse array of influences cutting across multiple genres and generations.
One of the more novel songs to pierce mainstream consciousness in recent years, “Let It Happen” is a psychedelic disco-rock epic largely inspired by Kevin Parker’s chance encounter with a classic Bee Gees banger while cruising around L.A. high on mushrooms and coke. For those who can’t get enough of the way Tame Impala blur together trippy hypnotism and funk-fueled repetition, guitars and synthesizers, kaleidoscopes and mirror balls, I’ve pulled together a few tracks — some old, others new — that bottle varying concentrations of these potent qualities. The slick, light-refracting cuts drawn from ’70s disco definitely speak more to the coked-out aspects of Parker’s stoned epiphany. The quirky art rock and alt-dance jams, on the other hand, throb with the visionary delirium unique to a ’shrooms journey. The mix covers a lot of ground; after all, it includes both Daft Punk and Electric Light Orchestra. Yet it maintains an alluring, deeply immersive sensibility throughout. Hopefully, you’ll dig it as well.
"Listening to an eclectic range of music has been a great way for me to spark fresh ideas. Theres so much music out there its hard to fit it all into genres and often the best songs dont fit into a category at all. The most important element is how the music makes you feel! The following playlist is a taste of the music I was listening to while recording Shapeshifter II: Outbreak that bends genres and feels good to me. Youll hear a soup of drum&bass, electronic, hip-hop, progressive-rock, and more that circles around the TAUK camp. Enjoy the ride!" - Alric “A.C.” Carter (keyboardist)
For over two decades—first as the frontman of Chisel, then as a solo artist—Ted Leo has cemented his status as one of indie rock’s most respected songwriters. With literate, layered lyrics that are as personal as they are political, Leo has honed a unique voice in part by wearing his influences on his sleeve, merging punk, folk, and classic rock. And the songs that inspired his sound have often crept into his live repertoire and, occasionally, his recorded output.Although Leo has had some of the most viral moments of his career by showing his appreciation for pop singers like Kelly Clarkson and Robyn, the covers that have made it onto stopgap EPs between albums stick closer to his roots. The Anglophile singer/songwriter affects a slight British accent when singing songs by The Jam and Stiff Little Fingers. And when he released one of his most urgently political records, the Rapid Response EP, during the 2008 election season, songs written by the Brit punk bands Cock Sparrer and Amebix sat alongside his own agitated anthems. He’s covered more famous acts like The Beatles and David Bowie for tribute albums, but even in the latter case he put his own stamp on “Heroes,” turning the song into a slow burn that works its way to an anthemic climax.Thin Lizzy’s soaring guitar leads and Phil Lynott’s dense storytelling have always been some of the most distinctive and undeniable influences on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. So it’s no surprise that he’s covered Thin Lizzy on multiple occasions, including “Little Girl In Bloom” with the Pharmacists and “Honesty Is No Excuse” with The Both, his 2014 side project with Aimee Mann. But an equally important influence may be the New Zealand-bred bands Split Enz and Crowded House; Leo has covered the former’s “Six Months In A Leaky Boat” on multiple releases, and even took a line from the song as the title of one of his most beloved albums, 2001’s The Tyranny of Distance.
Free jazz is a bit of a nebulous thing. All Music Guide lists Thurston Moore, Charlie Haden, and Eric Dolphy, among others, as its key artists, and even Ornette Coleman, whose album Free Jazz arguably launched the genre, later publicly dismissed it as a genre. Still, whatever you want to call it, the type of playing that Coleman pioneered -- the endless tangents, aborted themes and searing improvisational stabs of noise -- became a style that would influence generations of jazz and rock artists. This playlist, from the Village Voices archives, captures some of the highlights of that style. This is definitely a narrower (and more current) take on the genre -- there is no Thurston Moore, but Sharp also leaves out Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor, two very important musicians I generally have associated with the genre. Still, this remains a compelling playlist.
Philip is consistently one of my favorite music writers and he proves why with this excellent look at the artists and tracks that influenced a key track from Jamie XXs new collection, In Colour. Four Tet, Burial and Lone are all clear influences, but (relatively) obscure artists such as IVVVO and WK7 make this playlist enjoyable. Be sure to also read Philips excellent profile of Jamie XX in Pitchfork
By the early 90s, Brian Eno’s cachet was at its apex. I caught up to him the year he did more than produce U2’s best album, Zooropa: I discovered Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger, found a Nice Price cassette version of Another Green World, and bought James’ Laid. Then Roxy Music beckoned. Eno was right, as usual: Roxy recorded its best music upon his departure. Through four wonderful vocal albums—unmatched in their admixture of formal invention and gonzo humor—and a beguiling series of collaborations with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, John Cale, and others, Eno has approached rock with a dilettante’s amateurish glee and a sophisticate’s subtlety, bound only by the limits of his curiosity.So vast as to seem forbidding, his catalog is full of unexpected diversions, uneven by definition. I rank his 1990 Cale collaborationWrong Way Up with Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science but find the Jon Hassell co-recording Fourth World, Volume 1: Possible Musics a vaporous bore, while Discreet Music and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks are never far away from my stereo, notably around bedtime.I’m happy with my list: a compulsive miscellany. The songs include the collaborations mentioned above, plus a couple excellent ones from David Bowie’s Outside and a standout from his second Karl Hyde project. The differences between “songs” and “collaborations” is elastic though.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
Though electronic music nostalgia continues unabated, its a little difficult to swallow that Exit Planet Dust is 21. Upon its release in 1995, it sounded like the future. Listening to it in 2015, it shows its age. The breaks, in particular, sound dated, a relic of an era that were a little more forgiving to snares, while the sound affects, with their channel-panning flares, sound quant and a little contrived. With that said, the Chemical Brothers remain the innovators of modern popular electronic music. They were the among the first ones to successfully shoehorn the freeform, experimental trax-sound of early electronic into the pop format. And whats surprising listening to Nate Patrins playlist is just how good some of their later work is ("Escape Velocity" in particular).
Dummy Magazine has an interesting artist-curated playlist series that focuses on very specific themes or motifs and engages some truly knowledgable figures, thus avoiding the cliched, self-serving, PR-crafted "artist-curated" playlists that plague mainstream music services. This one looks at the 10 best "proto grime" tracks. Theyve tapped DJ Logan Sama, who has been connected to the grime and underground hip-hop and electronic scenes in the UK for the past decade.
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.
