In the mid-2010s, high school friends Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons began tinkering with a 4-track tape machine, crafting hazy, lazy lo-fi melodies under the name Good Morning. The Melbourne duo have since come into their own, releasing three full-length albums in a span of under 18 months. Their most recent release, Basketball Breakups, was recorded in just four days while the band were on tour in Japan in 2018. That rapid recording process gives the songs a sort of looseness that evokes the detached coolness of The Velvet Underground and the melodic whimsy of The Kinks. As the duo prepare for their North American tour in support of the album, Liam shares with us the songs he relies on to help calm his nerves.
Says Liam of the playlist: “Music that I have been playing for the week commencing September 30 as I’ve been moving out of my house and packing up my stuff to go on tour. Some of it makes me dance alone in my kitchen (Pet Shop Boys) and some makes me cry a little (Weyes Blood), but it’s all part of the same process.”
Grey Mcmurray creates a haunting baroque mix that bounds up and down a whole spectrum of emotions without ever letting up. On his hypnotizing debut solo album, Stay Up, he fuses classical and ambient music with the poignancy of a singer/songwriter unleashing his most vulnerable secrets. It’s music that’s beautiful and terrifying at once, and cinematic in the way it constantly builds tension. To give us some perspective on his wide and fascinating range of sounds and influences, Mcmurray put together this Oslo playlist just for us. Says Grey of the playlist: “All of this music feels inevitable. Like eggs or pancakes or coffee finding their way to the start of the day. Different slots, but all of them tumbling unconsciously toward their resting place in eternity. I don’t mean to imply any label for any position. Just that, taken together, words like high or low or pop or serious or old or new evaporate, as if they were never really there. (I don’t think they were ever really there.) Also, when down these help me.”
There was nothing like Hot Buttered Soul, the luxuriant, expansive, exploratory soul album by Isaac Hayes, when it was released in 1969. Given complete creative control, the Stax producer and songwriter stretched out figuratively and literally, two of its four tracks stretching past the 10-minute mark, exploding with strings and horns. It turned Hayes from songwriter to sensation to icon. His style—soulful, cinematic, assured, lush, deeply arranged—would win him an Academy Award for his theme song to 1971’s Shaft and earn him a headlining spot soon after at the historic Wattstax concert.
In the ’80s and ’90s, Hayes found most of his success as a film and TV star, but hip-hop musicians were keeping his music alive. Some of rap’s most defining songs between 1988 and 1992—Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” The Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” DJ Quik’s “Born and Raised in Compton”—were built off the baroque samples of Hayes tunes. New York producers like RZA, Pete Rock, MF Doom, and Evil Dee used his palettes to make boom bap. And drawn to the cinematic, ’90s British trip-hop artists like Portishead and Massive Attack used Hayes to cull their nocturnal moods. To celebrate 50 years of Hot Buttered Soul, here’s Hayes refracted through hip-hop’s prism.
Second-guessing Ken Burns documentaries has become a national pastime, especially when they focus on something close to viewers’ hearts, like music. When he tackled jazz years ago, naysayers ran rampant, and his 2019 PBS doc Country Music is similarly fodder for Monday-morning quarterbacks.
Even when you’re making an eight-part miniseries in which each episode runs about two hours, if you’re tackling a topic as monumental as country music, some things are bound to end up on the cutting-room floor. Burns did a bang-up job overall, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some inevitable omissions.Y
ou don’t have to go digging back through all eleventy-jillion hours of Country Music to figure out which important country artists didn’t make the final cut. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you with this playlist of the people who were left out. While some of the artists Country Music forgot might be familiar only to hardcore country fans, others are bound to induce a major amount of bemused head-scratching.
Let’s look at some of the legendary, enormously influential artists who fall into that latter camp, for starters. We’ve got the likes of Billy Joe Shaver, who’s as responsible for the outbreak of outlaw country in the ’70s as anybody. Then there’s rock ’n’ roll giant Jerry Lee Lewis, who managed a remarkable comeback as a country hitmaker in the ’60s and ’70s. And speaking of hitmakers, how about Don Williams, whose sonorous baritone brought him dozens of Top 10 country singles in the ’70s and ’80s? That’s saying nothing of country/pop crossover queen Linda Ronstadt, one of the biggest superstars of the ’70s.
Lesser known but equally important names like country-soul pioneer Tony Joe White, trucker-country hero Del Reeves, and bluegrass star Jimmy Martin are conspicuous in their absence from the series too, but you’ll find them right here. You’re bound to come away with a wider view of country than what Burns’ narrative encompasses.
Former Dead Astronauts singer and producer Hayley Stewart continues to explore whole new worlds as Mecha Maiko. Her latest album, Let’s!, slips frequently between dark, brooding synthwave and bright, danceable disco-infused pop on tracks like “Alive” and “End of Your Life.” This melding of opposites embodies everything about Mecha Maiko, down to the name itself, which was inspired by Stewart’s fascination with Japanese culture: Mechas are giant robots controlled by humans, while a maiko refers to a geisha in training. A similar theme runs through this handcrafted playlist she put together for us—a synth-laden soundtrack that blends mechanical rhythms with sensual melodies to get you dancing like it’s the end of the world.
Says Stewart of the playlist: “Dance tracks for people who want to tell the apocalypse to fuck off. These unapologetically catchy Italo/dance/electro songs will help us ganbatte [translation from Japanese: ‘do your best’] while we change the world.”
Before we had RIYL algorithms and Spotify discovery playlists, we had Kurt Cobain. The Nirvana frontman wasn’t just one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed alt-rock artists of the early ‘90s, he was also its foremost tastemaker. Cobain’s conflicted relationship with fame has been well documented, but one benevolent side effect of his discomfort in the spotlight was that he used every opportunity to redirect it onto lesser-known artists, and not just ones from his immediate community. While the media was hyping the Seattle scene, Cobain was leading impressionable kids down underground pathways that extended from Scotland to Japan.
This was a guy who could get an obscure, out-of-print punk record reissued through a major label by name-dropping it an interview, or who could effectively play armchair A&R rep and score a deal for an unsung artist just by wearing their t-shirt. Even if only a tiny fraction of the 10 million people who bought Nevermind were willing to check out a record based on his recommendation, it was enough to turn groups like Shonen Knife into international club headliners, and enough to transform The Wipers’ once-obscure early ‘80s releases into canonical punk classics for future generations to discover.
Since his 1994 suicide, Cobain’s life and work have been put under the microscope many times over, through numerous biographies, documentaries, and barrel-scraping box sets. But one of the most illuminating pieces of detritus can be found in the 2002 scrapbook Journals: a handwritten list of his 50 favorite albums of all time. It’s a document that illustrates how, behind all the disaffected cool, Cobain was just a list-making music nerd like the rest of us. And based on the most recent entry—PJ Harvey’s 1992 debut Dry—it was a practice he indulged in even after his face was all over Rolling Stone and MTV. (He even divided his entries with lines as if he were designing the flippable label cards in his own imaginary jukebox.)
You can listen to selections from each of the records on the master playlist above. (Note: we included a song from each side of The Faith/Void split LP, bringing our track total up to 51. Also, the What Is It California-punk compilation he lists isnt on Spotify, though the Germs songs featured on it can be sourced from other releases.) But for a more in-depth look at how these records inspired Cobain—whether musically or philosophically—we’ve broken down his picks by category and created subsidiary playlists below that feature some of his picks alongside the Nirvana songs they inspired.
Like many kids born in the late ‘60s, Kurt’s first musical obsession was The Beatles. Their melodic sensibility formed a crucial strain of his musical DNA that withstood his eventual conversion to punk, leading to breakthrough moments like “About a Girl.” (Tellingly, Kurt’s favorite Fab Four record isn’t a typical muso pick like Revolver or the White Album, but the band’s winsome U.S. debut, Meet the Beatles, whose brevity and simplicity are more compatible with his passion for DIY indie rock.) Meanwhile, his adolescent affinity for mid-‘70s Aerosmith was entrenched enough that he would (partially) name a song after them, and while David Bowie was a less obvious influence on Nirvana, the band’s reverential cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” forged their spiritual connection with rock’s original iconoclast. But Kurt was also willing to own up to inspiration from less-respected hit-makers—listen to the verses of The Knack’s “Good Girls Don’t,” and you’ll hear the sort of slack, sardonic delivery he brought to Nirvana songs like “On a Plain.” His list also betrays a growing fascination with ’40s folk pioneer Lead Belly that would ultimately yield one of Cobain’s most chilling performances.
Kurt’s list reveals a typical punk-rock initiation process: You’ve got the pioneers (The Stooges, the Sex Pistols), their more extreme hardcore spawn (Black Flag, Fear), the detouring post-punk experimentalists (Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four), and the mutant recombinant offspring who fuse and abuse all of the above (Flipper, Butthole Surfers). It’s the last iteration that had the most audible impact on Nirvana, particularly on bludgeoning Bleach-era tracks like “Paper Cuts” (which bears both the bone- and soul-crushing heft of ‘80s Swans), Incesticide oddities like “Hairspray Queen” (which finds Kurt squealing like a young Gibby Haynes), and In Utero crushers like “Milk It” and “Scentless Apprentice” (where Kurt chews on the tin foil spit out by Scratch Acid’s David Yow). And then there’s the only band to earn three slots on Kurt’s list: Portland underground demigods The Wipers, whose relentless momentum and hoarse-throat hooks set the fiery pace for Nirvana corkers like “Breed” and “Territorial Pissings.” (Funnily enough, after once admitting that The Clash’s Sandinista! disappointed him as a kid because it didn’t align with his perceptions of punk, Kurt includes the much more commercial follow-up, Combat Rock—perhaps as a commiserating reminder that he wasn’t the first punk who had to deal with becoming popular.)
Nirvana’s explosive success couldn’t have happened without the fuse-igniting efforts of their immediate alt-rock antecedents—both close to home and beyond. “Negative Creep” is essentially Mudhoney’s “Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More” flipped from 33 rpm to 45. The crash/burn/rebuild structure of Sonic Youth’s “Silver Rocket” would reappear in smoothed-out form on the alternately rousing and brooding “Drain You.” The whisper-to-scream hysterics of the Pixies, can of course, be heard on any number of Nirvana songs, but bassist Kim Deal’s Breeders offshoot was an equally profound influence, with the nocturnal, string-scraped atmosphere of Pod filtering down to In Utero respites like “Dumb” and “Penny Royal Tea.” And though the radiant, paisley-patterned jangle of R.E.M.’s Green may not be as perceptible, the wry, self-reflexive quality of “Pop Song 89” feels like a spiritual successor to Nirvana’s own meta-rock commentaries, like “In Bloom.”
Embarrassed somewhat by Nevermind’s big-budget studio polish (which he infamously compared to a Mötley Crüe record), not to mention the increasingly slick nature of alternative rock, Kurt used his pop-star pulpit to champion the virtues of amateurism. In the collapsible sing-alongs of ‘60s outcasts The Shaggs, he heard something stranger and more radical than anything you could find on 120 Minutes. Through his beloved Vaselines, he learned how to balance playful melodies atop rickety punk-rock foundations. And in the solitary serenades of Daniel Johnston and the giddy garage-rock of Shonen Knife, he heard the purest manifestation of the childlike emotions he tried to access on songs like “Sliver.” But while his fondness for ramshackle post-punk and lo-fi indie pop brought out Nirvana’s more playful side (best heard on Incesticide’s odds ‘n’ sods and the more whimsical moments of the MTV Unplugged set), for Kurt, that music also represented an effective weapon for dismantling rock’s patriarchal power structure. Nirvana may not bear the direct musical influence of minimalist, female-fronted bands like The Raincoats, Young Marble Giants, and Kleenex, nor is there anything in their catalog resembling the homoerotic joke-folk hijinks of The Frogs, but they undoubtedly inspired him to become the preeminent male-feminist and pro-gay rock star of his generation, one who was willing to write indictments of rape (“Polly”) and machismo (“Mr. Moustache”), and who happily used his liner notes to tell the racist and homophobic jocks in his audience to fuck off. (Though one cant help but wonder if, he were around today to make a similar Top 50 list in this post-poptimist age, he might include more than one hip-hop record.)
DJ and producer Adrian Sherwood has long been at the forefront of the British dub scene as the founder of the influential On-U Sound label. One of his most treasured relationships over the years has been with Jamaican icon Lee “Scratch” Perry. Here, Sherwood explains their first momentous meeting:“Our mutual friend, the radio DJ Steve Barker, first introduced me to Lee in the mid-1980s. He said, ‘Look, you guys have got to get together.’ Steve was in Lancashire, but we agreed to meet at Southern Studios. Lee turned up with Rudy, who is married to Max Romeo’s sister. Rudy was driving him around, and he turned up with some multitracks and said, ‘Put these on.’ So I put them on, and they were him doing cover versions of Bob Marley songs. I think he had a real beef with Bob Marley at that point. I said, ‘Hang on a minute, check some of these rhythms.’“Style had recorded some rhythms in Jamaica that I’d been overdubbing and processing in London. I also had some other rhythms that I’d recorded with Style and the crew in London. So I played them to Lee. Lee loved them and said, ‘Get the mike,’ and that was the start of the Time Boom X De Devil Dead album, which we spent a year making. We’ve gone on to work together a lot since, and I’m particularly proud of Rainford, which I think is the most intimate album that Lee has ever made and one of my best productions.”
Sherwood worked with Perry on Rainford and another album released in 2019, Heavy Rain. To celebrate both releases and the duo’s long-standing partnership, the English producer put together a playlist spanning the 35 years they’ve worked together, in which they’ve defined—and continually redefined—the sound and feel of dub music.
Photo Credit: Kishi Yamamoto
Canadian band Loving make music just as soft and gentle as their name suggests—except it all comes with an unexpected existential twist. The trio’s dreamy, melancholic pop slips between cozy acoustic melodies and blissed-out arrangements that defy (as they also question) the concepts of time and space. On their 2020 debut full-length album, If I Am Only My Thoughts, their songs radiate with a warm, vintage glow influenced as much by classic singer/songwriters as psych-pop pioneers. Here, they’ve compiled a playlist of favorite tracks—old and new—that fits with that aesthetic beautifully.
Says band member David Parry of the playlist: “Here are some favorites from playlists friends have made and shared with us for good listening in the tour van ... with some of our current faves thrown in. I’ve been playing that Nilsson song real loud these days!”
Photo Credit: Ft Langley
You know the segment of the horror and sci-fi movie spectrum we’re talking about here. The worse they are, the better they are; the lower the budget, the higher the entertainment value. And the more goofy and outlandish the plot, the more there is to love about it. They operate in an entirely different universe than venerated, “legit” horror films like, say, The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. They’re the kind of movies that turn up in the wee hours on TV, or maybe in a cult film festival if you’re lucky.
Some of the songs assembled here pay direct homage to some of those films. For instance, Roky Erickson’s “I Walked With a Zombie,” John Cooper Clarke’s “(I Married a) Monster from Outer Space,” and Screaming Lord Sutch & The Savages’ “Dracula’s Daughter” are all inspired by the films that bear those titles. And after recording “House of 1000 Corpses,” Rob Zombie took matters into his own hands and directed his own movie of the same name.
Then there are the tunes that suggest an alternative history of cheesy horror movies, ones that never actually existed but sound like they should have. Blondie’s “The Attack of the Giant Ants,” The Hollywood Brats’ “Vampire Nazi,” and The Cramps’ “Burn She-Devil, Burn” are creations that originated entirely in the minds of the musicians, but after you hear them it’s hard to resist imagining them coming to life at three in the morning on your TV screen.
It’s the perfect playlist to fire up when All Hallows’ Eve rolls around, but if you’re a lover of B movies and vintage cinematic kitsch, these tunes will do the trick whenever you’ve got the urge to get gloriously tacky on the scary side.
Vancouver-based Necking manage to make the tightly wound jitteriness of classic post-punk sound positively fresh on their debut album, Cut Your Teeth. The fearless female foursome have a dark sense of humor but an even sharper sense for melodies that wriggle and bite—just see the fabulously fiery single “Big Mouth,” which carries the angst of indie-rock greats like Sleater-Kinney and Pixies. To live fully by their name, they’ve put together a playlist for your next necking session, although it comes with a mighty big disclaimer … Say Necking about the playlist: “Here’s a list of songs to make out to. Not, like, romantically. This mix only works for revenge makeouts.”
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.
