Artists

Up until quite recently putting together a Complete Fleetwood Mac playlist wasn’t even possible. If you had explored the band’s catalog across all streaming services, you would’ve encountered the same problem: While every record from the Stevie Nicks-Lindsey Buckingham era was available (including expanded editions of Rumours, Tusk, and the crazy underrated Tango in the Night), and the Peter Green-era titles, while hobbled by a few nit-picky omissions, were largely intact, the stretch of albums linking these two periods was totally MIA.Of course, the fact that Kiln House (1970), Future Games (1971), Bare Trees (1972), Penguin (1973), Mystery to Me (1973), and Heroes Are Hard to Find (1974) have been added to the group’s streaming catalog shouldn’t register the same level of excitement as, say, AC/DC or Bob Seger opening up their discographies to Spotify and Apple Music for the very first time. Nevertheless, they are vital titles that deserve love from serious classic-rock fans. Not only are they key to understanding Fleetwood Mac’s gradual (and frequently bumpy) journey from British blues and hard rock to sun-drenched California pop, they boast some of the best tunes of the band’s long and winding career. Bare Trees is particularly sublime. A favorite for more than a few longtime Mac obsessives, it’s a hazy, zoned-out, comedown album showcasing a trio of gifted songwriters in Christine McVie, Danny Kirwan, and Bob Welch.When encountering these albums, the uninitiated will immediately notice they’re all over the stylistic map. After all, they document a band searching for an identity after the hasty departure of founding member Green, whose moody vision and six-string genius dominated the group (despite him splitting lead vocal duties with ’50s-rock fetishist Jeremy Spencer). Where McVie’s “Spare Me a Little of Your Love” is a moving slice of singer/songwriter fare infused with gospel’s ecstatic longing, Kirwan’s “Sometimes” is rambling, countrified folk-rock that sounds as if it could’ve been recorded in a remote English cottage. The American-born Welch—who, along with McVie, was the outfit’s most dependable songwriter during this time—complicates things further, penning both hyper-lush pop ballads (“Sentimental Lady”) and post-psychedelic jams drawing in touches of fusion and The Grateful Dead (“Coming Home”).But despite their deliciously messy nature, these records also show how Mac began moving towards tightly crafted pop-rock before Buckingham and Nicks’ entrance at the tail end of 1974. The most obvious instances are the McVie cuts “Prove Your Love” and “Remember Me,” which find her deep, enigmatic voice and genius for melancholic balladry already locked in place. But there’s also odd stuff like “Forever,” from Mystery to Me: Benefitting from Mick Fleetwood’s interest in African music and percussion, the rhythmic ditty totally hints at the quirky shuffles that Buckingham had the drummer work into both Tusk and Tango in the Night.At this point, fans adamant that Fleetwood Mac peaked during the Buckingham and Nicks years (something I won’t argue against) might be wondering why I haven’t delved into those records as much. Well, they’ve been picked apart and examined so intensely I decided to devote more words to the group’s lesser-known recordings in hopes of exposing folks to music they possibly haven’t heard. That said, I do want to touch on the otherworldly and exotic Tango in the Night—which everybody reading this needs to add to their library ASAP—because it’s a goddamn great record: kind of like Tusk in how it packs a lot of eccentric sounds and ideas into songs that are insanely catchy, only this time around Buckingham decides to be a ruthless editor. A perfect example is the title track, which pushes his fascination with rhythm as a compositional element to new extremes, sounding like some kind of classic-rock interpretation of 4AD-style dream pop. Just brilliant—so much so, in fact, that my playlist has more tracks from it than Buckingham and Nicks’ 1975 debut with the band. Risky, but I think you won’t be disappointed

There’s an amazing story that DJ Premier relates near the beginning of this excellent hour + interview with Chairman Mao. Although he’s now synonymous with New York hip-hop, the legendary hip-hop producer and DJ was born and raised in Texas. His grandfather, however, was a BK resident, and Premier would frequently visit him as a child. On his first trip to New York in the fifth grade, Premier was on a subway car that ran over a man who had jumped onto the tracks. The train backed up, and a young Premier peered out the subway window and watched as the man’s disembodied arm wriggled on the tracks. According to an excited Premier, this had been a suicide attempt. “Wow, this is where I want to live,” DJ Premier remembers thinking.To a certain extent, this is just a typical NYC origin story -- the sort of semi-mythological shit you say to sound like a comic book bad-ass. But it also embodies a lot of the qualities of DJ Premier’s music --gruesome, grimey, traumatic, and incredibly vivid. Hip-hop is clearly bigger than one person, city, or era, and any attempts to claim ownership are misplaced -- to say the least -- but few figures seem to embody the music and the culture better than Premier. It’s not that he invented it -- he was nowhere near its mid-70s birth -- but he created a style and sound that was uniquely and singularly hip-hop. Bleary, spiraling samples wrapped around and onto drums that were harder than nails -- pounding, body-rocking combinations of the snare and bass drums known by its onomatopoeia, “boom bap” -- and paired with rough-hewn, Mt. Olympus raps from a rotating pantheon of legendary emcees (Jay-Z, Nas, Rakim, and, of course, Guru). But more than being a singular touchpoint for ‘90s hip-hop, Premier was arguably the most important sample-based musician, ever; his vision of hip-hop pastiche was unlike anything before it, and, due to market forces, it’s doubtful anyone will return to such a nuanced, intricate manner of sampling music, in hip-hop or elsewhere.Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, the quintessential DJ Premier sound was born partially of necessity. It took a while for Premier to hone his godlike sound, though the journey there is almost as compelling as the destination. Listen to the early albums with Gang Starr, his flagship group with the Boston emcee Guru, and the sound is looser, jazzier. The instrumental “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration” from the 1989 album No More Mr. Nice Guy serves as an initial calling card of sorts for the young producer. The track is anchored by a liberal sample Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” that achieves the neat trick of gliding off the track with soaring, croaking synth line, while also feeling diffuse and guazy -- it’s a multi-textured sonic illusion that be-bop musicians were particularly skilled at pulling off. There are no rapped vocals in “DJ Premier in Deep Concentration,” but Premier weaves in a variety of samples and callouts to various producer (“Prince Paul!”), so that the track both has vocal presence and texture and even a narrative focus. All of the components of his later masterworks are there: the sample-based pastiche, the self-referential callouts, the swagger, the soul.Around 1992, Premier begin to switch up his style. Like a lot of early hip-hop innovations, this evolution was born of necessity. In 1991, Biz Markie was sued for his use of Gilbert OSullivans 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)." Judge Kevin Duffy’s ruling against Markie not only cost the rapper $250,000, but also meant that hip-hop producers had to be much more careful and either clear their samples before use or cut them up to the point that they were unrecognizable. Premier largely, though not exclusively, decided for the latter course of action. He recognized that it was not just the rhythms or melodies that drew him to classic soul, jazz, and funk, but the textures and sound of the music, so he would cut his drums into millisecond intervals and overlay them on one another, combining them with a cache of synth and piano samples that seemed to emphasize their pure otherworldliness. For Gang Starr, this made sense. They had largely been marketed as a jazzy, college hip-hop, but that didn’t feel entirely true to either Guru’s personality or DJ Premier’s artist ambitions. They were nostalgist, to a degree, but their milieu was more modern and urban. The music they made on 1992’s Daily Operation and 1994’s Hard to Earn reflected this grimier reality. The dizzying organ sample laid of “Soliloquy of Chaos,” the chaotic swirl of “Brainstorm,” or the urgent, corporal drum breaks of “Code of the Streets” signal Brooklyn. It’s broken crack vials and loosey butts, summer nutcrackers and skelly sketches. Rarely has a music so embodied such a particular time and space.This would be the template for all of Premier’s best known productions, from Nas’ hip-hop totum “NY State of Mind” to Biggie’s dizzy disorienting “Unbelievable.” Though the sound undeniably strange and novel, it’s also immediate and visceral, which allowed it to ascend the charts in the mid to late-90s. It’s hard to believe, but, at one point, Premier was among hip-hop’s most on-demand commercial producers. The specificity of his music meant that designation wouldn’t last. Beginning in the late 90s, Southern hip-hop would loosen the genre’s focus -- bringing back the more overt homages to funk and soul -- and the music would move back onto the dancefloor. And New York hip-hop would adopt the more polished nihilism of G-Unit and Dip Set, before later seeming to abandon any notion that there was a unified, tri-state sound. But, for a minute, thanks to Premier, the music was pure, aberrant, and purely hip-hop.

Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Sophie Austers haunting voice and soaring, lush poetry set to music is what you might expect from a daughter of both NYC and author parents, but her reach is much more worldly, hovering somewhere between French luminaries like Charlotte Gainsbourg, British folk masters like Marianne Faithfull and telling stories like a young Tom Waits. Plus, shes pretty big in Spain. And while shes got some major musical accomplishments worth celebrating --from releasing her first album at 16, to winning The John Lennon Songwriting Contest at 29, to collaborating with accomplished songwriter Barry Reynolds and having just released her third full-length and first new record in four years --when we asked Auster to make us a playlist, the one thing she sought to celebrate was her decade plus retirement from teenage years.Says Auster: "This playlist is an eclectic mix of nostalgic and contemporary songs. It represents my love of wide ranging pop music from yesterday and today and captures my own personal melodic and diverse leanings as a songwriter. The most surprising pick on the list is probably "I remember" by Molly Drake. Mother to Nick, I found her album while poking around in a record store in Seattle, on tour. It was an amazing discovery since I had only known of her son. In the same haunting vein is Sibylle Baier, who I discovered some years ago, through a musician friend. Baiers son released her home recordings thirty years after their inception. I find them beautiful and ghostly intimate."Listen above, and check out her own ghostly intimate album Next Time, out now.

If you worship at the altar of Ian Mackaye, then you should probably check out Vancouver slacker-punks Dumbs latest album Seeing Green (picking up the correlation yet?) which just came out on June 22nd.The album, according to the band, "revolves around a confused and angry young person unknowingly being tossed around by the same western capitalist conditioning that weve all been raised on. Green in this sense refers to being a novice, as well as to money, envy, and growth. Its meant to be somewhat of a self-aware exaggeration of some feelings in our every day lives that we often dont want to admit to and may even lie to ourselves about."Furthering their self awareness to the music happening around them, we had them hand-pick a playlist that they dubbed their "favourite publicly traded newish DIY music on Spotify including tour pals Pardoner, side project Swim Team and Mint family members Woolworm."Give their DIY playlist a listen to the right, and check out their album wherever you go for new music.

Anthony Gonzalez is a singular force in French electronic music. Since 2001, operating primarily as M83, he has created everything from nostalgic shoegaze rock and pulsing electronic dream pop to film soundtracks, asserting his meticulousness both as a composer and performer. 2003’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts explored the intersection of sampled sound, electronic synths, and post-rock, evoking both Mogwai and My Bloody Valentine, while the melancholy and ecstatic Saturdays = Youth stands strong as 2008’s best ‘80s album. Employing battalions of excellent vocalists, mixers, engineers, and more, Gonzalez always manages to push his perfect rhythms into crystalline atmospheres of sound. His expansive music is equally perfect for midnight cruises with friends and packed music festival fields, insisting that feeling sad can feel good, as long as you are dancing through it.

2018 has been a great year for music so far, so we decided to create a ‘currently listening’ playlist that captures the new (and new-ish) releases we’re listening to right now. Some of the tracks we’ve included are by our friends and others are by people we wish we were friends with, the common thread is that they’re all grade A bangers. It’s important to support other musicians and hopefully people who like Doe will also find something they like here. We’re going to keep adding to the playlist as the year goes on, if nothing else it’ll provide something we can listen to together in the car on the way to shows to get pumped. - Nicola (Doe)

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Virginia native Shelley Marshaun Massenburg-Smith always seems to have a huge grin on his face, and makes the kind of infectiously whimsical anthems that put a smile on everyone else’s faces. The 2015 EPs #1Epic and Gahdamn! established his unique sound and irrepressible personality with the Super Mario Bros.-sampling hit “Cha Cha.” A wide array of features followed, with kindred spirits like Chance The Rapper and Donnie Trumpet as well as surprising collaborators like Chairlift and E-40. The full-length debut Big Baby D.R.A.M. arrived on the heels of the smash Lil Yachty collaboration “Broccoli,” showcasing D.R.A.M.’s witty rhymes as well as his earworm melodies.

When Daft Punk released Random Access Memories in 2013, they posted up two artist-curated playlists on Spotify, one from Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and the other from Thomas Bangalter. Frequently, artist-curated playlists feel like marketing artifacts, promoting the artists’ own music, or that of their crew or label mates. But both Daft Punk playlists seem genuine, reflecting something essential about the legendary duo’s tastes, and, in the process, revealing new aspects about their own music. Thomas’ playlist is probably the most useful in understanding where Daft Punk were as a group in 2013. There’s the jaunty disco of Chic’s “Good Times” and the French Touch-inspired synth pop of Phoenix, as well as a lot of tracks from Random Access Memories’ collaborators—the Neptunes, Giorgio Moroder and Panda Bear all show up. It’s a fun collection of some great (if painfully overplayed) songs, but the playlist delivers few surprises. Guy-Manuel’s playlist, on the other hand, does feel both more sprawling and idiosyncratic. From the lost ‘68 Move hit “Blackberry Way” to Juicy J’s hypnotic 2013 trap banger, “Show Out,” the playlist covers a lot of ground. It also focuses on some interesting detours in well-known catalogs, offering up a genuinely great “Casablanca” from Raekwon’s Immobilarity (the mostly overlooked follow-up to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx) and rescuing the disco honky tonk of the Rolling Stones’ “Dance (pt 1),” a deep album cut from Emotional Rescue. There are times when it feels like Guy is taking the piss out of us—Exhibit A: Phil Collins overearnest “Against All Odds”—but few playlists can make it from Rocko’s 2013 smash “U.O.E.N.O.” to Alan Vega’s “Jukebox Babe,” and Guy-Manual should be applauded for connecting a lot of dots. — Sam Chennault

In July 2017, veteran Washington State sludgemasters The Melvins unleashed their 26th album (and a double, to boot), A Walk with Love & Death. At the time of its release, we gave you a thorough introduction to their extended family; now, with his debut solo album,The Fickle Finger of Fate, out this month, drummer Dale Crover has created a special Dowsers playlist celebrating his kings of the kit.

"Heres a playlist I made of some of my favorite drummers. I left off the obvious. Theres no Bonham, Moon, Charlie, or Ringo on the list. All of these songs/drummers have had a big influence on my playing. Even though none of these songs date past the 1980s, I can still listen to them to this day and get excited. Enjoy!"—Dale Crover

1. Judas Priest, "Exciter" (Unleashed in the East version)Drummer: Les Binks

2. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Little Miss Lover"Drummer: Mitch Mitchell

3. Black Flag, "Slip it In"Drummer: Bill Stevenson

4. Blondie, "Dreaming"Drummer: Clem Burke

5. The Stooges, "Dirt"Drummer: Scott Asheton

6. Gang Of Four, "Hed Send In The Army"Drummer: Hugo Burnham

7. Alice Cooper. "Public Animal #9"Drummer: Neal Smith

8. The Sweet, "Sweet FA"Drummer: Mick Tucker

9. Deep Purple, "Fireball"Drummer: Ian Paice

10. Iron Maiden, "Murders In the Rue Morgue"Drummer: Clive Burr

11. Kiss, "Parasite"Drummer: Peter Criss

12. Mountain, "Never In My Life"Drummer: Corky Laing

13. Cactus, "Evil"Drummer: Carmine Appice

14. Black Sabbath, "Turn Up The Night"Drummer: Vinnie Appice

15. Jeff Beck Group, "Shapes Of Things"Drummer: Mickey Waller

Since the late ‘90s, New Jersey trio Dälek has been pushing hip-hop into harsh, dissonant realms, and their latest album, Endangered Philosophies (Ipecac Recordings), honors their reputation for raw rhymes, bruising beats, and extreme sonics. On this playlist created specially for The Dowsers, the crew’s namesake MC salutes his fellow rap iconoclasts. “This is a collection of songs and groups that move me. It is a playlist of underground musicians who each, in their own way, have pushed the culture of hip-hop forward. What strikes me is the sheer variety of styles, sounds, and experimentation here.“I am lucky enough to have shared stages or studios with most of the musicians here. Some I only admire from afar. All of them leave me in awe of how powerful and beautiful music can be. These groups to one degree or another are, in my opinion, underappreciated.“There are a few artists that unfortunately were not available on Spotify that should be on the list: Techno Animal, B L A C K I E, The Labteks, Company Flow, and I’m sure a few others that may have slipped my mind.“Also, full disclosure: I added two of my own groups—Dälek and iconAclass—and a few tracks I produced for other artists, as I feel these all are a part of the story that this playlist paints.“This list goes back from the mid-’90s to present day. It is not in any particular order, chronological or otherwise. It was just compiled to show the depth and scope of what hip-hop music is.”—MC Dälek