Marvel’s Luke Cage is a black superhero from New York with a conscience. And the creators of the hit Netflix series about him chose to name his adventures after after an appropriate musical inspiration. Each of the 13 episodes of the show’s first season are named after classic tracks by Gang Starr, the group that paired one of hip-hop’s greatest producers, DJ Premier, with Guru, the erudite and soulful MC who passed away in 2010. The Luke Cage episodes draw on song titles from the group’s first five albums, with a particular emphasis on their 1994 classic Hard To Earn, which featured tough guy anthems like “Code of the Streets” and “Suckas Need Bodyguards.”
In 2017, synth-punk pioneer Gary Numan released his 21st album, Savage (Songs From a Broken World), a dystopian concept album that hit No. 2 on the UK album charts. On this playlist he created specially for The Dowsers, Numan reveals the eclectic influences that have kept him on the vanguard of electronic rock for four decades. “The playlist is based on inspiration. All of these songs have inspired me in various ways—some small, as in discovering an interesting sound or lyric; some major, as in encouraging a complete rethink and change in my own musical direction. But they all played a part in shaping the music Ive made over the last 40 years.”—Gary Numan
The genre of jazz has become rigidly perceived and narrowly used by the music industry. What Ive constructed is a playlist that reflects a newer breed of jazz artists, who are too often overlooked as a representation of the music, though their modern use of elements like syncopation, improvisation and rhythm would beg to differ. Each artist draws from the past but also paves their own unique way within the art form.
Tracks we dig! Songs we like by artists we like.
Few bands greeted the new millennium with as much pure pizzaz as The Go! Team did when they emerged out of Brighton in 2004. Fronted by mastermind Ian Parton and featuring a rotating cast of members (most notably Ninja, who delivers most of the group’s irresistibly upbeat raps), The Go! Team stood apart from many of their indie-rock peers with their eclectic, overflowing cauldron of influences and sounds, drawing on everything from English big beat to classic film scores to ‘90s college rock to left-field hip-hop. Approaching their craft with the diligence of crate-diggers, The Go! Team’s music channels all the relentless joy of an elementary-school playground, their sing-songy melodies and marching-band exuberance freely mashing together samples and styles until the resulting product feels as if it’s about to burst.Part of the magic of The Go! Team is how the band is able to stir all their scattered sources of inspiration together into something that feels effortlessly cohesive, their cheer-leading celebration rock sounding as though it were the kind of thing that just always existed in the sunny side of our imagination. But a peek into their influences unveils a wonderland of varying artists and styles, a plane where the Beastie Boys can shoot hoops with Ennio Morricone, and Deerhoof might get caught stealing Pokémon cards from The Prodigy. With their new album, Semicircle, arriving on January 19, we took the opportunity to assemble a roll call of The Go! Team’s many muses, charting the ways that the band has connected the dots between everyone from Happy Mondays to The 5th Dimension, and, in the process, forming a compendium of feel-good music for the ages. One, two, three, GO!!!!
Indie supergroup GØGGS features singer Chris Shaw of Memphis-based punk outfit Ex-Cult, indie psych darling Ty Segall, Bay Area garage noise revivalist Charles Moothart and bassist Michael Anderson. Having started as a conversation between Shaw and Segall when Ex-Cult opened for White Fence back in 2013, the band has just surprise-released their second album Pre Strike Sweep digitally in early September and are currently celebrating the physical release. Built on the more aggressive side of their foundational music influences (namely 80s hardcore), GØGGS is both fierce and thoughtful, exploring each members root in the underground through the totally fitting theme of destruction and rebirth. We recently asked them to make us a playlist, and were stoked to see them explore that theme and their musical influences family tree even further.Says Chris Shaw: "Pre Strike Sweep- the title track from the new GØGGS album- is a song about starting over. New beginnings are a common theme in rock music, so it was easy to make this list of rippers that are all loosely based on some kind of change. This is also probably the only playlist to ever feature Lee Hazelwood and Urban Waste back to back. Medicinal marijuana will do that to you."Listen above or go right here.
This post is part of our program, The Story of Kendrick, an in-depth, 10-part look at the life and music of Kendrick Lamar. Sound cool and want to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out and share on Facebook, Twitter, or with this link. Your friends will thank you.Kendrick Lamar’s albums are holistic, meticulously crafted meditations on the idea of blackness in America; they’re novels disguised as albums, and one gets the sense that every couplet and every bass lick has been labored over. All this is great, but sometimes you just want to hear Kendrick rap. This is what made his untitled.unmastered outtakes album from 2016 so enjoyable, and also why his guest verses are always so charming. The span of artists on this playlist reflects the central tension in Kendrick’s own music; the transcendent, post-electronic jazz of Flying Lotus nestles beside the rickety soul street reportage of Schoolboy Q. Navigating the space between those two poles is Kendrick, who moves forward and raps his ass off.
To say Grant Hart lived a hard life is a gross understatement. With 80s noise-pop pioneers Husker Dü, he played the misfit McCartney to Bob Moulds lacerating Lennon, providing the honey chaser to his partners hoarse-throat howls. But just when the band seemed on the verge of following R.E.M. out of the college-radio fringes and into the mainstream, Hart was waylaid by a heroin addiction, not to mention an HIV diagnosis (which ultimately proved to be false). Following the bands extremely acrimonious break-up, Hart gradually faded into obscurity, releasing a small handful of under-the-radar records while Mould enjoyed a steady, successful career as an alt-rock elder statesman. Recent years had been especially trying: Hart lost both parents in quick succession, and he was injured in a fire that destroyed his longtime family home in South St. Paul. And then 2017 brought the diagnosis of the kidney cancer that ultimately claimed him on September 14 at the age of 56.But throughout Harts many trials and tribulations, he never lost the gifts for swooning melody and psychedelized experimentation that made Hüsker Dü the most adventurous band in 80s indie rock. Just when you had counted him out—or even completely forgotten about him—hed blindside you with the dizzying fuzz-pop of 1999s Good News for the Modern Man, the frayed-nerve garage-rock of 2009s Hot Wax (recorded with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor), or the cinematic grandeur of 2013s Milton-inspired concept album, The Argument, a record that deserves to go down as his career-capping masterpiece.With this playlist, we pay tribute to the man who forged the Dave Grohl prototype of the shit-hot drummer who also a tender tunesmith, beginning with Harts greatest Hüsker Dü hits (including the peak-era duet with Mould on "Flip Your Wig"), and then on through his short-lived early 90s combo Nova Mob*, and his increasingly sporadic, exceedingly underrated solo work.* Note: Nova Mobs 1994 self-titled second album isnt available on Spotify.
We here at The Dowsers adapted this playlist from Marshall Bowden’s “10 Great Forgotten Bob Dylan Tracks,” a listicle the writer put together for Paste magazine. Admittedly, the word “forgotten” is overstatement. Seeing as how Dylan is one the most analyzed artists in the history of recorded music, there simply isn’t a whole lot in his catalog that hasn’t been obsessively chronicled. Headline hyperbole notwithstanding, Bowden proves a knowledgeable fan with a sharp ear for minor gems. There are no missteps here. Each and every cut succeeds in helping paint a fuller picture of the icon’s vision. If you’re a Dylan fan looking to move beyond his classic albums and songs, this playlist will make a great guide into the deep end.
Zak Trojano is a "fingerstyle" singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, and one who cant seem to be mentioned without a nod to his erudite guitar skills. Having just released his third album Wolf Trees this summer, Trojano is so honed into his craft that The Alt Revue calls it, "Masterful finger picking guitar, and a baritone vocal style that is smooth as hell. If you havent listened yet, you need to do so ASAP." Clearly garnering some folk guitar worship in his own right, its refreshing to know that when we tapped Zak for a playlist, his go-to was all about his personal guitar-picking heroes. Says Zak: "Some artists can write a good song, and some can pick a good guitar, but very few can do both! Heres a playlist of some of those rare talents that can really write and play. Kick back and enjoy some finger style guitar brilliance and memorable songwriting by some of the very best."Check it out above or go right here.
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.
