Genres

"Everybody hates a tourist," a wise, skinny man once sang. So lets leave "Wonderwall" at the karaoke bar and rediscover some quality overlooked choons from the Britpop era, which, in our unscientific opinion, begins with Suedes self-titled 1993 debut and stretches all the way to 2000, if only to remind you that Gay Dad and Elasticas The Menace werent all that bad. (Really!) Were also abiding by a fairly liberal definition of Britpop here, because tracks like Spiritualizeds "Lay Back in the Sun" and Shacks "Natalies Party" are as eternally splendorous as anything produced by their NME-mugging peers.After listening to this playlist, youll be left wondering why Oasis "Hey Now" wasnt as big as "Supersonic," why the Boo Radleys werent as big as Oasis, why Pulps "Sylvia" isnt considered Jarvis Cockers career-defining performance, and why the only way to experience Echobellys "Insomniac" on Spotify is through the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack. Youll also be reminded of that fleeting moment when Ride went mod-rock, The Stone Roses turned into Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead were just a bunch of alt-rock chancers who named their first album after a Jerky Boys sketch. And if 2018 brings us a Catatonia revival, then our work is done.

In love in 1988, I gave “The Flame” more attention than it deserved. But Robin Zander sings the hell out of this make-or-break ballad, and Rick Nielsen’s mandocello is front and center. Thus began the most reviled period of Cheap Trick’s history, during which Zander recorded a duet with a Wilson sister not even as sharp as “Almost Paradise” and they competed with Poison and Whitesnake. But I’m no fan of power pop, so classing up hair metal ballads strikes me as no different. I wish I’d been there during their live peak. I rely on my knowledge of a couple studio albums and The Essential Cheap Trick.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Mere minutes before sitting down to write this post, Dais Records announced its plan to drop reissues of Psychic TV’s Pagan Day and Allegory & Self—stone-cold classics of ’80s psychedelia—in July. This is exactly the kind of record nerd–salivating news I’ve come to expect from label co-founders Ryan Martin and Gibby Miller (who started the operation in 2007). On what feels like a weekly basis nowadays, they revive some long-forgotten synth/ambient masterpiece or a vintage industrial jam that’s exquisitely dark and dreary. If you’ve never soaked up Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession, a fringe art-pop album from the post-punk era, prepare to have your skull cap unscrewed and brain turned upside down. (Seriously—“Turkey Girl” manages to sound like outsider hip-hop recorded inside an intestinal tract.) Same goes for Hunting Lodge’s Will. It may have been forged in the raging fires of Michigan’s ’80s industrial scene, yet its hell-encrusted hypnotism, stuttering bass thuds, and minimalist dread is so damn prescient, it may as well have been recorded yesterday.Dais isn’t just an archival label, however. In the spring of 2017, the pair unleashed The Gag File, American noise artist Aaron Dilloway’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2011’s Modern Jester. Easily a contender for experimental album of the year, it employs murky, surrealist electronics and violently contorted samples to capture the fear and loathing suffusing our Trumplandia nightmare. In addition to Dilloway, the Dais catalog features churning brutality from hardcore-troublemakers-turned-EBM-fist-pumpers Youth Code, and Sightings, the most important noise-rock band of the 21st century.But not everything Dais puts out seeks to obliterate eardrums: on top of their taste for the ugly and abrasive, they have a deep love for the beautiful and sublime. To date, they’ve released two albums from Scout Paré-Phillips (pictured), a gothic singer/songwriter whose imposingly austere sound falls somewhere between folk music and art rock. At first blush, Drab Majesty’s gauzy and undulating darkwave feels worlds removed from Paré-Phillips’ guitar-driven theater, but when you sit down and spend some quality time with the former’s Careless and The Demonstration, it becomes apparent both explorers share a love for intricate songwriting with lyrics balancing the cryptic with the emotional. Quite honestly, most modern darkwave artists don’t even come close to touching Drab Majesty in terms of compositional originality. Then again, most modern experimental labels don’t even come close to touching Dais in terms of quality, so it’s a perfect fit.

With a slim oeuvre for which my colleagues have made grand claims, D’Angelo has used writer’s block as a kind of incubator: for thirteen years he watched as Brown Sugar and Voodoo matured into R&B touchstones, unsullied by mediocre contractual follow-ups. At the turn of the century I preferred other Soulquarian releases like Mama’s Gun and Things Fall Apart, not to mention his fellow mononym, the crucially Sade-besotted Maxwell; what they lacked in accretive density they compensated with forthrightness. A dumb binary, I realized later, especially when the accretive density was as tasty as devil’s pie without the addictive qualities.Speaking of “Devil’s Pie” — it inspires D’Angelo’s ambivalence. Not lyrically — he’s an example of why submission to the eddies of his bass lines and the silt of his harmonies produces useful tensions. The moment in that track when hand claps joins the scratching and granitic groove laid down by Questlove as D’Angelo repeats the title hook reveals the potency of devil’s pie as an aphrodisiac, mephitic and deadly. 2014’s Black Messiahreached new heights of studio craft: the stentorian piano of “Another Life”; yet another tumbling opening of a groove in “The Charade”; the sitar as bridge joining East and West, engaged in diplomatic back channel communications with Roy Hargrove; the mumbled imprecations meant as prayers but, despite their unguent qualities, sharpened with menace.Still, I reach for Brown Sugar most in 2017—the impishness with which he scrubs a metaphor of Mick Jagger’s eros-inspired sensationalism.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

This playlist was curated by our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum—go there for more great lists, commentary, and more.

The genius of Definitive Jux can be traced to an idea stolen from Ghostfaces song "The Grain," off 2000’s Supreme Clientele. Overtop a beloved breakbeat, Ghost and RZA forbid rappers from going against the grain of classic hip-hop tenets—while making a thoroughly surreal, topsy turvy masterpiece that went against the grain of classic hip-hop tenets. Each landmark indie-rap release from Def Jux was rooted in a similarly simple but rebellious idea: What if the most awe-inspiring rap gods of the ‘80s and ‘90s never conformed to industry demands and kept swimming farther away?Before Run the Jewels, El-Ps beats paid homage to Marley Marl, Ced-Gee, Paul C, and the Bomb Squad, the most revered knob turners in 80s rap; he just eschewed James Brown samples for prog guitars and John Carpenter synths. Aesop Rock followed his Long Island mentors De La Soul, the original distorters of vocab, by replacing daisies with art-house darts laced in code that never relented. RJD2 imagined early DJ Shadow albums not shaded strictly gray. Mr. Lif lifted the cool monotone delivery of Guru with the fiery political fury of Public Enemy. C Rayz Walz was the only son of Ol Dirty Bastard and Cappadonna. Murs and 9th Wonder made a one MC/one producer album in the golden-age vein of Gangstarr and Pete Rock & CL Smooth. Hangar 18 was Souls of Mischief in a drunken cypher outside Fat Beats.Oddly, Def Jux were loathed by the purist rappers and conservative hip-hop consumers who gobbled up all the classic aesthetics that the Jukies were reimagining in the era of iPods, 9/11, and the booming market of internet rap. But no other collective of rappers and producers soundtracked the dread and fear of the early 2000s, all the while staying true to their roots of graffiti, b-boy-friendly beats, and telling the government and other MCs alike to kiss their ass.But 10 years since the one-two punch of El-Ps Ill Sleep When Youre Dead and Aesop Rocks None Shall Pass, and seven years after the label shut its doors with Camu Taos posthumous 2010 album King of Hearts, you can still see the influence of the acclaimed New York based indie-rap label that was sued by Def Jam before they even dropped their first full length release. On 2014’s So It Goes, RATKING emerged as the logical extension of Cannibal Ox, young dwellers of a post-apocalyptic New York where gentrification did more damage than Giuliani. Milo, Elucid and billy woods have continued the ethos of Jux for Bandcamp kids who missed the original dynastic run. Danny Brown wrote Aesop Rock lyrics by hand while in jail. Camu Tao begat his fellow hometown off-kilter crooner Kid Cudi. Party Fun Action Committee wrote the blueprint for The Lonely Island. RJD2 soundtracked Mad Men and dozens of commercials. Adult Swim head honcho Jason Demarcos love for the label led to the union of El-P and Killer Mike. And Cage helped us all see how truly insane Shia LeBouf could be.Since Def Jux shut down at the dawn of the streaming age, much of its back catalog isn’t available on Spotify—however, a handful of its key releases have surfaced thanks to reissues. We’ve collected the best tracks from those albums in the playlist above, and mixed them with a selection of cuts from the contemporary hip-hop artists they’ve inspired. And for a deeper dive into the Def Jux discography, check this YouTube playlist:

I knew I’d joined a special place when the first act Stylus Magazine inducted its Hall of Fame wasn’t Joy Division, Talking Heads, or Brian Eno but…ELO. Tireless enthusiasts of British pop but with progressive-rock roots, Electric Light Orchestra at their best recorded pop as otherworldly as the (in)famous spaceships yet as familiar as Jules Verne. Jukebox heroes whose material absorbed the other jukebox competition.I hesitated, it’s true, before including “Evil Woman.” “Evil Hook” is more like it — damn! The chorus sung in falsetto answered by Richard Bevan’s clavinet. Misogynist, there’s no denying it, except like most dorks closeted with their addled dreams synchronized on synthesizers, they get their idea of women from other songs or their own suppressed lust. In essence, the speed and detail and delight of the music mitigates, to my ears, the dumb, received tropes; women couldn’t be evil if they inspired a love-as-lust ode as addled as “Don’t Bring Me Down.”Expert magpies (“Shine a Little Love” is Lynne doing ABBA doing disco, or perhaps ABBA heard ELO’s use of strings and thought, “Hm…”) and precise trend reflectors (“Hold Me Tight” became a hit in 1981 just as American pop music was drenched in homages to the fifties), ELO could get exhausting, especially when in a rotten mood their songs remind me of bumpers or Saturday morning cartoons from the dawn of the Reagan era. So much of Lynne’s work presaged the dork futurism of Gary Numan and Trevor Horn’s use of call and response harmonies singing at the top of their range while pianos tinkle and a singer tries keeping his equilibrium in a world intent on banishing his awful hair to obsolescence. Perhaps this explains Lynne’s alignment later in the eighties with Tom Petty and George Harrison. It had to be more than “It’s Over.” Otherwise they would have dialed the number of the dude from Supertramp.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

All my conversations with electronic-music heads have had a common theme recently: Everyone agrees that there was little consensus in dance music this year. It’s been that way for a while, really. Every year, there are more scenes running in parallel, fewer standout anthems that everybody can agree on. But this year, even dance music’s broad, diffuse overground felt scattered. Plenty of reliable figures kept doing what they do best—Four Tet and the Caribou side project Daphni turned out well-regarded albums, for instance—but aside, perhaps, from Bicep, there were few emergent artists with wide crossover appeal.The good news, though, is that there were plenty of pockets of brilliance across the underground, both in terms of micro-scenes and individual artists boldly blazing their own paths. In terms of the former, the most exciting was a nameless corner of the UK bass spectrum, largely headquartered in Bristol, encompassing labels like Hemlock, Hessle Audio, Timedance, Livity Sound, and Whities. Even here, there’s no single rhythmic signature or sonic feature that unites them all, the way there is with dubstep or techno. Instead, it’s a shared predilection for highly abstracted sound design, deliriously drawn-out patterns, and twisted arrangements that turn on a dime. Minor Science’s shuddering, jewel-toned “Volumes,” Mosca’s wild, whip-cracking Latin-dub raver “Peyote Stitch,” and Batu’s feverishly repetitive “Murmur” were all standouts here, alongside stellar tracks from Lanark Artefax, Airhead, Ploy, Hodge, Parris, and the artist known simply as Joe.If that’s the “scenius” end of things, the genius end was just as fruitful. Confidently sailing far beyond the known limits of Chicago footwork, Jlin continued to melt minds with her own brand of dazzlingly polyrhythmic, ultra-vivid, triplet-riddled club tracks. Laurel Halo, never one to repeat herself two records in a row, hit upon the strangest, squishiest sounds she’s conjured yet—an enveloping amalgam of funk, affectless electro-pop, and musique concrete. Errorsmith, designer of Native Instruments’ popular software synth Razor, put his creation through its paces on a head-spinningly intricate album of synthesized percussion and needling sound design that, despite its wanton experimentalism, is also one of the most giddily enjoyable records of the year. And as far as singularity of vision goes, few could touch Fever Ray, who returned from a eight-year absence with the brilliant, challenging, sometimes sexy and sometimes confounding Plunge. “IDK About You,” highlighted here, was one of its wiliest curveballs: a 160-BPM co-production with the young Portuguese batida producer Nídia Minaj (also included here with her own “Underground”) that put an unprecedentedly breathless spin on Karin Dreijer’s creepy, out-of-body pop.The link between electronic music and pop is practically as old as electronic music itself, but this year there were still artists who made the relationship feel fresh. The Korean-American singer/producer yaeji turned out a heady, low-lit fusion of house, ambient, and trap music. Sophia Kennedy, an American living in Hamburg, brought her experience writing music for the theater to an odd and deeply infectious album for DJ Koze’s Pampa label. And even TORRES, best known as an indie rocker, broke new ground on “To Be Given a Body,” the absorbing final track from her album Three Futures: It’s a captivating fusion of storytelling and wispy-yet-weighty ambient production, and I couldn’t stop listening to it this year, often cueing it up multiple times in a row. It’s an outlier on this list, but it also feels like a jumping-off point. Hopefully, 2018 will bring more songs like it—fresh energy and fresh ideas from artists way out on the margins of a deeply decentered genre.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.For certain fans, the high point of Slowdive’s return came a few days before the release of their eponymous comeback album in May 2017, when the band unveiled Avalon Emerson’s blissful ambient-house remix of “Sugar for the Pill,” a song that harkens back to the mid-’90s glory days when electronic shoegaze briefly flowered.There were precedents to this brief crossover: My Bloody Valentine, the band to whom all shoegazers aspire, used sampled breakbeats on “Instrumental No. 2” and asked UK producer Andrew Weatherall to remix the already dance-influenced “Soon” for the Glider Remixes EP; A.R. Kane, another key shoegaze progenitor, took influences from house music and dub; and Cocteau Twins’ ethereal rush felt like Brian Eno’s ambient music made flesh. Meanwhile, Primal Scream’s epochal 1991 album, Screamadelica, had already proved that guitars and electronic music could mix. This spirit of experimentation played out in other early shoegaze releases, with Chapterhouse making use of sampled beats on “Falling Down,” and Curve audibly influenced by techno and industrial music.Two records released in 1993 would cement the alliance between electronic music and shoegaze. Souvlaki, Slowdive’s second album, was a stunning fusion of ambient atmospheres and guitars, influenced by Aphex Twin, dub, and Brian Eno (who worked on the album), and was epitomized by the celestial summer-day-glide of “Souvlaki Space Station.” Then there was Seefeel’s debut album, Quique, a dazzling concoction of ambient textures played out on guitar and drums, blurring the line between man and machine.When not mimicking electronics, many shoegaze bands commissioned contemporary electronic music producers to remix their work, their delicate vocals and celestial guitar lines proving ripe for electronic manipulation, such as Spooky’s remix of Lush’s “Undertow” and Aphex Twin’s astonishing take on Curve’s “Falling Free.” The pinnacle of this crossover occurred when Chapterhouse invited Global Communication to remix their second album, Blood Music, in its entirety, creating the ambient classic Pentamerous Metamorphosis. Chapterhouse would return the favor by providing guitars for “8:07” on Global Communication’s 76:14.But by the mid-’90’s, shoegaze was a media bust and the fallout hit its leading lights hard (Souvlaki, in particular, was trashed). Slowdive were dropped by Creation after the release of their third studio album, Pygmalion, in 1995, while Seefeel went on hiatus the following year. Shoegaze was dead, and so too was its electronic counterpart.The release of Blue Skied An Clear in 2002 was highly unexpected. The album, from fashionable electronic label Morr Music, was a tribute to Slowdive, and consisted of covers of their work and new songs influenced by their sound. German producer Ulrich Schnauss, who appeared on the album, released his own tribute to shoegaze the following year, A Strangely Isolated Place, while M83’s second album, Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, would also drink deep from the shoegaze sound, laying the foundations for his global success and the eventual return of Slowdive, et al., as did The Field’s 2009 shoegazey album, Yesterday and Today. When Slowdive hit up Avalon Emerson for a remix, the circle was completed.

A caveat: This is a personal list, not a purportedly objective overview of electronic music in 2017. Would such a thing even be possible? It’s doubtful, if only because there is no single overarching scene that unites all electronic music. It’s not just about the divide between commercial EDM and everything else; even within the underground, electronic music’s fans are fragmented into innumerable overlapping niches according to subgenres, stylistic quirks, cities, clubs, and cliques. Fortunately, one of the perks of my job—and one of the perks of going out a lot less than I once did, if I’m honest—is that I feel less compunction to pledge fealty to any single tribe. As a critic, I get to eavesdrop on them all. So while I can’t promise that this list is comprehensive, it does encompass a broad array of sounds, from Mark Barrott’s Balearic ambient to Jlin’s flickering post-footwork to Demen’s claustrophobic goth.Given that range, I’ve sequenced the list with listenability in mind, not in any sort of ranked fashion. There are a few principal threads. The first is the strain of jewel-toned, bittersweet house music heard in tracks by DJ Koze, Project Pablo, and Young Marco; for daydreaming dancers, 2017 has delivered in spades. Then there’s a range of heavier, beat-oriented fare, like Proc Fiskal’s brittle, fidgety grime, or Sinjin Hawke’s choral trap. And finally, I couldn’t resist fleshing out my list with ambient tracks like Visible Cloaks’ “Mask” and Kara-lis Coverdale’s “Grafts.” Ever since the disappearance of chillout rooms, ambient has tended to remain at arms’ length from dance music, but with incredible records coming along at an unprecedented clip, there’s never been a better time to close the gap.