Genres

Middlemarch. The Changing Light on Sandover. Get Up On It. When I’m seventy, I’ll be divining their mysteries. Even if D. Boon hadn’t died in a car accident in 1985, The Minutemen suggest plumbless depths. Marrying the terseness of Wire to an adoration of classic rock produced musical haiku whose undulating bass riffs and shouted hooks ultimately owed nothing to no one. I can’t even say I’m a devotee; I’m still figuring out how to listen to them, and it’s a thrill. To realize slop and precision is some kind of feat, hence their CCR and Steely Dan covers (adducing the precision side) and “Bob Dylan Wrote Political Songs” (adducing their sloppy-visionary side)The most amiable of double albums, Double Nickels on the Dime is also among the deepest. I’ve owned it for fifteen years yet I look at the track listing and couldn’t hum a bar of certain songs — and that’s fine. I look at the list below and have trouble recalling certain riffs too. Boon’s furtive tone is, of all people’s, like Dionne Warwick: he’s sharing a conversation which listeners may or may not be able to follow, babbling and crooning as required, wondering if you know the way to San Jose because he wrote the directions down on a scrap of cig pack paper he lost. George Hurley can be as spare as Robert Gotobed or insert a roll as unexpectedly as Keith Moon. Negotiating between Mike Watt’s stentorian bass runs and Boon’s chikka-chikka riffs defined the Minutemen’s tension — see “Mutiny in Jonestown.”I titled this post after a lyric in “The Price of Paradise”; awed by CCR’s “Don’t Look Now,” they wrote their own distillation of what they’d learned about American life under a frightening president, in their case Ronald Reagan, i.e. life is cheap and, to quote the song, you die without dreams. Hi! It’s 2017. 3-Way Tie (For Last), its host album, has a tune called “The Red and the Black,” named after Stendhal’s classic novel about political intrigue in post-Napoleonic France. Imagine if Boon had lived long enough to read about Iran-Contra.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Fortify your pulse with Philip Sherburnes regularly updated playlist of electronic tracks ranging from club bubblers to horizontal home listening.We kick off our latest roundup of the best electronic music with one of the fiercest club cuts to come around in a while: Jlin and Zora Jones’ “Dark Matter,” a bass-heavy beast of a track—part footwork, part d’n’b, all evil—anchoring Jones’ essential new Visceral Minds 2 compilation. It’s a good indicator of how outre things are going to get this month: James Holden (pictured) and The Animal Spirits’ “Pass Through the Fire” is a psychedelic-synth excursion from the experimental electronic mainstay’s new band project that has more in common with Terry Riley than with techno. And Peder Mannerfelt’s “Obey” finds the ROll the Dice member (and Knife/Fever Ray collabortor) revving his engines for a terrifying trip into hair-raising sound design.It’s not all such a white-knuckled ride, though. Four Tet’s “SW9 9SL” is as sleek and resonant a house track as he’s delivered in ages; Moritz von Oswald and Juan Atkins’ “Concave 1” is as enveloping as dub techno gets. And Destroyer’s sax man Joseph Shabason takes us out with “Aytche,” a gorgeous array of drifting synths, processed sax, and honest-to-goodness muted trumpet solo—just the thing to keep you warm as we begin our inevitable slide into fall.

There was a time when emo and indie were forced to sit at separate tables in the lunchroom. But volcanic new songs from the battle-hardened Brand New and Rainer Maria prove that genre tags are often too restrictive and willy nilly, and that its never too late for a band to express themselves via insightful lyricism and volcanic outbursts. And while we praise the emocore veterans for their standard-setting returns, take some time to breathe in the potent resurrection of shoegazing hardcore/proto-emo deities Quicksand, while also appreciating the stunning artistic growth Turnover has already shown.Elsewhere: Seven years after This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem has returned with some of their more searching, epic songs, while R.E.M. guitar god Peter Buck and Sleater-Kinneys Corin Tucker have made sweet music together with Filthy Friends. And though his band cant seem to stick to a name, Oh Sees leader John Dwyer continues to prove himself one of the undergrounds leading lights.

In this recurring playlist, The Dowsers Mosi Reeves gathers new sounds and styles from across the hip-hop diaspora. Some are familiar, and others are personal favorites, but all reflect the state of rap as it is lived now.Every year brings a new culture war, and the dog days of 2017 have found us arguing over the alleged criminality of rappers like Xxxtentacion and Kodak Black, and whether listening to them amounts to tacit support. On their new projects, both men acknowledge their controversial reputation—and perhaps even ask for forgiveness. Elsewhere, Action Bronson rehashes his old Blue Chips mixtape formula, and makes a decent retail project in the process. And if you can’t be bothered with the drama surrounding the "lamestream," then there are vital indie voices like Milo and his densely literate art-rap.

Released in August 1997, Be Here Now was Oasis very own Titanic—a too-big-to-fail colossus that ultimately turned Britpops leading light into a sinking ship (one that was no doubt weighed down by nine laborious minutes of "All Around the World"). Granted, eight million copies sold worldwide hardly constitutes a disaster, and the band would continue to fill arenas and headline festivals worldwide until their 2009 dissolution. But after the world-beating triumphalism of 1994s Definitely Maybe and 1995s Whats the Story Morning Glory?, the infamously coke-bloated Be Here Now marked the moment when Oasis ceased to be a dominant pop-cultural force, precipitating a decade-long slide through a series of increasingly formulaic, interchangeable albums. Seemingly bereft of any inspiration beyond Abbey Road, the band spent their last decade cloning their old warhorses into inbred offspring ("Stop Crying Your Heart Out" is essentially "Slide Away" given the "Wonderwall" treatment), and at a certain point, it seemed like they couldnt even be arsed to come up with fresh song titles (Ill see your "Roll With It" and raise you a "Roll It Over"). Unlike their one-time peers in Radiohead and Blur, there was never a concerted attempt at reinvention, never an embrace of outré influences that could steer them into a new creative phase. Oasis were arguably the first massive, generation-defining rock band to become an oldies act by their third record.But while songwriter Noel Gallagher effectively played all his chips on the bands first two albums (and their equally top-notch B-sides) like a Vegas gambler who thought his luck would never run out, the bands post-Morning Glory catalog still yielded a handful of keepers in between all the lugubrious power ballads, bloozy filler, and Beatles Rock Band karaoke tracks. And rarely were these songs the lead singles—for all its overwrought, helicopter-powered bombast, "DYou Know What I Mean?" coasts on a repetitious, undercooked chorus that wouldnt passed muster on their first two albums, while on perfunctory would-be anthems like "Go Let It Out," "The Hindu Times" and "Lyla," Oasis sound like theyre content to just hit the first 30 rows of Wembley rather than the bleachers. Instead, this playlist focusses on those rare tracks where Oasis still exuded the hunger and swagger of a band that anointed themselves rock n roll stars on the first song on their first record ("I Hope I Think I Know," "The Shock of the Lightning"); the simple acoustic sing-alongs that stripped away all the ego and excess ("Songbird," "She Is Love"); and the tentative toe-dips into experimental psychedelia ("The Turning," "To Be Where Theres Life") that they sadly didnt pursue any further.On one of Be Here Nows superior tracks, Liam Gallagher declares, "Its getting better, man!"—and, unfortunately, as their post-1997 discography proves, it really didnt. But even if Oasis last five albums didnt yield nearly as many classics as their first two, there are definitely, maybe enough quality choons here to inspire a spritzer supernova.

For electronic fans of a certain age, French Touch (or, as it’s also known, “French House) owned the 90s. Marrying the plop disco with the peaking phaser effects, Ed Banger, Daft Punk, Kavinsky, and Cassius provided the soundtrack to many late nights (and early mornings). The music was sexy and fun, and was the most commercially dominant type of electronic music in the States until EDM reared it’s ugly head in. This Apple Music playlist is a little jerky in terms of its flow and pacing, and “Heatwave” if from ‘00, but it contains some great remixes from the genre and succinctly sums that particular time and place.

People aren’t born with good taste; it’s a phenomenon you edge into if you’re lucky. Plenty of kids grew up with KISS and Save Ferris records. Peter Gabriel was my first Serious Crush, and with all due respect to Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter, I still love the old frog. In the summer of my sophomore year in high school, which coincided with one of those century-long breaks between albums that older Gabriel fans had learned to expect, I checked what was then called Security out of the public library. Tribal drums. Oblique references to Jung. A song called “San Jacinto” boasting i in its last forty-five seconds the creepiest Fairlight sample — some kind of manipulated basso whistle — in recorded music (fans know the one I mean). A song about shocking the monkey that might’ve been about shocking the monkey whose video creeped the fuck out of me as much as the Fairlight sample in “San Jacinto.”As correctly as carpers have dismissed the eighties as a time of rapine and greed, it was also a period when musicians enjoyed the largess of label recording budgets; if you were a Peter Gabriel, this meant a last shot attempt to exploit growing stardom to make an album that honored his influences. So was a perfect gateway. Fairlights, sure. Also: hi-hats, Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, Youssou N’Dour, the poetry of Anne Sexton. In “Sledgehammer” Gabriel wrote and sang the only convincing Otis Redding homage by an English public school graduate. With “In Your Eyes” he created John Cusack and Ione Skye for the purpose of watching them fall in love to a song about the kind of desire from which doorways to a thousand churches, light, and heat spring. In some ways “In Your Eyes” is one of the subtlest of Bowie tributes. Think about it: the church of man-love is such a holy place to be.Three years passed before he released a lumbering, sincere record About Relationships. Anticipation led to a high chart placement for US — it’s hart to remember that Peter Gabriel was a genuine star in 1992 — before the mass audience he’d gained in 1986 realized “Steam” wasn’t another “Sledgehammer,” although, boy, did it try. As my interest in most of his records waned, I still listened to Passion. This ostensible soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ celebrates relationships too: Gabriel’s to music from many lands. Unlike his forebears he respects distance; he’s an art school rocker who used to dress as a flower, after all. Turns out this distance gives him the proper respect for the sounds of Zaire, Sudan, Morocco, and Ethiopia. Passion contains the most committed music of Gabriel’s career. Even when the arrangements get bombastic, he’s generous enough to allow the players to do it on their own terms. Often the synthesis of Gabriel’s keyboard and percussion effects and these native players is breathtaking.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.

Get warped with the latest tracks and trends in metalcore, post-hardcore, emo, pop-punk, and everything in between, as selected by The Dowsers Justin Farrar.

The triumphant return of Brand New—whose new single "Cant Get It Out" pushes deep into the modern-rock zone—is upon us. But dont sleep on Converges "Under Duress," a chilling slab of metalcore, or Blindwishs "Single Word"—post-hardcore blending soaring melodieswith pummeling heft.

Of all the killer emo, pop-punk, hardcore, and metalcore dropped in 2017 (thus far), it’s a no-brainer as to what the very best song is: Paramore’s “Hard Times,” of course. Injected with Daft Punk’s robotic vocoders and boasting a vocal from Hayley Williams that leaps from playful to frayed to resilient at the drop of a dime, it’s a tension-racked marriage between New Wave, discoid joy, and downer mediations on strife.But Paramore certainly have had plenty of competition. Motionless In White—a.k.a. the second coming of Marilyn Manson, albeit with way more breakdowns—unleashed the industrialized, metalcore rager “LOUD (Fuck It),” one of the rudest odes to ear-bleeding volume and teenage rebellion of the past few years. Another stand out is Rise Against’s “The Violence, a searing and earnest punk anthem railing against the man in an age when railing against the man has taken on awful urgency.But wait! There’s even more 2017 goodness: Pvris finally returned and delivered the goth-kissed torch song “Heaven,” Of Mice & Men dished out a sonic knuckle sandwich in the form of “Unbreakable,” and The Word Alive mashed post-hardcore and art rock together with the spacey “Misery.” Whether you prefer the pop or the metal end of the Warped punk spectrum, this playlist offers plenty for you.

We weren’t prepared for the dissolution of Sonic Youth in 2011. An alternative-rock institution for three decades, the band’s last few records were of such high quality, fans were entitled to question whether they’d sold their souls to an ungodly demon to achieve the kind of perpetual, everlasting prime that was suggested by their band name. (The final record was, funny enough, called The Eternal.) No, nothing lasts forever, but with seemingly so much creative juice left in the tank, it’s no shock that each member has continued to thrive post-Youth.Lee Ranaldo’s songwriting contributions usually came out to just one or two tracks per album, so it always seemed likely that his creative dam would burst outside of the group. Tracks like “Xtina As I Knew Her” and “New Thing” are classic Ranaldo—melodic cuts with textural guitar licks and slightly sardonic vocals. The latter track closes his fine 2017 album Electric Trim, which sees the guitarist testing the borders of his sound, working with north African grooves and electro-tinted folk.Thurston Moore seems the most interested in continuity. With an emphasis on gentle melodies and lengthy, spacious guitar sections, tracks like “Speak to the Wild” and “Smoke of Dreams” sound like first cousins of latter-day Sonic Youth cuts. However, his collaboration with Yoko Ono and former bandmate Kim Gordon on the challenging avant-garde record YOKOKIMTHURSTON allowed Moore to indulge his experimental inclinations.Connecting the work of Ranaldo and Moore has been drummer Steve Shelley, who has continued to back his ex-Sonic Youth comrades, as well as Admiral Freebee and Sun Kil Moon, among others. Meanwhile, Jim O’Rourke, a member from 1999 to 2005, has built a fine solo catalogue (mostly unavailable on Spotify) without losing the producer/session-musician spirit that has seen him orbit the alt-rock scene for years. Recent team-ups has included work with Vova Zen.But among all of Sonic Youth’s alumni, Gordon has been the most free-ranging. She’s released just one track under her own name, but what a track! The bass-heavy, blood-thirsty “Murdered Out” is a thunderous rocker: “You get lost, murdered out of my heart,” she asserts with a fierce punch. Elsewhere, the Wild Style Lion team-up “Lovewasinme” runs as barbed as a subway train wrapped in razor wire, while the rumbling, tuneless “Last Mistress”—released with guitarist Bill Nace under the name Body/Head—offers a freaky bedrock for her breathy vocals, forever one of indie rock’s most cutting instruments.This playlist isn’t an attempt to piece together a kind of lost Sonic Youth album, as though pulling together tracks could forge a singular, cohesive record that never was. (Besides, latter-day bassist Mark Ibold, who has kept a low-profile of late, isn’t here at all). Instead, it acts as a sampler of the fine music the band’s former members continue to create—songs that honour their history without stifling the ambition that powered their peerless oeuvre.