Genres

Whats This Playlist All About? The "Havana” singer and former Fifth Harmony star reveals the tracks that leave her swooning.What Do You Get? A fun (though somewhat predictable) mix of mushy modern pop hits and timeless romantic classics. The playlist leans mostly on recent stuff (well give her a pass since shes only 20 years old), including Taylor Swift at her sweetest ("Love Story"), Ed Sheeran at his schmaltziest ("Perfect"), and Selena Gomez at her sultriest ("Hands to Myself")—oh, and Camila herself at her slinkiest ("Never Be the Same"). A little Stevie Wonder and Prince are thrown in for good measure, while The Weeknd slips in not once, but twice.Most Romantic: No one can top Etta James. No one.Will Playing This Win Over Your Crush? Only if youre 15 to 25 years old.

There were two things we were looking forward to in 2018: Robert Mueller indicting Donald Trump, and Migos releasing Culture II. After all, Migos has been at the forefront of pop music for the better part of this decade. If we’re being 100% honest, we’ll admit that we dismissed them as one-hit wonders when “Versace” first dropped in 2013, even if we kept it in rotation for a long minute. But they’ve proven much more resilient, creative, and influential than we ever imagined. “Bad and Boujie” and “T-Shirt” helped get us through the past year-and-a-half of this orange-stained apocalyptic shitshow, and the first Culture felt like a coronation not only of Migos as the kings of hip-hop, but also of a new generation of hip-hop stars. So we just assumed Culture II would be like Easter with triplet flows, pinging trap beats, and wealth-porn punchlines.We can’t blame Migos for taking a victory lap, but, at 24 songs stretching nearly two hours, Culture II feels like a victory slog. There’s some hot tracks——“Stir Fry,” “BBO,” and “MotorSport” are all career highlights——but there’s a lot of bloat. Whether they did this because they lacked any sense of quality control (sorry), or because they were trying to game the streaming system, doesn’t really matter to us. The fact is, it gets tedious.So we’re asking you, our loyal readers and keen discerners of good taste, to help us make Culture II great again. Please, EQ the speakers, stake out the X-Actos, and carve out the amazing, taut album that we feel is lurking in there somewhere. You can see how we’d cut this up in the playlist above, but we want to hear your version, too. So, visit our Facebook post here, post your tracklist and Spotify playlist link in the comments, and/or give the thumbs up to the other version you like the best. We’ll feature the winning version of Culture II on our homepage and in our social feeds, attributed to you. Playlist away.

Captain Beefheart was a man, but also an idea, and to write a straightforward piece about him here seems antithetical to his essence. He had a mustache sometimes and other times he had a goatee; sometimes he wore a fedora and other times he wore a cowboy or top hat. Despite having no musical training, he played numerous instruments. Occasionally, he composed at the piano, which he did not know how to play. He was friends with Frank Zappa, who produced Trout Mask Replica. His music is indisputably its own strange amalgamation, but it was still as directly tied to the confusion of the ‘60s as any music ever was, fusing blues, beat poetry, jazz, rock ‘n roll, psychedelic, noise, and avant-garde. His voice was almost magical and he could shift between gravelly falsetto and rumbling baritone at the drop of a harmonica. To try to make sense of Captain Beefheart is pointless, and furthermore, it goes against his very being. Sure, he can be understood as a social phenomenon, but this playlist isn’t about that. It’s called “Captain Beefheart Insanity.” Just go with it.

During Car Seat Headrest’s meteoric 2016 ascent, various fans and critics tried to pin down the band’s sonic DNA. An obvious touchstone was Matador Records mid-90s golden era—the hushed/clanking dynamic of Yo La Tengo and the absurdist suburban ennui of Pavement are both evident—but there was also strands of polished ‘90s alternative rock in the album’s clean and at-times intricate production. “Sounds of Denial”—the Spotify playlist that band braintrust Will Toledo posted around the time of the album’s release—features “songs that are responsible in some way for the creation of my new album Teens of Denial.” It’s a surprisingly broad playlist that leans very heavily on the rock canon, beginning with The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and continuing with tracks by the likes of Queen, Nirvana, The Clash, and Rod Stewart. You’d like to imagine your indie rock heroes being inspired by something a bit more obscure and idiosyncratic than “Maggie May,” but there’s also something oddly appropriate about it. After all, much of the charm of Teens of Denial was a sense of teenage nostalgia, and the album perfectly captured the boredom of hazy drug-fueled days spent listening to classic rock radio and gazing into the abyss of disposable relationships and strip malls. This playlist captures that, to some extent, even if it’s largely inessential listening.

In 2015, Caribou famously posted a 1,000-track mixtape that served as a journal of his musical discovery over the past few years. It’s a lot to digest, to say the least. The Canadian electronic artist has omnivorous taste, for one. New Wave freakout king Gary Wilson bumps up against a particularly eerie track from jazz icon Nina Simone. There’s disco legend Cerrone on the groovy “Got to Have Loving” and also lots and lots of Velvet Underground (of course). You don’t have to make sense of any of it, of course, but, if you squint just so, you can piece together Caribou’s own aesthetic roots.The squiggling synth lines, and bouncy beat of “E.V.A” from Moog pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey reflects Caribou’s own tendency to reconcile more experimental strains of electronic music with an overarching pop sensibility, while the hanging-off-the-bone, mandela hip-hop of Madlib is a natural fit for an artist who started his career focused on lo-fi psych sounds. The delicate, understated intensity of Caribou’s most recent album, 2015’s Our Love, is captured in tracks from Radiohead, Koushik, and Shuggie Otis, and house and disco-derived sounds figure in heavily—in addition to Cerrone, the playlist also contains Sylvester, Derrick May, Moodymann, Larry Heard, and Chez Damier—which tracks nicely with Caribou’s own pivot towards more dance-friendly beats for his Daphni project.The original YouTube playlist was nearly one hundred hours of unsequenced music (in the note that came with the mix, Caribou suggests that it be listened to on shuffle), and it’s obviously sprawling. Even in this slightly abridged Spotify version—presumably, the 204 tracks not included here weren’t cleared for digital music services, sadly—it’s easy to get lost. Ultimately, this feels more like a radio station than a “mixtape” or a playlist. The listener lets it spin passively in the background, occasionally swooping in to figure out who exactly is doing what. The contextual editorial information that Spotify offers comes in handy—YouTube provides no similar key, and you’re constantly flitting between Google and YouTube to discover who the hell is Asa-Chang (a Japanese percussionist and leader of the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra) or Hal Blaine (Phil Spector’s go-to drummer). But this isn’t really an academic course as much as it is a party, or a celebration of the scattershot, sublime aesthetic of one of indie music’s most vital and unpredictable artists.

American-born, Oslo-based dream-pop chanteuse Carmen Villain recently released her mesmerizing second album, Infinite Avenue. To mark the occasion, she created this playlist for The Dowsers. Here, she explains its unifying theme: "This is a collection of abstract and cosmic jams, recent obsessions, and inspirations. Some of these I listened to a lot during the album recording process, some of the tracks are by brilliant friends and collaborators, others are more recent discoveries, or older favorites that have resurfaced to the front of my collection again. Usually, Im drawn to music where theres a kind of magic between sounds, something that might not be audible, but maybe felt more. I think most of these tracks have that."

Whats This Playlist All About? Named after "Woman," the lead single from Cat Powers new album Wanderer (her first in six years), this mix shows a little of Chan Marshalls indie rock roots as well as her respect for GOAT singer-songwriters and the women who have consistently challenged the music industrys status quo.What You Get: A selection of classic odes dedicated to the power and struggles of women, alongside modern-day classics devoted to the baddest bitches around (see: Trina and Rihanna). The Woman Playlist aptly starts with her own "Woman," the smoky duet with Lana Del Rey, before kicking into "The Other Woman," the sad mistress tale perfected by Nina Simone. Its then sprinkled with tragic indie anthems (Husker Dus "Diane"), poignant folk secrets (Joni Mitchells "Little Green"), and, of course, John Lennons own "Woman."Biggest Surprise: On the surface, 2Pacs "Keep Ya Head Up" may seems a strange addition, but the rap icons 1993 hit single is a powerful critique of misogyny and the incredible strength of women through it all.What Does This Playlist Say About Women? This is no fluffy statement about girl power. Many of these songs are heartbreaking and tragic as they show the many complexities of being a woman—through all of her trauma, toughness, sadness, and open-heartedness.

Following the US election on Nov 8, 2016, we asked Dowsers contributors to discuss the moods and music the results inspired. We collected their responses in this series, After the Election. The following text is a transcript of an e-mail to a friend that accompanied the playlist. Hey Jordan,Sorry that it has taken me so long to write this to you. Since I last saw you, things have been a bit crazy, for all of us, I guess. I’m glad to hear that you’re doing well. I was worried, at first, with you being in Texas, but I’m glad to hear that Austin remains a solid blue fortress. I know you mentioned that you were into Run the Jewels, but hadn’t dug into any of El-P’s solo work, so I’ve made you a playlist of his early work. You can find it here. As a note, I had to make a Youtube playlist since his earlier work is not on any streaming services. So, I’ve been listening to El-P’s music in various incarnations for nearly 20 years. At first, I lumped him in with the other abstract/heady/sci-fi emcees of that era — Del the Funky Homosapien, MF DOOM, Kool Keith, et al — but that doesn’t feel accurate now. Those guys were walking, rapping therasuses or science books, and tapped into a grimey-but-essentially-goofy thread of afrofuturism where robots and aliens are cool, and people talk in polysyllabic rhymes. For El-P, the idea of unseen universes didn’t carry so much a promise of escape (as it traditionally does for afrofuturism), as it represented an opaque, existential threat, and his lyrical density was more of a textural element.Impenetrability was the point. The occasional Marxist-tinged slogan or Philip Dick reference would surface, but you didn’t need to unpack all of El-P’s clustered alliteration to understand that things were fucked and scary. There’s a sense of vulnerability when he describes drones hovering over Brooklyn, or builds a narrative around the idea of a factory that manufactures abusive stepfathers, or describes a Nazi theme park. Like he raps on “Tuned Mass Damper,” "Motherfucker, does this sound abstract?/ I hope that it sounded more confusing than that."The first album that I ever professionally reviewed was El-P’s solo debut, Fantastic Damage. The album came out in May, 2002 — a few months after the attacks on the Twin Towers — and it’s hard to overstate how important it was to many of us. There are those who’ve pointed out the similarities between 9/11 and this election — the collective shock, a sense of unreality, the helplessness and fear we feel. But there are also differences. After 9/11, culture as we know it shut down. We were urged to pull together, irony was declared dead, dissent quashed, and, for the sake of our safety and our nation, monoculture reinstated. Neil Young tried to heal us during a marathon for dead firemen. My roommate foisted an American flag outside of our apartment. For months, things were like this: patriotic country songs and overwrought rock anthems. We’d all come together collectively, as a nation, and it was weird as fuck. Fantastic Damage — with its throughlines of static; lo-fi rumble; crusty, cacophonous boom bap; and jerky, noisey funk — was an anecdote to the sanguine. Every word that El-P rapped rang true, even the ones I couldn’t understand, which were a lot of them. It validated a lot of the confusion and darkness and paranoia we felt. It contained no answers, per se, but it was enough to know that there were others who felt like they were walking through the world with a gun held to our heads (see the video for “Deep Space 9mm”).I’ve returned to those early albums since the election. Honestly, Run the Jewels feels more appropriate now. It’s cleaner, clearer, and more focused in its dissent; its anger is cut through with liberal doses of humor and levity. Killer Mike is a moderating force for El-P. Fantastic Damage feels like an ugly artifact unearthed from a dark time capsule. Maybe we don’t need to open that, yet.Anyway, I hope you’re well. I finished that Emma Cline book. I was wrong and you were right: It’s good. The prose in the first 50 pages was really verbose and overworked. It felt like she had something to prove, as a young, first-time novelist. But once it settled in, it was pretty great. The Suzanne character felt well-developed and original. I liked that issues of gender and sexuality were present, but kept at arms length; it made them feel more powerful. Did you finish Savage Detectives? I’ve been thinking about rereading 2666. Last night, I read Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf. It’s only one sentence long, but that sentence lasts for 75 pages. So, yeah, I hope you’re doing well. Write me back and let know what’s up.Best,Sam

Chances are it will never become a national holiday unless Jack White is elected president, a possibility that may not be so far-fetched given the universe we now live in. Regardless, Record Store Day has fast become one of the most cherished events on the calendar for a growing swath of music lovers. Back when it began in 2007, the event’s humble ambition was to celebrate the musical ecosystem fostered and sustained by the nearly 1,400 independent record stores in the U.S. But little did the participants know that vinyl sales were about to boom, making an unlikely climb from 1.88 million units in 2008 to 13.1 million last year. So what if the top-selling vinyl LP last year was by Twenty One Pilots? Nothing can spoil the sweetness of this comeback, not with new record stores becoming the surest sign of a gentrifying neighbourhood.Meanwhile, the number of special releases for Record Store Day has grown nearly as dramatically. Ranging from instantly covetable seven-inch singles to ridiculously lavish box sets—and from long out-of-print albums by heritage acts to obscurities by new favourites—the massively diverse slate for this year is another embarrassment of riches. To whet your proverbial whistle, here’s a selection of tracks from this years Record Store Day releases that can be yours. That is, of course, if you happen to be in the right store at the right time. Quantities range from the 5,000 copies for the new edition of David Bowie’s BOWPROMO—a long AWOL EP originally released as a teaser for Hunky Dory—to the mere 200 copies for an exclusive split single on Captured Tracks by Alex Calder and Homeshake, all proceeds for which go to the International Refugee Assistance Project. It’s up to you how to spend those dollars on Record Store Day, but make ‘em count.

Of Montreal may be nearly two decades removed from their days as Elephant 6 upstarts, yet the collective’s unmistakable blend of eccentric DIY ethos and ’60s pop hooks continues to haunt the Georgia group’s music — including 2016’s Innocence Reaches. The same holds true for indie rock as a whole. Inspect the genre’s rank and file and the dreamily melodic flavors of Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, and all their blissed out pals continue to exert a powerful influence. In addition to spotlighting key tracks from Elephant’s 6’s charter members, our playlist ropes in notable outliers such as neo-psych brats The Essex Green and the utterly indescribable A Hawk and a Hacksaw.