Genres

Veteran Atlanta-based all-girl garage punks The Coathangers can turn up the dial pretty substantially -- just listen to their latest offering LIVE to see what we mean. Hitting all the high-energy house party vibes (with a little bit of piss and vitriol stirred into the mix), the band was formulated 13 years ago as a means to have fun with their friends, so its no surprise that when we asked them for a playlist, what they delivered was all about good times for the weekend. And a reference to one of their other epic album titles.Says the band, "This playlist is all about rockin out and enjoying whatever youre doing while listening to it! Whether its a road trip, house party, or simply background music while you get to work, crank it up and rock tha hell out!!!"Check out the playlist to the right or go here.

In 2017, the perpetually restless and increasingly prolific post-punk veterans Wire released their 16th album, Silver/Lead, and hosted three editions of their roving curated festival DRILL (in Los Angeles, Leeds, and Berlin). Here, the bands main singer/guitarist Colin Newman reveals the songs that inspired him most this past year. "A list of a few things that have been catching my ear this year. Some artists will be on everyone’s list, some will be on no one’s! It includes one artist celebrating his 50th (10 more than Wire!), one artist who actually thinks Michael McDonald is cool, one band who played in DRILL : LA, and one person who played in the pinkflag guitar orchestra, oh and the best band in Brighton (my hometown) right now. You don’t need me to tell you it’s been an unsettling year but luckily not for music."—Colin Newman of WireNote: Colin also wanted to include Wands "Plum," but it isnt available on Spotify.Photo: Mike Hipple

The sound of Run the Jewels is crafted from El-Ps beats. But Killer Mikes singular balance of brash confidence and vulnerability—not to mention his love of 80s and 90s rap from all regions—has vaulted the duo to a level of popularity that would’ve seemed improbable back when mutual friend Jason DeMarco of Adult Swim initiated their unlikely union five years ago. Listening now to Mikes Pledge Allegiance to the Grind series a decade later or El-Ps Fantastic Damage 15 years after it detonated this month back in 2002, there isnt a straight line to draw between the two. How do you blend Alec Empire and T.I., Trent Rzeznor and Sleepy Brown, Mars Volta and Young Jeezy? Obscure yet joyous moments—like 2002 El-P rapping over Missy Elliots "Gossip Folks" and 2011 Mike floating on Flying Lotus "Swimming"—predicted how they could inhabit each others worlds. But many left-field rap collaborations are one-time novelties, not dynasties.Now that Run The Jewels has become a staple of festivals, Marvel comic book covers, and soundtracks for TV shows and video games, its worth noting how much Mike and Els work ethic hasnt changed in the combined 38 years theyve worked in the music industry. Mikes discography pre-RTJ was 10 deep (counting studio albums and mixtapes) while El-P was at nine (if you include the two Company Flow albums). Their unifying love of Ice Cube, EPMD, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang, and Run-DMC has crystallized into subwoofer H-bombs as a duo, while their individual catalogs are snapshots of young rappers proving themselves. El-Ps biggest single in the Def Jux days featured a video of him being flanked by shotguns and hand cannons in post 9/11 New York during a neighborhood trek for smokes. Killer Mike was shoehorned onto hits by Outkast, Bone Crusher, and JAY-Z, but his biggest single was about the urban myth of Adidas namesake.El-P stated his intention early, back in 1997 on the inner artwork of Company Flows debut album Funcrusher Plus: "Independent as fuck." Killer Mike concurred, starting in the mid 2000s with his eyeopening mixtape series after stalling out with major labels. El-P came up during the great indie rap boom of the late 90s/early 00s: Stones Throw, Anticon, Def Jux, Rawkus, Fondle Em, etc. while Mike was slangin CDs hand to hand, everywhere from strip clubs to barber shops to mom and pop record stores, in the vein of Atlanta success stories like Ludacris, DJ Drama, Lil Jon, and Lil Flip. The models of independence varied wildly between New York and Atlanta, but the idea was the same: Your career has to be earned.Now that theyre playing Made In America Festival this year, its interesting to look back at their best work (compiled in the YouTube playlist below) and hear a redheaded maverick from Brooklyn holding his nuts while making Philip K. Dick and Vangelis into viable hip-hop ingredients, and the son of a Southern police officer running through brick walls with a Bible and a blunt in his hands.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEAFD97JV-MKrgVHuWwn991Vc4r2fzKjj

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.

The Flaming Lips may be one of the few mainstream crossover acts whose latter-day material is actually even crazier than their early work. Over the course of their 30-plus year career as a psychedelic-pop mainstay, the Lips have maintained an inspiring ethos of consistently challenging themselves to never stay in one place for too long. In the field of psychedelic rock, phaser-pedal effects and guitar solos are so often used as shorthands for mind-expanding, reality-altering music. So it’s refreshing that Wayne Coyne and friends have found so many ways to work within that Technicolor playing field while constantly pushing its boundaries and reconfiguring the rulebook.At the outset of their career, The Flaming Lips wore their Oklahoma roots with pride, fusing a joyous cowpunk silliness with their LSD-fried noise rock freakouts. But it didn’t take long for major labels to see them as potential beneficiaries of the early ’90s alt-rock boom, and once the Lips signed to Warner Bros., they took to their expanded studio capabilities with glee. Albums like Transmissions From The Satellite Heart—which spawned the surprise hit single “She Don’t Use Jelly”—and Clouds Taste Metallic bear the same garagey feel as their earliest work, but with a newfound sense of instrumental chaos, as fuzzed-out bass guitars and crashing drums led the way for Coyne’s childlike tales of animals and Christmas. But the band took things to the next level with 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, an orchestral, Brian Wilson-style studio masterpiece that left the rock-band format behind for a layered collection of sonic experiments and celebratory declarations of life.As the Lips pushed into the ‘00s, they continued to work within this studio-sculpted realm on records like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots before completely throwing that approach out the window with the loose, jammy 2009 LP, Embryonic. A dark, unsettling collection of minimal, rhythmic, but heavy songs, Embryonic shot a jolt of energy into the band’s seemingly complete major-label success, paving the way for even more radical visions from the group. Since that album, the Lips have continued to evolve, experimenting with longer, more improvisational songs (some lasting as long as 24 hours!), and exploring the moodier side of their sound with instrumental-leaning albums like The Terror and Oczy Mldoy.Where The Flaming Lips will go from here is anyone’s guess. For most bands, scoring a beloved ‘90s hit and signing to a major label is excuse enough to call it a day and spend the rest of your life playing reunion tours. But The Flaming Lips are too restless for that, too bursting with imagination and cosmic sounds—a rock band as experimental as they are pop. Their sound is a difficult beast to summarize, but with this mix we’ve attempted to illustrate what a colorful, slowly unfolding path the band has taken over the years. Strap in, and keep your eyes to the stars.

You might not be aware that April 7 is National Beer Day, but do you know who probably would be? Country singers, that’s who. Why? Two reasons. First of all, when it comes to drinking songs, there’s no style of music that has a higher percentage of them than country. Sure, blues has plenty of them, and rock has its share, but none can compare to country. So nobody spends more time singing about drinking than country singers. And drilling down to a more specific level, although there has yet to be an official scientific study of the subject, it seems safe to say that when it comes to country drinking songs, beer is most often the beverage of choice.

So when National Beer Day rolls around, you can be sure it’s not going unnoticed in the country-music world. In that spirit, it’s only right to offer up a playlist that’s chock-full of suds-focused tunes in the genre, ranging from the ubiquitous to the little-known, reaching all the way back to the golden era of honky-tonk and coming right up to the present moment, while making plenty of stops in between along the way.

For instance, you’ve got three generations of Hanks leaning in to bring beer fully into focus. Western swing king Bob Wills represents the old school one moment with “Bubbles In My Beer,” and modern-day Nashville hitmaker Luke Combs delivers “Beer Never Broke My Heart” the next. And whether it’s a low-key ballad like Luke Bryan’s “Drink A Beer” or a roof-raiser like Toby Keith’s rocking “Beers Ago,” odds are that you’ve never heard so many variations on the topic at hand in one place before. In other words, if you’re about to lift a tall, cool one, you could do a lot worse for your soundtrack.

Photo Credit: Photo by mnm.all on Unsplash

Whats This Playlist All About? One of indie rocks rawest and realest wordsmiths updates her mix of new and old faves with a breezy, brand-new song of her own, "Need a Little Time."

What You Get: A mostly woman-powered show of badass babes whove mastered sultry funk (Janelle Monae); crunchy, cathartic grunge (The Breeders); angelic, irreverent folk (Neko Case); and enchanting futuristic pop that no one could ever possibly replicate (Bjork). She does give a nod to a few notable men as well, sprinkling in a Bowie classic, heady jazz from Kamasi Washington, and an assist from Roger Waters on a cuddly, old-timey blues standard with the frontwomen of Lucius.

Greatest Discovery: Lots of goodies to discover here, but if you like Barnett, check out TT, the new solo project from Warpaint singer and guitarist Theresa Wayman. First single "Love Leaks" is a syrupy slice of trip-hop-infused hypnotic pop.

Is This the Best Indie Mix Youll Hear This Year? So far, no competition. As much as were looking forward to CBs new album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, out May 18, we kind of wish shed start her own radio show—her tastes are impeccable.

Thank you for checking out the fifth installment of our Thrash 101 program, produced in conjunction with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station hosted by heavy-music experts and artists like The Dillinger Escape Plans Ben Weinman and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Get more metal here.Sure, its easy to think of thrash as a metal genre that dallies with hardcore, but thats actually (literally) only the half of it. On the hardcore side of the fence, bands began incorporating more of a metal tinge in their speed and sonics, too, resulting in a sound that "crossed over" into the thrash zone. So yeah, theres more to the subgenre known as "crossover" than just a clever name, one that D.R.I.—absolute legends of the form—reinforced with album and song titles (you know, aside from the mic-dropping sound that became crossovers blueprint).This fusion was controversial at the time, as these two worlds did not peacefully coexist. Metalheads werent exactly welcome at hardcore shows and vice-versa; your hair length (or lack thereof) was enough to incur violence on sight. But as this clash of preferences peaked, these two heavy-music scenes found a kindred spirit in each other and something began to shift—i.e., the speed and guitars.Bands like Leeway, Gang Green, and Nuclear Assault took hardcore tempos, made them faster, kept the shouted punk vocals, and worked in wailing solos. Perhaps the biggest band to come from the crossover scene, Suicidal Tendencies, even made the sound commercially viable. The spirit of crossover still thrives today in bad-ass revivalists like Iron Reagan, who take the sawing hardcore breakdown structure and add in thrashing speed and vitriolic vocals to continue the tradition.

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.