Genres

In terms of persona, Miguels is poised somewhere between Frank Oceans headcase auteur and Lana Del Reys sun-damaged SoCAl rock-star shtick. Its a bit strained, and his deceleration on Wildheart that hes "speeding through all those red lights...dreaming of a beautiful exit" ("a beautiful exit") or his desire to "fuck like were filming in the valley" ("the valley") feel a little edgy-by-the-numbers, but he generally has a great ears for songs ("coffee") that complement his airy falsetto, and he seems to understand how to reconcile his R&B roots with his more the more experimental sonic motifs of future soul. This playlist, part of Apples ongoing "guests" series, looks his guest appearances. Its great to hear the early collaborations with aughts LA indie rapper Blu.

It is said that all contemporary American music derives from Black music. Folk, rock ‘n’ roll, blues, jazz, and country music have roots in African American spirituals, and the early guitar music of slaves and poor Black musicians who created songs that addressed their work, their love lives, and their community.Black folk music can be traced back to the early 1900s through the guitar-based music of Elizabeth Cotten, whose self-taught finger-picking style provided an equally complex and tender backdrop for her soft vocals. It’s since become so steeped in the American artistic lexicon that you many not even notice how prevalent it is in modern music.Today, Black folk music is commonly associated with the artists who broke into the mainstream in the ’80s and ’90s, like Tracy Chapman and Ben Harper. But there is so much music that came before and after. A folksinger since the ‘50s, Alabama native Odetta was a huge influence on artists like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. (In fact, Odetta was a guest on Cash’s variety show in 1969, and one of his final singles, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” was a cover of a song Odetta recorded back in 1956.) Now, artists like Valerie June and Rhiannon Giddens are continuing the tradition of Black folk music, incorporating acoustic guitar, banjo, and mandolin on their recent albums. This mixtape spans 1910 to 2017—it was a pleasure to make and I hope you’ll find it’s a pleasure to listen to.

The band has always displayed such an appetite for its own self-destruction, it’s incredible that Guns N’ Roses ever made it in the first place. Even the question of what to put on the cover of Appetite for Destruction—the debut album that turns 30 this summer—threatened to put them outta the race before they’d even gotten out of the gate. Axl Rose initially wanted a picture of the Challenger explosion on the cover, but Geffen 86’d that as fast as possible. Then the band wanted (and got) a lurid cartoon image—based on the same 1979 painting by cult comix and hot-rod art great Robert Williams that was the source for the album’s name—of a robot rapist menaced by a multi-armed contraption as a female victim lies slumped against a fence. When retailers said there was no effing way they’d rack that, Geffen hastily revised it, shifting the image to the inner sleeve, where it would mess with the minds of impressionable teens forever more. They replaced it with a cross-and-skulls image by Billy White Jr. representing each of the band members (hence the black top hat for the Slash skull on the bottom).Despite the label’s efforts and the band’s sweat and toil in the two years since its membership had coalesced out of some of L.A.’s scrappiest hard-rock acts, Appetite for Destruction debuted at No. 182 in its first week on the Billboard charts in August 29, 1987. A year later, however, the story was very different. Driven by the band’s relentless touring and the ubiquitous radio and video airplay for “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City,” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” Appetite for Destruction would eventually rack up over 18 million in sales and become the all-time best-selling debut album.Thirty years later, it’s easy to hear how the music was more than just what they needed to surf past their troubles and penchant for self-sabotage (at least for a while). Part of what made GNR so thrilling was how they took a disc sander to all the glam and pop elements that prevailed in the hair-metal era of the ‘80s. Their sound was so much gnarlier, drawing from hardcore punk heroes like the Misfits, the primo biker metal of Motörhead, and—first and foremost—the bluesy, boozy rock of Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Aerosmith and The Rolling Stones. Just as crucial was the ability of producer Mike Clink to present it all with a minimum of clutter and maximum force.Yet at the same time, GNR were unafraid to provide some hooks or show off a more vulnerable side. Indeed, Rose had way more ballads ready to go after “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” but they decided to stick with only one for the debut. “November Rain,” the singer’s first full-bore expression of his love for Elton John-sized grandeur, was one of several early songs that had to wait for release on Use Your Illusion I and II, the 1991 double set whose bloat was a far cry from GNR’s ruthlessly action-packed debut.The live tracks that would surface on the stop-gap album Lies—which was the first time most folks heard Live… ?!*Q Like a Suicide, the demi-legendary self-released EP that came out the year before Appetite—and the unabashedly ragged ’87-’93 compilation served as further proof of just how exhilarating GNR were in their late-‘80s prime. The best of them are here along with early tracks by the proto-GNR band Hollywood Rose and songs by other bands whose impact on Rose and Slash was obvious even without the regrettable existence of The Spaghetti Incident? And at the heart of this playlist is Appetite for Destruction, still one of the most ferocious, most bad-ass, and most unabashedly rock ‘n’ roll rock ‘n’ roll albums ever made. So wake up, sleepyheads… it’s time to diiiieeeeee.

Is it weird that the Haim sisters seem to all love the same songs? Anyone with a sibling who shouldn’t go anywhere near a Bluetooth speaker knows that the sharing of DNA has virtually no correlation with musical taste. At least a little disparity should be par for the course for Este, Danielle, and Alana, too. But on the matter of musical taste—as with so many other areas for the harmony-loving trio—HAIM are far more in the tradition of the Osmonds and Hanson than Oasis and the Kinks, putting the lie to myths about sibling acts and the likelihood that their members may attack each other with drum cymbals.Indeed, the women of HAIM present a surprisingly unified front in the opportunities they’ve had to present their predilections to the world. In the four years since they broke through with the irresistibly hooky contents of Days Are Gone, the playlists they’ve either curated together or individually are very much on the same page, with the sisters expressing their solidarity through their shared love of ‘70s and ‘80s pop, soul and disco crowd-pleasers (with an emphasis on all the ladies they love), party-starting hip-hop, more introspective singer/songwriter fare, and vintage California sounds from either coastline. (Their hero Tom Petty may live in Malibu but he’s still pure Florida.) They sound just as snug in the same pocket when performing covers, a diverse array that ranges from Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” (performed with Stevie Nicks, no less) to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” to Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” to songs by pals-slash-inspirations such as Jenny Lewis and Julian Casablancas.Their savvy when it comes to mixing the old with the shiny and new is all over their second album Something to Tell You, too. To celebrate the arrival of what will surely be a summer soundtrack for the ages, we’ve got an extensive slate of HAIM-approved songs that you can enjoy with the relative of your choice.

It’s summertime - dont just let your hair down, tease it out and get your best buds together for some grilling action! We highly suggest serving your burgers, beers and hot dogs with a side of the best hair metal anthems the 80s (and a few pre-cursors) had to offer. Light your grills (but maybe dont stand too close if youve been hitting the Aqua Net in homage) and "Turn Up The Radio" to 11 while these anthems from the Sunset Strip and beyond ring through like the crisp sound of the Liberty Bell.

Though we’ve still got his 2016 Rostam-assisted stunner, I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, in heavy rotation, raspy indie-rock raconteur Hamilton Leithauser is already back with new music—and another fabulous foil. “Heartstruck (Wild Hunger)” is a string-swept duet with Angel Olsen that serves as the first teaser for Leithauser’s next album, due in early 2018 on Glassnote Records. In the meantime, he’s provided The Dowsers with a playlist portrait of where his head is at these days.

You really need to go to Red Bull Music Academys critical reclamation of happy hardcore to know what Im talking about -- and you totally should, btw, regardless of how you feel about the music -- but the smiley face graphics they have randomly popping up over the text is as inanely brilliant as the genre. Miles Raymer provides a critical perspective to a genre he says has been treated as "as an awkward phase in dance music’s teen years, the gangly, overenthusiastic cousin of the more sophisticated, intriguingly dark jungle scene." Miles goes on to observe keenly that "happy hardcore quickly became the UK equivalent of what pop punk was in the States at the time" and "like happy hardcore, EDM artists judge their work strictly by its ability to get large crowds moving, using a number of techniques drawn from happy hardcore’s playbook to do the job, from digitally altered pop vocals to aggressively noisy synths to huge drops that come at regularly scheduled intervals."

Let’s make one thing glaringly plain right at the start: This is not a Halloween playlist. So if you’re expecting “Monster Mash” or “Ghostbusters” or any of that sort of business, you’re trick-or-treating at the wrong door. The songs assembled here are meant instead for ushering in Samhain, a holiday that occurs at the same time as—and is a predecessor to—Halloween, but has different, decidedly older origins. But make no mistake, things surrounding Samhain can still get plenty creepy.

It’s essentially an end-of-harvest commemoration that is Gaelic in origin and goes back at least to the 10th century if not farther. It’s generally reckoned to be connected to paganism, and some of the spooky rites and rituals connected to it (which have also been an inspiration on Halloween) bear that out. But there’s also an organic and naturalistic, almost folksy side to it. Check out the classic ’70s movie thriller The Wicker Man (represented here) some time and you’ll get an idea of that intersection, albeit slanted distinctly toward the dark side.

Then again, positioned as it is to herald the oncoming winter, Samhain is known as the harbinger of the “dark half” of the calendar year. So that darkness manifests itself in more ways than one. And the Samhain-friendly songs here fall all across the spectrum. On one end, you’ve got the gentle folky stuff, be it Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore,” Jethro Tull’s “Songs from the Wood,” or Loreena McKennitt’s “All Souls Night.” Then there’s the moodier, more intense, dancing-naked-in-the-moonlight vibe represented by the likes of Dead Can Dance, Kate Bush, and Faith and The Muse. And on the most unsettling side, you’ve got Black Sabbath, Bruce Dickinson, and Electric Wizard conjuring classic metallic, black-magic imagery.

Some of these tunes have an explicitly subject-specific spin, and some may simply fit the feel, but brought together they provide a soundtrack for the full range of Samhain moods.

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Santa Claus is a proudly blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy who never leaves the house without his black leather boots and who never fails to get the job done in the toughest of circumstances. So when he’s hurtling from house to house with a bunch of amped-up reindeer on a sled full of Hatchimals and Marvel action figures — all traveling at a velocity that would be dangerously reckless on any other night of the year — you can most definitely believe he needs to hear something harder than Michael Bublé to get through his shift.Thankfully, there’s a legion of metal dudes and hard rockers who know that no season is complete without a very different kind of holiday music. They’re responsible for a valuable counter-tradition of Christmas songs, the kind that combines long-loved tidings of joy and fellowship with the sounds of wicked guitar solos, monster riffs, and blast-beats. Twisted Sister, those legends of Long Island-style mayhem, have arguably been the most enthusiastic purveyors of hard-rock holiday action. After all, the band’s reliably frank frontman, Dee Snider, was always quick to fess up that their biggest hit — 1984’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” — was partly inspired by the tune for “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”Snider and his bandmates made the somewhat unlikely connection between the two songs perfectly clear when they opened 2006’s A Twisted Christmas with a rowdier version of the 18th-century carol than you’ll ever hear at midnight mass. Just as much fun are Twisted Sister’s gnarly takes on “White Christmas” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” which Snider and Co. revamped to include such rocker-appropriate gifts as skull earrings, quarts of Jack, cans of hairspray and, of course, “a tattoo of Ozzy” in place of the lame-ass partridge. As sacrilegious as they may seem to those who believe the holidays can only be shiny, bright, and holy, Twisted Sister’s assaults on the holiday-music canon actually do something very worthy. They bring the sounds and sentiments of the season into lives and households that may not fit any cookie-cutter conception of seasonal good times.As such, Dee Snider’s tidings get pride of place in this playlist of songs that range from exuberant (Skid Row’s “Jingle Bells,” Cheap Trick’s “Christmas Christmas”) to sinister (Venom’s “Black Christmas,” Apocalyptica’s “Little Drummer Boy”) to irresistibly crashing (Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Wizards in Winter,” Kamelot’s “We Three Kings”). All get the job done on a cold winter’s eve lit only by cheap strands of electric lights.

Aside from being vaguely familiar with Hood and Flying Saucer Attack, I knew nothing about Bristol post-rock. And Im still not sure if its a "real" thing, but the music is quite beautiful. It has all the dreamy textures and ethereal melodies of Sigur Rós, and the shifting, odd tempos of the Chicago scene, but it also sounds fairly dreary in parts, which is a nice touch. Pitchforks Nick Neyland provides an overview:

A group of interconnected musicians traced a filmy circle of darkness around the English city of Bristol during the late 1990s and early 2000s, forming a significant post-rock outpost. They often appeared on each other’s records, started short-lived projects together, and assembled brittle home-recording setups that provided a lo-fi flipside to the city’s trip-hop forerunners.

As a side not, Pitchforks "Essentials" series continues to impress. Their subjects (such as last weeks melodic IDM) continue to be both very idiosyncratic yet strangely intuitive.