Genres

These days, metal’s eclecticism runs pretty deep, and in a climate where so much unrest is bubbling up to the surface, its gratifying to have all this music provide a place of refuge for those who want/need to look away from the news. Metal has always possessed a degree of defiance and attitude, serving as a counterpoint to a mainstream thinking. And now its added more ambience and a broader range of emotion. Its thought-provoking, ability-defying, and at times just a pure exorcism of rage—totally fitting for 2017.Check out the right-on-point sheer aggression of Full Of Hells "Deluminate," the interstellar sound of Mastodon soaring even higher on "Sultans Curse," and the continuing rise of Power Trip on "Executioners Tax (Swing of the Axe)." Our 2017 survey also includes buzzed-about up-and-comers like Code Orange, hardcore revivalists like Higher Power and Trapped Under Ice, heralded mainstays like Pallbearer, the oft mentioned (and must-hear) 83-minute opus by Bell Witch (pictured above), as well as smouldering southern crew Royal Thunder, and total wrenches in the machine like the spastic Pyrrhon. And those are just some of the many far corners metal stretched into this year. We also saw comebacks from Godflesh and Glassjaw, polarizing Grammy recognition for August Burns Red, and then glimpses of future releases from Windhand, Turnstile, Old Wounds, and Gatecreeper. Theyre all here in our round-up of this years best metal.

Trip-hop took college campuses, or at least my dorm room, by storm in the mid-90s, and then very quickly fell out of view. A lot about the psych hip-hop genre still seems overcooked, underwhelming and redundant, but certainly not all of it. This is the sort of list that FACT usually knocks out of the park, and this is no exception. The list provides a good overview of the micro-genre, though well quibble with calling Meat Beat Manifesto trip hop. It also works great as a playlist as trip-hop songs have a uniformity of sound that translates well into this type of mix.Note: Some of the songs here simply arent available online, so we didnt quite make it to the full 50.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Those who can’t remember the ‘60s may be doomed to repeat them, but that may be more a blessing than a curse. Though other eras ebb and flow in terms of their musical influence on the present moment, the Age of Aquarius appears to be a constantly churning river that runs through every subsequent period in pop culture, providing inspiration anew to each fresh crop of strummers, slammers, and shouters. 2016 was no exception to this phenomenon—of the albums released over the course of the year, there was no shortage of records sporting a significant ‘60s flavor. Of course even among ‘60s fetishists, everyone has their own variation. For instance, current troubadours like Ryley Walker and Itasca show fealty to the acoustic guitar-wielding folkie songsmiths of bygone days, while The Explorers Club and Seth Swirsky pay homage to the sunshine pop powers of The Beach Boys and their ilk, and Night Beats and The Warlocks represent the drop-some-acid-and-floor-the-distortion-pedal approach to psychedelia. All in all, 2016 turned out to be a pretty good year for the ‘60s.

If you were a teenager in the ‘80s (as I was), you could be forgiven for thinking the ‘60s were lame. Between yuppies dancing around to Motown milestones in The Big Chill to classic rock radio’s ossification of a couple dozen hippie-era hits (whose ubiquity proved that familiarity does indeed breed contempt), any right-thinking young person was bound to eschew the Aquarian age in search of greener pastures. Most likely, you gravitated toward the bright, gleaming light beckoning from the New Wave/post-punk realm, where everything seemed fresh and vibrant.But as I discovered pretty quickly into my obsession with college radio—and contemporary chronicles like Trouser Press, New York Rocker, and Creem—punk’s tabula rasa/year zero ideal didn’t hold much ground when you got into the nitty-gritty of what followed it. The flood of ‘80s acts who arrived in punk’s wake, for all their bold new moves, still sported a slew of influences from the ‘60s—sometimes overtly in the form of cover tunes, and sometimes more subtly in the influences they’d assimilated.The more I viewed the music of the ‘60s through the filter of ‘80s bands who were breathing new life into the airwaves and record stores again, the more attractive that bygone era seemed. Sometimes a cover version could put you on a direct route to the original artist’s oeuvre: For instance, ‘60s L.A. psych underdogs Love, who would be posthumously deified a couple of decades later, were more popular than ever as an underground phenomenon in the ‘80s. The Damned’s cover of their “Alone Again Or” made it easy to find your way to the seminal Forever Changes; and once you were there, the spelunking was endlessly rewarding.Even on the less obvious end of the spectrum, it didn’t take a cultural anthropologist to trace the links from, say, the power chords of The Jam and Secret Affair to mod OGs like The Who and Small Faces. Nor was it too tough to determine that the chiming guitar riffs of R.E.M. and The Cleaners From Venus led straight back to first-gen jangle kings The Byrds.It wasn’t just ‘60s rock that revealed itself to me in this manner. The ‘80s synth-pop bands may not have had much of a musical investment in psychedelia and such, but the pop, R&B, and girl group sounds of the ’60s were another story. It was easy to follow the paths of the likes of Naked Eyes to the glittering legacy of singers like Dionne Warwick, who previously might have seemed like a middle-of-the-road musician from another generation to my amateurish ears. And while New Orleans R&B wasn’t especially accessible to an ‘80s kid growing up in The Bronx, Devo’s mechanized take on the Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey classic “Working In the Coal Mine” illuminated a whole new world to be explored.Of course, in a pre-Internet world, these explorations of the past were far more difficult than they are for teens, or anybody else, today. But the thrill of the chase was as much a part of the fun as the end result.

You read that right: This is 90s "alt-pop," not "alt-rock." If alt-rock represented the commercialization of 80s indie-rock, then these artists represented the commercialization of alt-rock. These are the diluted descendants of Nirvana, Green Day, Beck, and other legit underground-to-mainstream crossovers, artists who didnt have to worry about selling out, because, with few exceptions, they had no indie cred to begin with. They were "alternative" only by virtue of existing in the 90s, when any rock act that wasnt Aerosmith was ostensibly "alternative." Theyre the artists who made Kurt Cobain roll over in his grave more vigorously than most.But if each of these songs represented a nail in the coffin of the freak-scene utopia that Neverminds success briefly promised, today they function as a portal to an equally distant and inaccessible realm: i.e., a more innocent pre-9/11 era, before our hearts were perpetually filled with despair over the state of the world, before social media was clogging our brains with a 24/7 dose of aggravation. Lets go back to a world where our sunshine never got stolen.

Source: Mel of the Outfit, NoiseyA Guide to Dallas Rap ; Listen for free at bop.fmMel, from Dallas rap group, The Outfit, curates his list of the top 24 Dallas rap groups that matter right now. There are some great finds here -- Topic, Crit Morris, and Johnny Cage are from great to good -- and there are also some artists that I never want to hear again -- Dustin Cavazes, namely, but whats most interesting is how the scene is a microcosm for the larger rap world -- a dash of hipster rap, a pinch of street, a bit of frat rap bullshit, and then a dabble of crossover. Anyway, if nothing else, it was enjoyable to read the story behind "My Dougie":

Around 2007, a number of Dallas artists began to soundtrack a sort of inner-city war dance—residents of various Dallas neighborhoods would hit their respective variations of the dance before or after brawling—that became the Dallas Boogie...Thousands of kids in the region uploaded videos of themselves hitting the boogie to the new hot Dallas tracks, and some of these reached millions of views in a couple of months’ time.Then, in 2009, right as this two-year-old movement seemed on the cusp of going national, the LA rap group Cali Swag District made an homage to the movement, influenced in particular by North Dallas rapper Lil Wil’s “My Dougie.” Their song, “Teach Me How to Dougie,” became a global phenomenon, and Dallas’s distinctive style and music—everything from the crazy, dyed haircuts to secondary dances to songs like “Ricky Bobby” and “Cat Daddy” to usage of the long-time Dallas-area familial term “bro”—became rebranded as a California thing, a setback for Dallas that still smarts.

No Wave always seemed like more of an idea or a scene than a particular music aesthetic -- theres a lot of space between Liquid Liquid, ESG and Sonic Youth, for example -- but there are general common denominators (detuned guitars and shouted vocals). The scene was entirely based in New York, began in the late-70s and fizzled out by the mid-80s. It got its name from the amazing Godard quote, "There are no new waves, there is only the ocean," and while it was never popular, per se, the bands associated with the scene were endlessly influential, inspiring everything from hardcore to DFA-era electro pop. Im sure a no wave purist would scoff at some of the inclusions on this list, but its still a good primer for the genre.

You could pretty easily make the case that Chicago is the musical center of the United States. Blues, juke and house all originated (at least in part) from the city. Two-Step (or just Steppin) never achieved the national name recognition as house music, but it was a pretty potent strain of R&B that peaked in the middle half of the last decade. Like a lot of music to emerge in the past thirty years, it was a dance first. The music was bright, romantic and highly syncopated. Its great, summery R&B music. It was popularized nationally by R. Kelly in his "Step in the Name of Love" single, but that was really just the tip of the iceberg, as this excellent playlist demonstrates. Rizoh over at Beats did a great job capturing some of the highlights from the scene. Listening now, it definitely feels of a certain time and place, and it seems very out-of-step with the more dour and minimal sounds the genre would adopt in subsequent years, which makes two step even more powerful.

A$AP Mob has been having a productive summer. A$AP Twelvyy released his debut album 12, and A$AP Ferg dropped his Still Striving mixtape. The group’s sophomore studio album, Cozy Tapes Vol. 2: Too Cozy, is scheduled to be released on August 25.Although the collective is still going strong, they’ve been through a lot since they first rose to prominence earlier this decade. A$AP Yams, co-founder, music business guru, and de facto leader of the group, passed away in 2015. A$AP Rocky, the Mob’s biggest star, hasn’t released a new album since that year. As is the case with any popular group, their momentum has begun to slow.In 2012 and 2013, when the buzz behind A$AP Mob was just beginning to peak, Complex ran a series of features highlighting various members’ favorite albums. A$AP Rocky and A$AP Ferg both listed their top 25 albums, with A$AP Yams listing his top 42.This playlist consists of songs from the A$AP Mob members’ respective lists of albums, which vary widely in genre and sound. A$AP Rocky, whose choices account for the first 23 tracks on this playlist, lists rock groups like Nirvana, Colplay, Cold War Kids, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jimi Hendrix among his favorites alongside rap legends like Rakim and Big Pun. A$AP Ferg likes Selena. A$AP Yams liked Stillmatic more than Illmatic. A$AP Rocky specifically mentioned he didn’t like College Dropout, only Late Registration. A$AP Ferg liked both, plus 808s and Heartbreak and Kid Cudi.Despite the differences, there are commonalities. Everyone in the A$AP Mob loves Cam’ron and Dipset, which is unsurprising considering both hail from Harlem and brought global attention to their New York neighborhood by utilizing the group format. All three also list DMX among their favorites. A$AP Rocky said he listened to DMX to remind him of home when he had to move to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as a child.The A$AP Mob members reference the styles that influenced their sound, citing New York classics from the era in which they grew up as well as the Texan sounds of UGK and Scarface that A$AP Rocky notoriously incorporated into his music. Most of the songs on the playlist are recognizable singles or classic tracks, to underscore the fact that the group’s members have been inspired by music everyone likes. They’ve already produced work of their own that should stand the test of time, and hopefully their new music continues in that tradition.

Rock ’n’ roll is all about relentless forward propulsion, and its success hinges on how well a musician can balance his or her violent adrenaline rushes and animalistic urges with the self-discipline and focus that comes with heady groove research. This is something at which AC/DC’s Malcolm Young—who recently left us after succumbing to the dementia that had plagued him for nearly a decade—excelled. If his brother, Angus, is Chuck Berry (all about dazzling flashes of lightning and speeding, razor-wire licks) then Malcolm was Bo Diddley, a brilliant groove engineer (as well as songwriter—let’s not forget that) who could ceaselessly combine and recombine the essential, fundamental components of boogie (rock, as well as the blues). He was not unlike a minimalist architect, only Malcolm’s geometry unfolds across time, which certainly adds a whole new level of intelligence to it. In fact, a friend of mine recently said something quite relevant to this point: There should be a chapter on AC/DC in any quality book chronicling the rise of minimalism in 20th-century music and art. Amen. Such a proclamation is a testament to Malcolm’s belief in the effectiveness of simplicity and archetypal forms and how this belief shaped AC/DC’s mission statement. To really bask in his understated genius, check out berga570’s fantastic YouTube clip, which isolates and loops his riff for “Thunderstruck.” It’s insane—a sublime blending of off-kilter, intuitive swing with a kind of mechanized symmetry. It’s maniacally stuttering and repetitive, falling somewhere between John Lee Hooker and avant-garde oddity Henry Flynt.But Malcolm took things another couple steps further; blast the extended live version of “Bad Boy Boogie” or the locked-tight “Overdose” (both representative of the deeper-style cuts you’ll hear on our playlist) and what you have is the grease of vintage rock and blues fed through the grinding gears of the modern industrial world. We’re talking savage robotics here. Hell, you could even argue that AC/DC were proto-techno rockers before such a concept even existed! So yeah, thanks to Malcolm, these dudes weren’t just debauched rock ’n’ rollers; they were (along with ZZ Top and Motörhead) real-deal innovators of what I like to call rough-neck, working-class minimalism. R.I.P. to the greatest rhythm guitarist in the history of hard rock.