Source: Moses Wiener, Pigeons & PlanesThe Best New Mixes Streaming Right Now ; Listen for free at bop.fmHeres a different kind of list compiled on a weekly basis by Pigeons & Planes Moses Wiener. It encompasses some of the best mixes available on SoundCloud right now. Among the entrants: a blend of yacht rock by true school hip-hop vets People Under the Stairs, a Sonar Festival preview by the 2 Bears (featuring Joe Goddard of Hot Chip), an Essential Mix entry by tech-house star Scuba, and an intriguing melange of screwed rap-and-B by newcomer Drae Da Skimask.
Photograph: Misha Vladimirskiy/FilterlessBrainfeeder got its start in 2008 as an imprint for the landmark LA producer/DJ Flying Lotus. And while it took a few years to find it’s footing, it’s now home to some of music’s most progressive artists. From the hazy lo-fi beat experiments of Teebs and Lapalux to the rich jazz fusion of Kamasi Washington, the label’s sound is constantly expanding and changing, but there are some clear through-lines: a tendency towards jerky rhythms overlaid by ambient textures, an abiding belief in the idea (if not always the sound) of free jazz, and a relentless pursuit of turning over the next musical stone.
There is something special about Kranky Records. Amidst a sea of labels that release a consistent bill of fare, Kranky puts out everything from avant-garde electronic and ambient to noisy dream pop, going out of their way to shed light on original and imaginative voices. Since its founding in Chicago in 1993, Kranky has released albums for such visionary artists as Deerhunter, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tim Hecker, and more. In her time on the label, Liz Harris (Grouper, Mirrorring) has developed a wholly unique and prismatic aesthetic, while Bradfox Cox (Deerhunter, Atlas Sound) took his bedroom pop project to its post-punk and shoegaze fruition. With hazy synths, towering guitars, impressionistic vocals, and a decidedly experimental sensibility, Kranky Records really does do it all.
Lil Wayne became the best rapper alive in the mid-2000s with an amazing run that culminated in the 2008 blockbuster Tha Carter III. Since then, Weezy’s star has dimmed somewhat as proteges like Drake and Nicki Minaj have taken over the rap game, but he’s remained a voraciously prolific MC who can still surprise fans with flashes of the brilliance of his peak period. And the highlights of his post-C3 albums, as well as the posse cuts where he still regularly upstages younger stars, display the punchlines and melodies we’ve come to expect from the living legend. He’s taken to frequent promises to retire, but these tracks affirm that he’s still got plenty of gas left in the tank. -- Al Shipley
Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.Just as the Flamers mixtape series from 2008 to 2010 made Meek Mill the toast of Philadelphia, the Dreamchasers series became the franchise that made him a national star. The first volume in 2011 celebrated Meek’s signing to Rick Ross’s Maybach Music Group and featured his breakthrough single “Ima Boss,” as well as the first of his narrative “Tony Story” tracks, demonstrating the MC’s commanding voice and his chemistry with Philly producer Jahlil Beats. 2012’s Dreamchasers 2 was so highly anticipated that its arrival crashed the servers of mixtape sites, and 2013’s third installment was a star-studded affair with multiple appearances from Nicki Minaj and French Montana. And 2016’s DC4 was a confident comeback after a year of beef and controversy.
Many years ago I heard “Precious” and “The Phone Call” side by side and thought I’d discovered the secret of what rock ‘n’ roll singing should sound like. Although she hasn’t recorded an album I care about since the first Clinton was in the White House, I like to say Chrissie Hynde is my favorite vocalist. Most comfortable with a talk-sing meter indifferent to iambs but so intuitive about listener expectations that she understood when to sustain a phrase, Hynde has been imitated by few. Like many first-rate vocalists who write, her stresses come at the beckoning of her melodies. Her band followed nobody — until the deaths of Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott. Even so she recorded Learning to Crawl, one of the great roaring-backs in rock and one of 1984’s quiet blockbusters. With the exception of 1986’s Get Close, produced by Jimmy Iovine and Bob Clearmountain and sounding like it, she recorded no duds, and before you say Packed!, know that this quiet, modest collection addresses (the fear of) commitment without the verities of adult contemporary. That would come with “I’ll Stand By You.”Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary and more.
Rumba has been around for over 100 years, and has evolved to encompass many different unique styles. It has it’s genesis in the music that slaves used to play in Cuba, and was popularized in Havana when that city became the center of the cultural universe during prohibition. The flavor of Rumba that famed British DJ Gilles Peterson ethnomusicologist Crispin Robinson collects here is rustic, polyrhythmic and deeply spare and soulful. It’s a pleasure to read these two trade tracks. A note on this playlist: Spotify’s catalog is spare, and some songs have been substituted for other tracks by the artists they selected. We really wanted to bring you a Rumba playlist and this is the best we could do.
What a relief to hear “Eminence Front” in car commercials: the heretofore forgotten 1982 track, distinguished by a burbling synthesizer loop and a steady Kenney Jones drum track that’s like a metronome and for once doesn’t make me miss Keith Moon, now is among The Who’s most streamed and downloaded songs. “Eminence Front” also redeems the group’s ignoble final chapter, during which Pete Townshend, realizing he was no longer young, couldn’t write for an imagined audience of twentysomethings and pretend he still understood them. Who Are You, Face Dances, and especially It’s Hard were among the first signs of the menace represented by the boomer generation as it aged. When Roger Daltrey rasps, “You came to me with open arms/and open legs” in 1981’s “You Better You Bet,” I want to hide in a fallout shelter. And it got MTV play.But for a decade Townshend did understand. The kids weren’t just alright; sexually confused, struggling with a rage incommensurate with the parents they had no say in choosing or the schools to which they were sent, they were fucked up and willing to get more fucked up. Townshend offered no answers save release.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.
Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.If you want a taste of just how radical progressive metal’s transformation has been, look no further than Animals as Leaders. The instrumental power trio’s brainy blend of djent and jazz fusion is light years removed from the genre’s roots in the scorching, technical precision of old school heavies like Dream Theater and Fates Warning. Where those outfits basically are hair metal dudes with killer chops, Animals as Leaders look like clean cut, lovably nerdy computer programmers. Over the last two decades, progressive metal has spawned dozens of similarly unique hybrid outfits. Periphery incorporate seething, emo-spired screams and metalcore crunch, while Mastodon enjoy slathering their prog with sludge. At the heavier end of the spectrum lurks The Dillinger Escape Plan, the undisputed champs of mathcore, as well as those Swedes in Meshuggah, who basically were the first band to cross progressive metal with extreme metal and neck-snapping polyrhythms. Press play and get cerebral.
While the internet has hurtled us light-speed into the future, its most pervasive effect (as noted by writer Simon Reynolds in his 2011 book Retromania) has been to make the past instantly accessible, reviving cultural artifacts and iconography long ago erased from our collective memory and stripping them of their context. The late-2000s indie-pop permutation known as chillwave was the sound of that process happening in real time. It was a virtual mood board of borrowed nostalgia for a half-remembered ‘80s, with old-school rap beats, electro synth bleeps, plush yacht-rock, Baeleric house, and 4AD dream-pop all blurring together like repurposed images in a rapidly scrolling Tumblr feed, and mutating and fading like the resolution on an overused VHS tape.Of course, like all genre buzzwords, nobody wanted to own it at the time, and both its key progenitors (Ariel Pink, Animal Collective) and early ambassadors (Toro y Moi, Washed Out) have since moved on to pursue more grandiose visions or pop-accessible paths. But like many easy-to-dismiss fads, chillwave’s sound has lingered to become a permanent component in the contemporary indie toolkit. Its DNA is present in the music of modern-day mavericks like Blood Orange and Tame Impala, and it’s had a soluble effect on the sound of latter-day Flaming Lips and Destroyer; even Nick Cave’s 2016 track “Rings of Saturn” bears its unlikely influence. A decade on from its emergence, chillwave very much remains the future sound of our ever-present past.
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
