Whats This Playlist All About?: The Radiohead icon continues to thrill die-hard fans and alienate casual ones with this woozy, wordless sound manifesto curated for Pitchfork’s Day for Night Festival in 2017. In his words: “Its not this years music, its just the music that comes out of my walls at home.”What You Get: Exotic blips, beats, and strips of sound laced, looped, and left to disintegrate (sometimes literally) into moody ambient and avant-garde pieces. The mix is bookended by Dutch artist Machinefabrieks aqueous world of rippling drones, but in between it slips through dark, entrancing dream worlds (like John Luther Adams "The Light That Fills the World") and eclectic sound sculptures molded from our most deep-seated anxieties (William Basinskis "dlp 2.1"). Think "Treefingers" translated through advanced alien technologies.Greatest Discovery: A Winged Victory for the Sullen—the name itself is perhaps more Thom Yorke than Thom Yorke could ever be. But even better is the European duos gorgeous, string-soaked, ambient-neoclassical arrangements, two of which are featured here. (By the way, their song titles are just as awesome.)Will This Playlist Bore You? Lets say theres a 50/50 chance that, yes, it will. Keep in mind: This is mood music that can move you to the core, but only at just the right, reflective moment.
The most striking vocalists have always had an otherworldly quality about them, from D’Angelo’s subverbal warble to angelic high tenor of Smokey Robinson. Thom Yorke is no different, and, like those other singers, he’s able to convey something deeply humanistic in his otherness. Stripped from the context of Radiohead’s heavily textured sonic experimentation, the beauty of Yorke’s voice is arguably more evident here. It’s also interesting how you can track the progression of modern alternative music through this playlist, how it evolves from the sadsack balladry of the late 90s and early naughts to the IDM-informed formalistic experimentation of the past few years.
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The Dowsers teams up with Gimme Radio——a 24/7 all-metal free radio station——to present Thrash 101, a 14-playlist study in all things fast and brutal...
Thrash songs can be about a lot of things, but sometimes theyre just about the act of thrashing. Call it meta-metal if you like, but sometimes the best mindset for thrashing is simply thinking, “I’ve gotta bang my head right now, for no other reason than because thrash exists.” It’s a perfectly sound rationale.Here are a few songs that are about thrashing, whether directly or indirectly. Of course, something like Metallica’s “Metal Militia” is extremely direct with lyrics like “Joining together to take on the world/ With our heavy metal/ Spreading the message to everyone here/ Come let yourself go.” Other tracks are a little more veiled, but are clearly about the band giving it to you hard, like Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” (about some outlaws who come to town intending to mess shit up) or Anthrax’s “Metal Thrashing Mad” (which uses the metaphor of an out-of-control car to conjure the sensation of thrashing). Either way, if you feel like you gotta thrash because you simply must thrash, this playlist will do the trick.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.
Thank you for checking out the 12th installment of our Thrash 101 program, produced in conjunction with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 radio station hosted by heavy-music experts and artists. Get more awesome metal right here.Thrash songs can be about a lot of things, but sometimes theyre just about the act of thrashing. Call it meta-metal if you like, but sometimes the best mindset for thrashing is simply thinking, “I’ve gotta bang my head right now, for no other reason than because thrash exists.” It’s a perfectly sound rationale.Here are a few songs that are about thrashing, whether directly or indirectly. Of course, something like Metallica’s “Metal Militia” is extremely direct with lyrics like “Joining together to take on the world/ With our heavy metal/ Spreading the message to everyone here/ Come let yourself go.” Other tracks are a little more veiled, but are clearly about the band giving it to you hard, like Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” (about some outlaws who come to town intending to mess shit up) or Anthrax’s “Metal Thrashing Mad” (which uses the metaphor of an out-of-control car to conjure the sensation of thrashing). Either way, if you feel like you gotta thrash because you simply must thrash, this playlist will do the trick.
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.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.
By the mid-1980s, the sound of heavy metal had come a long way from the demonic riffs of Sabbath and the groovy beats of Deep Purple. Its themes had evolved a lot, too. When Ozzy encounters Satan on the song “Black Sabbath,” he lets out a petrified cry of “Oh, no, no, please, God, help me!” But in the music of Slayer, Entombed, and the other bands in this playlist, we start to see man aligning with evil, pursuing it, making peace with it, even encouraging it. As thrash gave way to the rise of death metal, the mantra became “the more evil, the better”—we start getting dark, mythological, and even sadistic lyrics accompanying faster, heavier, and gnarlier music. As Mercyful Fate sang, “You know my only pleasure/ Is to hear you cry.” If that ain’t true evil, I don’t know what is.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.
Welcome to the sixth chapter of Thrash 101. This feature was produced in partnership with GimmeRadio, your free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Death Angels Will Carroll. Check it out here.By the mid-1980s, the sound of heavy metal had come a long way from the demonic riffs of Sabbath and the groovy beats of Deep Purple. Its themes had evolved a lot, too. When Ozzy encounters Satan on the song “Black Sabbath,” he lets out a petrified cry of “Oh, no, no, please, God, help me!” But in the music of Slayer, Entombed, and the other bands in this playlist, we start to see man aligning with evil, pursuing it, making peace with it, even encouraging it. As thrash gave way to the rise of death metal, the mantra became “the more evil, the better”—we start getting dark, mythological, and even sadistic lyrics accompanying faster, heavier, and gnarlier music. As Mercyful Fate sang, “You know my only pleasure/ Is to hear you cry.” If that ain’t true evil, I don’t know what is.
With 30-plus years of thrash under our bullet belts, its hard to think of a time when the music didnt exist (especially if you grew up during the early reign of Metallica on MTV). But the late 70s/ early 80s were a vastly different landscape, where music was separated by geography and two major forces were about to collide.Powered by complex guitars and cerebral bombast, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) was thriving in England. And before long, U.K. bands like Judas Priest, Saxon, and Iron Maiden became more than just social currency in the stateside tape-trading underground; they were starting to make waves on the charts one mega-solo at a time, spreading the word to ravenous heavy music fans everywhere about this massive sound blowing up on the isles.Concurrently, hardcore was erupting in the U.S. underground on both coasts. Bands like Discharge, The Misfits, and the Dead Kennedys had something to say and a rabid voice to say it with, along with an equally rabid fanbase to heed the call. And at a time when socio-political unrest was plaguing the American counterculture due to the intensifying Cold War and the cold conservatism of the Reagan presidency, both of these music scenes (one the natural progression of metal, the other the natural progression of punk) spoke to disenfranchised teens nationwide, and a movement was born from their marriage: thrash.Fueled by the outspokenness of punk, the big sound of NWOBHM, and the bottled aggression of hardcore, the disillusioned youth of America picked up their guitars and built upon the foundation laid before them. Tracks like Discharges "Protest and Survive" practically nailed the thrash formula in 1982, and when you hear early Venom and Angel Witch alongside Agnostic Front, youve got two sides of the same rusty coin.This feature is part of our Thrash 101 online course that was produced in partnership with the good rocking folks at GimmeRadio, a free 24/7 metal radio station hosted by heavy-music experts like Megadeths Dave Mustaine and Lamb of Gods Randy Blythe. Check them out here and sign up for the Thrash 101 course here.
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.
