Sure, at this point, KISS are less a band than an automated merchandise factory, with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley essentially counting down the days until old age forces them to hire younger actors to slap on the facepaint and portray them in a never-ending Vegas musical revue. And, even in his own son’s opinion, Simmons is to rock ‘n’ roll what Donald Trump is to U.S. politics—except that Gene’s become even too big of an asshole for Fox News. But there’s a case to be made that, for all their relentless branding and ingrained arrogance, KISS are kinda underappreciated.They were always too craven in their careerism to acquire any of the dirtbag cool of early ‘70s glam peers like the New York Dolls, too pop-oriented to stand alongside more artful proto-metal giants like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, too enamored with spectacle to attain the working-class cred of Thin Lizzy or AC/DC, too liberal with the shameless horn-dog metaphors to accrue the camp cachet of Queen. (Sorry kids, "Rocket Ride" is actually not about space travel.) And aside from the occasional spin of “Rock and Roll All Nite,” you’d still be hard-pressed to find them in regular rotation on any classic-rock radio station. However, when you strip away the make-up, upchucked blood, and one-piece open-chested unitards, the six studio albums KISS released in their 1974-77 golden period showcase a band with a preternatural gift for wrapping sticky melodies around sturdy riffs——a power-pop band with a steely command over both halves of the equation.While their many live albums and greatest-hits sets tend to prioritize the songs that go best with pyro, those early KISS records are loaded with more modestly scaled tunes that betray the group’s affinity for ’60s garage nuggets (see: “Love Her All I Can,” a blatant rewrite of The Nazz’s “Open Your Eyes”), harmony-rich sing-alongs that wouldnt sound out of place on a Big Star or Raspberries album (“Comin’ Home”), acoustic-powered Rod Stewart-style serenades (“Hard Luck Woman”—the plaintive Peter Criss antidote to the more popular and opulent “Beth”), and a lean, punkish propulsion (“Plaster Caster”—well, as close to punk as you can get when youre a rock star singing about getting a souvenir of your dick made by the world’s most famous groupie). Heck, debut-album deep cuts like "Let Me Know" could almost pass for Three Dog Night. And while “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” has come to epitomize KISS’ disco phase, it’s better represented by the ultra-smooth, mirror-ball-twirling slow jams “Sure Know Something” and “Shandi” (which features the sort of gilded, glistening jangle that’s become indie-ubiqutious in a post-Mac DeMarco world). The band’s core philosophy may have never evolved beyond rockin’ and rollin’ all night, but this playlist highlights the KISS songs you can still respect in the morning.
Subscribe to this playlist here.On “Suzanne,” the first song from Leonard Cohen’s debut album, Cohen positions Jesus Christ as a “broken” and “forsaken” figure who watches “drowning men” from a “lonely wood tower.” Cohen’s messiah is a cypher for longing and solitude — a totem for the lovesick and desperate. As a metaphor, it might seem bizarre, or even blasphemous, but twisting the sacred and profane into odd, interloping configurations became Cohen’s modus operandi for the next five decades. His most famous composition, “Hallelujah,” refashions the biblical story of David and Bathsheba into a tale of sexual obsession and, ultimately, spiritual transcendence; while the late-period classic “Show Me the Way” is a meditation on mortality that is addressed to either a savior or a dominatrix (or maybe both). For Cohen, faith is a complicated thing, but it’s ultimately humanistic and forgiving; it doesn’t seek to judge the transgressions of the sinner as much it attempts to understand our failures by chipping away at our ideals of divinity. It interjects tragedy into the holy order, and adds a whiff of squalor to the sacred spaces. It bridges the gap between heaven and earth. -- Sam Chennault
In September 2017, Colombian-Canadian experimental pop artist Lido Pimienta shot straight out of the Toronto avant-indie underground to the international spotlight when her most recent album, La Papessa, became the first self-released album (not to mention the first sung entirely in Spanish) to win Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize. Here, she shares the soundtrack to this transformative year in her life. “This year has been an exciting one for womxn in music and queer artists, like it always is, but the notoriety that womxn are getting as not just singers but producers is really inspiring and motivating. I am drawn to these songs because they carry interesting point of views and production. I enjoy making experimental music, so this list too reflects my personal taste and inspiration.”—Lido PimientaNote: Lido also wanted to include Xenia Rubinos’ “L.O.V.E.” on her playlist, but the song is not available on Spotify. You can listen to it here.
A kick drum? A tambourine? Foot stomps and spoons? One very tired Razeem? It’s impossible to imagine what hip-hop, house, and techno might have used for a rhythmic foundation block if not for the 808 beat.That’s why the impact that inventor Ikutaro Kakehashi had on the last four decades of music is incalculable. The news of the Osaka-born engineer and Roland founder’s death on April 1 at the age of 87 has prompted a deluge of grateful tributes from just about every music maker who benefited from his innovations, most prominently with Roland’s most iconic drum machine, the TR-808. One of the earliest programmable models, its sound was initially criticized as too synthetic when it was introduced in 1980. But with its tight snare and booming bass, Kakehashi’s contraption proved to be more adaptable than anyone could’ve dreamed.Since the fine 2015 documentary 808 tells you everything you could want to know on the subject (and way more), we’d prefer to let the music do the talking with a set that includes many of the most famous uses of the 808 (and its successor the TR-909) by early adopters like Arthur Baker as well as such present-day devotees as Kanye West, who transformed the beat into the sonic epitome of emotional desolation on 808s And Heartbreak. Roland developer Tommy Snyder said it best in his farewell: “He was a super funny, wonderful and gifted human being, and his contributions to the musical instrument world and music touched millions of people worldwide.” To which we can only add: let the rhythm hit ‘em forever more.
Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.Martin Newell has been making brilliant, ‘60s psych-pop-inspired DIY music at a startlingly prolific pace since the early ‘80s, either under his name or as Cleaners From Venus or the short-lived Brotherhood of Lizards. But he doesn’t just make a lot of records—he makes a lot of great records. He has a shockingly high battering average; out of the dozens of albums he’s released, there’s nary a bad one in the bunch. Provided you view the lo-fi homemade sound of his output as a plus rather than a minus (as all of his admirers must), pretty much everything the British singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist touches turns to gold.Naturally, 2016’s Cleaners From Venus album, Last Boy in the Locarno, is no exception. And it makes an excellent entry point for a deep dive into Martin Newell’s world. But in addition to absorbing highlights from his own vast catalog, try soaking up the sounds of Newell’s fellow travelers, like XTC (whose Andy Partridge once produced a Newell album), Robyn Hitchcock, and R. Stevie Moore. And while you’re at it, take a stroll through some of his ‘60s influences, like Syd Barrett, The Kinks, and The Move. Then for good measure, add some extra historical context by examining the other end of the aesthetic family tree, with sonic descendents like Guided By Voices and The Clientele.
Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser weren’t so obviously ahead of the curve when the duo’s debut album as MGMT arrived 11 years ago. Maybe that’s because their wild, baffling, possibly culturally insensitive hipster-shaman look on the cover of Oracular Spectacular seemed more suggestive of the “spectacle” component of their cryptic title rather than a reference to the Oracle of Delphi or any other seers of ancient times.Nevertheless, few could’ve known how prescient they turned out to be when it came to heralding the dippy, woozy aesthetic of so much music from this past decade. Likewise, recent singles like the mesmerizing, darkly witty “When You Die” (from their upcoming fourth album, Little Dark Age) arrive into a rather more crowded field of freaky, dreamy pop oddballs than either of them could’ve anticipated back when “Electric Feel” was everywhere in 2007. With equally ubiquitous early singles like “Time to Pretend,” the duo crafted a canny merger of elements that felt modern and retro at once. Along with fellow travelers like Ariel Pink, MGMT popularized a lo-fi take on psychedelia that soon begat terms like “chillwave” and “hypnagogic pop.” Yet they were also remarkably astute about their music’s potential chart appeal——perhaps more so than they would’ve liked, seeing as VanWyngarden and Goldwasser would famously retreat from the spotlight and dive into more willfully obtuse sounds for 2010’s Congratulations and 2013’s MGMT, the pair’s subsequent and far less commercially successful albums.As the original articles were content to return to the fringes, many more artists would come to frolic in the Day-Glo-colored playground they built with Oracular Spectacular. Some——like Foster the People, Passion Pit, and fun.——would have fewer reservations about using these previously subterranean strategies and textures to create ear candy with mass appeal. The likes of Portugal. The Man, Two Door Cinema Club, and Neon Indian felt just as free to get their respective electric feels on. Meanwhile, Tame Impala, Temples, and other retro-renegades would continue their own MGMT-like exercises in temporal displacement, jumbling together ‘60s, ‘80s, and ‘00s aesthetics to create psych-pop that belonged to no age in particular. And there’s been no lack of shimmering, sun-kissed pop slathered in vintage synths and analog effects thanks to Mac DeMarco, who collaborated with VanWyngarden on some thus-far unreleased recordings in 2016. Indeed, there may be a whole new generation of MGMT devotees judging by the off-kilter yet eminently catchy sounds favored by teenage sensations like Cuco, Superorganism, and Cosmo Pyke.So were those two luridly attired loons on the cover of Oracular Spectacular looking into the future all along? It’s impossible to say, but this playlist featuring the many inhabitants of MGMT’s musical universe might’ve made them the envy of Nostradamus.
Missy is easily one of hip-hop’s most innovative talents. Her and Timbaland’s production effectively globalized the genre, and she’s always been underrated as a rapper -- she mined the space between singer and rapper a good decade before Drake got there. Some albums are better than others, but she never fell off, and it’s a travesty that she hasn’t released one in over a decade. Although her singles are epochal, she’s much more than a singles artist, and she’s the latest in Al Shipley’s amazing “deep cuts” series.
Click here to add to Spotify playlist!It’s endearing to hear expressions of ardent fandom from someone who inspires fervent adulation himself. Such is the case with Neil Gaiman: Though he is the creator of landmark comic The Sandman and a modern-day master of fantasy fiction and weird storytelling of all kinds, he gets unabashedly fanboyish when the subject turns to heroes like Lou Reed (“His songs were the soundtrack of my life,” he said when Reed died in 2013) and David Bowie. Indeed, Gaiman claims that one of his great sorrows in life was learning that his father had tickets for the final Ziggy Stardust show but didn’t take him because it was a school night. And don’t get him started on Tori Amos, whose devotion to The Sandman led to a close friendship, or The Magnetic Fields, a.k.a. “My favorite live band.” Gaiman even bought 69 Love Songs in bulk so he could give it away to friends.The latter was one of the albums he listened to a lot while writing American Gods, a mind-bending saga about an epic battle between gods old and new that is this season’s coolest TV event. As in so much of Gaiman’s work, music plays a major role throughout his storytelling, so you can expect the same on the small screen. In anticipation of its April 30 debut on Starz, we present a wide-ranging selection of music that Gaiman knows and loves, much of which has seeped into his writing in very direct ways. As you might expect from such a deft writer, he has a fondness for masters of wordplay like Stephin Merritt and Elvis Costello, though he has an equally strong allegiance to underappreciated songwriters like Greg Brown and Thea Gilmore.There’s also a wealth of songs that his stories have inspired, as heard on the enjoyably daffy tribute album Where’s Neil When You Need Him? and Jarvis Cocker’s contributions to Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories, another recent TV adaptation. And though the man’s own musical endeavors are limited, he was an eager foil for his wife Amanda Palmer—better known as one-half of avant-cabaret act Dresden Dolls—during their touring show of songs and stories in the fall of 2011. Of course, the contents do get awfully strange at times, but that’s exactly how Gaiman’s devotees prefer them.
In July 2017, New Jersey native Nicole Atkins released Goodnight Rhonda Lee, her fourth serving of lush orchestro-soul and regal R&B. But on her best-of-2017 list, she indulges her love of dark, heavy rock and oddball art-pop:1. St. Vincent, MasseductionI’ve always loved Annie’s lyrics. Romantic and smart. Here, she is at the height of her powers, like a female Prince. So glad she exists, because the world needs rock-star superheroes right now.2. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Murder of the UniverseI listened to this album so much this year I thought I was going insane. Kind of King Crimson in a space action movie, complete with a narrator to lead you through this journey.3. The Black Angels, Death SongI saw them perform this record live a few times this year and was blown away, as I usually am by The Black Angels. “Half Believin” breaks my heart.4. The Lemon Twigs, Brothers of DestructionThere are so many exciting and fun musical moments on this EP. Reminds me of the Kinks at times. These brothers are so young and have such a deep, musical understanding of history. I think they’re the most important band I’ve heard in a long time.5. JD McPherson, UNDIVIDED HEART & SOULJD McPherson has one of my favorite voices ever and, on this record, he takes pockets of songs to really unexpected places, turning older sounds into future sounds. Very original, while keeping you warm and fuzzy.6. Queen of the Stone Age, VillainsI put this on when I need to fuck the day.7. Mark Lanegan, GargoyleThis man could sing anything and I’d love it. Fortunately, his poetry is just haunting as his voice, and every record he releases reveals a deeper and more beautiful layer.8. Dion, Kickin’ Child: The Lost Album ’65There are so many melodies on the top of this record that put me in another world. It inspires me greatly.
I’ve shazamed a lot of songs on this album this year, like, “Whoa, what is this?!” Completely original. It melds so many different types of music, but doesn’t sound gimmicky. He gives me the same feeling I had when I was young and Trent Reznor (who he sounds nothing like) came out—like, this person is gonna start an entire new sound that a lot of people are gonna follow.
It’s powerful and raw and amazing and timely. I’m just getting acquainted with it, because it just came out and it’s on repeat.
Following the US election on Nov 8, 2016, we asked Dowsers contributors to discuss the moods and music the results inspired. We collected their responses in a series, After the Election.It’s the wee small hours of November 9: I wake up around 3:30 and can’t get back to sleep. Just one of those nights, it seemed. Since I hadn’t watched any of the election night coverage because television news sucks, I have no idea who won. I reluctantly grab my phone, click on HuffPo (more lamestream journalism, folks), and see the ghastly headline: “Nightmare: President Trump.” What the fuck just happened? A thick and heavy feeling of anxiety and disgust rips through my gut as though I’m trying to crap out an Ex-Lax-dusted anvil. I pace; I weep. My heart races; my head turns feverish. Pure evil is here.I’ve since been able to gather myself — for the most part. Along with 2,000 other equally alarmed Americans (good people from all walks of life), I’ve marched here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a battleground state, and called a long list of representatives. As for my soundtrack during these days (record nerds would fret over what jams to spin for an asteroid bashing into the planet), I’ve been listening to a lot of classic American music (folk, gospel, blues, soul), and that helps me stay motivated and anchored. Still, I experience stretches of nihilistic dejection when reality feels like a cosmic scam. It’s during these phases that my belief in love, peace, and understanding is chucked out the window; all I want to do is curse American mainstream society to hell. Screw Trump’s army of pasty white racists, and screw the smug neo-libs who enjoy undermining good Americans who try to forge progressive reforms. Hell, screw this entire empty, meaningless universe.The soundtrack to these admittedly unhealthy states of mind is seething, eardrum-damaging noise-rock, industrial, electronic-tinged propulsion, and bummer metal: Sightings singer Mark Morgan’s choked screams, Scissor Girls’ manic and fidgety spazz-tantrums, Pissgrave’s stuttering blasts of pure decrepitude and down ‘n’ out vibes, God Bullies’ swirling eviscerations of small-minded yokels. What’s interesting to note about noise-rock (as well as its related movements) is its non-affiliation in terms of politics. I mean, sure, most of these bands save their most intense viciousness for Repugs and deranged Bible bangers (when they’re that explicit, of course), yet it has to be noted that the Clinton years witnessed an explosion of virulent badasses, including Six Finger Satellite and KARP. Some musicians are pissed off no matter who is in office. Mainstream normalcy in and of itself is to be rejected.The irony is that all this cacophony, like therapy, actually sets me straight (though this wasn’t always the case in my self-loathing, pre-dad years, when hard booze and other substances weren’t infrequent). These bands are so committed to loud, writhing, horrid music that they wind up creating beautifully ugly artwork, and that’s 1000% life affirming. Think about it: beauty from ugliness. Maybe that’s something those fighting the good fight in modern AmeriKKKa can achieve in the coming years?
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Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
