Indie

Subscribe to the Dowsers Spotify account for all the best playlists from Tame Impala and more.Listeners across nearly every streaming service love putting together track-by-track comparisons meant to meticulously chart how one artist has influenced another. While the erudition displayed in these playlists is phenomenal, they almost always make for lousy listening. Thirty-four tracks bouncing between just Tame Impala and The Beatles gets really old really quick. I’m checking out after about six. What I’d rather hear is a playlist that maps out Tame Impala’s influences on a macro level, one that, in addition to The Beatles, spotlights Led Zeppelin, The Flaming Lips, and Air. After all, what makes Tame Impala unique isn’t the fact that they’re inspired by any one classic rock group, but that they manage to synthesize an absurdly diverse array of influences cutting across multiple genres and generations.

This is our track of the day. Be sure to subscribe to The Best Songs of 2018 (So Far) for regular updates.What It IsNeu-psych festival darlings Tame Impala team up with Chinese American house producer ZHU on a one-off collaboration.What It Sounds LikeThis sounds like 4PM on a 90° summer afternoon. You and the crew have spent the day stumbling from stage to stage at your music festival of choice. You’re slightly intoxicated, but not so much that you’ve lost track of where you are. The opening synth sounds of “My Life” waft through nearby speakers -- soft appredigios that lead into Kevin Parker’s hazy falsetto, which are soon underlined by rolling bass drums. The edible you just kicked in. Everything is perfect. You’ll live forever.Either that or you’re shopping for a sweater at Urban Outfitters and nodding your head to a seemingly random synth-house track you can barely hear on the loudspeakers. Playlists PlacementAnything with “sun,” “summer,” or “synths” in the title. Extra credit if it’s a “Summer Sun and Synths” playlist.

One of the more novel songs to pierce mainstream consciousness in recent years, “Let It Happen” is a psychedelic disco-rock epic largely inspired by Kevin Parker’s chance encounter with a classic Bee Gees banger while cruising around L.A. high on mushrooms and coke. For those who can’t get enough of the way Tame Impala blur together trippy hypnotism and funk-fueled repetition, guitars and synthesizers, kaleidoscopes and mirror balls, I’ve pulled together a few tracks — some old, others new — that bottle varying concentrations of these potent qualities. The slick, light-refracting cuts drawn from ’70s disco definitely speak more to the coked-out aspects of Parker’s stoned epiphany. The quirky art rock and alt-dance jams, on the other hand, throb with the visionary delirium unique to a ’shrooms journey. The mix covers a lot of ground; after all, it includes both Daft Punk and Electric Light Orchestra. Yet it maintains an alluring, deeply immersive sensibility throughout. Hopefully, you’ll dig it as well.

For over two decades—first as the frontman of Chisel, then as a solo artist—Ted Leo has cemented his status as one of indie rock’s most respected songwriters. With literate, layered lyrics that are as personal as they are political, Leo has honed a unique voice in part by wearing his influences on his sleeve, merging punk, folk, and classic rock. And the songs that inspired his sound have often crept into his live repertoire and, occasionally, his recorded output.Although Leo has had some of the most viral moments of his career by showing his appreciation for pop singers like Kelly Clarkson and Robyn, the covers that have made it onto stopgap EPs between albums stick closer to his roots. The Anglophile singer/songwriter affects a slight British accent when singing songs by The Jam and Stiff Little Fingers. And when he released one of his most urgently political records, the Rapid Response EP, during the 2008 election season, songs written by the Brit punk bands Cock Sparrer and Amebix sat alongside his own agitated anthems. He’s covered more famous acts like The Beatles and David Bowie for tribute albums, but even in the latter case he put his own stamp on “Heroes,” turning the song into a slow burn that works its way to an anthemic climax.Thin Lizzy’s soaring guitar leads and Phil Lynott’s dense storytelling have always been some of the most distinctive and undeniable influences on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. So it’s no surprise that he’s covered Thin Lizzy on multiple occasions, including “Little Girl In Bloom” with the Pharmacists and “Honesty Is No Excuse” with The Both, his 2014 side project with Aimee Mann. But an equally important influence may be the New Zealand-bred bands Split Enz and Crowded House; Leo has covered the former’s “Six Months In A Leaky Boat” on multiple releases, and even took a line from the song as the title of one of his most beloved albums, 2001’s The Tyranny of Distance.

Once again, Teen Vogue—the young, woke sister of the Condé Nast family—reveals its on-the-pulse badassery with a recent article detailing the shady politics of Coachella bigwig Phillip Anschutz, who has historically donated funds to anti-LGBTQ charities and organizations. As the magazine points out, billionaires supporting right-wing institutions are nothing new, but if you want to try and elicit change, “The most effective way (as the #BoycottCoachella tag demonstrates) is to hit em where it hurts: their wallets.”But boycotting festivals doesn’t mean you have to be without banging tunes. In the article, Teen Vogue champions queercore bands as musicians “who are using their art for more productive means.” And while purists may balk at the term “queercore” in this context, the message is clear: LGBTQ rights matter, and there are a lot of amazing musicians out there willing to scream it from the rooftops.The inclusion of London band Skinny Girl Diet is a measure of just how right they’ve gotten this playlist—part Russ Meyer vixens, part scrappy girl gang, the band have produced some of the most sublimely, unapologetically feminist punk of the last decade (their most recent album is called Heavy Flow). SGD’s “Silver Spoons” is a rollicking dirgey mess, a wall of sound with an insanely hooky vocal line, while Brooklyn’s Aye Nako champion a more nostalgic, grungy sound. London trio Shopping (pictured) amp up the energy with “In Other Words,” with Rachel Aggs’ inimitable jagged guitar work driving the track. And no queercore playlist would be complete without math-pop dreamboats PWR BTTM’s “Answer My Text.” This isn’t just a list of queer artists; it’s a statement of intent, a journey through genres, and a politically driven (wo)manifesto.If you like Teen Vogue’s playlist, you’ll also love artists like New Yorkers The Shondes, Pittsburgh natives Rue, and Seattleites Tacocat. And luckily for you, I’ve added a handful of relevant artists to the end of the playlist. Consider it further reading.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Remember Stereolab? The band was one of the biggest stars of the 90s indie scene and, like so many of their peers, seemed as much interested in process -- refining the same idiosyncratic grooves over and over -- as in writing singularly great songs. As a result, any fan could come up with their own top 10, though Raymond Cummings omission of "Metronomic Underground," which was a mainstay of Stereolab shows before they finally splintered in 2008, seems particularly careless. However, if you need a short primer to the band that made 60s French chanson cool again, this is as good as any.

Some may argue that shoegaze is not even a sound but an otherworldly sensation that engulfs both listener and creator from the ground up (literally). See, it wasnt the shoes these artists were gazing at, but the pedals beneath them—pedals that could turn a simple six-string into a conduit to another state of consciousness. In the entire musical spectrum, shoegaze is really just a blip, a micro-genre for guitar geeks and perpetual daydreamers, yet its worth a 50 All-Time Best playlist from Pitchfork because its been so influential to nearly every indie movement following it—and still is. Id even go as far as to say that many of those dark, dreamy, atmospheric soundscapes dominating 21st-century indie, electronic, even hip-hop could arguably be traced back to Kevin Shields feet. And Pitchfork agrees My Bloody Valentine is where shoegaze starts and (basically) ends. From there, their list isnt too terribly shocking, loaded at the top with the genres usual suspects (Slowdive, Ride, Swervedriver) and sprinkled with artists like M83 and Ulrich Schnauss who have shifted their gaze downward once or twice for some notable space excursions. But shoegaze has never been about the artists themselves—theres no room for ego in all that ecstatic haze, after all.

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.

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.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.Tom Waits has not only one of the most distinct voices of all folk-rock crooners, he also has one of the most nuanced and studied approaches to narrative and musical accompaniment of any modern songwriter. His gravelly, whiskey-soaked voice, one whose every forlorn syllable bears witness to a lifetime of tragic loss, conjures somber and lamenting narratives almost effortlessly and constructs unmistakably American stories with vivid language and crushing pathos. The content he takes up, which ranges from hobo adagios and flower funerals to tearful reflections on missed opportunities, moves even the most stoic of listeners. His relatable melodies and his jazz- and blues-flavored progressions and cadences meld into a strange and unmatched sound—one of a singular, time-worn voice gliding sympathetically above 88 melancholy black and white keys, ever-searching for the heart of Saturday night.