Indie

Listen, The xx are people, too. Yeah, they seem overly morose and make austere, sad tunes that got you through some rough times in college, but they have their own needs and desires. And it’s not easy to be on tour—and thats why their mix, “The xx: on the road,” is such a revelatory look into what the trio listens to throughout the good times and the bad, after the excellent shows and after the depressing gigs that bum everyone out. (If you’ve been in a band, you understand this despair.) Creating the perfect sonic zone is the key to surviving the drives between shows with your sanity intact, and this mix definitely conjures some vivid vibes.“The xx: on the road” opens with a song of their own: “I Dare You," a track that signifies confidence and, as a precursor to their favorite jams, serves as a testament to the band’s search for meaning in the musical world. It is pretty cool to see Iggy Pop’s (Bowie-produced) “Nightclubbing” and Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” on here, and it’s easy to hear how the slow-motion darkness of those songs has affected The xx over the course of their career. But while its not surprising to learn they enjoy grooving to Talking Heads and Dinosaur, it requires a little more imagination to visualize them getting jiggy to Missy Elliott and Usher.Overall, all of these tracks elicit a pretty relaxed vibe; there’s no noise music, no metal, no jazz, no classical, nothing too avant-garde. This isn’t music for pregaming a monumental event or for shotgunning beers. This is some serious, chill-the-fuck-out music. And it totally makes sense coming from The xx.

I first listened to Yo La Tengo sometime in the mid-90s, slightly after the release of their 95 album Electr-O-Pura. I was living in rural North Carolina, and the idea of "indie" music was pretty new to me, and it was pretty amazing to me that there were bands creating great experimental pop music in a commercial vacuum. It seemed more "authentic" and "honest." You can laugh at those values now, but for a young person living in a small town at the south in the pre-internet era, these things didnt seem illusionary then. I was primarily drawn to the dueling aesthetics of ambience and noise in their music, especially evident on Painless and in songs like "The Evil that Men Do." I saw them in Charlotte,NC and they played 20 minute stretches of noise. Sometime after I Heard the Heart Beating as One, my musical interests had shifted, I largely abandoned guitar-based music for electronic and hip-hop. I was surprised many years later, living in San Francisco and in my mid-20s, that they had become a much quieter band, and were darlings of the latte-n-vinyl, NPR set. I wasnt sure who had changed more -- them or me -- but this is still a great playlist of the songs that theyve covered over the years. Its also great to see bands getting more involved with curation.

What’s This Playlist All About? The self-proclaimed “slop pop” duo out of New York offer up a soundtrack for solitude. These are the songs they’ve been listening to in the comforts of their home as they celebrate the release of their second album, Do You Wonder About Me?, a fidgety set of vulnerable indie-rock confessions.

‍What You Get: A breezy sampler of raw, emotionally resonant sounds—both young and old—reflecting the messy (and sometimes silly) reality Diet Cig so naturally capture themselves. This includes a mix of young DIY punks (Nouns), indie-pop underdogs (The Spook School), blissful bedroom-pop darlings (Addy), Icelandic disco groovers (Daði Freyr), and some of the 2010s’ most potent voices, like Perfume Genius and Billie Eilish. They slip in a few indie mainstays as well, including Bright Eyes and Broken Social Scene, alongside avant-garde heroine Nico.

‍Greatest Discovery: The woozy, wispy wanderings of Someone, the moniker of artist Tessa Rose Jackson, whose “Forget Forgive” is the ideal accompaniment to pensive moments of daydreaming out the window.

‍Best Pick for Anytime You’re Stuck Inside: Bring some sunshine into your home with The Friends Of Distinction’s shiny, happy, conga-banging psych-soul classic “Grazing In the Grass”—an activity that feels downright rapturous after too much time inside.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: We’re in the midst of a post-punk renaissance! It’s a phrase that was on every music critic’s lips back in the early 2000s, when The Rapture were mining Gang of Four’s solid gold, Interpol were summoning the ghost of Ian Curtis, and !!! staked out the common dance-floor turf between PiL and ESG. And there’s evidence to suggest that the revival never really ended, as post-punk’s rhythmic principles have become firmly embedded in the DNA of modern indie rock. But whereas the post-millennial post-punkers offered a hedonistic escape from the looming black clouds of 9/11 and the Iraq war, the current class cropping in the U.K. and Ireland is forcing listeners to reckon with reality as if thrusting your head into an unserviced porta-potty on the final day of a weekend festival.

There’s an old line of wishful thinking that suggests political turmoil makes for the best music (as if a couple of great records would be enough to compensate for the rise in income inequality, the degradation of the environment, and the proliferation of fascism). But the theory bears out when you consider all the exciting—and fiercely antagonistic—artists from the Isles who are thriving amid the chaos of the post-Brexit era. From the working-class warfare of Sleaford Mods to the pub-brawl poetry of Fontaines D.C. to the inspirational aggression of IDLES, these are good times for music about the bad times. But if these groups reinforce a definition of post-punk that centers on bruising basslines and melody-averse admonishments from vocalists with thick regional accents, other artists featured on this playlist uphold post-punk’s legacy of fearless, nonconformist experimentation, as manifest in the oblique artcore of black midi, the hypnotic pulse of Vanishing Twin, and the extended percussive odysseys of the aptly named Nottingham duo Rattle. That’s why post-punk revivals never go out of style: There are always so many different kinds of post-punk to revive.

‍Photo courtesy of Daniel Topete

An homage from Dowsers founder Sam Chennault: I’ve never written an obituary, and I’m not entirely sure where to begin, but I’ll start with what I know is true: David Berman is dead. Berman was a poet and the leader of the band the Silver Jews and, more recently, Purple Mountains. I’ve spent thousands of hours over the past 25 years listening to his songs and reading his poems. To say that his words and voice were beautiful, poignant, clever, funny, or any of the usual adjectives that I’ve used over the years to describe music feels wholly inadequate. More than anything, they were unflinchingly human and startling honest. They provided a window into a journey and a life that was difficult, and oftentimes incomprehensible and cruel.

Maybe he described it best: “Songs build little rooms in time/ housed within the songs design/ is the ghost the host has left behind/ to greet and sweep the guest inside.”

Berman was born in Virginia, not far from where I lived for a period of my life when I was younger. He was the son of an infamous Republican lobbyist, and he began making music in the early ‘90s. His first songs felt like a lark — the music equally appropriated noise rock and country, and they were ramshackle, disheveled, and sometimes formless. They oftentimes sputtered out without warning. But it was clear that he had a gift for conjuring images of liminal, ancient spaces. An early jewel: “Sin and gravity/ drag me down to sleep/ to dream of trains across the sea.”

‍Over the years, his songs took on more concrete forms. The track “Pretty Eyes” from the 1996 Natural Bridge was a turning point where he first understood the power he wielded. The song is a surrealistic, trickster slice of Americana that tells of  “little forest scenes and high school Halloweens.” In it, Berman declares “one of these days these days will end,” and relays a story of hosing down elephants in his backyard. These elephants are “ashamed of their size,” so he comforts them by telling them that they have “pretty eyes.” It’s a silly image on some levels, but there’s also an underlying tenderness to it, as there is with so much of his work. The last verse begins: “I believe the stars are the headlights of angels/ Driving from heaven to save us/ to save us/ Look in the sky/ Theyre driving from heaven into our eyes.”

Berman was also a deeply troubled person. He spent many years addicted to crack cocaine, and, in 2003, he tried to kill himself in the same hotel room in Tennessee where Al Gore was holed up on election night 2000. He declared he wanted to die where the presidency died. In 2009, he temporarily quit music, saying that his father (the Republican lobbyist) was "a despicable man ... a human molester ... an exploiter...I thought that through songs and poems and drawings I could find and build a refuge away from his world...There needs to be something more.”

He would return from his self-imposed exile in 2019, recording under the moniker Purple Mountains. His work had become progressively darker — his voice grew warbly and broken, and he conceded that he’d been “humbled by the void.” Even more alarmingly, was his line that “the dead know what they’re doing when they leave this world behind.”

It’s all very bleak, but there was always a hardwon hope. One of my personal favorite songs of his is “The Wild Kindness.” To an extent, the song is about entropy and decay. He relays that “Grass grows in the icebox/ and the year ends in the next room/ It is autumn and my camouflage is dying.” But the song ends with this image: “Four dogs in the distance/ Each stands for a silence/ Bluebirds lodged in an evergreen altar/ Im gonna shine out in the wild kindness.../And hold the world to its word.”

He was always fighting, trying to find an escape route from his family’s history, from his own addictions and mental issues, and from a world that was, at turns, absurd and cruel. I identified with this, as did many of the people whom I love and care deeply about. I thought that if Berman could negotiate these dark alleyways, and still produce works of such startling beauty, maybe there was hope for the rest of us. When I met him, I told him as much. I hope that meant something to him.

On August 7th, 2019, we found out that the worst had happened. Berman, in his own words, had been “playing chicken with oblivion,” and, this time, no one flinched. His last video was for a song called “All My Happiness is Gone.” It’s lonely and ecstatic, and begins with Berman and his friends entering a cave. The last verse of the track will always be devastating:

Its not the purple hillsIts not the silver lakesIts not the snowcloud shadowed interstatesIts not the icy bike chain rain of Portland, OregonWhere nothings wrong and no ones askingBut the fear is so strong, it leaves you gaspingNo way to last out here like this for long

My friend texted me to let me know the news at 7:52 EST. Four minutes later, another person, someone who is one of the most important people in my life, also texted me, “I’m having such a hard time. Life is painful.” She’d never heard of Berman or the Silver Jews; life doesn’t always require a specific tragedy or death to be crushing.

I called her partner and found out that she was curled up, crying, mumbling that she wanted to “meet Jesus.” I asked to speak to her, and told her that she should get professional help, that a therapist would help her unpack and understand her past. She replied that her past — consumed with a dead child and lost dreams — was too heavy, and that she had no desire to revisit it. I asked to speak to her partner, and told him to hide the sleeping pills. Sometimes, this is the best advice you can give.

As I mentioned when I first began writing this, I’ve never written an obituary. You tell me, but maybe they should have a happy ending, or at least some nod toward redemption or celebration. I’ll try to provide that here. About a month ago, I lost someone whom I cared deeply about. They didn’t pass away, or disappear into drugs or alcohol; they simply stopped caring about our relationship and exited my life. I consoled myself with the knowledge that there was a new David Berman album, and this album contained more than just new songs from a master. It held 10 new friends, friends who would help carry the weight of mass shootings, dead children, failed relationships, and lonely bars, and they would go on and on and on. They will live forever.

It was 2010, and ghosts were everywhere. The previous decade’s electronic innovations were staring down dead ends: Dubstep had run its course, and minimal techno was flatlining. In the absence of a bold new narrative, absence itself haunted the conversation. Into this void stepped Tri Angle. The Brooklyn label, founded by Robin Carolan, came whispering of another world. The first record on the label, Balam Acab’s See Birds, was all sighs and reverb, its sonics as corroded as a thing exhumed. The label’s next release was an eponymous EP from someone or something called oOoOO—not so much a band name as a wraithlike howl.

Over the next few years, this kind of doomy affect would become a kind of self-parody, but Carolan never settled for kitsch. Taking echo-soaked emptiness as a starting point, he kept pushing outward and, in the process, redefined the sound of 21st-century pop. Acts like Forest Swords and The Haxan Cloak helped make goth cool for a new generation; Lotic and Rabit drove deconstructed club music toward dystopian extremes, queering the electronic vanguard; Clams Casino shaped an entire generation of hip-hop by steeping his beats in an impenetrable haze. It’s impossible to think of Billie Eilish—to name just one multiplatinum megastar—without Tri Angle’s atmospheric precedent.

In April, Carolan announced that he was closing down the label, bowing out after just 10 years. To mark the occasion, he put together a 29-song playlist. (It’s telling that he added the first tracks to the playlist in September 2019; clearly, he’d been getting ready to shut things down for a while.) It makes for both a strong introduction for the uninitiated and a comprehensive recap for the label’s followers: While it’s neck deep in murky gloom (The Haxan Cloak’s sensuously dreadful “Miste,” FIS’ frankly terrifying “DMT Usher”), it also touches upon more ecstatic club music (Katie Gately’s “Lift”) and, crucially, the sort of genre-crossing soul (AlunaGeorge’s “You Know You Like It,” How To Dress Well’s “Ready For The World”) that constitutes one of the most fertile fields in pop music over the past decade. Taken together, it makes for a wide-ranging look at a label whose influence outstripped its own fame. Tri Angle is dead; long may it haunt us.

The world has gotten smaller. If you compare the U.S. and U.K. Top 40 pop charts these days, you’ll mostly see the same batch of songs on both. It’s probably a function of the Information Age turning cultural variations into one big, transatlantic pile of homogeneity.

But it wasn’t always that way. In decades past, the British and American pop charts were almost entirely different creatures. Americans trawling through the U.K. Top 40 would encounter a slew of songs and artists that were foreign to them in every sense of the word, as well as some they might know but would never have expected to have mainstream appeal.

The U.S. Top 40 has always been known for playing it safe. Rarely does anything too far outside the margins pop up. But in England of old, you could find edgy, underground artists rising to the top as well as utterly eccentric bits of weirdness with no readily discernible explanation, the results of the kind of old-fashioned regionalism that’s been increasingly phased out.

This collection of U.K. Top 40 hits from the ’60s through the ’90s is designed to astonish Americans who’ve grown used to thinking of the pop charts as the home of the lowest common denominator. On one end of the spectrum are the artists too cool, too quirky, or too in-your-face to ever score U.S. pop hits. That encompasses everything from the doomy post-punk of Joy Division and Public Image Ltd. to the goth glory of Bauhaus, the seminal electro-pop of Kraftwerk, the punk roar of The Damned, and the thrash-metal madness of Megadeth.

But before you decide the U.K. musical mainstream is just exponentially cooler than that of the U.S., take a look at the other end of the spectrum. There’s goofy pre-WWII pastiche, Peter Sellers’ mock-dramatic recitative of “A Hard Day’s Night,” a loopy-sounding brass-band instrumental, a ska remake of a tune whose only lyrics are “Ne Ne Na Na Na Na Nu Nu,” and plenty of other bizarre entries unknown to most Americans.

It all adds up to one of the most schizophrenic playlists you’re ever likely to experience, swooping back and forth from the sublime to the ridiculous with giddy glee. And the breathless momentum incurred will echo the mercurial feeling of following the U.K. Top 40 in the pre-internet era.