Rock + Alternative

Whats This Playlist All About? The NIN mastermind cherry-picks from his own catalog to gift us with a soundtrack for soaking in the beautiful sadness of solitude. His only tip: "Darkness optional but recommended."What Do You Get? Reznors bleakest but most seductive instrumentals, mostly from his film scores with main collaborator Atticus Ross. Theres no shortage of minor keys, moaning drones, and endless black holes of white noise. The mood is not all nihilistic, though; in fact, the way the songs flow—patiently, almost placidly—allows for ample moments of blissful reflection. Darkest Moment: Theres something truly disorienting about the weirdly pitched drones weaving through Reznors soft piano jabs on "Soft Trees Break the Fall" from The Social Network. Its even more terrifying to think about listening to this while scrolling through Facebook.What Did He Forget? While a few tracks from the underrated Still are here, that releases glistening finale "Leaving Hope" would have been a fine addition. But perhaps that ones better with the lights on.Should You Dare Play This in the Presence of Others? We wouldnt. This stuff can take you to dark places you never knew existed.

First off, what the hell is The Triangle? Technically speaking, it’s shorthand for Research Triangle Park, a massive slab of subtly rolling hills in the center of North Carolina that’s home to a whole mess of tech companies. Informally, however, it refers to the cities and college towns surrounding the RTP, namely Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Most fans of indie music are well aware of the area’s bona fides: It is (or at one time was) the home of Superchunk and the Merge Records empire, a young Ben Folds Five, cult faves Archers of Loaf, and John Darnielle, the super-learned tunesmith behind The Mountain Goats, who just dropped their latest album, the wonderfully idiosyncratic Goths.So yeah, The Triangle is highly respected as a place where important music is created. At the same time, the region is underrated because it doesn’t quite strike the same level of reverence and cool as the similarly sized Seattle, Austin, or Portland. Perhaps its greatest quality is the sheer breadth of music it has churned out: In addition to all that legendary indie music, it has been a home for genre-defining thrash (Corrosion of Conformity), punk blues (Flat Duo Jets), swing revivalism (Squirrel Nut Zippers), hip-hop (Lords of the Underground), electro-pop (Sylvan Esso), and experimental noise (Secret Boyfriend).Now, a good deal of this music exists because The Triangle overflows with creative kids and arty weirdos attending one of its gazillion universities. But that’s only half the story, amazingly enough: It’s also served as a major hub for Southern vernacular music, like blues, country, and folk, since the early 20th century. Indeed, these artists may actually outnumber the many indie and alternative bands in the area. In addition to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, one of the most lauded old-time revival outfits in the United States, there’s campfire folk troubadour Hiss Golden Messenger, absurdly soulful singer/songwriter Tift Merritt, and American Primitive banjoist Nathan Bowles.Outside of Austin, or perhaps Memphis, what other scene in the U.S. boasts such an amazing balance between the modern and cutting edge and the folksy and down-home? The Dowsers guarantee that this will be the only playlist you’ll hear all week with synths, atonal guitars, and banjos.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Columbus, Ohio’s genre-bending Twenty One Pilots pack their high-powered tunes with myriad influences, filtering dynamic pop through head-nodding reggae grooves, breakneck hip-hop beats, and even skyscraping synth blasts. While this kitchen sink approach can create the sort of mess even a smash hit hook couldn’t clean up, the duo have managed to master combos that not only result in irresistible bangers, but also positions them as an original voice in pop music.They learned from the best. Their tendency toward catchy, key-heavy hip-hop recalls Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ team-up with Chance The Rapper, “Need To Know”; The Killers’ lit-up, synth-dipped chorus on “Spaceman” matches their rousing sing-along aesthetic; and they share the same penchant for sonic theatrics as groups like Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy. By some magic, they all sound just right next to each other.

Southerners and Midwesterners can whine to the contrary, but let’s face it: Since the early ’60s, it’s the West Coast that has coughed up garage rock’s coolest and most innovative punks, brats, and sonic Neanderthals. Right now, as I bang out these words to the raging sounds of The Hospitals’ lost, twisted classic Ive Visited the Island of Jocks and Jazz, there are jean-jacketed snots all throughout the United States blasting the latest fuzz-soaked hits from John Dwyer’s Oh Sees, White Fence duder Tim Presley, and Ty Segall (who’s about to drop his latest slab, Freedom’s Goblin). Any survey of current, cutting-edge garage has to begin with this talented trio. And speaking of surveys, it’s the West Coast that’s responsible for building the intersection of garage and psychedelia: Southern California coughed up The Seeds, Love, Count Five, and The Electric Prunes, while the Bay Area gave us the acid dreams of The Chocolate Watchband and the wildly under-heralded Mystery Trend (some of San Francisco’s very first ballroom explorers).Right about now, the Pacific Northwest contingency reading this are starting to howl, “Hey know-it-all dork, what about us?” Good point. The land of suffocating overcast and rain indeed possesses a lofty place in the history of garage rock. After all, it gave us the movement’s very first bands, like The Fabulous Wailers, who cranked out a stomping, R&B-heavy sound punctuated with sax skronk as early as 1959. And then there’s Paul Revere and the Raiders, who possessed a wily pop sensibility, and The Sonics, furry beasts who sound as if they’re strangling their instruments. But the most infamous of all have to be The Kingsmen, whose “Louie Louie” really, truly established the template for the three-minute blast of sloppy distortion, slurred drums, and horny howls. Crank just about any tune from Segall or Oh Sees or White Fence—including their more out-there, Velvety throwdowns—and you’ll hear an unmistakable link back to this moldy oldie.

The Joshua Tree wasn’t one of those albums that quietly arrived on record store racks one dewy morning, attracting a few raves and then enjoying a gradual build before changing the world. Instead, U2’s fifth studio album elicited a reception that in contemporary terms would be described as breaking the internet ten times over.Speaking as an ‘80s kid who listened to his cassettes of War and The Unforgettable Fire obsessively and could sense that something big was on the launch pad, I can tell you that everything about the album felt massive from the get-go. Sending the mass media and the band’s fast-expanding audience into maximum overdrive when it was released in the spring of 1987, The Joshua Tree was the subject of heavy promotion and hype, such that U2’s music and image seemed everywhere at once. According to a Newsweek story published the same week the band made the cover of Time, Island spent $100,000 in 1987 dollars on store displays alone. Not even Bono’s cold-ravaged voice put a damper on the hysteria when the band opened its sold-out North American tour in Tempe, Arizona, on April 2. That show included the first live performance of “With Or Without You,” which became the band’s first American No. 1 single a few weeks later. It would help drive sales for an album that eventually shifted 25 million units worldwide.And the rest is history, which, if we know anything about history, means we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s repeating itself in the form of a summer anniversary tour this year. It too feels massive—over one million tickets were snapped up in the first 24 hours of going on sale—even if no rock act will dominate the pop-culture landscape as forcefully as U2 once did. Indeed, just about every subsequent effort to achieve the same level of impact by U2 or later contenders reeked of an unseemly hubris or—in the case of that iTunes debacle—sheer stupidity.Yet The Joshua Tree is still huge and intimate all at once, which is a testament to the production skills of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (whose thumbprints were far more overbearing on The Unforgettable Fire) and to the big leap in songwriting acumen by a band who had mostly got by on bravura up to that point. True, there were glimmers of what was to come on songs like “40” on War and “I Threw a Brick Through a Window” on October, which now seems like a dry run for “Bullet The Blue Sky.” But this album is where U2 indisputably became U2, achieving the greatest synthesis of their various punk and post-punk influences—especially Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and the sorely underrated The Chameleons—and the most anthemic rock of Springsteen and The Clash. Bono also talked up his blues, gospel, country, and folk inspirations at the time, but thankfully they had yet to result in the kind of stodgy Americana that clogs up Rattle and Hum. Here’s our exploration of the fertile ground around the biggest of U2’s big moments.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Not even a broken leg can stop Dave Grohl from rocking out—which is exactly what happened during the Foo Fighters’ 2015 tour of Europe. After a nasty tumble from a stage in Gothenburg, Sweden, sent him to the hospital mid-show, the dude then returned, and, chair-bound and coursing with meds, played for another two and a half hours. (Note: the Foos wound up cancelling the rest of the tour, so yeah, Grohl can be stopped, but like the Red Sox, who in fact had another game to win the 1986 World Series after this, the myth is far sexier than the truth.) I know Dan Auerbach and Jack White are super busy and productive, but they’re lightweights when compared to Grohl, a quintuple-threat singer, guitarist, drummer, producer, and filmmaker whose list of bands, collaborations, cameos, and cheeky Rock Hall induction appearances has grown exponentially since he joined the D.C. post-hardcore band Scream in 1988, two years before making history with Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic.Of course, all of us are familiar with the hard-rock portion of his CV: When Grohl isn’t banging out chart-topping records with Taylor Hawkins and the Foos, he has jammed with Queens of the Stone Age, Ghost B.C., Nine Inch Nails, Slash, and Sir Paul McCartney. (Their Sound City: Real to Reel collab, the “Helter Skelter”-like “Cut Me Some Slack,” most certainly qualifies as hard rock.) He also joined forces with Zep bassist John Paul Jones and QOTSA main man Josh Homme to form Them Crooked Vultures (who seem to be on hiatus nowadays—oh well). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Grohl pops up all along the genre spectrum. In addition to serving as a one-man rhythm section for indie singer-songwriter Cat Power, he’s gotten his (new) rave on with The Prodigy and produced jammy, heartland twangster Zac Brown Band. He’s even laid down beats for some rapper called Diddy.Grohl’s omnipresence in rock music (mixed with his perpetually smiling, nice-guy persona) has annoyed more than a few critics, bloggers, and even fellow musicians in recent years. Google “Dave Grohl” and “annoying” and some awfully viper-like (and really quite clever) diss pieces pop up calling him both a punk-rock sellout and a phony. Outside of his teenage years, Grohl never was a punk; he’s been a rocker through and through. But that’s besides the point. The fact remains that Grohl will outlive us all and survive global warming. A century from now, he’ll be like Kevin Costner in Waterworld: sporting gills, sailing the all-consuming seas in a tattered catamaran, and jamming with any and every musician he encounters.

Uni are a fab new glitter-rock trio from NYC featuring Nico Fuzz, David Strange, and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, best known for collaborating with Sean Ono Lennon in their psych-pop outfit The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. The band just released their starry-eyed first single, “What’s the Problem?,” with a full-length coming out in early 2018 on Ono Lennon’s Chimera Music label. To give you a taste of what to expect, the group curated a Dowsers playlist that salutes their glitter-rock gods—and provided these highly informative, totally fact-checked, irrefutable liner notes about each song’s creation:Gentle Giant, “The Queen”This song was inspired by a notorious crossdressing hermaphrodite who lived in the underground tunnels beneath Leicester Square in the winter of 1976. She only had three teeth, ate nothing but fish and chips, and prowled the streets in a tattered sequin negligee mumbling about “Churchill’s black dog” and the “goddam war.”T. Rex, “Children of the Revolution”This song is about a stray bullet that pierced the testicle of a revolutionary soldier during the Siege of Yorktown (Virginia, Oct. 1781) and lodged itself in the ovary of an 18-year-old girl who was 300 yards away at the time. Two separate eggs were inseminated and the offspring of this most unsafe sex in history were known as the Children of The Revolution. Marc Bolan wrote this song about them.Electric Light Orchestra, “Telephone Line”Jeff Lynne was addicted to phone-sex hotlines before the advent of the internet. He squandered his vast earnings from Electric Light Orchestra on 1-800 numbers then wrote this song penniless, heartbroken, and destitute on the floor of a Telephone Booth in 1976 detailing his downward spiral like the cord of a telephone line.Sparks, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” This is Sparks’ magnum octopus. It’s a modern-day West Side Story that gives voice to the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2017. It speaks from the voice of a Wall Street banker who purchased, tore down, and built condos on the site of a former Puerto Rican community center. Sparks makes their political statement clear in this epic manifesto.John Cameron Mitchell, “The Origin of Love” (from Hedwig and the Angry Inch) In Plato’s Symposium (or, The Drinking Party), Aristophanes, a well-known comedic playwright at the time, suggests that humans were once round balls of flesh with both male and female anatomy who rolled to and fro. Zeus, threatened by their power, cut them in two with a lightning bolt. He describes love as the human desire to be whole again by locating the missing half. Hedwig further immortalized this myth in this incredible song.Pulp, “This Is Hardcore”In 1998, after mixing quaaludes, LSD, bourbon, and Marlboro Reds, Jarvis Cocker stumbled into a Hollywood soundstage shooting a dream sequence of Busby Berkeley line dancers. Doesnt get any cooler than an emaciated, confused Jarvis being brushed by feather fans while singing "you are hardcore/ you make me hard."Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”Elton was diagnosed with high blood sugar in 1971. Yellow Brick Road was a salt-water taffy and Rocky Mountain-style fudge shop that he used to have send chocolate-dipped potato chips, brown bears, and caramel nut patties to him on the road. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was a bittersweet farewell to his sweet tooth that he performed on The Muppet Show. Lou Reed, “Vicious”Lou wrote the first version of this song entirely on the cowbell. When it came time to record the track, it wasn’t coming together very well, so Lou swallowed his pride and on the recommendation of producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson, called in all of Blue Öyster Cult to lay down the initial cowbell recording that you hear featured prominently in the final version. It became the inspiration for Ian Durys “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and many other classics.Oasis, “Supersonic”Oasis made this list because they’re the only band who fights with each other more than we do.David Bowie, “Life on Mars”Bowie took the chord changes from Sinatra’s “My Way” to write this song. Sinatra took the womb of Mia Farrow from Woody Allen. And Woody Allen took his daughter to be his wife. So, we hope there is life on Mars.Chrisma, “Black Silk Stocking” From 1991 to 1999, the USA Network aired a drama series called Silk Stalkings. Advertised as “crime-time TV,” in reality it was soft-core porn stitched together from the leftover plots of 1980s triple X films. Chrisma’s “Black Silk Stocking” was cited as the series’ main inspiration.Pink Floyd, “Apples and Oranges”Song about the two basic food groups.Lemon Twigs, “Frank” In 2016, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut regained the Mustard Yellow International Belt at the annual Fourth of July hot-dog-eating contest at Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. Chestnut, 32, downed 70 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes—the most hot dogs and buns ever eaten at the competition. That same year, The Lemon Twigs released “Frank”—a song, we assume, that’s about hot dogs and their admiration for this American hero.The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Snakedriver”Not a euphemism. Definitely a song about a chauffeur who works for a very wealthy snake.Queen, “Mister Fahrenheit”[Ed. note: Were pretty sure they mean “Don’t Stop Me Now]Undoubtedly the most debated song in rock history. The argument goes like this: If Queen is a British band, then why would they call the song “Mister Fahrenheit” and not “Sister Celsius”Marilyn Manson, “Personal Jesus” In 2005, Manson gave us his Personal Jesus. In 2013, Kanye publicly brought Jesus onstage with him. In 1964, Bob Dylan said “The Times They Are a Changin’.”The Modern Lovers, “Pablo Picasso” This is song is the handbook for any lonely guy who wants to pick up chicks.Violent Femmes, “Good Feeling”The song you hear in your head when you are trying to keep the sun from rising.Beck, “New Pollution” People really confuse the meaning of this song. An art department intern at Geffen responsible for delivering the final album files accidentally left out an “s” in the song title. It was meant to be called “News Pollution,” all about fake news. Beck smelt it back in the ’90s and was trying to warn us. Because of this one typo, the whole country believed Bill Clinton never had sexual relations with an intern, thought everything was cool in Rwanda and Burundi, were convinced Iraq had WMDs, and had no reason to think that Harvey Weinstein was anything other than guy who liked professional one-on-one meetings with all his prospective female leads. If only we knew now what Beck knew then…The Rolling Stones, “Shes a Rainbow”Definitely the best jingle that Skittles ever had in a commercial. I have no idea how they convinced the Stones to write this one for them, but we did hear that Keith ate nothing but blue skittles and vodka during the summer of 1967, so maybe this had something to do with the decision. Great song either way. Taste the Rainbow…T. Rex, “Cosmic Dancer”If all the celestial bodies in the infinite firmament of beginning-less time and the vacuum of space manifested their quarks into a private lap dance on your deathbed on the moon in the final countdown before the Milky Way exploded, it would feel exactly like this song.

It’s been 20 years since Wilco’s Being There seduced me in my roommate’s Ford Escort. This happened in the fall of 1996, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, just two hours northeast of Chicago. So yeah, the place was crawling with Midwestern college students all earnest and modest and way into Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, The Jayhawks and any other artist camping out halfway between alternative and rootsy. A fan of noisy underground rock, I tended to dismiss these bands — that is until I started borrowing Rob’s Escort to run errands: laundry, the bank, record stores, Smirnoff. The super generous dude said I could take it anytime, and I did. (I also devoured a lot of his groceries — sorry, man.) Why exactly I began listening to his copy of Being There — which had been out only a few weeks — and not one of the dozen other CDs strewn across the floor has been lost time. I’d love to say that I started the ignition one day and became instantly intrigued once the gargantuan, Flaming Lips-like feedback of the opener, “Misunderstood,” drenched the car. But that would be the kind of apocryphal crap music critics love foisting upon readers. Nevertheless, I started listening to the record and gradually became obsessed. It’s never left me. I know it forwards and backwards. I can recite the track list from memory. I appreciate other Wilco albums, but none even come close to blowing my mind like their second.From the little I’ve read about the album (I’m not lying when I say I haven’t read much about Wilco), Jeff Tweedy, Jay Bennett (RIP), and the rest of the crew harbored lofty themes about the complex relationship between rocker and fan when they began recording the sprawling double album in late 1995. You can hear them grapple with this idea on “Misunderstood,” written from the perspective of a fan, as well as “Sunken Treasure” and “The Lonely 1.” I didn’t know any of this when I first formulated my take on Being There, which is this: It’s an overly self-conscious rock album made by an overly self-conscious rock a band about rock, both its awesomeness and suckitude. It’s about how rock is totally weary, spent, and repetitive, yet at the same time utterly inescapable for those addicted to it. And since there is no escape, we might as well drink from that repetition — revel in it. As Tweedy sings on “Someone Else’s Song,” a slowly rolling folk number with a melody reminiscent of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” “I keep on singing/ You’re eyes they just roll/ It sounds like someone else’s song/ From a long time ago.”Wilco take the notion of singing someone else’s song as a license to wear their influences on their sleeves in a way that most bands would be too embarrassed to ever attempt. Many of these — early Little Feat, Neil, Gram, The Replacements, Big Star — are baked deep into the grooves. Others, in contrast, are shoved in listeners’ faces. Not only does “Misunderstood” lift The Lips’ uniquely groaning feedback, it actually contains lines — “Take the guitar player for a ride/ You see he ain’t never been satisfied/ He thinks he owes some kind of debt/ Be years before he gets over it” — lifted almost verbatim from Rocket From the Tombs’ proto-punk ballad “Amphetamine.” The rocker “Monday” boasts Keith Richards’ guitar tone from Let It Bleed and blaring horns from Exile On Main St. On the blurry-eyed ballad “(Was I) in Your Dream,” Tweedy sounds like a drunken Dr. John impersonator, while over the course of the fiddle jam “Dreamer in My Dreams” he mimics the raspy hellraising of Tex-Mex legend Doug Sahm (who recorded with Uncle Tupelo, incidentally).In addition to blatant plagiarism and mimicry, Tweedy works in all manner of historical references, some obvious, others oblique. In the folksy love ditty “Far, Far Away,” he slips in the phrase “on the dark side of the moon.” You can tell from his hesitant delivery that he totally knows what fans will be thinking when they hear him nick a phrase from Floyd. “Hotel Arizona” has to be a nod to “Hotel California” because the song doesn’t actually contain the phrase in the lyrics. Tweedy sings “hotel in Arizona” but not actually “Hotel Arizona.” Being There contains an “Outtasite (Outta Mind),” as well as an “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)”; both are basically different versions of the same song, just like how The Beatles included slightly different renditions of the title track on the art pop classic Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Ditto for Neil on Tonight’s the Night.)I freely admit that many of my references are wholly my own creation, and Tweedy probably would roll his eyes if he ever read this. Like a nutty conspiracy theorist with a wall full of photographs, pins, and yarn, I’ve constructed a map of the different rock coordinates that I’ve projected onto . The whistling closing out the richly melodic “Red-Eyed and Blue” is a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream.” “The Lonely 1,” a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life, is Wilco’s “Beth,” itself a syrupy ballad about the rock ‘n’ roll life. And best of all, the playfully walking piano chords opening “Outta Mind (Outta Sight)” are a secret love letter to the influence that “Sesame Street Theme” exerted on Tweedy as a child.Being There totally invites this kind of fanaticism, however delusional, from its fans. After all, only fellow rock fanatics — the kind that spent their teenage years picking apart every last lyric, riff, and fill on their favorite albums — could’ve recorded a set so absurdly referential. This is music by obsessives for obsessives. What started as a fling in a Ford Escort in the mid ’90s turned into a fascination spanning decades.

Seattle hard-rock supergroup Walking Papers——featuring Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin——recently released their second album, WP2. Here, the band’s singer/guitarist, Jefferson Angell, shares the music that moves him, either physically or mentally. “I divide my music into two categories: music for the neck up, and music for the neck down. I dont really prefer any one genre over another. This playlist has a little of both and was put together spontaneously as I listened along. I just allowed them to work their magic at the moment and let my mind lead me to the next one. All of these songs, at one time or another, stopped me in my tracks, and I became obsessed with them. Exclusively, or along with the album they are pulled from. Some are new to me, others have stuck with me since childhood.”——Jefferson Angell, Walking Papers

There is only one dude in rock who has Miley Cyrus, Tame Impala, Yoko Ono and Lightning Bolt all on speed dial, and that is Wayne Coyne. His long list of BFFs and partners in crime is just as phantasmagoric and unpredictable as the psychedelic murals splashed across the façade of The Womb, The Flaming Lips’ art space in Oklahoma City. One would think a playlist featuring such a motley assortment of musicians would yield to musical chaos, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t matter if he’s crafting high-polish chart pop with Kesha or unleashing noise-rock tantrums with Yoko — the trippy, alt-rock messiah has a way of drawing those around him deep into his Day-Glo surrealism and candy-coated, kaleidoscopic wondrousness. You will be, too, after hitting play.