Rock + Alternative

Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-’60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock. But, over the past five decades, it has morphed into so many different forms that its more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the surrealist pop of The Beatles and Caribou, the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix and The Jesus and Mary Chain, the dreamy reveries of Slowdive and Tame Impala, or the head-nodding beats of Madvillain and Flying Lotus, psychedelia is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering.In The Dowsers Psych 101 feature, well be exploring the psychedelic sound through a 14-playlist program that breaks down the crucial components of this mesmerizing musical kaleidoscope. This introductory mix provides an overview of what you can expect in your inbox over the next two weeks: the rock n roll radicals, the Afrofuturist freaks, the headiest hip-hoppers, the most adventurous beatmakers, the lava lamp–smashing metalheads. By the end of it, we hope youll see psychedelia less as a hippy-dippy 60s phenomenon and more as an endlessly renewable energy source that is forever fueling boundary-pushing artistry across all genres and eras. For now, we invite you to turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream—and brace yourself for the many weird and wonderful trips to come.

Chart the journey from the Fab Four to Flying Lotus through The Dowsers virtual box set devoted to all things psychedelic. Your trip begins in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

Don’t try looking up pop-mosh on urbandictionary.com. It’s so street that only those kids deep into everything Warped-related use it to tag tracks in their music libraries. It refers to the recent explosion of metalcore and post-hardcore bands who add melodic vocals, big room synths, and/or thumping beats to their gutter howls and bruising breakdowns. While some of the groups, A Day to Remember and Of Mice and Men among them, still sound very crunchy and riff-centric, others, including The Amity Affliction and I See Stars, are inching closer to an aggro brand of art pop. Then there’s Bring Me the Horizon and Issues: These party monsters are so down with EDM they may as well be hanging with Steve Aoki and Skrillex at Ultra. -- Justin Farrar

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!First things first: While jamgrass certainly is progressive bluegrass (a form of it, at least), not all progressive bluegrass is jamgrass. More than a few music critics, and even fairly serious fans, tend to use the tags interchangeably, but there exist key differences in their attitudes toward experimentation. Even at their most outré, progressive bluegrass’ core outfits—Nickel Creek are a prime example—still retain a string-band flavor that, however faint, reaches back to the genre’s more traditional iterations. This isn’t the case with jamgrass acts, who, in addition to pouring their improvisational chops into extended workouts, think nothing of cutting their ’grass with funk grooves, bouncy ska, swinging jazz, Indian microtonality—even polka accordions!This certainly is the case with The String Cheese Incident’s latest full-length, Believe. In keeping with the band’s mischievously anarchic spirit, the music hops across Irish-kissed folk rock, porno disco, reggae, and riff-crunching power pop. Half the time they don’t even remotely resemble front-porch pickers and grinners. Jamgrass’ other key outfits are equally audacious: Where Railroad Earth can follow up a down-home mountain ballad with Phish-style funk, Greensky Bluegrass have been known to insert Bruce Springsteen and even Michael Jackson covers into their live shows. Leftover Salmon are so maddeningly eclectic, they’ve come up with their own genre tag: polyethnic Cajun slamgrass.Obviously, the neo-hippie jam band movement—Phish, Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit, Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, et al.—looms large over jamgrass. But a more direct lineage leads back to the highly influential Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, who, in the ’90s, used bluegrass instrumentation to create what essentially is acoustic-based jazz fusion and world music. Fleck, in turn, built his sound upon innovations made by bluegrass-based groups orbiting around the Grateful Dead in the ’70s and ’80s—Old & In the Way and the clutch of other collaborative albums released by Jerry Garcia and mandolinist David Grisman are notable for sure. But it’s the latter’s other project, The David Grisman Quintet, who are the most vital. The blend of virtuoso picking, hot jazz, and folk music documented on their 1977 self-titled debut is the tree that would go on to seed all future jamgrass.

When Black Rebel Motorcycle Club sang, "Whatever Happened to My Rock n Roll" on their 2001 debut, they were gazing upon a contemporary rock landscape overpopulated with backward red baseball caps and greasy grunge-oil salesmen, and lamenting the lack of raw, raucous, life-changing (and corrupting) devils music on the radio. In this case, the complaining actually worked: Within a year, BRMC found themselves standing alongside The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and many other disgruntled guitar-slingers, perched on the precipice of the last moment in history when the words "rock" and "revolution" could be uttered together with a straight face. And mobilizing right behind them were all the bands on this playlist——groups that may have enjoyed a few spins on Subterranean, earned a glossy magazine spread or two, got name-dropped by Jack White in an interview, or scored a prime opening slot on a Franz Ferdinand tour, but never quite achieved the same notoriety or longevity as the aforementioned acts.The early 2000s were, of course, a transformative moment in the music industry: The advent of mp3s and file-sharing opened up new portals for underground bands to achieve more widespread visibility; at the same time, old-school publications like NME and SPIN still wielded enough king-making power to anoint new rock saviors on a seemingly weekly basis, while labels were scooping up any band with unkempt hair and thrift-store blazers. The result was a cyclonic swirl of hype that sucked in MTV2-ready arena-indie acts (Longwave, Ambulance Ltd.), stylish post-punk revivalists (The Stills, Hot Hot Heat), unruly post-punk revivalists (Ikara Colt, Radio 4), unrulier post-hardcore miscreants (The Icarus Line, The Bronx), post-hardcore 70s-rock fetishists (Danko Jones, Rye Coalition), brainiac Brits (The Futureheads, Clearlake), seasoned garage acts gunning for a long-deserved close-up (Billy Childish with the Buff Medways, Mick Collins with the Dirtbombs), new-school misfits (The Ponys, The Gris Gris, Vietnam), and, thanks to The Hives surprise crossover success, an uncommon amount of Swedes (Sahara Hotnights, Division of Laura Lee, Mando Daio, The Concretes)——not to mention Canadians (The Deadly Snakes, Tangiers, The Marble Index), New Zealanders (The D4, The Datsuns), and Icelandians (Singapore Sling).Though a handful of these acts have managed to duke it out to this day, many didnt survive the 2000s. And a quick glance at this years Coachella line-up shows that the question posed by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the top of this post has, in the long run, only become more existentially pertinent. However, if the early 2000s garage-rock uprising didnt alter the course of popular music in the way its adherents had hoped, its impact can still be felt in less tangible ways. The eras blurring of indie aesthetics and mainstream aspirations has become manifest in everything from satellite-radio formats to boy bands sporting skinny jeans and salon-sculpted messy haircuts to the sheer number of annual alterna-festivals that didnt exist before 2001. Meanwhile, Lizzy Goodmans recent tell-all oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom has effectively mythologized the Strokes heyday for a new generation just as Please Kill Me did with the 70s CBGB scene (with a documentary adaptation to come). And right on cue, several long-dormant early-2000s phenoms——including Franz Ferdinand, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and BRMC——are resurfacing with new albums and/or reunion appearances; you can also expect 2018 releases from Jack White, ex-Walkmen singer Hamilton Leithauser, and Julian Casabalancas garage-prog side band The Voidz.But here, we remember those bygone would-be hype magnets who are less likely to fire up newsfeeds in 2018. Just as Lenny Kayes 1972 compilation Nuggets commemorated the countless short-lived garage bands that formed in the wake of the mid-60s British Invasion, this playlist forsakes the most hyped and heavily rotated bands of the 2000-2005 era to focus on the forgotten phenoms, unsung instigators, and steady-as-she-goes survivors who, in their own little ways, intensified the hysteria of that moment. (It also excludes groups like The Kills, The Black Keys, and Gossip, who, while still relatively under-the-radar at the time, would go on to much greater success. You may also note the absence of The Libertines, who quickly transcended their second-hand Strokes roots to spawn a landfill-indie legacy all their own.)This is a mix for anyone who actually bought a stellastar* single based on the NMEs recommendation, anyone who was momentarily convinced The Mooney Suzuki (pictured at top) were the future of rock n roll, and anyone who thought Elefant would be as big as Elephant. Our Cheap Monday jeans may not fit anymore and our once fulsome shag cuts may have given way to receding hairlines, but lets do a bump for old times sake——this bathrooms got your choice of 50 stalls.

If you’re hoping for a historically astute overview of grunge’s evolution, you’re listening to the wrong playlist. You won’t encounter a single song from Green River (who kickstarted the movement), and the only Mudhoney tune is “Suck You Dry,” from their (gasp) major label debut. Oh, and another thing: not one but two Stone Temple Pilots songs, “Sex Type Thing” and “Plush,” make the cut, inclusions that are sure to piss off those Sub Pop-era grunge fans steadfast in their dismissal of STP as corporate knockoffs.Why all this sonic sacrilege? Because this playlist (put together after Chris Cornell’s death got me thinking about his crazy-intense impact on my youth) reflects how I encountered grunge as an early-’90s teenager. Growing up among the dying factories of Syracuse, New York, I wasn’t a skate punk or alt-rock kid. Independent record labels like Sub Pop and SST were not anywhere near my radar. I was a classic-rock fan who discovered the music through videos on MTV, four in particular: “Man in the Box,” “Alive,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Outshined.” And let me tell you, they blasted my worldview into smithereens. The widely held belief that the grunge revolution overthrew hair-metal dominance overnight is more myth than reality (the shift was, in fact, gradual), but goddamn, it sure as hell felt like it. Kids one day were sleepwalking through life to a soundtrack of Bon Jovi and Firehouse hits, and the next they were stage-diving at Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains concerts. It was heady.The radical cultural upheaval that grunge unleashed was maybe more important than the music itself. Though the movement barely lasted three years (1991 to 1994), it transformed me, my friends, and a shit-ton of folks my age. And I’m not just talking about the addition of flannel and Doc Martens to my wardrobe. All this thrillingly angry and aggressive music hit me at a time when I was beginning to question society, mainstream culture, and especially my high-school teachers and their shitty conservatism. It’s no exaggeration to say the music pushed me to become intensely sarcastic, caustic, and irreverent towards the status quo. On top of all that, there was a lot of mind-expanding exploration. When grunge pierced mainstream consciousness in 1991, I was just discovering weed; by early 1994 I was dropping acid and blasting the hellishly damaged In Utero. It, more than any other album from the time, nails the deep biting contempt I possessed for just about everything on this planet, a quality that still lurks inside me (thought largely dormant) over 20 years later.I wish I could say it was Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, five days before my 19th birthday, that severed my ties with grunge, but it wasn’t anything that romantic. I had simply moved into the deeper corridors of indie rock. I did have a fling with Pearl Jam’s No Code, an album that possesses a meditative, post-grunge comedown vibe. But by the time of its release in 1996, I was already thinking of PJ as something from my past. Grunge, meanwhile, had become something to be rejected—which I think the musicians would’ve been fine with. The last thing a grunge band wanted was to be worshipped.Revisiting this music now, in the weeks after Cornell’s death, I’m blown away by the sheer amount of downer vibes oozing from it. Pearl Jam excluded (their lifeforce has always had some lift to it), Nirvana, AIC, and Soundgarden all released a lot of deeply painful music. “Rape Me” is absolutely chilling; so is “Down in a Hole.” Layne Staley is straight-up drowning: “Down in a hole, feeling so small/ Down in a hole, losing my soul/ Id like to fly, but my wings have been so denied.” Back in my teens, I didn’t pick up on all the fragility; I was too busy using the music as high-decibel anthems for my own alienation. As I dig deeper into my 40s, however, it’s hard to expose myself to the pain. It makes me wonder: Has there ever been a pop fad (and it most certainly was a pop fad) as depressingly fatalistic as grunge? I doubt it.At the same time, I wouldn’t swap my youth for anything. It was a thrilling time to be a rock ’n’ roll teenager (especially the concerts, which were sweaty, chaotic, and euphoric). For a brief moment, grunge actually managed to throw a monkey wrench in the gears of corporate-determined youth culture. As my friend Chloe recently said of those days, “I think the best part of the whole scene was the rejection of how things were. It was cool to be different. To be yourself. To be into whatever you wanted. To reject the corporate lifestyles we were sold.” For that we owe these artists, both surviving and fallen, a big thank you.

Neil Young has to be rock’s most unconventional guitar god. Nobody sounds like the guy. Instead of scorching hot licks and Keef-style riff swagger, he’s all about piercing, one-note solos, fuzzy stoner-drift, and rhythm playing slathered in distortion squall that ripples through the atmosphere like shockwaves. On top of all that, his playing is shot through with a primitive, minimalist sensibility, a quality that has inspired J. Mascis, Thurston Moore, Curt Kirkwood, and dozens of other alt-rock guitarists who worship his eccentricity. Rust Never Sleeps, from 1979, generally gets the nod as Young’s heaviest guitar album, but don’t sleep on 1991’s Weld; his tone is so dirty and gnarled it sounds as though he kicked a hole through his amplifier. While the bulk of the cuts on our playlist feature Young front and center, a handful of other guitarists pop up, including his old pal Stephen Stills, Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and the late Danny Whitten, both of Crazy Horse, and Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and Mike McCready. Young is no stranger to the long-ass guitar jam; best to buckle in and enjoy the epic ride.

William Shatner began his outside-the-box musical career in the 60s, recording spoken-word versions of rock hits. In the 2000s, he resumed his recording career, and ever since it has taken him into strange, unexpected territory, with a head-scratching array of collaborators including Henry Rollins, Joe Jackson, Lyle Lovett, Sheryl Crow, Steve Vai, and many more. This year even saw the release of a Shatner Christmas album.Shatners musical moonlighting began while he was still inhabiting the role that would define him for generations of fans: Star Treks Captain James T. Kirk. His 1968 album The Transformed Man found him delivering dramatic, spoken versions (with musical backing) of some of the most popular songs of the era, like Bob Dylans "Mr. Tambourine" and The Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Was he delivering these out-there performances in earnest or with a broad wink? To this date, thats never really been determined, but that nebulousness has always been part of the fun.It took until 2004 for the always-busy actor to finally follow up The Transformed Man. His second album, Has Been, opened with his version of Pulps "Common People," and the rest of the record was occupied with original material, mostly co-written with Ben Folds, that found Shatner doing duets with everyone from Henry Rollins ("I Cant Get Behind That") to Brad Paisley ("Real"). Has Been turned out to be a surprise hit, and it earned such a rapturous reception that Shatner was inspired to embrace music more wholeheartedly than ever before. A string of albums followed over the next several years, each one demonstrating both his eclecticism and his willingness to go out on a limb. In retrospect, its hard to believe it took him so long to tackle the concept of Seeking Major Tom, an album of outer space-themed rock classics like David Bowies "Major Tom," Elton Johns "Rocket Man" (a song hed famously done live on TV but never recorded before), and Duran Durans "Planet Earth."Ponder the Mystery took the trippy themes a step further, as producer Billy Sherwood of Yes helped Shatner create an appropriately interstellar-sounding prog rock album that featured contributions from artists associated with Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Frank Zappa, and other art-rock outfits. Never one to be pigeonholed, Shatner followed that cosmic outing with a country album, Why Not Me, co-helmed by Jeff Cook of country superstars Alabama, with original tunes featuring guest appearances by Neal McCoy and Cash Creek.For 2018, Shatner took a simultaneously traditional and typically confounding turn on Shatner Claus, a Christmas album unlike any other. After all, where else are you likely to hear his old pal Henry Rollins shouting along with "Jingle Bells" or Iggy Pop crooning on "Silent Night?"

One of the most elusive, confrontational, and downright bizarre artists to ever grace the pages of rock history, Frank Zappa staked his entire being on messing with people. To outsiders, his music can seem both needlessly intellectual and disgustingly immature, but beneath all his crude jokes and mind-bogglingly complex compositions lies one of the first true avant-garde composers to make major waves in the rock mainstream. His cynical tirades and knotty arrangements certainly have a way of testing his listeners’ limits, yet the magic of Zappa’s music is how much fun the man clearly had designing his eccentric sounds, fusing the worlds of classical music, rhythm and blues, free-form jazz, and comedy as if they were naturally meant to be together all along.As a young L.A. guitarist gigging in the city’s ‘60s freak scene, Zappa immediately stood out from his contemporaries with his staunch anti-drug stance and utter distaste for the entire flower power movement, backing up his satirical and sarcastic music with daring, genre-defying arrangements and serious instrumental chops. Early releases like Freak Out! (1966) embodied Zappa’s sense of humor, but it wasn’t until 1969’s Uncle Meat and Hot Rats that Zappa began to fully let his compositions run wild, incorporating long sections of free improvisation with performances so coordinated and tight that it’s almost hard to believe people actually played them. Zappa’s early phase reached a zenith with his two most popular records to date, Over-Nite Sensation (1973) and Apostrophe (1974), which mixed his juvenile sensibility with a bluesy take on classic rock, making for surprisingly hooky songs that still felt like one big joke.As Zappa’s career went on, he took every possible opportunity to use his music to express his political ire, none more prominently than the filthy-funk epic Joe’s Garage (1979), which envisioned a world where the government has outlawed music. He continued to approach his music from a more serious angle in his later years, commissioning orchestras to perform his work (as on The Yellow Shark) and even pioneering computer music in the late ‘80s on albums like Jazz From Hell. But even at his most academic and studious, Zappa was never one to keep a straight face. Though he died in 1993 of prostate cancer, his sense of irony and musical dexterity has lived on to this day, inspiring everyone from Ariel Pink to Phish.Zappa’s world is certainly a peculiar one, and reconciling his jokey disposition with his outlandish music requires a certain level of patience and adventurousness on the part of the listener. But his music represents a freedom in expression that one rarely sees in the mainstream, a win for the freaks whose legacy continues to endure. To crack the code on one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most mischievous maestros, hit “play” on our mix, and hold on tight.

I wish I had recorded a version of “I’m Going Bananas” at the peak of my career too; it’s what I expect from artists in their imperial phases. Dipping into her work after 2005’s acknowledged Good Album Confessions on a Dance Floor is an enervating affair, though, so I refrained from listing post-2008 options except for inescapable stinkers. Her last acknowledged mega hit “4 Seconds,” for example, tops my list: a compendium of exhausted Timbaland sounds (synth horns), Justin cameos (Madonna would’ve been less desperate if she’d coaxed a writing credit out of him in 2000), and party-over-oops-out-of-time twaddle.It’s a testament to Madonna’s quality control that ninety percent of her singles would pass federal guidelines: attractive melodies, strong hooks, identifiable and charismatic vocal performance. I don’t care about “Material Girl,” “True Blue,” “Express Yourself,” “Rain,” or “Causing a Commotion,” but they don’t offend me. The worst of her big hits remains “Who’s That Girl,” on which she and co-writer Patrick Leonard, gasping for air, reprised the “Oriental” presets first deployed on “La Isla Bonita” and the three other Spanish words that Ms. Ciccone didn’t whisper on that same track. “American Pie” was gruesome when Don McLean sang it in the Nixon era; when Madonna invests its stale pieties with more commitment than is her wont it feels like a betrayal; she’s too smart, too modern, to believe in long-long-time-ago (whatever else she keeps Justin and Avicii’s numbers on her phone). A similar investment in superannuated melodrama sinks the early “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.”Now for the surprises. I won’t tolerate no votes for Like a Virgin‘s “Shoo Be Doo” and “Stay.” I’ll defend 2015’s Rebel Heart as her most cohesive album since 2005; many tracks give the impression that she actually sat around a room with co-writers the old fashioned way and tossed melodies and lyrical ideas around. Finally, dig past American Life‘s first two singles and what emerges is an album of murmured weirdness unlike anything in her catalog to date. I want a sequel.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.