Rock + Alternative

I know Morrissey is stupid, but it’s a particular kind of stupidity that understands how to use semicolons to mitigate verbosity with racism. That’s a talent I don’t sneeze at. Please note how obvious these titles are. Piers Morgan could have structured a show around them.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

It should surprise no one that I included a quarter of Pop, released twenty years ago to a reception less derisive than received wisdom would suggest. “Last Night on Earth” remains their direst single — four minutes of nothing. But Rattle and Hum boasts “Angel of Harlem,” Bono’s most embarrassing attempt to connect with a songwriting conceit that is supposed to be a person (don’t ever try personification again, Bono). Also, “Hawkmoon 269,” with more heavy breathing than a telephone stalker and terrible contributions from esteemed organist Bob Dylan.

founder Phil Pirrone wants you to have a good time. And dammit if he isnt trying with the 2018 installment of his six-years-running fest. See, unlike some other festivals that have all but fully homogenized in recent years, Southern Californias Psych rock celebration is still uniquely its own beast, and not just because of the pinpointed approach (music thats centered on psych while exploring every corner it has to offer), but also because of the immersive experience waiting for those who take the trek out beyond LA county. While its expanding from the desert to a lake at the edge of the San Jacinto Mountains this year, headliners like Tame Impala and Warpaint ease into night 1, while full psych worship with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Ty Segall and White Fence electrifies night 2, before the weekend closes out with shoegaze icons My Bloody Valentine on night 3. And the day line-ups are equally as impressive for anyone into this musical movement born of the Mojave desert, with highlights like Kikagaku Moyo, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, Wand, Earthless, Deap Valley, and now that were listing them, honestly too many to list. But as for that experience we mentioned? In between sets and before and after the shows, theres no shortage of art installations, sound baths, yoga, desert and moon teachings, films, workshops, talks and anything else you might wanna trip into.Founder Phil Pirrone has been doing this since 2012 and also operates his own psych band JJUUJJUU, so when we asked him what make for the best soundtrack to take the journey out to this year, heres what he came up with.Says Pirrone: "This playlist is for you, just like . This playlist is for having a good time, just like . This playlist will brush your teeth, just like .”Listen above or go right here. takes place October 12 - 14th in Lake Perris. Gates open noon daily with late night entertainment after the headliners. For tickets and more info, go to desertdaze.org.

At a minute and 53 seconds, “Old Town Road” made headlines for being the shortest song to hit No. 1 since 1965. Still, that’s a spiraling prog symphony compared to these songs: 50 of them, all 7 seconds or less.

The idea of tiny microsongs gestated for about 25 years before reaching full flower. The “event scores” of the ’60s Fluxus movement turned quixotic, whimsical actions into bursts of music and art. From the ’70s into the ’80s, punk rock got speedier and speedier. In 1981, D.C. hardcore band Youth Brigade released “No Song II,” a second-or-so-long blurt whose sole lyric was “No.” Humorous, punk-adjacent thrash-metal bands like Stormtroopers of Death (S.O.D.) and Wehrmacht jumped into the fray in 1985.

The big bang, as it were, for tiny songs was Napalm Death’s notorious “You Suffer,” the U.K. grindcore band closing the arms race of speedy songs in 1987 with a 1.316-second micro-rant (full lyrics: “You suffer, but why?”) that made the Guinness Book of World Records. Teeny songs quickly became a staple of grindcore bands and their scruffier counterparts in American “powerviolence” bands. Powerviolence label Slap-a-Ham even crammed 84 songs onto a 7-inch in 1998. Here are 50 tunes in less than five minutes, spanning hardcore, grindcore, powerviolence, cybergrind, experimental electronic music, alternative pop and more.

There’s a kid inside of us, no matter how decrepit we get, and the kid inside Tom Waits probably sounds a lot like the one in “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a highlight of Waits’ gloriously ragged 1992 masterpiece Bone Machine. Given that there’s “nothing out there but sad and gloom” based on what he’s seen in the lives of the adults around him, the world of grown-ups rightly seems unappealing and bewildering. “How do you move in a world of fog that’s always changing things?” he wonders, articulating a dilemma that stymied so many of the hard-luck characters who tell their stories in the hundreds of songs authored by one of American music’s most cherished mavericks.

That question is probably still on the man’s mind as he turns 70. We like to imagine him as the coot prospector he played in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, scratching his head and grumbling, “How the hell did that happen?” in that iconic voice, which never seemed as if it could get any raspier but somehow always did.

Then again, turning 70 maybe isn’t such a big deal to a guy who tried hard to seem old before his time. When Waits first emerged in the Los Angeles club scene of the early ’70s, his clear devotion to heroes like Jack Kerouac and Thelonious Monk made him seem like a scruffy relic to listeners more hip to Jackson Browne. He styled himself as a piano-playing Charles Bukowski, tickling the ivories as he spun hard-luck tales equal parts miserable and hilarious. (Check out his 1975 live album Nighthawks at the Diner for vivid early evidence of both his storytelling chops and his ability to delight a crowd.)But anyone who figured they had him pegged would be surprised again and again by what followed in the ’80s and beyond. Once Waits found a long-sought sense of personal stability with wife and creative partner Kathleen Brennan, his creative moves grew bolder, starting with 1983’s stunning Swordfishtrombones and continuing with later triumphs like 2004’s Real Gone. The music they contained could be tender and heartbreaking or crazy and chaotic. Whatever the case, it all remained true to his reliably skewed vision of that confusing grown-up world.

In the process, he’d honor his own inspirations—Bob Dylan, Harry Partch, Mose Allison, Captain Beefheart—while inspiring countless younger artists who absorbed his profound influence on how great songs get made and sung. To celebrate the occasion of his 70th, here’s a set of 70 Waits essentials and many more songs that show his grubby fingerprints.

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.

What’s This Playlist All About? The folks at Under the Radar Magazine highlight some of the biggest sleeper tracks in alt and indie rock. On their first go-around, they cover a wide field of songs that seemingly have nothing else in common other than being “precious stones buried in discographies” or ones that are simply “underappreciated for a variety of reasons” --leaving listeners to figure out what those reasons are for themselves.‍

What You Get: This is mostly an exercise in digging up deep cuts from big-name bands like Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Coldplay. But before you get there, they throw in a few offbeat indie and electro artists worth a shout-out, like Brooklyn duo High Places and Spencer Krug’s highly underrated solo project Moonface. Things get a little wilder midway through with the woozy Clap Your Hands Say Yeah nugget “Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air Burning?” and PS I Love You’s propulsive noise-rocker “Get Over.” Then it all cools down a bit with the Cure-esque Pablo Honey ballad “Thinking About You” and the slow-burning tearjerker “Friends and Foe” from Irish greats The Frames.

‍Greatest Discovery: Lead track “Digging Holes” comes from a lesser-known band from Madison, WI, called Icarus Himself. The song has several twists and turns, with organ jabs, wieldy guitar licks, and magical quavers of an electronic instrument called the Omnichord. The group sound like The Walkmen one minute, then Beirut the next, as the song concludes in a celebratory squall of brass.

‍Most Questionable Pick: Lady Gaga’s gut-wrenching showstopper “Always Remember Us This Way” from her Oscar-nominated performance in A Star Is Born. It may be up there as one of her greatest performances, but is this Billboard Hot 100 hit really a song that’s been slept on?

The great irony about the MTV Unplugged phenomenon of the 1990s is that the performances were often less stripped down than gussied up. Sure, the series provided a forum for rock artists to reimagine their riffed-up repertoires as campfire fare, but it also gave them license to crowd the stage with string players, woodwind sections, and other auxiliary personnel. Even a punk-conscious band like Nirvana weren’t immune to this when they sat down for their now-iconic Unplugged taping in November 1993 (released a year later as MTV Unplugged in New York), as they brought along a cello player and a couple of Meat Puppets. But the band’s quietest performance ever proved to be their most intense, no more so than on Kurt Cobain’s traumatic excavation of the Lead Belly standard “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

That song didn’t just become a key part of Nirvana’s legacy; it set the gold standard for acoustic-administered emotional exorcisms, clearing the bar set by white-knuckled strummers like Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. The other performances collected on this playlist may not approach the same soul-wrenching extremes, but they each document a revelatory moment in a career (such as a young David Bowie finding his flamboyant voice in Jacques Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” and the early Jane’s Addiction showcasing their range with the harmonica-honked anomaly “My Time”), or they capture a legend in their purest, most primal state (see: Lauryn Hill’s epic freestyle on “Mystery of Iniquity” and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum stretching the physical limits of his voice on the haunting “Oh Comely”). The casual nature of acoustic performances has also presented artists with a forum for making other people’s songs their own, like Wings’ dramatic reading of Paul Simon’s “Richard Cory” (in which Macca cedes lead vocal duties to Denny Laine) and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson’s arresting rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore” (released on the Singles soundtrack under their Lovemongers alias). And no survey of quality acoustica is complete without oft-overlooked hair-metal outsiders Tesla, whose Five Man Acoustical Jam record actually predated the first proper MTV Unplugged release by six months.