In an era where taking ownership of and proclaiming faith in one’s own project seems a rarity, Chief Keef’s confidence in his own work and that of his friends is a breath of fresh air. When asked by Complex to list his favorite songs, he submitted a list almost exclusively of his own music. He justified this by pointing out that the meaning of each song is communicated in the title of each song, and the list ends up reading like more of an OKCupid “About Me” than a list of favorite songs. An interesting aberration here is “Gucci Mane’s Entire Catalog,” although Keef gives a bit by disclosing that his favorite Gucci song is “Spanish Plug.”
Chris Maxwell has consistently stretched the boundaries of his own sound and vision as a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer, starting in the late ’80s as frontman for Little Rock, Arkansas’ Gunbunnies, and then later with NYC band Skeleton Key, crafting raucous rock experimentations. More recently, Maxwell has helped create music for several commercials and TV series, including Bob’s Burgers and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, and has worked alongside artists like They Might Be Giants and Fiona Apple as one-half of production duo Elegant Too. In between, he’s written and recorded two solo albums, 2016’s Arkansas Summer and 2020’s New Store No. 2, the latter a cozy mix of lush indie pop and rock. In the homespun spirit of both, the Arkansas-born artist has put together a comprehensive playlist featuring musicians who hail from his native state.
Says Maxwell of the playlist: “My own personal peep into the strange and beautiful heart of Arkansas music. Whether it’s the butter-knife slide of Cedell Davis, Pharoah Sanders’ sheets of sound, Jim Dickinson’s irreverent approach to recording, or the prepared-piano-player compositions of Conlon Nancarrow, Arkansas has always produced sounds that ignore the rules. I left off a few of the unusual suspects in favor of curveballs like The Insect Trust, whose founding member Robert Palmer not only was the first full-time rock writer for The New York Times but also grew up next door to Pharoah Sanders. I also wanted to highlight a few of the early architects of rock ’n’ roll like Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Louis Jordan as well as a few familiar names like Glen Campbell and Al Green. Some entries might need a little explaining. For instance, I had somehow missed the fact that Little Rock native Al Bell, the former owner of Stax Records, was also a songwriter behind songs like Eddie Floyd’s ‘Raise Your Hand’ as well as the Staple Singers smash ‘I’ll Take You There.’ One of the gifts of growing up in a state that often flies under the cultural radar is that you can let your freak flag fly, and with that in mind I close out the list with the incomparable Elton and Betty White.”
On February 23, Montreal electro artist Clarian (ex-Footprintz) releases his debut album, Television Days (via Balance Music), a neon-lit, synth-smeared concept album about a failed screenwriter trying to survive in Hollywood. For his Dowsers playlist, he’s put together a mix of primitive electronica, post-punk, romantic goth, and outsider pop he describes simply as "music so that when she smiles, the fear flies away in little pieces of light."
Classixx released their sophomore LP Faraway Reach in 2016, and signaled a more straightforward pop aesthetic for the band that was in part responsible for popularizing the tropical house sound. There’s no contextual information that accompanies this playlist, and the user is left to guess at the theme, if there is any. There’s a lilting quality to tracks like Bobby Briggs’ reggae jam “Love Come Dow” that tilts its hand to Classixx’s own beachfront fireside vibe, and the emphasis on yachty electro-pop signals that perhaps this can be seen as a key to Classixx’s sonic formula.
Veteran Atlanta-based all-girl garage punks The Coathangers can turn up the dial pretty substantially -- just listen to their latest offering LIVE to see what we mean. Hitting all the high-energy house party vibes (with a little bit of piss and vitriol stirred into the mix), the band was formulated 13 years ago as a means to have fun with their friends, so its no surprise that when we asked them for a playlist, what they delivered was all about good times for the weekend. And a reference to one of their other epic album titles.Says the band, "This playlist is all about rockin out and enjoying whatever youre doing while listening to it! Whether its a road trip, house party, or simply background music while you get to work, crank it up and rock tha hell out!!!"Check out the playlist to the right or go here.
What’s This Playlist All About? For their 2018 tour with The Jesus and Mary Chain, Trent Reznor and co. have given us a peek into the ins and outs of the show with a mix of all the music playing in between sets. According to Reznor himself: “Hit shuffle and consider drinking an overpriced beer out of a plastic cup for enhanced effect.” Always the jokester.What You Get: A predictably dark and ominous ambiance filled with moody atmospherics from Reznor and Atticus Ross’ own brilliant film scores, as well as the NIN frontman’s other project How to Destroy Angels. There’s also a lot from once collaborator and touring partner David Bowie, plus classic post-punk and synth-rock gloom from Soft Cell, New Order, Bauhaus, and Killing Joke. He also throws in a good deal of glorious electronic dance and doom from this century by greats like Liars, Beak>, and Oneohtrix Point Never.Best Surprise: The wistful whistling and haunting harmonizing of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” from vocal Western wonders Sons of the Pioneers. Oh, and The Flamingos’ wonderfully dreamy doo-wop gem “I Only Have Eyes for You.”Which of These Bands Should NIN Tour With Next? We have to admit that a shared bill with Radiohead—represented here with their gorgeous elegy “Daydreaming”—would be pretty amazing. And let’s add Liars to that line-up, too (we know Thom loves them as well!).
In 2017, the perpetually restless and increasingly prolific post-punk veterans Wire released their 16th album, Silver/Lead, and hosted three editions of their roving curated festival DRILL (in Los Angeles, Leeds, and Berlin). Here, the bands main singer/guitarist Colin Newman reveals the songs that inspired him most this past year. "A list of a few things that have been catching my ear this year. Some artists will be on everyone’s list, some will be on no one’s! It includes one artist celebrating his 50th (10 more than Wire!), one artist who actually thinks Michael McDonald is cool, one band who played in DRILL : LA, and one person who played in the pinkflag guitar orchestra, oh and the best band in Brighton (my hometown) right now. You don’t need me to tell you it’s been an unsettling year but luckily not for music."—Colin Newman of WireNote: Colin also wanted to include Wands "Plum," but it isnt available on Spotify.Photo: Mike Hipple
Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Sophie Austers haunting voice and soaring, lush poetry set to music is what you might expect from a daughter of both NYC and author parents, but her reach is much more worldly, hovering somewhere between French luminaries like Charlotte Gainsbourg, British folk masters like Marianne Faithfull and telling stories like a young Tom Waits. Plus, shes pretty big in Spain. And while shes got some major musical accomplishments worth celebrating --from releasing her first album at 16, to winning The John Lennon Songwriting Contest at 29, to collaborating with accomplished songwriter Barry Reynolds and having just released her third full-length and first new record in four years --when we asked Auster to make us a playlist, the one thing she sought to celebrate was her decade plus retirement from teenage years.Says Auster: "This playlist is an eclectic mix of nostalgic and contemporary songs. It represents my love of wide ranging pop music from yesterday and today and captures my own personal melodic and diverse leanings as a songwriter. The most surprising pick on the list is probably "I remember" by Molly Drake. Mother to Nick, I found her album while poking around in a record store in Seattle, on tour. It was an amazing discovery since I had only known of her son. In the same haunting vein is Sibylle Baier, who I discovered some years ago, through a musician friend. Baiers son released her home recordings thirty years after their inception. I find them beautiful and ghostly intimate."Listen above, and check out her own ghostly intimate album Next Time, out now.
If you worship at the altar of Ian Mackaye, then you should probably check out Vancouver slacker-punks Dumbs latest album Seeing Green (picking up the correlation yet?) which just came out on June 22nd.The album, according to the band, "revolves around a confused and angry young person unknowingly being tossed around by the same western capitalist conditioning that weve all been raised on. Green in this sense refers to being a novice, as well as to money, envy, and growth. Its meant to be somewhat of a self-aware exaggeration of some feelings in our every day lives that we often dont want to admit to and may even lie to ourselves about."Furthering their self awareness to the music happening around them, we had them hand-pick a playlist that they dubbed their "favourite publicly traded newish DIY music on Spotify including tour pals Pardoner, side project Swim Team and Mint family members Woolworm."Give their DIY playlist a listen to the right, and check out their album wherever you go for new music.
2018 has been a great year for music so far, so we decided to create a ‘currently listening’ playlist that captures the new (and new-ish) releases we’re listening to right now. Some of the tracks we’ve included are by our friends and others are by people we wish we were friends with, the common thread is that they’re all grade A bangers. It’s important to support other musicians and hopefully people who like Doe will also find something they like here. We’re going to keep adding to the playlist as the year goes on, if nothing else it’ll provide something we can listen to together in the car on the way to shows to get pumped. - Nicola (Doe)
The ’90s have never sounded better than they do right now—especially for modern-day indie rockers. There’s no shortage of bands banging around these days whose sound suggests formative phases spent soaking up vintage ’90s indie rock. Not that the neo-’90s sound is itself a new thing. As soon as the era was far enough away in the rearview mirror to allow for nostalgia to set in (i.e., the second half of the 2000s), there were already some young artists out there onboarding ’90s alt-rock influences. But more recently, there’s been a bumper crop of bands that betray a soft spot for a time when MTV still played music videos and streaming was just something that happened in a restroom. In this context, the literate, lo-fi approach of Pavement has emerged as a particularly strong strand of the ’90s indie tapestry, and it isn’t hard to hear echoes of their sound in the work of more recent arrivals like Kiwi jr. or Teenage Cool Kids. Cherry Glazerr frontwoman Clementine Creevy seems to have a feeling for the kind of big, dirty guitar riffs that made Pacific Northwestern bands the kings of the alt-rock heap once upon a time. The world-weary, wise-guy angularity of Car Seat Headrest can bring to mind the lurching, loose-limbed attack of Railroad Jerk. And laconic, storytelling types like Nap Eyes stand to prove that there’s still a bright future ahead for those who mourn the passing of Silver Jews main man David Berman. But perhaps the best thing about a face-off between the modern indie bands evoking ’90s forebears and the old-school artists themselves is the fact that in this kind of competition, everybody wins.
It may be that 2019 was the best year for ’90s metal since, well, 1999. Bands from the decade of Judgment Night re-emerged with new creative twists and tweaks: Tool stretched out into polyrhythmic madness, Korn bludgeoned with more extreme and raw despair, Slipknot added a new drummer (Max Weinberg’s kid!) who gave them a new groove, and Rammstein wrote an anti-fascism anthem that caused controversy in Germany (and hit No. 1 there too). Elsewhere, icons of the era returned in unique ways: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor scored a superhero TV series, Primus’ Les Claypool teamed up with Sean Lennon for some quirky psych rock, and Faith No More’s Mike Patton made an avant-decadent LP with ’70s soundtrack king Jean-Claude Vannier. Finally, the soaring voice of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington returned for a moment thanks to Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton, who released a song they recorded together in 2017.
Taking a look at the playlists for my show on Boston’s WZBC might give the more seasoned college-radio listener a bit of déjà vu: They’re filled with bands like Versus, Team Dresch, and Sleater-Kinney, who were at the top of the CMJ charts back in the ’90s. But the records they released in 2019 turned out to be some of the year’s best rock. Versus, whose Ex Nihilo EP and Ex Voto full-length were part of a creative run for leader Richard Baluyut that also included a tour by his pre-Versus outfit Flower and his 2000s band +/-, put out a lot of beautifully thrashy rock; Team Dresch returned with all cylinders blazing and singers Jody Bleyle and Kaia Wilson wailing their hearts out on “Your Hands My Pockets”; and Sleater-Kinney confronted middle age head-on with their examination of finding one’s footing, The Center Won’t Hold.
Italian guitar heroes Uzeda—who have been putting out proggy, riff-heavy music for three-plus decades—released their first record in 13 years, the blistering Quocumque jerceris stabit; Imperial Teen, led by Faith No More multi-instrumentalist Roddy Bottum, kept the weird hooks coming with Now We Are Timeless; and high-concept Californians That Dog capped off a year of reissues with Old LP, their first album since 1997. Juliana Hatfield continued the creative tear she’s been on this decade with two albums: Weird, a collection of hooky, twisty songs that tackle alienation with searing wit, and Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police, her tribute record to the dubby New Wave chart heroes (in the spirit of the salute to Olivia Newton-John she released in 2018). And our playlist finishes with Mary Timony, formerly of the gnarled rockers Helium and currently part of the power trio Ex Hex, paying tribute to her former Autoclave bandmate Christina Billotte via an Ex Hex take on “What Kind of Monster Are You?,” one of the signature songs by Billotte’s ’90s triple threat Slant 6.
