Indie

Whats This Playlist All About? The slick synth-pop soul man carefully compiles a mix to go along with his new fourth album, Caer. Or, in his words, "Sometimes we brace and then fall. Sometimes we dont feel right. Sometimes we dont fall at all." (FYI, "caer" means "to fall" in Spanish.)

What You Get: George Lewis Jr., aka Twin Shadow, is as slick and shrewd of a playlist curator as he is an artist, so expect a well-crafted mix that reflects much of his own work. Some of his more obvious 80s influences—The Cure, Prince, even Bruce Springsteen—make an appearance, alongside some chirpy Japanese synth-pop (Yellow Magic Orchestra) and sax-infused jangle pop (Orange Juice). But Lewis isnt completely stuck in that decade, including some soulful hip-hop from Australian band Winston Surfshirt and atmospheric rap from Young Fathers.

Greatest Discovery: The soothing, slippery, nearly psychedelic electronic sprawl of Montreal duo The Beat Escapes "Moon in Aquarius.” The track comes from their debut album Life is Short the Answers Long, which is releasing the same day as Caer.

Does This Mix Serve as a Good Companion to Caer? Absolutely. Springsteen prepares you for the swinging, shimmering, Heartland-leaning pop of "Saturdays," featuring lovable sister trio HAIM. Meanwhile, the moody hip-hop of 6lack, the dark ambient of Grouper, and the melancholic piano of Nils Frahm come together beautifully on the doomy, Auto-Tuned burner "Little Woman."

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.

Un Blonde’s 2016 album Good Will Come To You—a dreamlike assemblage of folk, psychedelia, gospel, and field recordings—became the rare self-released Bandcamp effort to be long-listed for Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize. Last month, the album received an official vinyl release through the Flemish Eye imprint (home to Chad Van Gaalen and Braids). With his Dowsers playlist, Un Blonde impresario Jean-Sebastien Audet shows us how we likes to start the day. "Waking up is difficult enough as it is. Allow music to lighten that load, or clarify. This is most of my mornings, quintessentially. Not necessarily in an order, so shuffle that shit maybe—but I find both Happy Good Morning Blues and, particularly, Long May You Run to be the softest landings."—Jean-Sebastien Audet

Original photography by Tuyara Mordosova. Subscribe to the playlist here.The deceased LA artist Mike Kelly did something amazing in his art. Throughout much of his work, and most notably in his Memory Work Flats, a series two-dimensional sculptures that he created from 2001 up until his suicide in 2012, he grafted modern American bric-a-brac -- buttons, bottle caps, keys, coins, and pendants -- onto larger, wall-hung surfaces. As with the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, the overall effect of these is initially overwhelming and cacophonic -- the viewer struggles to find a focus -- but a rhythm inserts itself eventually, and the collection of junk (there’s no other way to describe it) gains a more ethereal, transcendent form. Kelly has taken objects that ostensibly have little relationship to one another -- that were built to decay in trash dumps and street corner cracks -- and transformed them into a cohesive modern American, high-art sacrament.

In their patchwork, low-hi-art approach, Deerhunter provide a sonic counterpart to Kelly’s artwork. Over the past two decades, the Atlanta band has stitched together elements of ambient, Krautrock, shoegaze, lo-fi electro, post-punk, warped rockabilly, and classic pop for a sound that is, at turns, explosive, defuse, ugly, and ethereal. The songs are full of sex, noise, drugs, screeching feedback, Russian porn stars, wheezing vocals, detuned guitars, and tiny deaths. It’s ugly until it isn’t -- when the dissonance coalesces into melody, and the characters emerge from their chemical cocoons to search for forgiveness, redemption, or, at the very least, empathy. Like Kelly, they tend to build their own iconography from the minutiae of suburbia’s spiritual dissolution, and it’s both revolting and beautiful.

Deerhunter was formed in 2001 in Atlanta, Georgia. It included Bradford Cox, Moses Archuleta, and others who are no longer in the band. The band’s first album, 2005’s Turn it Up Faggot, is more or less unlistenable for those not attuned to the more noisey end of the punk rock spectrum, but the band quickly pivoted, bringing on guitarist and longtime Cox friend Lockett Pundt, who would serve as the band’s other primary songwriter and provide a more trad-rock ballast to Cox’s experimental, kitchen-sink approach. The sophomore album, Cryptograms, was recorded over two days in late 2005, but it took nearly 14 months for their new label, the venerable indie Kranky, to release it. When fans finally heard Cryptograms, many were taken aback. The album was a fairly drastic departure; the jagged, lacerated guitar work of the original was replaced with atonal ambient textures, dadistic pop tunes, and nods towards a Southern Gothic strain of shoegaze. Traces of their earlier, noisy sound remained though, and the overall effect was that of a e listener fine-tuning the dial of a old radio knob, slowly bringing clarity and a bit of pop refinement (if not exactly polish) to the band’s lurking, free-range noise sensibilities. 2008’s Microcastle/ Weird Era saw the group continue to focus their aesthetic. There were actual songs, for one thing. The jangly “Agoraphobia” remains one of their most catchy and tender tracks. There’s a wisp of Sonic Youth’s no wave guitar fuzz, but largely the album is dedicated to taut, post-punk jams like “Nothing Ever Happened” or the great “Never Stops.” As you’ve probably been able to pick up, Deerhunter’s career has a certain arc, beginning with noise bedroom and blog jams of their early years to the learner, more traditionally structured indie rock of Microcastle. It’s not that their more recent work is without value -- 2013’s Monomania traffics in Krautrock and psych to bleary and occasionally beautiful results; while 2015’s jangling, Southern-fried Fading Frontier is the hangover from Monomania’s ridiculous affectations -- but 2010’s Halcyon Digest remains the group’s high-water mark. It’s an album were the band finally boiled down their disparate, oftentimes contradictory influences into a sound and emotional palette that felt uniquely theirs.The album title is a bit of a put on; in Cox’s telling -- it’s meant as a dig at the temptations of nostalgia -- but, otherwise, the album is emotionally and sonically accessible. The gorgeous “Helicopters,” with it’s chiming, elegiac melodies and plees for prayer, is probably the closest the group ever got to pure pop, while “Revival” is a swamy, garage blues burner.But the album’s centerpiece is “He Would Have Laughed.” That song manages to shift movements and melodies without seeming overly cluttered or fussy, and while the lyrics and Cox’s vocal performance is dark and tinged with death -- the track is a tribute to the recently deceased garage punk icon Jay Reatard -- the track is vulnerable and mournful; at one point, Cox muses that with “sweetness comes suffering.” There’s still a whiff of the anger, neurosis, repression, and self-destruction that swirling beneath the surface, but Cox is able to synthesize this into a voice that is tender, honest and revealing. The pain is still present, but it has transformed and taken the shape of art.

Whats This Playlist All About? Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman Ruban Nielson carefully curates a funky, groovy, sometimes paranoia-infused mix that serves as an excellent companion to his bands brand-new fourth album, Sex & Food.What Do You Get? A thoughtful blend of new and old sounds that swings between hypnotic and heavy—kind of like Rubans own music, which seamlessly sneaks into the mix every now and then. The older stuff is equally eclectic and edgy, from worldly disco treasure "Space Talk" by Indian polymath Asha Puthi to the Hendrix-conjuring magic of Funkadelic, and the unrelenting rhythms and riffs of NEU!. The newer stuff offers just as much out-there sounds with a slightly cannier sense of restraint, like Parquet Courts jittery garage rock and Grizzly Bears woozy harmonies.Greatest Discovery: Scottish producer Makeness doomy, dance-y, Matrix-like melodies.How Does This Playlist Match Up with Sex & Food? Exceptionally well—Ruban clearly found influence in every one of these artists. In tracks like "Major League Chemicals" and "American Guilt," you can taste hints of Sabbaths chugging, proto-metal and Fuzzs fuzzier translation of it. In the warped soul-funk of "Ministry of Alienation" and "Now in Love Were Just High," you can hear a touch of Sly & the Family Stone along with the groovy psych-jazz fusion of Toro Y Mois Chaz Bundicks recent collaboration with jazz duo Mattson 2.

Subscribe to this Spotify playlist right here.Pavement’s wildest, wooliest LP sits squarely in the middle of its career. In the wake of 1994’s indie totem Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, conventional wisdom held that 1995’s Wowee Zowee would be the moment when this quintet broke through to the mainstream. Instead, a mischievousness impulse won out, one that our musical culture is all the richer for. Primary songwriters Stephen Malkmus and Steve Kannberg dug deep into influences old and new, emerging with the scuzz-rock equivalent of a moth-eaten Choose Your Own Adventure book. Much of Wowee Zowee’s charm lies in its looseness, its abject lack of seriousness, the constant sense that things could fly off the rails at any moment; the album shares this DNA with the catalogue of Memphis’ The Grifters, a group frequently recorded by Wowee producer Doug Easley. Meanwhile, the gauzy, pedal steel-soaked “We Dance” recalls the woozy grandeur of “Quicksand,” from David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. Zig-zagging rager “Flux=Rad” cops attitude from “Let’s Lynch the Landlord,” a classic barnstormer by the San Francisco punk outfit Dead Kennedys. The freewheeling back end of “Half a Canyon” salutes Germany’s krautrock originators by way of Pavement’s 1990s peers Stereolab (“Exploding Head Movie”), while the nagging tug-o-war guitars powering the point where “Fight This Generation” crests can be traced back to key influence The Fall (“Jawbone + the Air-Rifle”). Olympia, Washington’s Bikini Kill celebrated an anti-corporate ethos that “Serpentine Pad” emulated, but as “AT&T” demonstrates, Pavement certainly weren’t above polishing a Nirvana-grade melody until it shone like a slacker anthem. Few albums have been quite so willing and eager to lead everywhere at once. -- Raymond Cummings

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.

Having spent the past year working on their new LP, A Deeper Understanding (out August 25 on Atlantic Records), The War On Drugs rhythm section—bassist Dave Hartley and drummer Charlie Hall—have compiled this special playlist for The Dowsers. Whether directly or indirectly, these are the artists and songs from which Dave and Charlie found inspiration—from George Harrison to the Cocteau Twins to Iasos, and all points in between.

Source: Warp, YouTubeNozinja has been the producer behind many of the tracks that have put Shangaan electro on the map. The sound is a mix of cheap, MIDI-inspired post new wave electro and bright local folk music. Its deeply infectious, and its great to see Nozinja getsomelooks in the Western world. This is a playlist that his label, Warp, assembled on Youtube.

Here we have a playlist that’s super fun to listen to yet deeply flawed in regards to its educational mission. Part of Pitchfork’s Essentials series, the Grayson Haver Currin-curated guide would make a worthy soundtrack for a weekend of mountain hiking. The only problem is that it isn’t at all canonical. The playlist spotlights too many inconsequential outliers while shunning numerous artists central to psychedelic folk’s identity. These include Love, Tyrannosaurs Rex, Kaleidoscope, Donovan, and The Holy Modal Rounders. Since there’s nothing in the accompanying text suggesting Way Past Pleasant is an intentionally unconventional guide, we’re left wondering why a music critic would think Hiss Golden Messenger is more essential to defining psych-folk than Donovan, who it can be argued invented the genre. -- Justin Farrar