Rock + Alternative

Psychedelic culture stands at the cusp of mainstream acceptance. This may sound odd given the fact that the United States still includes LSD, psilocybin, and numerous other hallucinogens on the list of Schedule I substances, but there are many signs. Academia is in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with Johns Hopkins University leading the way in exploring the therapeutic benefits, while tales abound of California techies microdosing. And though marijuana is not an hallucinogen, per se, it is culturally linked to psychedelics, and it’s legal in 30 states and counting. Then there’s the recent publication of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The book, written by celebrated author and journalist Michael Pollan, cracked the Top 10 of Amazon’s books charts and is sure to further accelerate the field’s growing respectability.Such developments were unthinkable in the mid-’60s when psychedelics, helping fuel the counterculture’s alienation from mainstream American culture and politics, were pushed underground through prohibition. Having been booted out of Harvard University in 1963, outlaw psychonaut Timothy Leary (in)famously exhorted America’s youth to “turn on, tune in, drop out”; Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, meanwhile, kickstarted the hippie movement with their Bay Area Acid Tests. Rock ’n’ roll played a central role in the spreading of this psychedelic gospel. As musicians themselves experimented with hallucinogens, they in turn penned anthems charting their consciousness-expanding adventures.The first wave of anthems, probably more inspired by cannabis than hallucinogens, sound rather innocuous, even goofy in hindsight. Bob Dylan’s double entendre-laced “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” wraps early “head” humor inside a marching band sing-along, and The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Daydream” sways with childlike innocence as John Sebastian croons the slyly suggestive lines, “And you can be sure that if you’re feeling right/ A day dream will last long into the night.”In 1966, however, the folksy playfulness of these tunes gave way to noggin-blurring proselytizing. The Beatles—whom Leary, in one of his typically hyperbolic bursts of cosmic thought, described as being “endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species”—led the charge. The group dropped both “Tomorrow Never Knows,” perhaps the first rock song to truly drone, and “She Said She Said,” a cryptic reference to an acid trip with Easy Rider actor Peter Fonda, into the sonically phantasmagoric Revolver. The Byrds kept apace, unleashing “Eight Miles High,” which certainly matched “Tomorrow Never Knows” in its ability to express the acid experience through mystical lyricism and raga-flavored music.The following year, 1967, saw the Jefferson Airplane and The Doors up the ante with “White Rabbit” and “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” respectively. Both are stirring—though radically different—evocations of West Coast’s exploding psychedelic movement. Where “White Rabbit” is a whimsical call to action drenched in Alice in Wonderland imagery, “Break On Through” comes on like a freight train threatening to jump the tracks. Its expression of a consciousness freed is reckless and unnerving (but also utterly thrilling).It’s important to remember that The Doors, named for Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a chronicle of the author’s experiences with mescaline, weren’t flower-picking hippies; they were art-school bohemians whose music charted the shadowy side of psychedelia, especially the sense of loss and disconnect that comes with untethering the mind from reality. As Patrick Lundborg points out in his 2012 book Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life, “In that tumultuous era, as acidhead musicians directed their creativity towards reflecting their psychedelic experiences, the looming threat and occasional reality of dark, terrifying trips unavoidably came to influence the music.”This ominousness courses through The 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside This House” and Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” two of the era’s most emotionally complex anthems. The former, swirling into vortices of reverb, creates a profoundly esoteric vision, over the course of which the promise of spiritual enlightenment and the dangers of ego death coil around one another like snakes. Pink Floyd’s early anthem, on the other hand, is a cold, paranoid, and atonal portrayal of an acid trip as a rocket ride into the black expanse of space. Needless to say, both walk the existential edge, a fact that should come as no surprise considering both the Elevators’ Roky Erickson and Floyd’s Syd Barrett embodied the excesses of the psychedelic era: psychonauts who wound up venturing too far out, damaging themselves in the process.In the United States and United Kingdom, the golden era of the psychedelic anthem didn’t last all that long, roughly 1966 to 1969. By the time Woodstock went down, more and more musicians were eschewing cosmic exploration for earthbound rock heavily accented with country, soul, and blues. The visionary utopianism so profoundly linked to altered states of consciousness simply couldn’t weather the harsh realities of a war in Vietnam that seemingly had no end in sight, the ascendency of Richard M. Nixon and his Silent Majority to the Oval Office, and the brutal Civil Rights unrest of 1968. Hippies, reeling from these bitter developments, embraced more personal forms of enlightenment: yoga, meditation, and health food, to name a few. Or, they bolted for the country.Exceptions did pop up, like Funkadelic’s moodily sublime “Maggot Brain,” not an anthem in the strictest sense yet certainly a powerful expression of mind-smashing lysergia. There also were late-to-evolve psychedelic scenes in central Europe and Japan, where hippiedom didn’t take hold until the early ’70s. A perfect reflection of this is the Switzerland-based Brainticket, whose 1971 epic “Brainticket (Part Two)” really is one of the most over-the-top anthems of the era. It’s tough to imagine anything better capturing the wild, transgressive spirit of the times than when vocalist Dawn Muir moans the line “An army of thoughts retreating towards oblivion/ A square of light, a circle of thought, a triangle of nothing!!!” as though she’s descending her entire being into an LSD-fueled orgy from which there is no return.As with most of the expansive pieces on this playlist, it’s safe to say the researchers at Johns Hopkins don’t play a whole lot of Brianticket around the lab!

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!When the Boston Red Sox need a late-in-the-game lift, they turn to one song: The Dropkick Murphys pugilistic 2005 track "Im Shipping Up to Boston," a reworking of lyrics lifted from Woody Guthries archive that showcases the bands Celtic-punk brawn and lead singer Ken Caseys strangled yawp. Whether or not the tune results in a team victory, it unfailingly livens up the Fenway Park crowd, who lustily yell "I lost my leg!" along with Casey while fiddles whirl and drums crash.The Murphys—who began as a dare back in 1996, according to Casey—have been embraced by not just the Red Sox, but by other New England-based sports teams. It’s a testament to the way they perfectly encapsulate an ideal of Boston: Think punk rock sing-alongs in memorabilia-festooned bars where the jukebox can veer from Rancid to Tommy Makem in the blink of an eye. Their blend of punks fighting spirit and traditional Irish folks storytelling fits in nicely with their hometowns cradle-of-revolution status and large population affiliated with the Emerald Isle—not to mention its passion for sports. Their annual run of St. Patricks Day shows in Boston—which in 2017 includes four small-venue gigs and a headlining stint at Boston Universitys hockey arena—illustrates just how well-suited the band and their hometown are to one another."What we run on is the fire in our bellies," Casey told The Boston Globe in 1999, before the band was about to embark on its first Warped Tour. "If its more about music and less about the passion, thats when no one wants to listen to you anymore." 11 Short Stories of Pain & Glory, the bands most recent album from 2017, shows that the fire in their bellies still burns. Some lyrics depict people affected by the opioid epidemic that has claimed many of the band members friends and loved ones, while a stirring cover of the old Rodgers & Hammerstein chestnut "Youll Never Walk Alone" joins their versions of "Amazing Grace" and the Irish famine ballad "Fields of Athenry" as songs that bridge the gap between the Fleadh Cheoil and the sweaty bar with gusto.

Post-whatever-you-wanna-call-it band Nothing have been carving their modern shoegaze sound out of their heavy music roots for years with an aim to uncover some deep-seated hardships in a shimmering, melodic light. And on their new album Dance on the Blacktop, (out August 24) the full realization of how to marry their struggles with blustering music that pulls you up by your bootstraps has been fully achieved. Tracks like album opener "Zero Day" and lead single "Blue Line Baby" reminisce the 90s with buzzing guitars, chugging rhythms and solemn vocals -- but with a jaded, yet hopeful view thats all 2018.While out on the road in anticipation of the albums release, we caught up with frontman Domenic Palermo who made us a playlist for the summers dry season. Or, as Palermo lovingly/ alternatively calls it, "Something To Listen To When Youre Falling Asleep At The Wheel In Carnudas, Texas."Listen above or go right here.

Any indie/alt-rock fan whos studied liner notes over the past three decades is familiar with the name Dave Sardy. The Brooklyn-bred producer has worked with everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine to LCD Soundsystem and Death From Above 1979. But as DSARDY, hes putting his name right on the cover—his upcoming solo effort, Unequal, finds him crafting moody, dystopian rock soundscapes for a rotating cast of guest vocalists that includes Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Ben Birdwell of Band of Horses, Macy Grey, Son Little, and more. On this playlist, the studio wizard reveals the eclectic artists that shaped the albums sound. "I always try to do research before making an album or track. When I work with an artist, Ill take some time and listen to music as a way of going to the library, getting excited, and finding common ground and a language to communicate with the person or band Im working with. Making my own record is no different—in a way easier and, at the same time, deeper, as I also have a lifelong relationship with songs and love of record production. This is an abridged collection of some records that inspired me in this current Unequal project. Listen loudly please."—Dave Sardy

“Break On Through (To the Other Side)” is both a feral howl of desire and dislocation and a sleek, supple creature that darts and pounces in a manner at once sinuous and sinewy. The Doors’ 1967 debut single, urging a shattering of society’s constrictions, served notice that there was something new happening, the likes of which no one had seen before. Its simultaneously explosive and seductive power embedded it irreversibly not only in the mood of the moment but also in the very fabric of American culture forever after. We recently reached out to Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger about the songs origins and heres what he told us:“We were working up “Break on Through” in rehearsal. John came up with this bossa nova beat. I didnt think it would work, but he said it would, and he was right. I had the idea to use the type of riff that Paul Butterfield used on Shake your Moneymaker. I wouldn’t say I stole it, just borrowed it. With Ray’s vox organ, it was sounding good! The lyrics were some of Jim’s best. As we played it at more and more gigs it got better and better. The only regret i had was that we let them cut out the word high from ‘she gets high’ on the single version. I guess that was too controversial for the AM radio, but we made up for that on the Ed Sullivan show (by singing), ‘get much higher.’ LOL”While its origins are relatively modest, its impact is far-reaching. Below, we’ll look at how the song changed The Doors and rock ‘n’ roll forever.Arrival of the Rock Gods"Break On Through" was The Doors introduction to the world—their first single as well as the first track on their debut album. It was the opening salvo of a four-man rock n roll revolution that would fill the collective cultural consciousness with a heady brew of sex, poetry, anger, beauty, and indelible tunes. The songs urgent entry into the publics ears marked the auspicious arrival of a group that would remain real-deal rock deities even decades after disbanding.The Real Start of the 60sThe Doors anthem of social sedition, fueled in part by Jim Morrisons use of LSD as a mind-expanding tool, arrived at the start of 1967, the year the 60s really became the sixties. The blend of gritty garage-rock tonalities and lithe, bossa nova-influenced grooves that rippled through “Break On Through” framed an invitation to abandon the cage of convention and leap headfirst into a bold, burgeoning countercultural realm. In that sense, for many it heralded the onset of the Aquarian age.Rock n Roll PoetryArriving ahead of game-changers like Sgt. Peppers and Songs of Leonard Cohen, "Break On Through" brought the world a brand of rock poetry that had nothing to do with Dylan. From its very first lines—"You know the day destroys the night/ Night divides the day"—it gave a glimpse of the possibilities still in store for rock n roll lyrics, possibilities Morrison fearlessly explored for the rest of his tragically short life.Trail of TributesIts a sure sign of a songs staying power when it appears in all sorts of disparate circumstances generations after its release. Any tune that can be covered by metal supergroup Adrenaline Mob, grunge gurus Stone Temple Pilots, power-pop heroes The Knack, and avant-garde guitar god Marc Ribot, as well as being sampled by hip-hop stoners Cypress Hill and Danish neo-garage rockers The Raveonettes, has got some serious shelf life.The Ultimate HonorIt would be absurdly easy to unfurl a laundry list of the countless times “Break On Through” has been used in movies, TV shows, and video games. And do you really need to know much beyond the fact that it was belted out on The Simpsons by Krusty the Clown himself, clad in Morrison-esque attire and writhing on the floor à la The Lizard King?

On one level, 1972’s “Suffragette City” is pure simplicity, an amphetamine rush that proves David Bowie could unleash high-decibel intensity just as potently as he could spacey ballads or post-modern artiness. Yet things aren’t so simple underneath its glittery crunch, where a tug-of-war is waged between nostalgia and futurism. If the pounding ivories and greasy boogie long for the ’50s, then the slashing chords and razor-sharp execution lunge toward the punk revolution that’s still a few years out. This tension, acting like a slingshot, shoots the penultimate song from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars clear out of the march of history and into that archetypal realm commonly referred to as rock music that’s so badass it’s timeless. Here are five facts to help you better appreciate Bowie’s hardest rocker.Science fiction and rock ’n’ roll.“Suffragette City,” like the rest of Ziggy Stardust, is inspired by Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (Director Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation arrived during the album’s making.) Bowie certainly wasn’t the first rocker to embrace sci-fi (see producer Joe Meek or Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd), yet he clearly was ahead of the curve by soaking up Burgess’ uniquely dystopian vision. It’s a quality that would seep not just into punk and post-punk, but also industrial and even techno in the following decades.Mick Ronson’s killer guitar.Perhaps no early Bowie track better displays his love of The Stooges and The Velvet Underground; it all begins with brilliant guitarist Mick Ronson’s opening riff, roaring and clawing like a famished tiger. It’s an aesthetic Bowie would bring with him when he mixed Iggy and the Stooges’ 1973 landmark Raw Power, a record that helped kickstart punk and hardcore.Sexuality and gender.The live version took on a life of its own, generally becoming faster and more sneering. It also adopted a performative edge, as Bowie, during concerts, often would drop to his knees and pretend to suck on Ronson’s guitar. When a photograph of this wonderfully flamboyant exhibitionism made it into Melody Maker in 1972, it helped cement glam rock’s reputation as a movement steeped in transgression and decadence.Those blaring horns aren’t really horns.It may sound like horns during the cut’s first half when they fall somewhere between vintage Memphis R&B and The Beatles’ “Savoy Truffle.” But the sound reveals its source-—an ARP 2600 synthesizer—during the static-caked surge that ripples across the final 60 seconds. You can be sure that bands like Pere Ubu, The Stranglers, Tubeway Army, The Twinkeyz, and any other punk(ish) band experimenting with the cyborg impulse were taking notes.Film and television legacy.As with many other Bowie tunes, “Suffragette City” has racked up several IMDb credits, including Gilmore Girls, Vinyl, and Californication. The most telling, however, is 2005’s Lords of Dogtown, a period piece chronicling the Venice Beach teenagers who revolutionized skateboarding in the mid-’70s. The fact that these early shredders jammed Bowie along with The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Deep Purple stands as a testament to the artist’s lofty stature not just among punks and alternative kids, but longhaired surfers and heshers as well. There’s no messing with David Bowie.

In September 2017, Enter Shikari released their fifth album, The Spark, which saw the British post-hardcore experimentlists foreground the synth-pop sounds that have always been an undercurrent in their work. It’s a move that makes even more sense once you hear what the band were blasting this year. “For us personally, 2017 was a game of two very distinct musical halves. We started the year looking backwards and touring in celebration of 10 years since the release of our debut album, and then halfway through the year we released what we would consider to be our most forward-thinking music so far.“While we were putting our list together, it became apparent that it’s been a good year for great music. It’s probably been a good year for shit music too, but we haven’t been listening to that. It’s always amazing how some people can still release new music from beyond the grave. Still, were glad they did.“This is a list of music released this year that we’ve been enjoying, from the smooth tones of Brian Eno to help with mindfulness, to the big bangers like Astroid Boys.”—Enter Shikari

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!A café opened in my neighborhood a few years ago that I just couldn’t figure out. The trouble wasn’t the menu, but the decor: The interior was a gaily colored hodgepodge of Buddha busts, paper lanterns, pretty vases, and posters of mighty waves and long-tongued dragons; the place was a kitschy riot of Chinese and East Asian motifs. Yet I didn’t see a single Asian employee. It took me several visits to realize that the design aesthetic wasn’t just some egregious example of cultural appropriation—though it probably was that, too—but a new manifestation of a phenomenon with much deeper roots.Derived from the French word for Chinese, “Chinoiserie” is the name for a style of European decorative arts that brandish an Asian influence, the result of new trade relationships between the East and West in the 17th century. King Louis XV was a fan, as were the architects who decided that no English manor garden was complete without a pagoda. In any case, my neighborhood’s belated example of orientalism-in-action must’ve confused people because the establishment didn’t thrive. The space was eventually reborn as a sushi restaurant, and needless to say, the new proprietors didn’t do much redecorating.I’m also relieved to no longer have to deal with complex questions of white privilege, cross-cultural exchange, and colonial power dynamics every time I want a decent latte. Yet these matters seem inescapable today, what with the Trump administration’s unabashed Islamophobia, the growth of nationalist and nativist movements throughout Europe, and the hardening of attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. Citizens of the so-called First World have never been freer to cast a fearful eye on whichever group they consider the “other.”Meanwhile, in the cultural realm, there’s a renewed urgency to carve out new spaces for previously marginalized or unacknowledged voices and perspectives within a dominant industrial-entertainment-media apparatus that seems forever prone to missteps. In other words, it’s not an overreaction to question the wisdom of casting Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese anime heroine. Every day yields a new Twitter eruption on the topic of who can and can’t represent positions and experiences, especially when the work involves transgressing boundaries of race, gender, culture, and class.All of this makes me feel even more confused and conflicted about a huge body of music that’s always fascinated me. This is music by (mostly) white people who eagerly adopted other modes that were ostensibly foreign, which automatically was a complicated move given the stew of African, Caribbean, and Latin influences in American popular music in the first place. Nevertheless, they drew and continue to draw from African, Asian, Arabic, East Indian, indigenous, and other traditions to create forgeries and mutations that positively revel in their inauthenticity.I’m not about to defend all of it—I can’t. So much of it reeks of an old colonial mindset, one I continue to grapple with as a suburban kid who grew up in a placid corner of Canada, devoid of the cultural markers I perceived and envied in other lives (an illusion that’s proof of my white privilege, of course). Yet much of it is also the product of an age in which much of the West had a different attitude toward the rest of the globe. Looking back at the world music vogue sparked by Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Peter Gabriel in the ‘80s, it can seem like a wave of cultural appropriation run rampant, a self-congratulatory embrace of cultural otherness that’s as suspect as the exotica craze of the 1950s. But at its best, this music can be seen and heard as an open-hearted effort to dissolve the borders and boundaries that are so important to people right now.Those good intentions and spirit of curiosity connect music as diverse as cheeseball tiki-lounge tunes, the cheeky ethnological forgery series of Holger Czukay and CAN, early American minimalism music—which was steeped in Indian raga, African percussion, and gamelan—and even The Rolling Stones’ dalliance with The Master Musicians of Jajouka. In recent years, newer acts such as Goat, Beirut, Dengue Fever, Vampire Weekend, and Dirty Projectors have incurred charges of appropriation for stepping outside of their own original cultural domains to investigate and play around in others. Such engagement is bound to be problematic on several levels, yet it deserves a reaction other than knee-jerk dismissal. So does the music we get when—to borrow a favorite title for post-grad courses on postcolonial legacies—the empire looks back: when Western pop modes become absorbed and transformed (though that’s another playlist). As confusing as it may be, this music elicits emotions and sensations other than the hate and fear that are otherwise so rife in our moment.

Cool things can happen when you turn a listicle into a playlist. Take Spin’s ranking of every Gn’R tune: As rock criticism, I wholeheartedly disagree. All 10 jams comprising the mighty Appetite of Destruction have to crack the top 15—yet only five do. In terms of listener experience, however, this anti-intuitive move pays dividends. With the ranking frontloaded with cuts off their other albums, the playlist winds up accentuating GnR’s under-appreciated diversity. For a bunch of Sunset Strip sleazeballs they covered a lot of terrain, from psychedelia to folk balladry and industrial. Only diehards will plow through the entirety of this admittedly immense playlist, but don’t be surprised if you come away with a markedly different perspective of these infamous rockers.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Controversy magnet Ronnie Radke and his bandmates in Falling In Reverse (who seem to change every few months) have made some of the densest, most outrageous, and devastatingly clever modern rock and art pop of the last decade—yet nobody outside of kids who attend the Warped Tour year in and year out pay them any mind.Some of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Radke. On top of boasting serious pop smarts, he’s cocky, moody, confrontational—let’s not forget he was fired from Escape the Fate in 2008—and at times misogynistic. As he sings in “Just Like You”: “I am aware that I am an asshole / I really dont care about all of that though / I got nothing to prove / But honestly Im just like you.” There’s also the fact that modern post-hardcore and metalcore bands aren’t given much space in outlets like Pitchfork,Rolling Stone, and Spin; it’s a black sheep subculture forever consigned to Alternative Press and Blabbermouth.Net.Falling In Reverse believe a rock album should be nothing less than an epic sonic experience, promoting a bigger-is-better philosophy preached by heroes like Queen, My Chemical Romance, and Andrew W.K. (Though, truth be told, Radke’s just as likely to name-check Katy Perry, Gwen Stefani, or Lady Gaga.) Their latest album, Coming Home, is no exception. Where 2015’s Just like You was a manic fusion of blink-182-style snot, glam pomp, chart pop, metallic crunch, and Eminem-influenced attitude, the more carefully paced Home clears room for post-dubstep spaciness and chilly, atmospheric synthesizers. For instance, the title track sounds like a cosmic collision between Muse’s “Madness,” Daft Punk’s “Give Life Back to Music,” and the ZAYN/Taylor Swift collab “I Dont Wanna Live Forever.”Of course, Falling In Reverse aren’t the only Warped cats suffusing their jams with electronic ether. Issues and I See Stars—with whom Radke has feuded—incorporate flickering EDM programming, while The Word Alive drench their brooding anthems in ambient-like textures and acts like Pvris and Tonight Alive incorporate electro-pop touches. Yet none of them can quite match Falling In Reverse when it comes to packing songs full of hook-laden brilliance. Radke, for all his faults and failings, is a tunesmith operating on a whole ’nother level.