Nas may be known primarily for classics albums such as Illmatic and It Was Written, but his work on other people’s tracks reveals new dimensions of his work. On earlier classics such “Verbal Intercourse” or the vastly underrated AZ collaboration “Mo Money, Mo Murder (Homoside),” Nas seems primarily concerned with sensory detail and pure sound -- the clanging consonants and sly insertions of internal rhymes that melt the rusted metal of his harrowing imagery into pure liquid poetry. As his career would progress, he became more interested in carving out meaning, and tracks such as “Road to Zion” -- his collaboration with Damian Marley -- and “Music for Live” are thoughtful post-colonialists critiques set to boom bap. His recent verse of DJ Khaled’s “Nas Album Done” verifies that, 20+ years into an already legendary career, the rapper is still near the top of the game. The power of his voice is matched by the subtlety of his language as he pushes for equality through economic re-investment in black communities. Yeah, it’s admittedly strange this is taking place on a DJ Khaled track, but the track has to be encouraging for all Nas fans.
Vince Staples is the latest disciple of resisting any club that would have him. His sophomore LP, Big Fish Theory, combines one of hip-hops wickedest pens with the most dense, dance-happy BPMs this side of a Burial record. Its a brave gamble for Staples, one previously pulled off by Danny Brown on his own sophomore LP, XXX.Like Danny Brown, Staples loathes convention. Unlike Danny Brown, who telegraphed his fandom of left-field producers and dance music, Staples has previously worked heavily with hip-hop hitmakers like DJ Dahi, Clams Casino, No I.D., Mac Miller, and Tyler, The Creator. Brown made a fluid transition from hip-hop blog worship to massive festival crowds, yearning for beats that would appease the nonconvential rap fan. However, Staples Big Fish Theory—the proper follow-up to his breakthrough 2015 double-disc Summertime 06—feels less like a natural progression than an abrupt break from 2016s excellent Prima Donna EP.Big Fish Theorys production team (Sophie, Sekoff, GTA, Justin Vernon, Jimmy Edgar) would make Azealia Banks jealous, but it feels odd for a guy who doesnt drink, smoke, or party. Alas, his dead-eyed street poetry sounds more at home on previous goth neck breakers like "Señorita," "Norf Norf," and "Blue Suede" than amid the frantic EDM energy of "Party People" and "Homage.""Ascension," Staples collaboration on the latest Gorillaz album, shouldve tipped fans off as to what to expect with Big Fish Theory. While the record deflty pays service to his trunk-rattling west coast roots on "Big Fish" and "Yeah Right," the album is more Damon Albarn than DJ Quik. Albarn actually contributes vocals and keys to "Love Can Be...", and his total disregard for genre mustve rubbed off on Staples during their Gorillaz sessions. To get a full sense of the albums sonic scope, cue up our playlist of its key tracks and their eclectic influences. But as Big Fish Theory proves, sometimes, the best bet is the safest bet, especially when one of top writers under 25 has already made his greatest strengths apparent.
Vince Staples came to prominence as an associate of the L.A. underground rap collective Odd Future, making multiple appearances on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2013 album Doris. Two years later, Staples released the acclaimed album Summertime ’06 on Def Jam, which featured an appearance by frequent collaborator Jhene Aiko and established the Northside Long Beach rapper as a brilliant and distinctive voice in hip hop. Despite his irreverence toward traditional hip hop gatekeepers, Staples has proven an able collaborator for conscious veterans like Common and Dilated Peoples, as well as an agile MC who can tackle adventurous tracks from producers like Flume and Clams Casino. With the sheer variety of collaborators he sounds at home with, Vince Staples has enhanced the unique place his solo work occupies in the musical landscape and the ways he can express his sense of humor and political perspective.
Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Visible Cloaks’ Reassemblage is the latest in a string of recent electronic music to investigate the ties between Eastern and Western forms of music, connecting commercial and spiritual art forms to create a mélange of plastic textures and heavenly auras. You can hear a similar—albeit more disturbing—collision in the Internet diaspora of vaporwave, or the constantly shifting configurations of Oneohtrix Point Never. But this meeting of schizophrenic digital assemblage and tranquil meditation stretches back into the ’80s as well, through the extraterrestrial world music of Jon Hassell.In widening the sonic palette of what constitutes easy listening, these artists lead the charge in finding new ways to zone out as we step further into the future, creating a liminal space where film scores, computer start-up sounds, and video game music can all mingle together in the otherworldly deep end. This playlist seeks to piece together the fractured influences of Reassemblage, and to illustrate the lush history of music that pushes the limits of what ambient means.
Seattle hard-rock supergroup Walking Papers——featuring Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin——recently released their second album, WP2. Here, the band’s singer/guitarist, Jefferson Angell, shares the music that moves him, either physically or mentally. “I divide my music into two categories: music for the neck up, and music for the neck down. I dont really prefer any one genre over another. This playlist has a little of both and was put together spontaneously as I listened along. I just allowed them to work their magic at the moment and let my mind lead me to the next one. All of these songs, at one time or another, stopped me in my tracks, and I became obsessed with them. Exclusively, or along with the album they are pulled from. Some are new to me, others have stuck with me since childhood.”——Jefferson Angell, Walking Papers
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.
There is only one dude in rock who has Miley Cyrus, Tame Impala, Yoko Ono and Lightning Bolt all on speed dial, and that is Wayne Coyne. His long list of BFFs and partners in crime is just as phantasmagoric and unpredictable as the psychedelic murals splashed across the façade of The Womb, The Flaming Lips’ art space in Oklahoma City. One would think a playlist featuring such a motley assortment of musicians would yield to musical chaos, but that’s not the case at all. It doesn’t matter if he’s crafting high-polish chart pop with Kesha or unleashing noise-rock tantrums with Yoko — the trippy, alt-rock messiah has a way of drawing those around him deep into his Day-Glo surrealism and candy-coated, kaleidoscopic wondrousness. You will be, too, after hitting play.
Toronto indie-rock quartet Weaves have just released their wonderfully hooky and kooky second album, Wide Open. On this playlist she created specially for The Dowsers, frontwoman Jasmyn Burke breaks down the rock classics that inspired the record’s mind-bending melange of glam, New Wave, and avant-pop. “These songs are from albums that inspired our new record! Playful, insightful, and direct. Simplicity meets extremity.”—Jasmyn Burke, Weaves
On Vic Mensa’s debut album, The Autobiography, the young Chicago rapper’s personal travails come sharply into view. He raps about his very public struggles with addiction, occasional troubles with the law, a complicated relationship with his hometown’s hip-hop scene, and stray thoughts about ending his life. Yet somehow, his musical identity lies just out of reach.That’s not surprising for a teenage prodigy whose first group, Kids These Days, was profiled in the New York Times when he was just finishing high school. The hip-hop/emo-pop band yielded many of the players who have driven the Windy City’s current renaissance, including trumpeter Nico Segal (a.k.a. Donnie Trumpet of The Social Experiment). Their rise preceded that of Chance the Rapper, who guested on the band’s EPs—and co-founded the SaveMoney crew with Mensa—before embarking on his own stellar career. But while Chance is now widely known as a good kid who connects a secular post-millennial generation with its spiritual potential, Vic has experimented as a solo artist, sometimes fitfully. His best single so far is arguably “Down on My Luck,” a terrific hip-house number from 2014. Like so many next-gen rappers, his work with electronic producers like Flume and Kaytranada is second nature, not a cross-genre gimmick. Yet he’s also tried to translate his industry buzz into songs with Kanye West (2015’s “U Mad”) and Gucci Mane (“What It Takes”), with little crossover success.Much of The Autobiography opts for an airy emo-rap sound typical of recent big-budget hip-hop like Logic’s Everybody and G-Eazy’s When It’s Dark Out. But Vic’s too sharp of a stylist to drown in the indistinct mainstream beats that mar some of his debut. He works real magic with Pharrell Williams and Saul Williams on “Wings,” and his collaboration with controversial South Side iconoclast Chief Keef on “Down 4 Some Ignorance (Ghetto Lullaby)” is long overdue. Then there are those diary-like lyrics, which range from comic tales like the Weezer-assisted “Homewrecker” to anguished meditations on blackness like “We Could Be Free.” Throughout, he remains an engaging performer, even if we’re not always sure where he’s leading us.
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.
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.
