Tracks we dig! Songs we like by artists we like.
(From DJ JonnyGo Figure, of NYC’s Deadly Dragon Sound and Megative):“These songs embody what Megative represents, to me.We’re a hodgepodge of different cultures, of different nations…but we’re a symbol of unity.Megative is just a beautiful confusion…that’s how i like to think of it, and this playlist is like that. It’s kind of all over the place, but it’s basically a mixture of what we do: it’s got the dub influence, the Two-Tone influence, it’s got the punk influence, the hip hop influence…. a hodge lodge of the sounds we love and that make up our musical DNA.”
While writing his latest album, "Some Strange Reason," Peace to Mateo kept this playlist cued up for inspiration.
I:Scintilla guitarist Jim Cooke shares a captivating playlist representing their hometown Chicago. This is Chicago.
“Needing to be fired up and comforted at the same time brought this playlist around. Its short but potent to me. It has some modern art and inspiration from legends like Kendrick and Atoms for Peace, while mixed with some good memories too.S. Marleys ""Hey Baby"" could play forever and ""Set Me Free"" by The Kinks just fn rocks while giving you a bearhug.” - Robert Wayne Davis (frontman; vocals and guitar)
I grew up on classical music, 80’s radio, and classic rock. Ive never been a fan of drama in my life, but I have always LOVED drama in music. I want music that elicits an emotional response, music that moves my body, puts me on the edge of my seat, stirs my rage, excites me, surrounds + encompasses me, asks something of me, takes me on a ride, or asks me to close my eyes and be fully present. I can’t have music on in the background while I am doing anything besides cooking or showering. Listening to music is a full body experience that pushes its way to the forefront of my awareness. Often even in movies or tv shows, if there’s a piece of music I really love playing in the background of a scene, I have to watch it multiple times because I completely miss the dialogue. Between this and spending so much time creating, rehearsing, or thinking about music, listening to it for pleasure isn’t historically something I’ve spent very much time doing. Working with my bandmate and artistic partner, Emilia Richeson, over the last year and a half has started shifting this relationship. She has SUCH GREAT TASTE in music and is incredibly skilled at crafting the ride I crave with her playlists for Pony Sweat - a fiercely non-competitive feminist dance aerobics practice geared towards eliciting those feelings of freedom so often only unearthed by bedroom dancing. I think this, combined with having birthed my first album has created space for more music in my life. So! Here are just a few of my greatest influences mixed with a few of my latest favorites. It’s a bit of a doozy, so settle in and get ready for the ride.
"Listening to an eclectic range of music has been a great way for me to spark fresh ideas. Theres so much music out there its hard to fit it all into genres and often the best songs dont fit into a category at all. The most important element is how the music makes you feel! The following playlist is a taste of the music I was listening to while recording Shapeshifter II: Outbreak that bends genres and feels good to me. Youll hear a soup of drum&bass, electronic, hip-hop, progressive-rock, and more that circles around the TAUK camp. Enjoy the ride!" - Alric “A.C.” Carter (keyboardist)
These songs will take you from zero to 100. The perfect group of tracks to listen to while you get ready to go out to the club.
This playlist consists of a wide range of bands and types of music, but mostly songs by current & active artists. When I look over it I realize a bunch of the songs are by bands PKP met and played with on tour and who we ended up loving. It feels nice to share memories with people whose music you love.
Woolworms third album, Awe, is coming out on Mint Records on November 8th, 2019. To hype the first single, Hold the Bow, the band put together a playlist of music that inspired the song and the album. The playlist covers brand new local bands from Vancouver, pals that the band has met across North America on tour, Mint Records label-mates and heroes and serves as a glimpse into the bands world.
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.
