Genres

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.

Uni are a fab new glitter-rock trio from NYC featuring Nico Fuzz, David Strange, and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, best known for collaborating with Sean Ono Lennon in their psych-pop outfit The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. The band just released their starry-eyed first single, “What’s the Problem?,” with a full-length coming out in early 2018 on Ono Lennon’s Chimera Music label. To give you a taste of what to expect, the group curated a Dowsers playlist that salutes their glitter-rock gods—and provided these highly informative, totally fact-checked, irrefutable liner notes about each song’s creation:Gentle Giant, “The Queen”This song was inspired by a notorious crossdressing hermaphrodite who lived in the underground tunnels beneath Leicester Square in the winter of 1976. She only had three teeth, ate nothing but fish and chips, and prowled the streets in a tattered sequin negligee mumbling about “Churchill’s black dog” and the “goddam war.”T. Rex, “Children of the Revolution”This song is about a stray bullet that pierced the testicle of a revolutionary soldier during the Siege of Yorktown (Virginia, Oct. 1781) and lodged itself in the ovary of an 18-year-old girl who was 300 yards away at the time. Two separate eggs were inseminated and the offspring of this most unsafe sex in history were known as the Children of The Revolution. Marc Bolan wrote this song about them.Electric Light Orchestra, “Telephone Line”Jeff Lynne was addicted to phone-sex hotlines before the advent of the internet. He squandered his vast earnings from Electric Light Orchestra on 1-800 numbers then wrote this song penniless, heartbroken, and destitute on the floor of a Telephone Booth in 1976 detailing his downward spiral like the cord of a telephone line.Sparks, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” This is Sparks’ magnum octopus. It’s a modern-day West Side Story that gives voice to the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2017. It speaks from the voice of a Wall Street banker who purchased, tore down, and built condos on the site of a former Puerto Rican community center. Sparks makes their political statement clear in this epic manifesto.John Cameron Mitchell, “The Origin of Love” (from Hedwig and the Angry Inch) In Plato’s Symposium (or, The Drinking Party), Aristophanes, a well-known comedic playwright at the time, suggests that humans were once round balls of flesh with both male and female anatomy who rolled to and fro. Zeus, threatened by their power, cut them in two with a lightning bolt. He describes love as the human desire to be whole again by locating the missing half. Hedwig further immortalized this myth in this incredible song.Pulp, “This Is Hardcore”In 1998, after mixing quaaludes, LSD, bourbon, and Marlboro Reds, Jarvis Cocker stumbled into a Hollywood soundstage shooting a dream sequence of Busby Berkeley line dancers. Doesnt get any cooler than an emaciated, confused Jarvis being brushed by feather fans while singing "you are hardcore/ you make me hard."Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”Elton was diagnosed with high blood sugar in 1971. Yellow Brick Road was a salt-water taffy and Rocky Mountain-style fudge shop that he used to have send chocolate-dipped potato chips, brown bears, and caramel nut patties to him on the road. “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was a bittersweet farewell to his sweet tooth that he performed on The Muppet Show. Lou Reed, “Vicious”Lou wrote the first version of this song entirely on the cowbell. When it came time to record the track, it wasn’t coming together very well, so Lou swallowed his pride and on the recommendation of producers David Bowie and Mick Ronson, called in all of Blue Öyster Cult to lay down the initial cowbell recording that you hear featured prominently in the final version. It became the inspiration for Ian Durys “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and many other classics.Oasis, “Supersonic”Oasis made this list because they’re the only band who fights with each other more than we do.David Bowie, “Life on Mars”Bowie took the chord changes from Sinatra’s “My Way” to write this song. Sinatra took the womb of Mia Farrow from Woody Allen. And Woody Allen took his daughter to be his wife. So, we hope there is life on Mars.Chrisma, “Black Silk Stocking” From 1991 to 1999, the USA Network aired a drama series called Silk Stalkings. Advertised as “crime-time TV,” in reality it was soft-core porn stitched together from the leftover plots of 1980s triple X films. Chrisma’s “Black Silk Stocking” was cited as the series’ main inspiration.Pink Floyd, “Apples and Oranges”Song about the two basic food groups.Lemon Twigs, “Frank” In 2016, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut regained the Mustard Yellow International Belt at the annual Fourth of July hot-dog-eating contest at Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island. Chestnut, 32, downed 70 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes—the most hot dogs and buns ever eaten at the competition. That same year, The Lemon Twigs released “Frank”—a song, we assume, that’s about hot dogs and their admiration for this American hero.The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Snakedriver”Not a euphemism. Definitely a song about a chauffeur who works for a very wealthy snake.Queen, “Mister Fahrenheit”[Ed. note: Were pretty sure they mean “Don’t Stop Me Now]Undoubtedly the most debated song in rock history. The argument goes like this: If Queen is a British band, then why would they call the song “Mister Fahrenheit” and not “Sister Celsius”Marilyn Manson, “Personal Jesus” In 2005, Manson gave us his Personal Jesus. In 2013, Kanye publicly brought Jesus onstage with him. In 1964, Bob Dylan said “The Times They Are a Changin’.”The Modern Lovers, “Pablo Picasso” This is song is the handbook for any lonely guy who wants to pick up chicks.Violent Femmes, “Good Feeling”The song you hear in your head when you are trying to keep the sun from rising.Beck, “New Pollution” People really confuse the meaning of this song. An art department intern at Geffen responsible for delivering the final album files accidentally left out an “s” in the song title. It was meant to be called “News Pollution,” all about fake news. Beck smelt it back in the ’90s and was trying to warn us. Because of this one typo, the whole country believed Bill Clinton never had sexual relations with an intern, thought everything was cool in Rwanda and Burundi, were convinced Iraq had WMDs, and had no reason to think that Harvey Weinstein was anything other than guy who liked professional one-on-one meetings with all his prospective female leads. If only we knew now what Beck knew then…The Rolling Stones, “Shes a Rainbow”Definitely the best jingle that Skittles ever had in a commercial. I have no idea how they convinced the Stones to write this one for them, but we did hear that Keith ate nothing but blue skittles and vodka during the summer of 1967, so maybe this had something to do with the decision. Great song either way. Taste the Rainbow…T. Rex, “Cosmic Dancer”If all the celestial bodies in the infinite firmament of beginning-less time and the vacuum of space manifested their quarks into a private lap dance on your deathbed on the moon in the final countdown before the Milky Way exploded, it would feel exactly like this song.

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.

Alicia Keys rode into the 21st century in a motorcade of hype, fueled by comparisons to just about every golden-voiced god of the past. Since putting out her debut album at age 20, the smooth New Yorker has been pitched as the heir apparent. Calling the record Songs in A Minor reinforced her classical music tutelage, doubling down on the line that she was an artist of substance right at the start of the Pop Idol era. Do you remember how big a hit “Fallin’” was? Keys somehow managed to tread between neo soul legitimacy and commercial prosperity.Her sound was something completely different than cyborg songstress Aaliyah’s progressive digital grooves. Instead, Keys took a vintage R&B style and deftly adding modern touches, even when working with super-producers like Kanye West and Timbaland, or providing the uptown chutzpah on Jay Z’s mega smash “Empire State of Mind.” Her recently released sixth studio album HERE isn’t quite her finest work (The Diary of Alicia Keys is my favorite of the canon), but it is in the traditional Keys vein. “I feel like history on the turntables,” she declares on opener “The Beginning (Interlude).” “Old school to new school, like nothing ever been realer.”This album finds Keys embracing her appointed role as a medium of bygone eras. It’s the distillation of decades of musical history, as well as her own body of work. She quickly namedrops two key influences: Nina Simone on HERE’s intro and Sam Cooke on first song “The Gospel,” a track that sees her bring rap to the jamboree.Elsewhere, the bluesy groove of Keys’ organ on “Illusion of Bliss” is reminiscent of ‘50s R&B belter Big Maybelle’s “Candy,” as well as The Animals’ “House of The Rising Sun” and Led Zeppelin’s more muscular blues rock. One of the most prominent instruments throughout the record is the acoustic guitar, as Keys evokes the spirit of the Delta Blues, Bob Dylan (who once name dropped her in the song “Thunder on the Mountain”) and Bob Marley. The militant march of “Pawn It All” itself sounds like a redemption song, trudging forward with the relentless stomp of Son House’s “John the Revelator.”Album standout “She Don’t Really Care_1 Luv” moves to the same summertime cookout flavor that DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince once mined from Kool and the Gang. The sleek track sees Keys’ graceful vocal moving with the satin-smoothness of ‘90s R&B, with the whole thing ending with a homage to Nas’s “One Love.” Though the influences are wide-ranging, Keys funnels them through her own distinctive lens. A decade and a half in and she’s still a key voice in commercial soul. Don’t take what she does for granted.

Click here to subscribe to the Spotify playlist.On “Celebrate,” the second last song on Malibu, Anderson .Paak sings “time never cares if you’re there or not there.” Time’s infinite indifference to our finite human experience elicits reverence, not concern or fear, from .Paak, who reasons at the end of the verse, “lets celebrate while we still can.” From growing up in Oxnard, California, to his pursuit of love and building a meaningful career as a musician, it’s made abundantly clear throughout Malibu, that .Paak’s life experiences have informed the perspective that his brief time on earth is an opportunity that cannot go to waste. This awareness arrives as a lyrical theme, but the songs themselves move with a life and freedom that suggest he’s motivated by his biggest limitation of all, time, not burdened or rushed by it.Part of what makes the record so compelling is .Paak’s use of place in conjunction with the theme of time. Parallels can be drawn to Kendrick Lamar’s relationship to his hometown, Compton, on To Pimp A Butterfly, which Lamar uses as a kind of measure for the ways success has changed him. There’s a dissonance within Lamar between the Kendrick that grew up in his hometown seeing his city’s place within hip hop history, longing to start a career of his own, and the Kendrick that now returns as a major star. For .Paak, Malibu is an aspirational place, and having finally made it there, much of the record is about him wanting to make the best of things while he’s still can, feeling as though he’s on the cusp of greatness. This philosophy is represented in his thoughts on his career and creativity, but also finds its way onto the dancefloor and into the bedroom.For someone so bound to the idea of “living in the moment,” .Paak’s music moves effortlessly through time via style, channeling vintage soul, funk, disco and boom-bap as needed, uniting these sounds with his mix of sung and rapped vocals. Also helping to make Malibu’s omnivorousness sound seamless is a sizeable cast of contributors, from his tried and true backing band, The Free Nationals, to more seasoned players like jazz pianist Robert Glasper and bassist Pino Palladino. Beats provided by luminaries like 9th Wonder, fellow Oxnardian Madlib, and DJ Khalil fluidly intertwine with more modern productions courtesy of Montreal-based DJs Pomo and Kaytranada. Paak trades verses with contemporaries like Rapsody, BJ The Chicago Kid and Schoolboy Q, while also getting nods from The Game and Talib Kweli. Though such an impressive lineup could overwhelm the record, each guest contribution has been deployed thoughtfully, playing to their strengths as well as .Paak’s.This playlist takes a close look at the supporting cast of musicians, producers and samples on Malibu, finding a throughline between their work and .Paak’s own in both sound and theme.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist right here.Lady Gaga once seemed so untouchable, perched on skyscraping heels while spinning dirty innuendos into chart-topping gold. But like the fame she has so gloriously glorified, shes also fickle—sometimes to a fault. Now, she simply wants to be our slightly wild drinking buddy eager to cause a scene at the dive bar in her Bud Light crop top and ratty cut-offs. Or at least this is the scrappy image shes conceived for her fourth solo album, Joanne.Since her arrival, Gaga has been constantly, exhaustedly calculating her next move. On Joanne, she speeds up that process, attempting reinvention with nearly every song. It makes for a scattered album with little focus: Even the title, named after her late aunt who died young of lupus, makes no sense in the context of, say, the reggae-tinged self-pleasuring ode "Dancin in Circles."But it also makes for one of pops more exciting releases of 2016. And thats partially due to her choice of collaborators: She pushes for indie cred by enlisting Tame Impalas Kevin Parker for "Perfect Illusion," a move that becomes somewhat overshadowed by Mark Ronsons disco-fied production and the chorus likeness to Madonnas "Papa Dont Preach." Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme is more successful at pulling that rock-bred rawness out of her on the Springsteen-soaring, Pat Benatar-nodding anthem "Diamond Heart."But when Gaga ditches the 80s glamour, she makes an even better case as a convincing Spaghetti western seductress alongside hippie-eccentric Father John Misty on "Sinners Prayer"; a slinky soul sister to Florence Welch on "Hey Girl"; and even a country crossover star, making the gorgeous ballad "Joanne" her "Jolene" and giving Taylor one more thing to shake off with the honky-tonkin "A-Yo," co-penned by Nashville hitmaker Hillary Lindsey. Forget that dive bar girl— with all that (and more), Gaga suddenly seems untouchable again.For this playlist we attempt to trace the influences and collaborators behind Joanne, which deserves way more than one listen to fully unpack.

Deep in the heart of Nicolas Jaars latest album, theres an extended domestic vignette: Jaar, a small boy, at home with his father, the Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar. Their talk, in Spanish, is playful and perhaps inconsequential; its actual content matters less than the way their voices charge the music with a special aura. Here is a tape, the snippet seems to say, rescued from a box long forgotten in the back of a closet; here is a memory brought to the light of day.It signals the extent to which Sirens—depending on how you count, either his second or third or fourth proper album—is the young electronic musicians most personal recording yet. As he explained to Pitchfork, with his previous records, he had taken aspects of his own identity for granted. "But in the months leading up to Sirens," he says, "there was a lot of change in my life—when you come back from a long tour, you really have to pick up the pieces in a way."And the album really does feel like a process of unpacking. It takes stock of the elements that have long characterized his work—the slow tempos, freeform arrangements, and shadowy atmospheres—while confidently pushing into a number of new directions at once. The pensive piano and effects of the opening "Killing Times" give way to a fairly rocking vocal number that sounds for all the world like a cover of the Bauhaus side-project Tones on Tail. "Leaves" incorporates a plucked string instrument—koto, perhaps—with ambient textures in a way that suggests an ambient musician like Biosphere. "No," the song that features his childhood home tape, taps into a spongy reggaeton beat faintly reminiscent of the Berlin producer Poles scratchy ambient dub—though the songs examination of his multi-national identity (Jaar, whose Chilean parents fled their home country after Pinochets coup in 1973, grew up between Chile, Paris, and the United States) also recalls the Ecuadorian-American musician Helado Negros own multi-lingual self-portraits.There are further surprises along the way: "Three Sides of Nazareth" hints at New York proto-punks Suicide as well as the contemporary UK musician Powell—which is pretty funny, because in most respects youd never think to mention Jaar and Powell in the same sentence. And it ends with a gorgeous, airy doo-wop song that cant help but bring to mind the Beach Boys weightless harmonies. Whatever else Nicolas Jaar may intend with his choice of title, theres no denying the seductive power of the final songs ethereal web of harmonies. Like everything on the album, it draws you in.

Calling Anderson .Paak an R&B singer shortchanges him. Under the moniker, NxWorries, his 2016 collaboration with producer Knxwledge, Yes Lawd!, the LA musicians pleading, lurching voice carries the weight of that genre’s history -- most distinctly recalling the bluesy soul of O.V. Wright -- but you can also hear the heft and bravado of hip-hop, a byproduct of both .Paak’s early years at the seminal underground label Stones Throw and his association with Dr. Dre and Aftermath Records. He’s of a generation of singers who came of age in rap’s shadows, and this makes for a strange nostalgia; a hall of mirrors where soul refracts hip-hop refracting soul, creating a sound that is uncanny.And while Yes Lawd! feels singular and very much of this moment, the sound that Knxwledge and .Paak crafted is the culmination of a strain of soul that has been bubbling in the LA underground scene (and beyond) for at least a decade. The twin pillars of the sound are J. Dilla and Madlib. The former worked with D’Angelo and Erykah Badu to craft neo soul in the 90s, while the latter opened the door of hip-hop towards psychedelia and outre world music. Their syncopated drums, hazy samples and penchant for compensational pastiche can be heard in the everyone from Flying Lotus to OmMas Keith, the latter of whom helped craft Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde.Yes Lawd! feels like a distillation of that sound -- Madlib’s presence is most clear in the compositions sketch-like quality, but there’s also a pop sensibility grounded in 90s R&B and the generation of forgotten alt. soul groups of the ‘00s, most notably Foreign Exchange (a group comprised of Little Brother vocalist Phonte and Dutch producer Nicolary) and the underrated LA group J*DaVeY, a trashy, funky duo who proclaimed themselves the “Black Eurythmics.”For this playlist, we peel back onion on this universe, tracing the influences of NxWorries; .Paak and Knxwledge’s solo work; as well as samples and the work of guest and collaborators. If you love the new album, as many do, this should provide great complimentary listening. Subscribe to the playlist here.

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