Indie

I first listened to Yo La Tengo sometime in the mid-90s, slightly after the release of their 95 album Electr-O-Pura. I was living in rural North Carolina, and the idea of "indie" music was pretty new to me, and it was pretty amazing to me that there were bands creating great experimental pop music in a commercial vacuum. It seemed more "authentic" and "honest." You can laugh at those values now, but for a young person living in a small town at the south in the pre-internet era, these things didnt seem illusionary then. I was primarily drawn to the dueling aesthetics of ambience and noise in their music, especially evident on Painless and in songs like "The Evil that Men Do." I saw them in Charlotte,NC and they played 20 minute stretches of noise. Sometime after I Heard the Heart Beating as One, my musical interests had shifted, I largely abandoned guitar-based music for electronic and hip-hop. I was surprised many years later, living in San Francisco and in my mid-20s, that they had become a much quieter band, and were darlings of the latte-n-vinyl, NPR set. I wasnt sure who had changed more -- them or me -- but this is still a great playlist of the songs that theyve covered over the years. Its also great to see bands getting more involved with curation.

For over two decades—first as the frontman of Chisel, then as a solo artist—Ted Leo has cemented his status as one of indie rock’s most respected songwriters. With literate, layered lyrics that are as personal as they are political, Leo has honed a unique voice in part by wearing his influences on his sleeve, merging punk, folk, and classic rock. And the songs that inspired his sound have often crept into his live repertoire and, occasionally, his recorded output.Although Leo has had some of the most viral moments of his career by showing his appreciation for pop singers like Kelly Clarkson and Robyn, the covers that have made it onto stopgap EPs between albums stick closer to his roots. The Anglophile singer/songwriter affects a slight British accent when singing songs by The Jam and Stiff Little Fingers. And when he released one of his most urgently political records, the Rapid Response EP, during the 2008 election season, songs written by the Brit punk bands Cock Sparrer and Amebix sat alongside his own agitated anthems. He’s covered more famous acts like The Beatles and David Bowie for tribute albums, but even in the latter case he put his own stamp on “Heroes,” turning the song into a slow burn that works its way to an anthemic climax.Thin Lizzy’s soaring guitar leads and Phil Lynott’s dense storytelling have always been some of the most distinctive and undeniable influences on Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. So it’s no surprise that he’s covered Thin Lizzy on multiple occasions, including “Little Girl In Bloom” with the Pharmacists and “Honesty Is No Excuse” with The Both, his 2014 side project with Aimee Mann. But an equally important influence may be the New Zealand-bred bands Split Enz and Crowded House; Leo has covered the former’s “Six Months In A Leaky Boat” on multiple releases, and even took a line from the song as the title of one of his most beloved albums, 2001’s The Tyranny of Distance.

Few bands greeted the new millennium with as much pure pizzaz as The Go! Team did when they emerged out of Brighton in 2004. Fronted by mastermind Ian Parton and featuring a rotating cast of members (most notably Ninja, who delivers most of the group’s irresistibly upbeat raps), The Go! Team stood apart from many of their indie-rock peers with their eclectic, overflowing cauldron of influences and sounds, drawing on everything from English big beat to classic film scores to ‘90s college rock to left-field hip-hop. Approaching their craft with the diligence of crate-diggers, The Go! Team’s music channels all the relentless joy of an elementary-school playground, their sing-songy melodies and marching-band exuberance freely mashing together samples and styles until the resulting product feels as if it’s about to burst.Part of the magic of The Go! Team is how the band is able to stir all their scattered sources of inspiration together into something that feels effortlessly cohesive, their cheer-leading celebration rock sounding as though it were the kind of thing that just always existed in the sunny side of our imagination. But a peek into their influences unveils a wonderland of varying artists and styles, a plane where the Beastie Boys can shoot hoops with Ennio Morricone, and Deerhoof might get caught stealing Pokémon cards from The Prodigy. With their new album, Semicircle, arriving on January 19, we took the opportunity to assemble a roll call of The Go! Team’s many muses, charting the ways that the band has connected the dots between everyone from Happy Mondays to The 5th Dimension, and, in the process, forming a compendium of feel-good music for the ages. One, two, three, GO!!!!

Since 1999, Carpark Records has been at the forefront of indie rock’s 21st-century evolution, releasing foundational early records from the likes of Beach House, Toro y Moi, Cloud Nothings, Dan Deacon, Speedy Ortiz, and many more. But this month, the label is looking back, by shining a light on two forgotten contenders in the early-’90s Chicago scene: Wendyfix and Remy (pictured above), both of whom featured Hyman himself on drums. With reissues of Wendyfix’s We Have the Cracks and Remy’s self-titled EP hitting stores this week, we asked Hyman to create a playlist that charts his transformation from aspiring 1990s indie rocker to founder of one of the most vanguard record labels of the 21st-century. I’ve been asked to chronicle my music listening habits from the early ’90s to the founding of Carpark in the late ’90s. I feel like I had three eras of music listening during this time.

1. COLLEGE

In the fall of 1991, I moved to Chicago to go to college at Northwestern University. I was super-stoked to start DJing at their college-radio station, WNUR. The first week I got there, my friend Jon Solomon (who was also in wendyfix with me) told me we should get tickets to this Nirvana show. I’d never heard of them. But our radio station was playing the first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a lot.

Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

It was the first show I went to at college and, to this day, is still the craziest. It was at the Metro. Good thing we bought our tickets a week or so in advance, because there was a line all the way down Clark Street to Addison of people wanting to get in. There were so many people crammed in there that, when people were jumping, my body was literally lifted off the ground with them. I had to go to the back towards the end because I felt like there was not enough air to breathe. The show was a couple weeks before Nevermind came out. Soon after, our college-radio music director pulled the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” CD single from our library because it was getting too popular.

Aphex Twin, “Pulse Width”

I was also a big Anglophile at the time and would pick up a copy of the NME or Melody Maker just about every week from our student book store. There was a pretty interesting feature about an artist called Aphex Twin that fall. I decided I wanted to hear what it sounded like. I went to Reckless and Dr. Wax but no one had it. Finally, I had to take the El all the way down to Lincoln Park to visit the Tower Records at Clark and Fullerton. They had the biggest “import” section in town then. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 was mine!

Stereolab, “Peng! 33”

Towards the end of my freshman year, I remember reading a really interesting feature review in the NME about a new band called Stereolab. I still remember buying their debut full-length, Peng, at Reckless on Broadway right before I went home for the summer.

Polvo, “Can I Ride”

In my freshman year, I was keen to get involved as much as I could with independent music. I interned at Touch and Go Records most of that school year. By the time I took the El down to Sheridan and transferred to a bus that went down Irving Park past Western, it took almost an hour and a half to get there from Evanston. The office at that time was in an old industrial space, I believe. Dave Yow (The Jesus Lizard) and Britt Walford (Slint) seemed to be doing a lot of carpentry work there. I remember those dudes being really funny. One of the perks of interning was that I got free music. One day I was given an advance promo “cassette” of Polvo’s Cor-Crane Secret. It was a clear cassette with no paper art in a plastic case. Still have it somewhere….

Wendyfix, “Ridge”

In my sophomore year, I started playing drums in a band with my friends Jon Solomon and Ted Pauly from WNUR. We were named Wendyfix after a local high-school tennis star. Jon was away most of my junior year, so we brought on Brian McGrath to take his place. There weren’t too many indie bands in Chicago doing the quiet/loud moody guitar thing then. I recently decided to digitally release all the tracks we ever recorded. “Ridge” was always one of my favorites.

Remy, “Coco Pebbles”

In my junior year, I started playing drums in another band with more WNUR friends, Peter Schaefer and Matt Walters. Remy was more on the Pavement/Polvo/Archers of Loaf tip. “Coco Pebbles” was one of the few jams we recorded before I graduated and moved away.Here are some other tunes that played a big part in my collegiate life:Unrest, “Cherry Cream On”Spacemen 3, “Come Down Softly to My Soul” *Slint, “Washer”Faust, The Faust Tapes *Bedhead, “Bedside Table”The Incredible String Band, “You Get Brighter”Seefeel, “Imperial”Big Flame, “Every Conversation” *Boredoms, “Hey Bore Hey” ** = not available on Spotify

2. NEW YORK CITY/CHICAGO/GLASGOW

I graduated college in 1995 and moved to New York. One of the things I ended up doing there was working as the indie music buyer for Kim’s West, which was a record store/video rental place at Bleeker and West 10th street in the West Village.I wouldn’t have had this job had Other Music not opened that same year. I started at Kim’s West working as a video-rental person. But the music buyers at Kim’s Underground (also on Bleeker) opened Other Music and suddenly Kim’s Underground was in need of music buyers. So the music folks at Kim’s West went over to Kim’s Underground to get things organized. And I ended up filling in the indie-music buyer spot at Kim’s West.I listened to a bunch of dub, French ye-ye, drum ‘n’ bass, MPB, ’60s/’70s easy listening, and IDM during this time.I moved back to Chicago for a year from 1996 to 1997. I worked briefly at Reckless Records and spent a lot of time at Dusty Groove. After Chicago, I went to Glasgow, Scotland for a 12-month graduat- school program for Popular Music Studies.I slowly stopped listening to indie rock around this time. I thought it was a dying genre. All the new music I was consuming was slowly transitioning over to digital and electronic music. I had burnt out on indie rock.Prince Far I, “Plant Up”Autechre, “Clipper”Maurizio, “M07A”Alec Empire, “Bang Your Head”Caetano Veloso, “Tropicalia”The Congos, “Fisherman”France Gall, “Mes Premieres Varies Vacances” *Marcos Valle, “Mentira”Plug, “Drum ‘n’ Bass for Papa” *Roger Nichols and the Small Circle of Friends, “Love So Fine” *Rotary Connection, “If I sing My Song” *µ-Ziq, “Brace Yourself Jason* = not available on Spotify

3. BACK TO NEW YORK CITY

I moved back to NYC at the end of 1998 and ended up working at my friend Rich’s record store Etherea in the East Village. All us record clerks there were pretty tight. Dance-music culture was our thing. Indie rock seemed passé. We had a weekly DJ/electronic music night and spent a lot of time listening to 12 inches at dance-music shop Temple Records a block away on Avenue B.Here’s some tunes I spun a lot during this era:Dopplereffekt, “Speak ‘n’ Spell” *Aril Brikha, “Groove la Chord”Giorgio Moroder, “From Here to Eternity”Eddy Grant, “Time Warp” *Frankie Knuckles, “Baby Wants to Ride”GAS, “Eins” *Jorge Ben, “Hermes Trimegisto Escreveu”Isan, “Clipper”Casino Versus Japan, “It’s Very Sunny”Lime, ”Angel Eyes”Moodymann, “Misled”Pepe Bradock, “The Charter” *Sparks, “Beat the Clock”Thomas Bangalter, “Turbo” *Throbbing Gristle, “Hot on the Heels of Love”Tones on Tail, “Lions”Tuxedomoon, “No Tears”Closer Musik, “One Two Three (No Gravity)”I was mostly buying techno, house, and electro 12 inches at this time. I was DJing a lot. Our night, Invisible Cities, put me in touch with a lot of the electronic artists that initially released music with us. Carpark was born! That means the end of this playlist. How Carpark moved away from exclusively electronic is a playlist for another time.* = not available on Spotify

While the internet has hurtled us light-speed into the future, its most pervasive effect (as noted by writer Simon Reynolds in his 2011 book Retromania) has been to make the past instantly accessible, reviving cultural artifacts and iconography long ago erased from our collective memory and stripping them of their context. The late-2000s indie-pop permutation known as chillwave was the sound of that process happening in real time. It was a virtual mood board of borrowed nostalgia for a half-remembered ‘80s, with old-school rap beats, electro synth bleeps, plush yacht-rock, Baeleric house, and 4AD dream-pop all blurring together like repurposed images in a rapidly scrolling Tumblr feed, and mutating and fading like the resolution on an overused VHS tape.Of course, like all genre buzzwords, nobody wanted to own it at the time, and both its key progenitors (Ariel Pink, Animal Collective) and early ambassadors (Toro y Moi, Washed Out) have since moved on to pursue more grandiose visions or pop-accessible paths. But like many easy-to-dismiss fads, chillwave’s sound has lingered to become a permanent component in the contemporary indie toolkit. Its DNA is present in the music of modern-day mavericks like Blood Orange and Tame Impala, and it’s had a soluble effect on the sound of latter-day Flaming Lips and Destroyer; even Nick Cave’s 2016 track “Rings of Saturn” bears its unlikely influence. A decade on from its emergence, chillwave very much remains the future sound of our ever-present past.

Psychedelic/folk/synthpop hybrid Well Well Well are asking the bigger questions. Namely "Is Here & Now always better than There & Then?" While the San Diego, CA band celebrates their dual EP release of Poptimism and Ships as well as a zine concept tour across their home state, were jumping down the rabbit hole with them on this hand-crafted playlist for The Dowsers. Says the band: "This playlist is a journey down the inspiration highway. Vocal harmonies, dance rhythms, clever lyrics and some of the finest production our ears have ever heard. You want to be a musician? This playlist is Step 3. Not quite for the amateur listener but not too deep down the musicians rabbit hole of hyper-complexity. If you carry a bit of rhythm with you, you will be rewarded. If you enjoy singing in your car or shower, you will also be rewarded. Let the music do what it was created to do. The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things seem strange."

Veteran Atlanta-based all-girl garage punks The Coathangers can turn up the dial pretty substantially -- just listen to their latest offering LIVE to see what we mean. Hitting all the high-energy house party vibes (with a little bit of piss and vitriol stirred into the mix), the band was formulated 13 years ago as a means to have fun with their friends, so its no surprise that when we asked them for a playlist, what they delivered was all about good times for the weekend. And a reference to one of their other epic album titles.Says the band, "This playlist is all about rockin out and enjoying whatever youre doing while listening to it! Whether its a road trip, house party, or simply background music while you get to work, crank it up and rock tha hell out!!!"Check out the playlist to the right or go here.

Whats This Playlist All About? The venerable music site ranks the chillest, haziest, and, of course dreamiest indie albums of all time—or at least those with a vague sense of "atmosphere, intimacy, and a light coating of psychedelia."

What You Get: An airy assortment of breathy, often angelic vocals, floating atop sumptuous layers of soporific sound. As its name implies, "dream pop" doesnt have any sort of concrete meaning or even unifying song structure, a truth even Pitchfork owns up to. Still, something intangible, ethereal, maybe even mystical, links these artists together, from the undisputed originators Cocteau Twins, who easily take the No. 1 spot with Heaven or Las Vegas, to their respected disciples Beach House (who also nab two spots). In between, the mood subtly shifts; the dark noir of Julee Cruise slips into the colorful pop of Atlas Sound, while the ambient melancholy of Grouper gives way to the euphoric nostalgia of M83 and the sultry twang of Mazzy Star and Mojave 3.

Best Surprise: The inclusion of Brightblack Morning Light, especially their featured track—the slinky, druggy doozy "Everybody Daylight”—which has always managed to slip under the radar.

What Did They Miss? Their "conscious decision to not include records that wound up on our Best Shoegaze Albums list—even though shoegaze and dream pop have, at times, been used interchangeably,” kind of messes with the playlist listening experience. Thing is, we dont care whats on the shoegaze list when were listening to the dream pop one, so to not include certain "shoegaze" standards like, say, MBV or Slowdive or bands like Pale Saints and Seefeel, feels slightly off. Theres also plenty of people noting the absence of Cocteau Twins Treasure.

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."

Whats This Playlist All About? The grungy indie rockers compile a list of favorite tunes as they prepare for the April release of their third album, Twerp Verse.

What You Get: A playful, kitschy mix of oddball sounds that oddly kind of work together. Find yourself swaying to the doe-eyed Irish folk of The Roches before thrusting to the X-rated raps of Cupcakke. Elsewhere, charming lo-fi (Frankie Cosmos) sits alongside groovy, kaleidoscopic pop (Shintaro Sakamoto); streamlined dance bangers (Zedd); growling metalcore (Code Orange); and spooky, melancholic marvels (Sparklehorse).

Greatest Discovery: Young singer-songwriter Sidney Gishs "I Eat Salads Now," a witty and charmingly weird slice of DIY guitar-pop.

How Does This Reflect Speedy Ortiz in 2018? Twerp Verse singles like the dark, twisted "Villain" and the disorienting pop of "Lean In When I Suffer" blend together some of the more warped riffs and sardonic wit sprinkled throughout the playlist. Like the mix itself, Speedy Ortiz have become a little harder to pin down—in a good way.