The Roots of Prog-Metal: 1969-1977
September 27, 2019

The Roots of Prog-Metal: 1969-1977

Progressive metal first emerged in the late ’80s, a whirlwind of ambitious themes, sprawling concepts, aggressive precision, ambitious arrangements, off-kilter time signatures and wild displays of chops. Bands like Queensrÿche and Fates Warning would have varying intensity of the spotlight, but nothing matched the commercial and critical success of Tool, the uncompromising band that released the biggest rock record of 2019, the 86-minute Fear Inoculum.However, the seeds of lofty, lateral-minded metal churn go back to the ’60s and ’70s. Pioneering prog artists (and Tool influences) King Crimson and Pink Floyd would often venture into the heavy and strange. Lesser-known bands such as Britain’s Atomic Rooster, Germany’s Lucifer’s Friend, and Los Angeles’ Captain Beyond sunk deep into proto-metal moods. Jazz artists like Tony Williams, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and ’70s-era Miles Davis mixed bonkers playing with abrasive rock energy. French “zeuhl” bands like Magma and Belgian “rock in opposition” band Univers Zero played with time signatures in disorienting ways. Here are some bands that paved the way for prog-metal’s lofty ideas.Photo Credit: Travis Shinn

How Sgt. Pepper Taught the Bands to Play
May 31, 2017

How Sgt. Pepper Taught the Bands to Play

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Since its release on June 1, 1967, The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band has been so overrated, its practically underrated. The albums reputation doesnt so much precede it as supersede it: Like the monoloth that periodically appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey to mark the crucial turning points in the evolution of human civilization, Sgt. Pepper has come to represent this massive, immovable talisman that looms untouchably over the course of modern pop history. Its emblematic of so many Big Events—the Summer of Love, the elevation of rock n roll into art, the embrace of the studio-as-instrument, Chris Martins more dubious wardrobe choices—that its easy to forget its a relatively compact, 39-minute record comprising 13 pop songs, only two of which go beyond four minutes, and some of which are pretty goofy.Sgt. Peppers oft-cited standing as rocks first concept album is somewhat overstated—its more like the blueprint for one, establishing the template (the opening vignettes, the scene-setting sound effects, the character role-play, the reprises, the grandest of finales) that contemporaries like The Pretty Things and The Who would later flesh out with proper narratives on S.F. Sorrow and Tommy, respectively. And for an album thats considered a watershed moment in psychedelic rock, Sgt. Pepper can be a stridently buttoned-up, old-fashioned record—for one, if its opening lyric is to be believed, its an album pining for the glory days of 1947. Many of its signature sounds—from the orchestral crescendos and harpsichord flourishes to the sitar drones and tabla grooves—were produced by instruments that have existed for hundreds of years. It’s an album full of loving odes to police officers, the eldery, and circus sideshows. Its most pointed examination of teenage rebellion—“She’s Leaving Home”—is sung from the perspective of the weeping parents who’ve suddenly turned into empty nesters.But Sgt. Peppers great achievement is how it made such quaint sources and subject matter sound utterly surreal. It’s a postcard portrait of a bygone England as rendered by Dali. And thanks to its cinematic 360-degree sound design, it was the closest you could get in 1967 to strapping on a VR headset. While Sgt. Pepper may have presented The Beatles as a surrogate band—granting successors like David Bowie and Elton John the license to create their ownalter-egos—the album didn’t so much teach other artists how to step into character as how to step outside their prescribed roles and processes. It showed rock bands they could still exist as rock bands even after they got bored of making rock music.And yet, for all the fundamental sea changes that Sgt. Pepper’s represents, it’s an album that has been perpetually plundered for simple musical ideas as much as grand philosophical ones. It’s actually the rare record that was already influential before it was even completed: While making their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, down the hall at Abbey Road, the members of Pink Floyd listened in as The Beatles recorded “Lovely Rita” and imported some of its sonic techniques to “Pow R. Toc H,” which plays like an abstract instrumental remix. Following Sgt. Peppers release, pretty much every ’60s rock band of note was hiring an orchestra, polishing off a trumpet, or learning the sitar to embellish their own magnum opus. Soul singers like Otis Redding and Stevie Wonder were inspired to leave traditional R&B behind to explore more musically expansive and emotionally introspective songwriting. And outsider acts like The United States of America were pushing Sgt. Pepper’s sound-collage ethos into more avant-garde terrain.By the early ‘70s, Sgt. Pepper’s ornamental essence could be felt in the theatrical prog of Genesis, the avant-glam of Brian Eno and Sparks, and the chamber-pop detours of iconoclasts like John Cale and Big Star’s Alex Chilton. And though punk momentarily put a moratorium on lavish rock records, Sgt. Pepper’s ideas would be imported into the alternative-rock arena through art-pop eccentrics like the Soft Boys and XTC. In the ’90s, Sgt. Pepper spawned the most bloated of Britpop anthems, gave lo-fi dreamers like The Olivia Tremor Control the confidence to go widescreen on a Super-8 budget, and led grunge stalwarts like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots on a yellow-bricked path to the pop charts. And around the turn of the millennium, Sgt. Pepper’s heady textures and lockstep Ringo rhythms began seeping into the dance tent thanks to artists like the Chemical Brothers, The Avalanches, and Caribou.At this point, it’s hard to even think of Sgt. Pepper as a Beatles album. It’s a readymade toolkit for any band that’s attempting to go “serious,” whether it’s the New Kids on the Block hot-stepping around trilling trumpets on “Tonight” or Panic! At the Disco outfitting their arena-sized emo with bouncing-ball piano lines on “Nine in the Afternoon.” But Sgt. Pepper is so overflowing with ear candy that its tiniest details have been spun into songs by artists who aren’t even attempting to make their own Sgt. Pepper. While the lift-off section of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is clearly modeled after the symphonic tornado of “A Day in the Life,” Elliott Smith’s “Colorbars” keyed in on the windswept, shuffling piano chords that The Beatles used to lure us into the storm. The clipped one-note guitar stabs of “Getting Better” power Sloan’s “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and Ween’s “Even If You Don’t,” while the same song’s droning fuzz-chord finale reverberates through both the pristine power pop of Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and the mouldy-basement murk of Guided by Voices’ “2nd Moves to Twin.” Even songs coming from completely different worlds gradually reveal their debt—Nine Inch Nails’ “Disappointed” may begin as tense minimal techno, but it eventually opens up to accommodate wondrous string-section sweeps that harken back to George Harrison’s sitar-spun Sgt. Pepper centerpiece “Within You, Without You.”Fifty years on from Sgt. Peppers release, its nigh impossible to imagine another rock album ever being so central to the pop-cultural conversation again. And in the 21st century, the standard for masterpiece records has shifted away from Sgt. Peppers studio-sculpted perfection to sonically chaotic, emotionally fraught albums—be it Kid A or To Pimp a Butterfly—that grapple with the anxieties of modern life rather than provide a fantastical escape from them. But while the impact of Sgt. Peppers glorious collision of rock n roll, classical, psychedelia, Indian music, barnyard sounds, and proto-Pro Tools tape-splice construction is felt less acutely today, it nonetheless continues to reverberate out into distant realms. This playlist reveals at least 50 ways that Sgt. Pepper taught bands to play, riding the ebb and flow of its influence from the late-60s to today.

Classic-Rock Songs for Progressive Patriots

Classic-Rock Songs for Progressive Patriots

Classic rock, cook-outs, and flag-waving patriotism aren’t only for right-wing yahoos who keep a copy of Cat Scratch Fever tucked next to their Beanfield Sniper Remington Sendero SF II. I know it feels that way in an age when the Nuge and Kid Rock are snapping selfies in the Oval Office. But trust me: There’s plenty of us on the left who jump at the chance to blast big, shaggy riffs and slather grub in barbecue sauce (even if the grub being slathered is veggie burgers). And it’s for you, my fellow classic-rock lefties—like the proud American down my street with the “End the War on the Middle Class” sign in his window and a pickup truck covered in union stickers—that I’ve put together what, in my humble opinion, is one hell of a Fourth of July playlist stuffed with songs fighting the good fight.A lot of the tunes you know and love, like Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (though maybe not everybody has cracked open the howling, wall-of-guitars rendition from 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue) and Jefferson Airplane’s muddy-ass, piano-banging, Woodstock anthem “Volunteers.” (“Hey, I’m dancing down the streets! Got a revolution!!!”). And as should be expected of any patriotic playlist worth its salt, you’re bound to find some Springsteen (whose original, acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” is a bloody, brooding anti-war cry that sounds more like the dread-stained “State Trooper” than the high-gloss “Dancing in the Dark”) and Seger. (If you know only the Night Moves era—which isn’t bad, mind you—then his 1969 anti-Vietnam War psych-raver “2 +2 =?” will have you burning flags by its second verse.)But listeners will also run into a bunch of obscure nuggets. Detroit’s megaton demolition of The Velvet Underground’s “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from 1971, should’ve been a massive hit for lead singer and perpetual underdog Mitch Ryder, who around the time of its recording had joined the fight to release White Panther revolutionary and all-around awesome guy John Sinclair from prison. Ditto for Relatively Clean Rivers’ “Easy Ride,” a smoothly rolling evocation of rural hippie ethos that will totally appeal to those pro-legalization types in love with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.There’s also a ton of soul and funk to be heard, and that’s because all true lefty rock fans don’t see any difference between rock ’n’ roll and R&B. It’s all righteous people making righteous groove music to battle the forces of oppression and tyranny that now, more than ever, are bearing down on our beloved United States. On the deliriously punchy, horn-stabbing “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” Stevie Wonder rails against Tricky Dick, but it may as well be 45. Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark” isn’t overtly political but rather serves as a gorgeous and uplifting example of the sublimely redemptive vibrations emanating from African-American spiritual music. Another powerhouse is the proto-disco “I Want to Take You Higher” recorded at Woodstock. For just shy of seven minutes, Sly & the Family Stone make good on the American dream: full equality and integration riding some of the most ecstatic funk ever laid down.So, this Fourth of July, crank these jams, eat a ton of great food, maybe even set of some explosives. But come Wednesday morning, let these songs inspire you to crawl into the trenches to fight all the anti-union, anti-universal healthcare, anti-Black Lives Matter, anti-LGBTQ, anti-climate change, anti-public education, anti-abortion, pro-corporate, pro-war, pro-Koch forces hijacking our country.

The Best Beatles Songs by John Lennon
July 20, 2017

The Best Beatles Songs by John Lennon

Notice I included many songs written before 1965, years too often slighted by compilers.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Bad Trips: The Dark Side of the ‘60s
May 29, 2017

Bad Trips: The Dark Side of the ‘60s

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Be advised: You’re about to encounter a bumper crop of bad vibes. The CliffsNotes version of rock history would have you believe that the ‘60s was just a wall-to-wall Age of Aquarius packed to the gills with peace, love, and paisley. But a closer look reveals a darker side to the hippie dream. The same counterculture that made all those sunshine daydreams possible also encompassed some seriously shadowy elements. Psychosis, sexual perversion, misanthropy, morbidity, social decay, the downside of psychedelics—all of these were a potent part of the scene. Whether you’ve got a well known band like The Velvet Underground delivering an ode to sadomasochism on “Venus in Furs” or a more obscure outfit like St. John Green serving up a song for the “Goddess of Death,” take a tumble into the creepier side of the ‘60s.

How the ‘80s Sucked Me into the ‘60s
March 7, 2017

How the ‘80s Sucked Me into the ‘60s

If you were a teenager in the ‘80s (as I was), you could be forgiven for thinking the ‘60s were lame. Between yuppies dancing around to Motown milestones in The Big Chill to classic rock radio’s ossification of a couple dozen hippie-era hits (whose ubiquity proved that familiarity does indeed breed contempt), any right-thinking young person was bound to eschew the Aquarian age in search of greener pastures. Most likely, you gravitated toward the bright, gleaming light beckoning from the New Wave/post-punk realm, where everything seemed fresh and vibrant.But as I discovered pretty quickly into my obsession with college radio—and contemporary chronicles like Trouser Press, New York Rocker, and Creem—punk’s tabula rasa/year zero ideal didn’t hold much ground when you got into the nitty-gritty of what followed it. The flood of ‘80s acts who arrived in punk’s wake, for all their bold new moves, still sported a slew of influences from the ‘60s—sometimes overtly in the form of cover tunes, and sometimes more subtly in the influences they’d assimilated.The more I viewed the music of the ‘60s through the filter of ‘80s bands who were breathing new life into the airwaves and record stores again, the more attractive that bygone era seemed. Sometimes a cover version could put you on a direct route to the original artist’s oeuvre: For instance, ‘60s L.A. psych underdogs Love, who would be posthumously deified a couple of decades later, were more popular than ever as an underground phenomenon in the ‘80s. The Damned’s cover of their “Alone Again Or” made it easy to find your way to the seminal Forever Changes; and once you were there, the spelunking was endlessly rewarding.Even on the less obvious end of the spectrum, it didn’t take a cultural anthropologist to trace the links from, say, the power chords of The Jam and Secret Affair to mod OGs like The Who and Small Faces. Nor was it too tough to determine that the chiming guitar riffs of R.E.M. and The Cleaners From Venus led straight back to first-gen jangle kings The Byrds.It wasn’t just ‘60s rock that revealed itself to me in this manner. The ‘80s synth-pop bands may not have had much of a musical investment in psychedelia and such, but the pop, R&B, and girl group sounds of the ’60s were another story. It was easy to follow the paths of the likes of Naked Eyes to the glittering legacy of singers like Dionne Warwick, who previously might have seemed like a middle-of-the-road musician from another generation to my amateurish ears. And while New Orleans R&B wasn’t especially accessible to an ‘80s kid growing up in The Bronx, Devo’s mechanized take on the Allen Toussaint-penned Lee Dorsey classic “Working In the Coal Mine” illuminated a whole new world to be explored.Of course, in a pre-Internet world, these explorations of the past were far more difficult than they are for teens, or anybody else, today. But the thrill of the chase was as much a part of the fun as the end result.

How Pharoah Sanders Captured the Promise and Chaos of Revolution

How Pharoah Sanders Captured the Promise and Chaos of Revolution

Subscribe to our "Best of Pharoah Sanders" playlist here, and follow us on Spotify here.Pharoah Sanders music is a place you can get lost in. It’s noisy and transcendent, carving out universes in tinkling vibes and jumpy blues grooves that are upturned by Sander’s trademark squawking, primal tenor saxophone. The music feels timeless. They frequently last for more than 20 minutes. But even beyond that, they seem to exist beyond our more pedestrian concepts of temporal matters. But there’s also a cultural context for all this ecstasy and upheaval, one rooted in a very specific cultural and political milieu. The New York-by-way-of-Arkansas free jazz icon had a coming out party of sorts on John Coltrane’s 1965 album Ascension. That album consists of one, 40-minute track (Spotify breaks up the track into two parts, for some reason) and marks Coltrane’s complete abandonment of post-bop for free jazz. The cascading, squealing interplay between Coltrane and Sanders sounds bracing even today, but the key to understand it is that it’s a product of a particular time and place. The Vietnam War was dramatically escalating, the social norms of post-war America were quickly being overturned, and, perhaps more importantly, the civil rights movement was splintering and turning increasingly militant: Malcolm X had been assassinated four months prior; the Black Panthers would form a year afterwards.But this isn’t nihilistic music. It’s the sound of confusion and propulsion, of being angry in a dark room, of taking a dive into a deep, unknowable abyss. In two years, Coltrane was dead, and Sanders would strike out on his own, becoming a band leader while employing the sonic template that Coltrane had forged. The 11 albums that he would release on Impulse Records over the course of the next either years -- starting with 1966’s Tauhid and ending with 1974’s Love in Us All -- serve as a high water mark or sorts for free jazz.Free Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman once said that Sanders was "probably the best tenor player in the world,” while Albert Ayler famously quipped, "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.” It’s easy to understand why when listening to tracks such as “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” or “The Creator Has A Master Plan.” The tracks capture the uncertainty and chaos of creation, they sound like either the big bang or the apocalypse. You have to destroy to build, and Sanders did plenty of both.

'90S THROWBACKS
Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

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.

The Year in ’90s Metal

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.

Out of the Stacks: ’90s College Radio Staples Still At It

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.