Indie

Once upon a time, Americana musicians dismissed synthesizers, drum machines, vocal processing, and programming as soulless products of our modern technological state. Where archaic, time-tested instruments like banjo, guitar, and drum kits express authentic human experience, these newfangled gizmos, with their myriad robotic zaps and pulsating repetitions, are cold and artificial. This was some deeply ingrained thinking, and let’s not forget: It was just over 50 years ago that, according to legend, hardline folk revivalist Pete Seeger attempted to take an axe to the cables amplifying Bob Dylan’s infamous electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. And that was over nothing more than some electricity!Times sure have changed. You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting an Americana, blues, or other roots-flavored artist who isn’t plucking a banjo over bubbling drum machines or weaving acoustic fingerpicking around club grooves. Currently, one of the biggest bands in the U.S. is Judah & the Lion, whose omnipresent mega-hit “Take It All Back” is high-energy bluegrass filtered through the digital production qualities of hip-hop. The same goes for The Avett Brothers’ “Ain’t No Man” off of True Sadness, which is laced with flickering synthesizers.Sonically speaking, some of this stuff ventures pretty far out. Where Judah & the Lion and The Avetts are fairly subtle in their digital flirtations, singer/songwriter Justin Vernon—a.k.a. Bon Iver—sounds like an Auto-Tune-drenched cyborg on his critically acclaimed 22, A Million, a full-length album that’s a million light years removed from the rustic indie folk that launched his career. Then there’s the Gazzo remix of American Authors’ “Best Day of My Life,” which turns the bouncing, folk-pop ditty into a bass-thumping banger perfect for sets at the Electric Daisy Carnival. Can you imagine what Pete Seeger would think of roots music mixed with EDM? We shudder to think.

Launched in September 2015 by Snoop Dogg and marketing entrepreneur Ted Chung, Merry Jane is a site that focuses on cannabis culture. One of its regular features is a Spotify playlist called “Takeover.” Earlier this May, Run the Jewels curated a collection of tracks for it that includes their own songs, other New York rappers like Your Old Droog, late-’60s garage rock savants The Shaggs, current garage punk faves White Reaper, and mysterious R&B singer H.E.R.It’s mostly rap, and lots of it—124 tracks to be exact—and its theme is hard to discern; it comes off as a data dump of whatever’s been percolating on El-P and Killer Mike’s hard drives (or, perhaps more accurately, streaming service accounts). Unfortunately, Patrick Lyons’ accompanying Q&A doesn’t go into how El and Mike selected the tracks for their list.With such a large and unwieldy buffet to explore, it may be best to head toward the more exotic fare. St. Louis rapper Tef Poe, buzzy Canadians like Ebhoni and VNCHY, and Chicago rapper Lud Foe are just a few to start with. But if you’re just looking for a good banger like Danny Brown’s “Really Doe,” well, there’s that too.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Ryan Adams’ latest record, Prisoner, contains a profoundly affecting and relatable story of personal overcoming that is beautifully filtered through a hard-hitting kaleidoscope of ‘70s and ‘80s sounds and techniques. Yet despite the ever-present ghosts of his influences, the album is an original, organic fulfillment of what he’s been aiming at for most of his career.The sonic ascent to Prisoner began with his 2014 self-titled album, a misty, midnight ride through his neon mind where echoing drums, glowing guitar riffs, and shadowy organs refract The Replacements and Tunnel of Love-era Springsteen. The following year’s 1989, a song-for-song cover of the Taylor Swift album, went even darker, gesturing toward The Smiths and Springsteen’s moodier moments—try to tell me Adams’ version of “Shake It Off” isn’t a luminous, slow-burn cousin to “I’m on Fire.”Prisoner completes the trajectory of these records. Many have called it a breakup album, which in many ways it is, but it’s also full of hope and power thanks to the strength it draws from Adams’ spiritual predecessors. The lightning-quick guitar outbursts of “Do You Still Love Me?” gesture back to Black Sabbath (Vol. 4 is an Adams favorite), Kiss, and AC/DC. The title track evokes the shiny jangle of Johnny Marr, while “Doomsday” imagines what would happen if The Cure had a harmonica player. “To Be Without You” harkens to the joyous, swaggering folk of The Grateful Dead, and “Outbound Train” is vintage Springsteen, complete with suspended chords and lyrics about cars, loneliness, and boredom.The album’s masterful closer resides at the top of the class of Adams’ grand finales, repeating its mantra of “we disappear” with production so crisp and transparent it sounds like Adams is actually disappearing. And yet, throughout the images of fading taillights and haunted houses, beyond The Smiths and Springsteen, Ryan Adams is doing his own thing. And he nails it.Click here to add to Spotify playlist!

The vast swathes of the Sahel and Sahara regions in West Africa may not look like much from a map, but for centuries they’ve been criss-crossed by trading caravans and pilgrims, creating unique migration patterns and allowing for the exchange of food, language, and ideas. So it’s no surprise that today this sandy and arid region is home to multiple generations of musicians who’ve embraced the key instrument of American and European rock ’n’ roll.From Timbuktu to Agadez, singers and songwriters have embraced the guitar as a mode of expression and musical reinvention. The instrument is believed to have distant roots in the Sahara region, as West Africans taken to North America during the transatlantic slave trade brought with them songs and dances that went onto inform the music of future bluesmen like Robert Johnson. The blues were reinvented again by Ali Farka Touré, the Malian singer and songwriter famed for his mesmerizing guitar style. But there’s also Tuareg bands like Tinariwen, who first picked up guitars in the 1980s as a way to articulate the struggles and sadness of their generation, as the Tuareg people were beset by displacement, drought and later took up arms in rebellions against the governments of Niger and Mali.Today, the recording industry and international festival circuit is packed with now-familiar names from the Sahara region, including younger generations of artists like the Sahrawi singer/songwriter Aziza Brahim and the electric guitar virtuoso Mdou “Bombino” Moctar from the frontier city of Agadez in Niger. This playlist reflects the many talents who come from this rich modern tradition.

Gangsta rap is supposed to be all about bravado and bluster -- a fantastical playground of platinum-plated pistols, barely dressed women and John Woo worthy shootouts. Houston emcee Scarface provides a dose of realism to the genre with his finely detailed narratives of guilt-ridden murderers, sorrowful drug dealers and disposed "civilians." First as a member of the Geto Boys and then throughout a lengthy solo career, Scarface is one of the Souths most respected and enduring lyricist. For a 2013 Complex feature, he picked his favorite tracks from his extensive. Its a comprehensive playlist that covers hits such as "My Block" or "Mind Playin Tricks," but also dips into deep catalog picks such as the excellent "A Minute to Pray and a Second to Die," a stand-out song from his debut that hinted at the narrative nimbleness and moral complexity that would become his calling card.

Writing another memoir, hiring replacement Wilburys, or actually bothering to show up to collect a Nobel Prize—these are just a few of the ways Bob Dylan could spend his eighth decade on Earth. Instead, he’s undertaken a rather different endeavor, one that on the surface may be as peculiar as any of his most inscrutable artistic gestures in the last half-century or more. But to just about everyone’s surprise, Dylan’s quest to perform and record his own versions of dozens of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra and others has yielded some unexpectedly marvelous music thus far.This week sees the release of Triplicate, the unfeasibly large follow-up to 2015’s Shadows in the Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels. The new three-disc set adds 30 more songs to the Nobel Laureate’s newly expanded repertoire of classics. Though most of them were initially made famous by Ol’ Blue Eyes, all are part of a canon that has become loosely known as the Great American Songbook, and also includes the handiwork of songwriters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, and the team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. These songs transcended their own era—one that roughly spans the glory days of Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s to the artistic peak of Broadway musicals in the 1950s—becoming pop and jazz standards for many generations up to and including this one.As tired as these tunes may seem in slavishly retrograde renditions—with Rod Stewart and Michael Bublé being regular offenders, though we must never forget Seth MacFarlane’s big band jazz album—their lyrical wit, melodic sophistication, and sheer malleability mean that they’re forever ripe for reinterpretation and hardy enough to withstand the occasional act of desecration. To mark the arrival of Dylan’s latest venture into the Great American Songbook, we provide a survey of renditions by other artists—Bryan Ferry, Joan Jett, The Roots, and The Bonzo Dog Band, just to name a few—who clearly love this canon, but whose own approaches avoid those easy conventions.

The emergence of a viable rap scene in Seattle didn’t happen overnight. Even as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis briefly took over the pop airwaves with “Thrift Shop” in 2012, less-celebrated artists were determining the future of the Northwest city’s sound. In fact, much of the Seattle rap underground resembles other U.S. homegrown scenes that formed in the wake of indie rap icons like Lil B and Odd Future: The music is amorphous and electronic, the lyrics tend toward chemically enhanced streams-of-consciousness, and there are enough sonic quirks to make you want to crawl down a SoundCloud wormhole.Shabazz Palaces’ surreal, Afrocentric-inspired treatises are a touchstone, as are Blue Sky Black Death’s cloud rap symphonies. The latter worked with Nacho Picasso, who then formed the Moor Gang collective with Jarv Dee and Gifted Gab. Shabazz Palaces’ Black Constellation crew attracted THEESatisfaction and Chimurenga Renaissance—who coined the popular event and meme “Black Weirdo” before disbanding in 2016—and influenced avant-rap artists like Porter Ray and Tay Sean. Then there’s Thraxxhouse, a crew formed by Mackned and Key Nyata who take inspiration from internet oddities like Florida’s Raider Klan.Unfairly or not, there’s some lingering resentment in the city toward Macklemore, whose huge successes have overshadowed the city much as Sir Mix-A-Lot did with “Baby Got Back” in the ‘90s. (We declined to include all the diss songs aimed at the rapper on this playlist.) No one seems capable of ascending to the same commercial heights, although Eighty4 Fly has earned over 1 million streams on SoundCloud with his 2012 trippy smoker tune “Kush High.” But maybe that’s the status quo the Emerald City prefers: a micro-scene dictated by industrious talents instead of pop novelty.

It’s not very cool to like Spoon today, which is strange because they are an incredible band. Whenever I bring them up to friends, other music writers, or even members of my band, my comments are usually met with: “They’re OK,” “I don’t like them,” or something far more pejorative. The thing is, Spoon are one of the most strange and creative bands working in popular indie rock today and they consistently reinvent themselves.Their tracks meld rock ‘n’ roll and electronic elements and are tempered by production that occasionally borders on noise. Their studio work is remarkably meticulous, using ambience and timbre cleverly and makes brilliant use of the depth between foreground and background. Their song structures are clever and vigorous with many tracks violently shifting speed, tone, or texture on a dime. For these reasons, I’ve been telling people for years that Transference is one of the best rock albums of this generation. But I have yet to convert anyone.Songs like “The Ghost of You Lingers” and “I Saw The Light” engage musical space in an innovative way, using static motifs to explore the use of noise in songs and soloing. “WhisperI’lllistentohearit,” from 2017’s Hot Thoughts, features ethereal pulses overlayed with fastidiously situated guitar until the song blasts into a different tempo, fleshing itself out with distortion, synths, and critically placed tambourines and shakers. This is extremely cool music.Do a lot of people like Spoon? Sure. Do they appear on TV and at big festivals? Yeah. Can their music be heard in films and trailers? Yep. That’s because they are a great band. As you’re warming up to Hot Thoughts, enjoy this playlist of their outliers. Songs about death, sex, and loneliness shouldn’t be this fun to listen to.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!We’re eight movies into our age’s preeminent action movie franchise and Vin Diesel has yet to use more than one facial expression. To be fair, it can’t be easy to maintain such a high standard of manly, steely intensity while glowering over your hand as it grips the top of a steering wheel and you put the pedal to the metal. Indeed, moviegoers would likely start throwing chairs if they didn’t see Diesel’s hard-driving hero Dom Toretto assume his signature stare in the next installment of the increasingly bombastic, ridiculous, and thrilling series of high-octane blockbusters spawned by the original The Fast and the Furious back in 2001.Actually, it can feel pretty good to assume the pose yourself. For one thing, it helps foster the adolescent fantasy that you’re burning up the highway in a souped-up Dodge Charger or a tricked-out Koenigsegg CCX-SR—while The Rock hangs out the passenger side window and fires a bazooka at the bad guys, of course—rather than barely hitting the speed limit in a shitbox Corolla or CR-V with two booster seats in back.So with The Fate of the Furious blazing into theaters soon, it’s high time for a soundtrack that’ll further stoke those foolhardy dreams of speed and supremacy. Featuring songs from the hip-hop heavy F&F soundtracks and other tunes built for the road, this playlist is for all the wannabe speed demons who’d be just like Dom if that kind of driving didn’t get people killed in real life. Sorry to be a bummer, but face it: You’re no stunt driver.

The passing of Chuck Berry on March 18, 2017 at the age of 90 put the final punctuation mark at the end of this musical pioneers story. But the legacy left behind by the man who made rock n roll what it is today largely rests on a relatively small group of milestone singles—about a dozen or so, mostly released between the mid 50s and mid 60s. And, when youre talking about an artist like Berry, that leaves a lot of things out. Though Berry mostly stopped having hits by 1964, he kept on recording at a fairly steady clip through the late 70s. And even though most of his later records flew below the radar, they were full of worthwhile tunes. The deeper you dig into Berrys catalog, the clearer it becomes that he had plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Of course, the rock n roll godhead will be forever associated with the style he introduced on titanic tracks like "Roll Over Beethoven," "Maybellene," "Johnny B. Goode," et al, and rightly so—they were the road map for generation after generation of rockers. But Berrys endlessly surprising (and rewarding) eclecticism is revealed by even a casual spelunk into his archives.Traipsing through this collection of Chuck Berry esoterica, youll find just about everything you can think of and then some: the spooky, minor-key "Down Bound Train," the calypso-flavored "Run Joe," the jazzy swinger "Bring Another Drink," the Latin-tinged instrumental "Berry Pickin," the dreamy Charles Brown cover "Driftin Blues," the startling psychedelic experimentation of "Oh Captain," the 18-minute wah-wah-flecked jam "Concerto in B Goode"—you name it.And alongside all these surprising stylistic detours are tunes in the signature Berry style like "Tulane," "Jo Jo Gunne," and "Oh What a Thrill" that stand up right alongside their more famous cousins. It makes for a great way to remember rocks godfather, who, for all his renown, was an even mightier musical figure than many people realize.