Indie

Deep down in the shadowy, cobwebby corners of many musical legends, you’re bound to come across a stray track that goes way against the grain, differing so drastically from the artist’s signature sound that you might think it was recorded by someone else entirely. These tracks are the outliers, and while a handful of them have become renowned over time, many are still lurking in the darkness waiting for some hardy historian to shine a light on them.One of the most famous outliers is The Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” in which John Lennon left conventional song format far behind in favor of an utterly avant-garde musique concrète composition. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music—essentially an album full of feedback and electronic whirring and buzzing—is almost as iconic. But there are plenty of other equally anomalous tunes to discover from the catalogs of major artists.Creedence Clearwater Revival might seem like the band least likely to go for their own “Revolution 9,” but that’s pretty much what they did with “Rude Awakening #2”; Folk rock trailblazers The Byrds found time to mix synths and Indian influences on the out-there instrumental “Moog Raga”; and everybody from Chubby Checker to Sonny Bono to The Four Seasons managed to turn out a mind-bendingly trippy tune or two in the psychedelic era.Those who associate Foghat with leaden blues rock boogie will be astonished at the shockingly Squeeze-like power pop nugget “Wide Boy,” and who expected hard rock hero Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy to cough up a Eurodisco-tinged synth-pop tune co-written with Ultravox’s Midge Ure? Tony McPhee, frontman for UK blues rockers The Groundhogs, is a cult hero, but his 20-minute electronic freakout “The Hunt” is such a quintessential example of the outlier phenomenon that it’s the ideal way to close out this carnival of the unlikely.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!Classic rock possesses all the stubborn resilience of a cockroach . It’s the 21st century, and the technological singularity is upon us: Humans are banging in VR, autonomous cars are causing fender benders up and down the West Coast, 3-D printers are capable of creating hideous yet entirely livable homes, and indie folkie Bon Iver has gone full-blown weepy cyborg. But despite wave upon wave of civilization-disrupting futurism, young musicians totally worship the musty vinyl albums on which their grandparents rolled joints back in the ‘60s and ’70s. The Temperance Movement’s bluesy chops earned them an opening slot for The Rolling Stones in 2014; Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats have zipped up the charts thanks to the kind of high-octane rhythm ‘n’ blues that made the J. Geils Band a workhouse live act in the mid-’70s; and Deap Vally, the take-no-shit female duo from Los Angeles, lay down grooves as big and growling as anything from Cactus.Clearly inspired by The White Stripes and The Black Keys—who basically are the patron saints of what we’ll call nü classic rock—a good number of these young guns temper their nostalgia with modern touches and twists inspired by alt-rock. On Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes dress up their Southern-fried garage rock with a gauzy, shoegaze-like drift and hulking bass drops. Royal Blood, who’ve memorized the stripped down, pulverizing caterwaul of Led Zeppelin I and II, have in Ben Thatcher a drummer whose beats frequently slip into the battering-ram stutter of robotic hip-hop funk.But not every artist on this playlist is a descendent of the Jack White/Dan Auerbach lineage. Both Crobot and Sweden’s Blues Pills follow the lead of retro-everything forerunners Wolfmother and The Sword, bashing out hybridizations of bell-bottomed riff rock and vintage metal heavily informed by Deep Purple, early Rush, The Jeff Beck Group, and other eardrum-drubbing longhairs from the FM rock days. If you think Western civilization peaked with James Gang’s “Funk #49,” then this definitely is the playlist for you. Best of all, no VR goggles needed.

Classixx released their sophomore LP Faraway Reach in 2016, and signaled a more straightforward pop aesthetic for the band that was in part responsible for popularizing the tropical house sound. There’s no contextual information that accompanies this playlist, and the user is left to guess at the theme, if there is any. There’s a lilting quality to tracks like Bobby Briggs’ reggae jam “Love Come Dow” that tilts its hand to Classixx’s own beachfront fireside vibe, and the emphasis on yachty electro-pop signals that perhaps this can be seen as a key to Classixx’s sonic formula.

The sound of Run the Jewels is crafted from El-Ps beats. But Killer Mikes singular balance of brash confidence and vulnerability—not to mention his love of 80s and 90s rap from all regions—has vaulted the duo to a level of popularity that would’ve seemed improbable back when mutual friend Jason DeMarco of Adult Swim initiated their unlikely union five years ago. Listening now to Mikes Pledge Allegiance to the Grind series a decade later or El-Ps Fantastic Damage 15 years after it detonated this month back in 2002, there isnt a straight line to draw between the two. How do you blend Alec Empire and T.I., Trent Rzeznor and Sleepy Brown, Mars Volta and Young Jeezy? Obscure yet joyous moments—like 2002 El-P rapping over Missy Elliots "Gossip Folks" and 2011 Mike floating on Flying Lotus "Swimming"—predicted how they could inhabit each others worlds. But many left-field rap collaborations are one-time novelties, not dynasties.Now that Run The Jewels has become a staple of festivals, Marvel comic book covers, and soundtracks for TV shows and video games, its worth noting how much Mike and Els work ethic hasnt changed in the combined 38 years theyve worked in the music industry. Mikes discography pre-RTJ was 10 deep (counting studio albums and mixtapes) while El-P was at nine (if you include the two Company Flow albums). Their unifying love of Ice Cube, EPMD, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang, and Run-DMC has crystallized into subwoofer H-bombs as a duo, while their individual catalogs are snapshots of young rappers proving themselves. El-Ps biggest single in the Def Jux days featured a video of him being flanked by shotguns and hand cannons in post 9/11 New York during a neighborhood trek for smokes. Killer Mike was shoehorned onto hits by Outkast, Bone Crusher, and JAY-Z, but his biggest single was about the urban myth of Adidas namesake.El-P stated his intention early, back in 1997 on the inner artwork of Company Flows debut album Funcrusher Plus: "Independent as fuck." Killer Mike concurred, starting in the mid 2000s with his eyeopening mixtape series after stalling out with major labels. El-P came up during the great indie rap boom of the late 90s/early 00s: Stones Throw, Anticon, Def Jux, Rawkus, Fondle Em, etc. while Mike was slangin CDs hand to hand, everywhere from strip clubs to barber shops to mom and pop record stores, in the vein of Atlanta success stories like Ludacris, DJ Drama, Lil Jon, and Lil Flip. The models of independence varied wildly between New York and Atlanta, but the idea was the same: Your career has to be earned.Now that theyre playing Made In America Festival this year, its interesting to look back at their best work (compiled in the YouTube playlist below) and hear a redheaded maverick from Brooklyn holding his nuts while making Philip K. Dick and Vangelis into viable hip-hop ingredients, and the son of a Southern police officer running through brick walls with a Bible and a blunt in his hands.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEAFD97JV-MKrgVHuWwn991Vc4r2fzKjj

With each new Gorillaz album, more attention is paid to the number of guest collaborators invited to perform than to the group’s only consistent musical member: Damon Albarn. Humanz, which arrives this week, is no different. The songs released so far center around performances from Benjamin Clementine, Popcaan, Vince Staples, Jehnny Beth, D.R.A.M., Pusha T, and Mavis Staples, with Albarn happily orchestrating things from behind the curtain. But he’s a strong performer and highly sought-after collaborator in his own right, one completely worthy of the spotlight he avoids. His selfless attitude, which foregrounds other performers in his own work, makes him such a great songwriting partner.Taking cues from The Kinks and XTC, Albarn’s early work in Britpop act Blur focused on couching his biting social commentary in character studies, a theme that continued even after the band’s influences drifted further and further beyond the white cliffs of Dover. As the band began to pull apart in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Albarn walked away, melodica in hand, and started the horror film-loving, The Specials-aping, cartoon outfit Gorillaz, beginning a lifetime of long-standing—and very fruitful—collaborations with the eclectic and diverse likes of Bobby Womack, De La Soul, and Tony Allen, among many others.He’s had countless other projects, including Mali Music, Rocket Juice & The Moon, and DRC Music, as well as his Honest Jon’s label, all of which show the songwriter using his visibility in pop music to give credit where credit is due, and to highlight the work of incredible musicians who have inspired him.This playlist goes deep into Albarn’s discography, putting his songwriting talents front and center and focusing on the not-so-guest-heavy songs that form the bedrock of Gorillaz’s nearly 20-year career. It also contextualizes his work with Blur, the band that put him on the map, and any and every collaboration he’s been involved with in between.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

At this point in our young century, Dan Auerbach’s trademark sound is damn near inescapable. His entrancingly fuzzy slide work, moody atmospherics, velvety reverb, and love for prominently framed percussion all pop up in albums by garage punks, shaggy hard rockers, folkies, rappers, and even pop divas. Of course, it’s through the wildly influential jams of The Black Keys (whom Auerbach has co-produced for most of the duo’s career) that his sound has left such a profound impact on modern music, but that’s not its only path. After all, in addition to maintaining a solo career—including his upcoming June 2017 release Waiting On a Song—as well as a clutch of side projects (The Arcs record from 2015 is a particularly tasty highlight), he has evolved into one of the music industry’s most in-demand producers.Much like The Black Keys’ music, Auerbach’s immediately identifiable work behind the boards has become more sophisticated with time. Patrick Sweany’s “Them Shoes,” from 2007, is a slab of husky, stripped-down blues rock that’s light years removed from the intensely textural swamp funk and gris-gris soul comprising Dr. John’s 2012 gem Locked Down, one of Auerbach’s most ambitious productions to date. Even when Auerbach, who possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of music history, steps outside of his rock ‘n’ blues comfort zone, he leaves a unique sonic imprint on the work of other artists. This is certainly the case with Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, on which he wraps the singer’s art-pop noir in layers of nostalgia-kissed echo and sustain so plush, your ears will sink into them. This is also true of Nikki Lane’s outlaw-country epic All Or Nothin, which boasts the same throbbing groove hypnotics heard on the Keys’ albums.Compiling tunes from all these albums and a whole mess more, including some overlooked production nuggets like the Buffalo Killers’ stoner-rock trip Let it Ride, our playlist is sure to impress even the most diehard Auerbach fans.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

For all the alluring and disturbing images that David Lynch has presented to movie audiences over the last 40 years, the filmmaker has always been just as particular about how his films sound as how they look. This has been obvious to listeners since they were enveloped by the harrowing soundscape that Lynch and Alan Splet created for 1977’s Eraserhead, the two men spending months concocting a mind-bending array of noises and drones in a garage. The same process yielded a catchy, if eerie, ditty called “In Heaven (Everything Is Fine).” As sung by the chipmunk-cheeked figure known as the “Girl in the Radiator,” Lynch’s song provides the film with an even more startling and disorienting bolt of lightning, even with the gloom already surrounding it.Lynch would toy with the idea of extremes again and again in the soundtracks of his films and TV shows that followed, including Twin Peaks, his landmark work in WTF TV whose reboot has just arrived to the world. The new show finds him teaming up with Angelo Badalamenti again, his go-to composer since 1986’s Blue Velvet, and another master of generating unease by aural means. Together, their musical approach consistently emphasizes themes of flux and decay that start as sumptuous or sickly sweet and disintegrate into doomy ambient passages or something more psychologically assaulting.Likewise, Lynch’s song choices have been just as daring and confounding. The filmmaker’s fondness for keeping the time periods of his stories ambiguous is reflected in his continual juxtaposition of ‘50s pop, early rock ‘n’ roll, ‘60s girl-group ballads, and lounge music with discordant blasts of industrial and metal. The latter category is especially prominent in his harder-edged films, like 1997’s Lost Highway, for which he enlisted the help of Trent Reznor and used songs by Marilyn Manson and Rammstein for typically nightmarish purposes.This love of extremes has also been fundamental to Lynch’s own musical projects, which have long been part of his career and have become much more prominent over the last decade as he shifts away from filmmaking to other artistic endeavors. Lynch has released two albums bearing his own name, collaborating with American singer Chrysta Bell, engineer John Neff, Polish composer Marek Zebrowski, and the likes of Karen O and Lykke Li.Even so, for many fans, it’s the haunting approximation of a sock-hop in hell in Twin Peaks that best represents the director’s aural aesthetic—a sound first developed by Lynch and Badalamenti for Into the Night, a 1990 album for singer Julee Cruise. As such, it makes for a fitting first stop in our tour of Lynch’s sonic world, a place that’s as intoxicating as it is straight-up terrifying.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

This is part of a series where we create playlists for friends or colleagues. The following text is a transcript of an e-mail that accompanied the playlist. Hey Eric,Here is the Silver Jews playlist I promised you. I know you said that you’re interested in them, but hadn’t been able to dig into them, in large part because they are not on any streaming services. So I made you a Youtube playlist. You can find it here.I’m curious to see what you think of them. It’s difficult for me to separate myself from my personal attachment to their music to form an objective critical appraisal. To me, they represent both a certain time in my life (my early twenties) and a place: the South, or, more specifically, Virginia, where I lived on and off during that period in my life. I don’t think most people think of them as a Southern band. The opening sentence of their Wikipedia bio declares that they’re an “an indie rock band from New York City, formed in 1989 by David Berman along with Pavements Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich.” But that is bullshit. The Silver Jews are David Berman (the other guys just show up sometimes), and David Berman is Southern.But they/he embody a part of the South that most of us don’t know exist (or at least don’t think about). It’s steeped in history (in civil war battlefields and antebellum plantations and all that shit), but is very consciously burdened (and not ennobled) by it, and tries to navigate through these shadows with a fatalistic wit and soft-lit irony.In that way subverts the notion central to Americana that nostalgia equals purity. Memories -- personal and collective -- are conjured and batted away, or used as punchlines. On the song “Slow Education,” which opens this playlist, the narrator recalls “a screen door banging in the wind” and that “you wanted to be like George Washington back then,” all of which sounds like Richard Manual writing a Lana Del Rey song, before adding that “everybody going down on themselves/ No pardon mes or fair thee wells in the end.” Which is a jokingly formal and pretty funny way of describing a certain type of asshole.And that’s the thing about the Silver Jews. It’s incredibly, consistently sad music -- the title of the song “Death of An Heir of Sorrows” could double as the name of Berman’s biography; Berman quit music due (in part) to the (self) revelation that his father was an arms dealer or some such -- but he’s also funny. Exhibit #1 is the oft-quoted opening line on “Random Rules”: “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection/ slowly screwing my way across Europe, they had to make a correction.”The guy has duende, or at least a southern surburban version of it. Wikipedia defines duende as “having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity,” but they’re wrong (Wikipedia is wrong about so much today). I prefer to think of it as having an acute awareness of death -- both one’s own mortality and a larger, communal death -- and the ability to laugh and fuck and play music anyway. “Pretty Eyes” is a perfect sad song -- more perfect than any sad song Dylan or L. Cohen ever wrote, at least. It begins with the line “Everybody wants perspective from a hill/but everybodys wants cant make it past the window sill,” and has the completely obvious but totally devastating line in the middle that “one of these days, these days will end,” before nailing the landing on the last stanza with this couplet: “I believe that stars are the headlights of angels/ driving from heaven to save us to save us." But theres also this amazing (and hilarious) image at its core: “The elephants are so ashamed of their size/ hosing them down, I tell ‘em ‘you got pretty eyes’.” If you’re only going to listen to one song from this mix, listen to that one.I know this is a bit rambling. I also know that I haven’t discussed the music. It sounds kinda like really shambolic Americana, I guess. Um, members of Pavement do some of it! Members of Pavement do the best of it, actually, which can be found on the album American Water. Outside of that, it’s often rambling, amelodic and lo-fi. It occasionally fits the lyrics’ themes, I guess. It’s the achilles heel, but it doesn’t get in the way.But I don’t want to end on a down note, because I really love Silver Jews. I’ve listened to them for 20 years. The connect me with the place that I’m from like few other bands (Outkast also do this, fwiw). They’ve gotten me out of tough spots. They’ve gotten a lot of my friends out of tough spots. You’re my friend, so maybe it’ll get you out of a tough spot some day. Or, at the very least, I hope you enjoy this playlist.Sam

On August 20, Frank Ocean released his first full-length work in four years (two if you count the soundtrack for the Endless visual album). As Blonde (alternately spelled as Blond) reached Apple Music, Ocean organized giveaways of a limited-edition magazine, Boys Don’t Cry, at four pop-up shops around the globe. A page in the magazine lists Blonde contributors, inspirations, and sample sources; as of this writing, it’s the only evidence of official album credits he’s given us so far.As a result, half of this playlist references Blonde guests such as Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Andre 3000, and Tyler, the Creator, and session players like Om’mas Keith of Sa-Ra Creative Partners. However, the other half of the list attempts to deduce how Ocean created his new album’s dense computer washes and hazy, amniotic sound. Thanks to the aforementioned Boys Don’t Cry tip sheet, we know that Brian Eno’s ambient explorations, Jonny Greenwood’s moody soundtracks, and Jamie xx’s melancholy club tracks make up his sources. There are parallels to Bradford Cox of Deerhunter’s fluid sexuality and adolescent anomie, Raury’s blend of airy indie-rock and conscious rap, Julee Cruise’s ethereal “Falling” theme for Twin Peaks, and Mazzy Star’s essential ode to long California drives with nothing to think about, “Fade Into You.” In total, this collection of gospel, electronic, rap, pop and rock numbers are a varied contrast to Blonde’s washed-out haze. Think of Ocean as a good chef who reduced dozens of ingredients into a tonally consistent and thought-provoking work.

Over at the Brooklyn Vegan blog, Andrew Sacher recently took on the task of selecting 30 Essential Psychedelic Soul Songs. The psych soul sound emerged when straightforward R&B artists tapped into the late-‘60s/early-‘70s countercultural vibe with trippy arrangements and often socially conscious lyrics. But it can be a slippery beast: On the early end of the timeline, it can be tough to draw the line between progressive but still relatively straight late-‘60s R&B and its turned-on, tuned-in cousin. On the later end of the timeline, all the wah-wah floating around tends to blur the border between acid soul and the realm of blaxploitation.But Sacher does a fine job hitting plenty of the genre’s highlights: The Chambers Brothers’ loopy, barnstorming epic “Time Has Come Today” and The 5th Dimension’s flower power harmony-pop classic “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” rub shoulders with the heady swirl of Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow” and Terry Callier’s hypnotic, jazz-kissed psych folk saga “Dancing Girl,” along with a healthy batch of contemporary tracks. But as satisfying as the list is, it largely sticks to marquee names and iconic cuts, and as Sacher rightly points out, there’s plenty more territory to be explored.In that spirit, here’s an addendum to the BV playlist; think of it as a psychedelic soul annex. You’ll find more esoteric acts like Black Merda, Madhouse—not the Prince side project—and William S. Fischer, as well as unexpected artists like Muddy Waters, Chubby Checker, and jazzman Stanley Cowell dipping a toe in the psych soul waters. Closing the list with a cut from Childish Gambino’s 2016 tour de force Awaken, My Love! underscores the fact that this sound needn’t be tied to a single era.