Indie

Elliott Smith’s best album, Either/Or, is 20 years old now, and it’s safe to assume that a whole new generation who got hip to it through Frank Ocean’s 2016 album Blond could use a primer on Smith’s music (“Seigfried” quotes Smith’s “A Fond Farewell,” and Smith is named as a contributor in the accompanying Boys Don’t Cry magazine/liner notes). But when you want to explore the music of Elliott Smith, you have to decide which road you want to head down.After moving to Portland, Oregon from Texas in his teens to live with his psychiatrist dad, Smith formed the rock band Heatmiser in the early ‘90s before going solo with a stark acoustic approach, creating wondrous worlds in dank houses. He played acoustic guitar perhaps more elegantly than anyone else in his era, mixing it with beautifully delivered yet emotionally messy vocals. The combination worked. His music became more layered and elaborate as recording locations shifted to L.A. and London, but his songs could always be reduced to voice and guitar. His music is often calming and church-like. Occasionally, it’s angry. It has a reputation for being sad.In some ways, Smith’s trajectory paralleled Kurt Cobain’s. They were both brilliant male feminist rockers from the Pacific Northwest. Both also abused drugs and committed suicide. And they’re both canonized today as scraggly fallen angels, which is like a cartoon version of who they really were. What’s most important is that, in both cases, the music transcends their tragic backstories. And with Smith, there’s more than enough—there are four sides to the story.VOICE AND GUITAR(See playlist at top right)Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyThis is how Elliott Smith started, and it’s where you should too. Voice and guitar were his building blocks: Early Smith albums were recorded on one microphone in a basement, and when your essential skills are of such high quality, that’s all you need. His lo-fi canon consists of Elliott Smith (good), Roman Candle (great), and Either/Or (masterpiece). But Smith would return to stripped-down recordings all the way to the end, and one of his best is “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” from 2000’s Figure 8.About that voice: You’ll notice it sound heathery; it’s the soft side of the human voice. Listen to “Say Yes” and hear how his approach can sound vulnerable and sweet and then powerful with overdubbing—Smith was a master at tracking his own voice. On “Angeles,” hear how he uses a quiet tone but can also summon a battered toughness. Smith was also a great actor.About that guitar: He played rhythm well but was especially skilled at coming up with lead lines, figures he would repeat throughout a song. Notice how the intro on “No Name #1” foreshadows the verse in a folksy way. This is Smith, the guitarist, showing off his great songwriting skills. On “Everything Reminds Me Of Her,” the opening figure is delicately bent, something to stare at. This is Smith, the guitarist, as an ornamental player, who is great at adding curlicues and embellishments.EXPLORING THE SPACE

Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify“Miss Misery” (on our first playlist) was nominated for an Oscar, which Smith lost to Celine Dion. Smith signed to a major label and his music opened up, incorporating many more instruments. He always played drums, bass, piano, and guitar—often, he was the only player on his albums—and the full range of his skills can be heard on 1998’s XO.“Baby Britain” recasted Smith as a solid piano man with a certain barroom jauntiness, while “Bled White” introduced a new, fuller sound, with multiple guitars and keyboards. He indulges in his George Martin and Brian Wilson fantasies with the wall of vocals in “I Didn’t Understand,” one of his prettiest recordings.STUDIO DECADENCE

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyBy 2000, Smith was living in L.A., doing drugs irresponsibly and eating ice cream for every meal. On Figure 8, the music is lovely and less heartbreaking than before, but the songs seem more like formal exercises with wild instrumentation and arrangements than statements from the gut. The harpsichord on “Junk Bond Trader” and the cinematic plod of “Happiness/The Gondola Man” suggest that Smith would make a great film scorer, as does “Everything Means Nothing To Me,” which thrillingly descends into a blown-out drum loop. Smith emulates Brian Wilson here, mental instability and all.POSTHUMOUS RELEASES

Click here to follow this playlist on SpotifyAfter he took his own life in 2003, we got the unfinished From a Basement on a Hill, which shows that the experimentation on Figure 8 was only the beginning. He was plotting his Pet Sounds, and it’s just as messy and smart as his finest work, but also kind of… not. We don’t need “Ostrich & Chirping,” but we do need “A Fond Farewell”—proof that Smith could still turn out an “Elliott Smith song” no matter what. We also got New Moon, a polar opposite kind of recording, lo-fi, humble, and intermittently excellent, particularly “Whatever (Folk Song In C).”After he died, we learned that Smith was prone to vacillating between these two modes: bare and lush. And we learned that his music went through a lot of iterations before he felt like he nailed it. In retrospect, he did.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!After a four-year silence that ended with last year’s widely acclaimed Blond(e), Frank Ocean has greeted 2017 with renewed vigor. He has dropped two singles, “Chanel” and “Slide,” the latter a pairing with Calvin Harris and Quavo from Migos. He has also released a dynamic playlist, “Blonded,” that appears far more personal and revelatory than the artist-branded content that label publicists crank out for streaming services. The first installment, revealed on February 24, included Celine Dion and Teen Suicide alongside obvious nods like Prince and Nina Simone. His March 10 update ventured further afield with jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, prog-pop enigma Todd Rundgren, and techno iconoclast Actress. “Blonded” aspires to the ideal of music consumption in the streaming era—now that we can listen to everything, we can consume anything (and switch things up when the mood strikes). It remains to be seen if Frank Ocean’s ideological generosity will eventually manifest in his music.

Subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.This playlist shouldn’t be interpreted as a best of 2016 mix. That would be insanely presumptuous of me. Rather, it needs to be considered a useful tool for anybody looking to explore just a fraction of the heavy, propulsive, and oftentimes weird beats forged on the outskirts of boring person normal culture. Simply press play and get blasted: there’s mangled hip-hop stutter (Prostitutes), aggro industrial fist-pumping (Orphx, M AX NOI MACH), meticulously sculpted hard techno (Cassegrain), dub-smeared throb (LACK), and pounding white noise that sounds like the next evolutionary step beyond Lightning Bolt and Death Grips (Dreamcrusher). You’re also going to encounter a few artists who are more rooted in rock than electronic tactics, yet make no mistake: they’re just as doggedly loyal to raw propulsion. The New York duo Uniform slayed 2016 with their vicious iteration of cyborg automation caked in gutter scum. Lost System, meanwhile, are pulsating synth-punk upstarts from West Michigan (a.k.a. DeVos country) chronicling Millennial alienation, while America flushes itself down the toilet. I’d wish you a happy new year, but we noth know that’s not going to happen.

Maybe it’s the cheap rent that’s essential for sustaining the vitality and vibrancy of artists and culture in a modern metropolis, or maybe it’s the proximity to beloved landmarks and bit players from The Wire and the movies of John Waters; either way, Baltimore continues to thrive as a musical hotbed, one that retains a fierce loyalty among the many great acts born and bred there. Future Islands count as one, even if they started two states south in North Carolina.After moving to Baltimore in 2008, they became part of a remarkably welcoming DIY community, one that resulted from the efforts of Dan Deacon and other members of the Wham City arts collective to transform the city from yet another study in American urban decline into a haven for millennials with a taste for maverick sounds. Some of those sounds were dreamy and some raucous, but all were more than a little weird.Of course, longtime local institutions like Dischord post-hardcore types Lungfish had already done much to foster that spirit, and before its members headed off to NYC and Europe, the teenaged Marylanders of Animal Collective paved the way for freak-flag-fliers like Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine. Future Islands weren’t the only imports; Matmos relocated there from San Francisco after Drew Daniel got a job teaching at Johns Hopkins. Wherever their origins, the fertility of the ground occupied was soon recognized worldwide thanks to the success of Future Islands and other Baltimoreans like Deacon, Wye Oak, Beach House, and Lower Dens.With this week’s release of Future Islands’ fifth album, The Far Field, it’s a fine time to celebrate the city’s indie scene with a playlist of Baltimore acts you may already know and love, and others who deserve more than hometown-hero status, like Ed Schrader’s Music Beat and relative newbies Sun Club. The music by Future Islands’ many side projects—such as Peals, William Cashion’s duo with former Double Dagger bassist Bruce Willen—is further proof that local politicians made a dumb move when they changed the city’s old slogan, “The Greatest City in America.” Keep it weird, Baltimore.

Apple’s generally excellent write-up of this playlist notes that Metro’s production are “surreal, vaguely dystopian soundscapes” that sound a “thousand years ahead of his time.” It’s a good description of the sound, but his soupy, sludgy sounds always struck me as more retro-futuristic, a regression towards a vision of a sinister pre-millennial tension rather than the glittering, bleached oppression that currently dominates our assumptions about what lies in front of us. Regardless, few producer/singer teams have been as successful at developing an instantly recognizable (and wildly successful) aesthetic as Future and Metro Boomin, and this playlist collects the best of them. This is pretty essential for understanding where hip-hop music was in the mid-’10s.

This is a constantly updated playlist of (mostly) new songs that the Dowsers’ Sam Chennault loves (or at least finds interesting). They span all genres, but it focuses on hip-hop, R&B, pop and electronic. Be sure to subscribe to the Spotify playlist here.

Marvel’s Luke Cage is a black superhero from New York with a conscience. And the creators of the hit Netflix series about him chose to name his adventures after after an appropriate musical inspiration. Each of the 13 episodes of the show’s first season are named after classic tracks by Gang Starr, the group that paired one of hip-hop’s greatest producers, DJ Premier, with Guru, the erudite and soulful MC who passed away in 2010. The Luke Cage episodes draw on song titles from the group’s first five albums, with a particular emphasis on their 1994 classic Hard To Earn, which featured tough guy anthems like “Code of the Streets” and “Suckas Need Bodyguards.”

Following the US election on Nov 8, 2016, we asked Dowsers contributors to discuss the moods and music the results inspired. We collected their responses in a series, After the Election.Like the rest of my fellow dowsers, I spent the second half of election week in a fog; I had trouble functioning. What menial task could make a case for my attention when so much had just gone so wrong? Then the weekend arrived, and my wife and I found ourselves at what might have been the single best place to spend that particular Saturday and Sunday: at a lesbian wedding in Berkeley, bearing witness as our Iranian/Indian/Pakistani friend married her Jewish partner. That Sunday, we exclaimed “Mazel tov!” as the new couple stamped on a glass; we watched as they sat next to the Sofreh as friends rained sugar down on them. Later, we danced the hora, then we danced to Bollywood jams, then we danced to “Call Me Maybe.” And man, what a dancefloor: flamboyant gay men dressed like Stevie Nicks, Iranian aunts and mothers in their finery, white folks from so-called battleground states, all cuttin’ a rug together.Alas, this playlist is not a mix of tunes played that night. I do not have sufficient working knowledge of klezmer, Bollywood, or Carly Rae Jepsen to pull that off. But recalling that wedding did seem like the unavoidably right way to start this post. Because in between the anger, sadness, and pure dumbfounded shock of it all, I’ve found that the mental space I’ve been most drawn to of late is the one in which we’re all making our best good faith effort to connect and commune, to remember a lot of the original values that set us on our various paths in the first place, and what ultimately helped us all to find one another: love for the arts and the people responsible for them; respect for diversity and the myriad ways it enriches our lives; vigilant empathy for all participants. This election reminded us that not all our countrymen share those values (or at least they don’t prioritize them as we might like). And it reminded me that the first place to start when it comes to upholding and ultimately proliferating them is with oneself.And so I made a mixtape. I used to make mixtapes all the time — not curated playlists of ‘70s psych or ‘90s boom bap or nu-metal workout essentials, which have their place, surely — but personal mixes of radical tunes that I shared with friends who did likewise. This is that. In the event we just met, or you’re an old friend who I haven’t talked to in awhile, and you wanted to know the kind of music I listen to when I want to feel a little more at peace and connected with the universe of good and worthy things this election has momentarily obscured our view of — it hasn’t gone anywhere, by the way, it’s just over the next hill, and we will march on until it comes back into view — then this would be a good place to start. It begins with a lot of dance music, because no matter what happens we should always remember to dance. Then it winds through some singer-songwriter stuff and some ambient-instrumental music, then resolves with a relatively new Monkees song written by Ben Gibbard and some Ethiopian jazz. Protest music, it is not, unless your idea of a protest is turning off the news for an ideally long stretch and just dwelling in your happy place, which actually come to think of it was exactly what that weekend’s wedding was: an act of defiance, dressed in the technicolor dreamcoat of love.

Click here to add to Spotify playlist!When The Get Down premiered on Netflix last August, it won plaudits for its smart evocation of New York music in the 1970s. But with the second half of its first season debuting on April 7, it’s a good time to revisit its meticulously curated soundtrack—and what aspects of the era it overlooks.The Get Down is structured around the rise of hip-hop culture in the Bronx, with Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign and the citywide blackout on July 13, 1977 as key events. On the one hand, the music supervision values precise period authenticity—the lack of anything from Saturday Night Fever initially seems like a major omission, but the film was released at the end of 1977 and its soundtrack didn’t dominate the airwaves until 1978. But at other points, that logic goes out the window: The show features Machine’s “There But for the Grace of God Go I,” released in 1979.At any rate, The Get Down is a historical fantasy. At best, it completely dispenses with reality, whether it’s the kung fu sequences that mark the first episode, or the discotheque shootout that ensnares drug dealer and budding DJ Shaolin Fantastic, a fictional protégé of real-life hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash who is recruiting MCs into the group The Get Down. Besides, why use sappy soft pop tracks like Chicago’s “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” and bland quiet-storm ballads like The Manhattans’ “Kiss and Say Goodbye” when you can cherry-pick the funkiest disco and soul of the early to mid-’70s?Perhaps the second half of The Get Down will broaden beyond the South Bronx park jams, community rec centers, and grungy neighborhood discos to include settings and music from different parts of New York in the late 70s. Maybe Marcus “Dizzee” Kipling, the graffiti artist who drops ecstasy and almost experiments with same-sex romance at a gloriously overcooked loft party, will stumble into a Manhattan bathhouse or check out a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it’s possible that Ezekial “Zeke” Figuero, the teenage poet whose halted attempts at rapping to his would-be disco-queen girlfriend set the story in motion, will journey down to CBGB and check out a Ramones set; or maybe Marcus’ knuckleheaded kid brother Boo-Boo channels his anger into a KISS Army fan club.We’ll find out what The Get Down kids get into next when the series returns. For now, enjoy our selection of ’70s pop chestnuts that didn’t make it into the first half of the inaugural season—and hopefully will make the cut for the second.

The most neutral adjective you could use to describe the voice of Sleaford Mods mouthpiece Jason Williamson is probably “distinctive.” His wordplay, as in the opening couplet of the Nottingham duo’s 2014 breakout track “Tied Up in Nottz”—“The smell of piss is so strong, it smells like decent bacon / Kevin’s getting footloose on the overspill under the piss station”—is impressive enough, what with the way he stitches together an in-joke about the band’s favorite grimy Hamburg hotel and a reference to everyone’s favorite Kevin Bacon movie. But Williamson’s air-hammer delivery and thick-as-marmite East Midlands accent—both front and center on the new album English Tapas—contribute hugely to Sleaford Mods’ appeal, even if some non-Limey listeners may require the use of subtitles—and probably footnotes, too.Indeed, the unabashedly regional nature of Williamson’s voice remains a rarity for any act who’s garnered international attention. The vast majority of British acts have largely stuck with the tradition instituted by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, which holds that popular music should be sung in an American accent or a close enough facsimile. While fellow British Invasion acts like The Kinks and Herman’s Hermits subverted the convention—and the ubiquitous voices of Adele and Ed Sheeran sometimes demonstrate a similar degree of latitude—it can still be jarring to get an undiluted dose of Cockney, Brummie, Manc, Geordie, Scouse or any other strain. Sleaford Mods belong to a proud counter-tradition of vocalists who not only defy the pressure to Americanize but brandish accents that have traditionally been masked as markers of low class in British society.This quality creates a fascinating connection between an otherwise disparate series of singers, poets, and shouters operating not just in the punk and post-punk styles dear to Sleaford Mods, but in folk, electronic, grime, and even sound poetry. To mark English Tapas’ release and the band’s first North American tour this spring, here’s a selection of these distinctive voices. And if it just sounds like a whole lot of British people—and a few Irish—yelling at you, just remember: You probably did something to deserve it.