Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February - March 2017 i Under the Radar

1. DAVID BOWIE Blackstar (ISO/Columbia) Mere days before he left us, David Bowie released Blackstar, and for one long weekend it played endlessly on loops, throngs of Bowie fanatics scratching their heads at the album’s mystical lyrics and otherworldly themes. His death pulled back the curtains and the symbols became clear; Bowie, diagnosed with cancer, intended this to be his final statement, a meditation on mortality , a dark and poignant work that features Bowie at his absolute best. Not only was it a final great Bowie album, but Blackstar set the tone for 2016 early on, echoing the gloomy shadow that his death left hanging over the rest of the year. By Cody Ray Shafer 2. RADIOHEAD A Moon Shaped Pool (XL) After The King of Limbs’ relatively minimal…

“Income inequality has grown really fast. People are upset and if there is someone with an easy solution, like the neofascists, they go for it.”– Johan Duncanson In the 15 years The Radio Dept. has been around, the Swedish duo has tried valiantly to resist the required expectations of musicians: touring, promotion, interaction, even putting out albums has been a struggle. Despite this, The Radio Dept.’s Johan Duncanson and Martin Carlberg (ne Larsson) have managed to maintain a strong international following, gaining cult-like status in the process. “It’s extremely important to us to do what we think is right, what we think is fun, what we think is worthwhile,” the unexpectedly affable and very agreeable Duncanson explains from a drab hotel room in New York City where he and Carlberg…

Though the Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t award a designation for “Most Time Spent Continuously Working on One Album,” The Avalanches would have to be strong contenders if such a category were created. Sixteen years—that’s how much time passed between the release of 2000’s genre-defining Since I Left You and 2016’s Wildflower . There were false starts and head fakes—a 2008 announcement of an imminent release, rumors of a finished album in 2011—but the band was never actually close to their sophomore release at any point in that timeline. By the time they finished, the Australian knob-twiddlers had outlived their label (Modular) and most of the original lineup had defected to other projects, leaving only founding members Robbie Chater and Tony…

January of 2016 officially marked 30 years since The Flaming Lips’ first full-length album, a tripped-out set of woozy psychedelic sing-alongs titled Hear It Is . If you were to make a list of bands that would be active three decades later—let alone ones that would eventually sign to a major label, sell millions of records, appear in TV commercials, and record with teen pop icons—the Oklahoma trio with bad haircuts and a bizarre sense of humor would have been very low on that list. If you were told that they would accomplish all of that without changing their idiosyncrasies, that they would sell millions of records while getting weirder and more eccentric along the way, it would have been utterly unthinkable. There was simply no…

Jonathan Rado remembers it like it was yesterday. One night during the recording sessions for Foxygen’s sprawling 2014 sophomore release ...And Star Power , his brain fried and his body exhausted, he sat down at the piano. He started to fumble around the keys with no particular intent and found a few chord progressions that sounded decidedly different from the material he was currently working on, like some cracked version of 1930s jazz and old-timey American pop music. The chords were grand and theatrical, classy in a way the sweaty, druggy experiments on ...And Star Power were not. Almost immediately, he had sketched out the basic skeleton of “Follow the Leader,” the track that would assume the first spot on the band’s…

Mogwai are an enduring and majestic band, singular in their fiercely integral approach to the dramatic rock instrumentalism they have defined and transcended. Back in 2001, their legacy was only just beginning to materialize. Mogwai’s first two records of alternately sweeping and pulverizing guitar composition had navigated them into the stormy realms of post-rock, where they reigned with a brooding mystique. Refusing to be contained by the parameters of genre, Mogwai headed into the recording of their third album, Rock Action , determined to distinguish themselves with an enhanced and diversified effort. “Rock Action was a very different record for us,” recalls co-founder Stuart Braithwaite 15 years later. “We spent a long time making it and kind of pulled out all the stops. We had just…

R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck has always been a remarkably candid and garrulous interview subject. Given that he’s done few interviews since R.E.M.’s dissolution (you can literally count them on one hand), Under the Radar was thrilled that that he was game to discuss the band’s largely overlooked 2001 orchestral-rock masterpiece, Reveal. It was surprising to find out that Buck, who favors ragged albums recorded quickly, was a fervent champion of the epicurean, rather labored-over Reveal , at least according to the band’s manager Bertis Downs, who enthused over Buck’s love of the album. Buck immediately repudiated that claim. “I don’t, really,” he laughs. “I’m proud of pretty much everything I’ve done, and when we finished the record I thought it was pretty good, and now that R.E.M.’s over…

For Under the Radar’s 14th annual Artist Survey we emailed some of our favorite artists a few questions relating to 2016. Check out this issue’s digital version and visit www.undertheradarmag.com/artists/artist_surveys_2016 for even more surveys. SPEEDY ORTIZ AND SAD13 Sadie Dupuis 2016 was regarded by many as a fairly tough and negative year. Was it also a hard year for you personally? If so, how? And also what were the high points for you? It was a hard year for anyone who identifies as, or is concerned about the safety of their friends who identify as, queer people, people of color, people who rely on the affordable care act, people who can get pregnant, people who would like to express their religious freedoms without fear of violent retribution. I think it…

Ten years ago, you never would have expected Natalie Mering to make an album like Front Row Seat to Earth . Back then, she was 18 years old and playing bass with noise-rockers Jackie-O Motherfucker, working on tracks that tangled witchy electronics around gothy folk as Weyes Bluhd. Despite her obvious gifts as a vocalist and arranger, there were few indications that she would eventually make one of the most gorgeously haunted, unapologetically pretty singer/songwriter albums of the last decade. Familiar yet otherworldly, it’s the rare album that inhabits its own insular universe, one that shares more in common with the leftfield cult classics of Judee Sill and Vashti Bunyan than it does with anything made in 2016. “My record has a lot of comfort food,…

In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, Paterson , Adam Driver plays the titular Paterson in the titular town of Paterson, New Jersey. He is a bus driver and a poet, two things that may not coalesce in the minds of snap judgments or assumptions. Every day, Paterson sits in his bus writing notes and lines he will eventually use in a poem. There is often a stilted narration providing a glimpse into his work and thought process. Later, a new narration kicks in and the poem is delivered with more confidence and polish. Paterson’s life is very regimented and routine-driven. He gets up at roughly the same time every day and drives his route the same way. He goes home at night and greets his wife, has…

In 2014, Jens Lekman was an artist in crisis. He had spent the year working on a nearly-finished album that “sounded like crap,” he had a wicked case of writer’s block, and he was starting to doubt that he even should be making music at all. He decided to throw the songs away and start over. He needed something to push him, something that would move him away from trying to “write a classic song” with every track. He came up with a solution: he would write and release a new song every week for 2015. He called it Postcards . “It was sort of like me just realizing that I had to do something very drastic to get out of it,” Lekman says of his…

It’s been a circuitous route for Surfer Blood since their auspicious 2010 debut album Astro Coast . Their following LPs, 2013’s Pythons and 2015’s 1000 Palms , were received less enthusiastically by their previously fervent audience, with lesser sales and generally tepid responses from live show attendees waiting to hear favorites from Astro Coast . It’s also been a very tumultuous couple of years for the band, most notably with the death of guitarist Thomas Fekete from cancer in May after his initial diagnosis in 2015. But on Snowdonia , Surfer Blood’s John Paul Pitts, despite his personal struggles, went to the well and wrote and recorded songs in a similar vein to Astro…

When Jimmy Tamborello talks about the release of his of first official Dntel album, 2001’s Life is Full of Possibilities , he does so with no sense of sentimentality. He had already been making electronic music for over a decade at that point, releasing albums with Figurine and Strictly Ballroom, receiving little attention. And despite its reputation as one of the great electronic albums of the past 20 years, Life is Full of Possibilities didn’t really change any of that when it was released in October of that year. “There was never a point where it hit it big or was a big seller or anything,” he recalls. “It felt big to me, but there was no big success story with it.…

Savages’ astounding 2013 debut album, Silence Yourself , began with a quote nicked from the John Cassavetes’ 1977 film Opening Night , in which Gena Rowlands’ character, the protagonist Myrtle Gordon, stares down the barrel of her professional life, opining despondently into the mirror as an actress in her 40s, “How old are you, really?” That rhetorical sentiment served as a manifesto for the band’s steadfast belief in the power of art to galvanize, with age being a state of mind, specifically pertaining to the notion that female musicians and actresses generally have a much younger expiration date within the sphere of public consciousness than their male counterparts. On their auspicious sophomore follow-up, 2016’s Adore Life , they…

“If you’d said to me 10 years ago while I was making beats in my bedroom in Sydney, ‘In 10 years you’re going to be sharing a studio with Andrew Weatherall and Ewan Pearson in London,’ I would have said, ‘No fucking chance,’” says Jono Ma, the musical epicenter of Australia’s Jagwar Ma, as he gives a tour of the studio space he shares in a grim industrial estate in North London. “This is Andrew’s room with decks, these are Andrew’s records and books, these are Andrew’s boots, this is the old door to his Rotter’s Gold Club, this is our tiki bar where we have tea in the morning and talk about music and politics,” Ma continues. Weatherall is known for many musical ventures, among them, producing Primal Scream’s…

It’s been a minute since we heard from Rose Elinor Dougall. But the former Pipette, sometime member of Mark Ronson’s band, and one-third of side-project Innerspace Orchestra hasn’t forgotten her solo work. Thanks to an extended label shopping and finding financing for artwork and mastering, it’s only now that she’s ready to release Stellular , the follow-up to her 2010 solo debut Without Why . (“There’s no years in rehab or anything to sex up the story,” she jokes.) But the delay, which she attributes more to the fate of the record industry than fate, wasn’t without its benefits. By Dougall’s estimate, having a few years away from the material helped her come to terms with some of its heavier themes, brought…

In April of 2001, the members of Death Cab for Cutie should have been on top of the world. With two acclaimed full-length releases (1998’s Something About Airplanes and 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes ) and a growing audience, they had reached the status every upstart band dreams of: they had quit their day jobs to focus solely on their music. But it’s never that simple. Burned out from an exhausting tour, they knew their most expedient choice was to go right into guitarist Chris Walla’s Hall of Justice Studios and bang out their next release so they could go back out on tour in the fall. They needed to capitalize on the momentum they’d spent the last…

When My Morning Jacket set out to record 2001’s At Dawn , for the first time they had outside expectations to consider—the band’s debut album, 1999’s The Tennessee Fire , generated enough momentum to shape a small and passionate fan-base. “When we made The Tennessee Fire we weren’t sure if anybody would even listen at all,” remembers frontman Jim James, “so having known that some people enjoyed that record, it was really strange to be making a record that we knew at least somebody would be listening to, it was the first time we felt like anybody was really listening.” Curiosity has always been a driving force for James. What started off as a passion for rock ‘n’…

For Under the Radar’s 14th annual Artist Survey we emailed some of our favorite artists a few questions relating to 2016. Here are some answers and surveys that didn’t fit in the print magazine. Visit www.undertheradarmag.com/artists/artist_surveys_2016 for even more surveys. “Voters on both sides were victims to separate media echo chambers.” LUCY DACUS Top 10 Albums of 2016 I had too many on my list, so I’m just going to list my most listened to of the year. Major omissions include Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, Angel Olsen, Mitski, Chance the Rapper, and Solange. 1. Big Thief: Masterpiece 2. Andy Shauf : The Party 3. Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial 4. Thao & the Get Down Stay Down: A Man Alive 5. Pinegrove:…