Before the year comes to an end, I wanted to leave you folks with a little holiday season present. But, you know me, right? I can’t just be brief and concise. My brain just doesn’t work like that. So, instead — as evidence of my ever-growing love for our little blog community (me & the voices in my head) — I bequest you two playlists. Exactly, you heard it right: two. playlists.
Not one.
Two creations of mine. My blood, my flesh. Firstly, my Christmas playlist:
Don’t question it. Just enjoy it.
Secondly, but definitely not less important: the songs you (honestly, I) almost (actually, did) miss out on. Aka. some artists whose names I kept hearing (on tiktok maybe? can’t remember) but whose work I hadn’t had the proper time to appreciate in more detail. So, hereby I offer you a compilation of songs I don’t really know, but who I’ve been enjoying to discover:
(this is portuguese for when you have the time cus i was really sleeping on some of these artists just cus i didn’t have the time to listen to it lol)
New post series just dropped! As a follow up to ‘Study abroad as playlists’, here is (Greek) houses as playlists!
If you are affiliated to any of Dartmouth’s many Greek Houses or Student Societies, feel free to send me a playlist that you think represents that space!
Without further ado, here is Alpha Theta’s playlist — compiled by Gabriel Clark and siblings.
I hate the acoustic guitar. Ok, that’s not true. I should say I’m less forgiving to acoustic-sounding music, whether that mean one sad man and a guitar, or several sad men, multiple guitars, and light percussion. While I love a lo-fi sound, I can’t stand, for example, Fleet Foxes, or (forgive me) Snail Mail. Stop whining! And for the love of God, buy a synthesizer.
This might make my love of the Shin’s debut album, Oh, Inverted World, a bit strange. After all, in the liner notes to the 20th anniversary vinyl, Pat McGuire dismisses my kind of music in favor of that emotional instrumental crap I usually hate. About Oh, Inverted World, McGuire writes, “It had melodies! Harmonies! Earnestness! Ardor, zeal! A singer who could really, truly sing! Quirky lyrics you could actually understand, even comprehend!”
I find this analysis irritating, and not only because it’s a not-so-subtle dig at “garage rock revival.” I also think Oh, Inverted World has a lot to offer beyond the musical subgenre it represents. It’s an incredibly complex album, even if recognizing that complexity takes several listens. On the first listen, you’ll notice the beautiful, compact songs, which sonically toe the line between upbeat light rock and a sinister strangeness. But give it a few more, and you’ll catch intricate basslines, thoughtful instrumental additions, and unique subtleties. This album does not give everything up at once, even if you can immediately hear all the care that has gone into each song.
Oh, Inverted World feels like a walk through the suburbs on a gray day in an especially inspired mood—wavering between the quotidian, the queasy boredom of small sadness, the nostalgic, and the smarmy told-you-so tone that alternative teenagers love to take with their parents and their friends.
It’s also an album with immense momentum. The Shins know where to hold off on the hi-hat and when to send it back with full force. They know how to use even simple chord progressions to their fullest effect. They know how to edit their music—and what you don’t hear is just as important as what you do. A sonic trick or interesting noise is never overused. Other similar-sounding albums fall short of Oh, Inverted World‘s genius because they linger too long, or fail to place every part of the puzzle together in a satisfactory way, creating bloated albums full of songs that engage with too-few musical ideas or motifs. But on this album, the Shins lay out each witty lyric and beautiful or interesting sound with no fanfare, no unnecessary lingering, as if “the goal is to ignite you then move on.”
I’ll always love excess in music, be that noise or screaming, overdrive, a crunchy bassline. But a light touch can do something no other technique is capable of. Oh, Inverted World‘s sparseness gives its mastery a window through which to shine. It also reveals the delicate beauty of a well-structured song. And it might… MIGHT… just convince me to give Snail Mail a listen.
The first time I heard Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, the landmark album by musician Kevin Barnes under his stage name of Montreal, I proceeded to listen to it on repeat for the next five hours while I dug a giant hole in Minecraft. I’m not sure what this means, besides that I like repetitive video game tasks—and also that Hissing Fauna has both the surface shine to pull you in and the intricacy to make you keep listening.
Barnes has always made music that is captivatingly complex. He churns out hooks, and he crams musical ideas and experimentation into every song he writes. Whether you like of Montreal’s music or hate it, you’ll be hard-pressed to call it boring. And in Hissing Fauna, Barnes makes tunes so danceable it’s nearly kitsch, with charming lyricism honed to an emotional height.
Hissing Fauna is about Barnes’s divorce, among other things, and the first half of the album sounds appropriately manic-depressive. The first three songs are falsetto, self-aware laments with digital tones, and flow into each other so beautifully that they sound as one. Barnes incorporates staples from his older work—acapella-style background singing, wonderful synth riffs and bass guitar lines that belong on a Top Forty song—into the deceptively-boppy “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse.” “Grolandic Edit,” the best stand-alone song of the album, is almost too rhythmically weird to make it onto your indie party playlist, but too catchy to not get queued at some point. A combination of weird, choppy sounds and samples looped onto incredible drum machine tracks gives these songs a playful atmosphere despite their serious subject matter.
“The Past Is A Grotesque Animal” is the album’s mid-point, as well as arguably its emotional climax. It glories in twelve minutes of mournful synth wailing and Barnes’s lyricism at its absolute best. He is able to fold the mystic and strange into the everyday misery of regret. Even his own intelligence is reason for reproach—perhaps marrying “the first cute girl that I met / Who could appreciate Georges Bataille” is too cerebral to be wise. But it’s the beautiful ringing, circular melodies of the song that reveal of Montreal’s true talent—turning digital music tools into sonic forces invested with emotional power. The synth-y, witticism-filled songs of Montreal records can sometimes feel disconnected from a personal base, but in Hissing Fauna, that disconnect collapses into a very human feeling indeed—self-loathing. All Barnes has left at this crucial juncture is his singing machines. “The past is a grotesque animal, and in its eyes you see / How completely wrong you can be.”
If you needed a break after that—understandable. And with his Shakespearian ability to oscillate between high drama and farce, Barnes provides it. In the next four songs, Barnes weaves narratives of short-lived, cringey romantic encounters. He rejects potential lovers (“Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider”) and is rejected (naturally, in “She’s a Rejecter”); he sings about hookups and creates a wriggly, difficult, even uncomfortably enthusiastic sexuality (“Faberge Falls for Shuggie” and “Labyrinthian Pomp”). Although these songs are considerably more upbeat than the album’s A-side, the specter of doom hangs over all of them. “She’s a Rejecter,” the penultimate song, slides seamlessly into “We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling,” a return to the album’s earlier shivering fears of loneliness. And doesn’t it make perfect sense that rejection would remind us of failures? Of Montreal uses the album to its fullest formal potential, and Hissing Fauna has a narrative and emotional arc that pays off without sacrificing the integrity of any single song.
This album rewards multiple listens, so even if you’ve heard it before, I urge you to give it another spin. And if you haven’t—and you like your pop music weird, pretentious, and wily—then I highly recommend this masterpiece.
Welcome back to another year of blogging at your favourite campus radio in the Upper Valley! Antônio here, ready to wrap up one of the coolest projects I’ve developed at WebDCR so far: the Study abroad as playlists program. To end this properly, I not only highly recommend checking what Poly has listened over in Berlin during her summer LSA, but also going through the past two posts to get educated on some Argentinian and Japanese bops :))
xoxo,
best blog buddy
ps: we remain accepting suggestions and submissions of any shape or form to our recently rebirthed blog 🙂
If you have ever listened to my and Julie’s radio show — Post-Colonial Stress Disorder (PCSD) — you know that, although we share a similar background as children of colonialism and racism, living in the Global South, and made super aware of the oppressive ways American colleges perceive us…… we have always disagreed on one thing. That is: I believe Kanye had a point when he stood up against Taylor’s victory at the 2009 VMAs.
Julie — a beautiful, young, smart, and brown (like me) girl — was raised to know that female voices deserved more space in the industry; that a young woman like Taylor has never deserved to be treated like that on stage. And, to some extent, I knew that too. Nonetheless, I stand by the idea that the industry has been negligent not only of female voices, but also (and perhaps mainly) of voices of colour. For me, Kanye’s statement stealing that mic was a statement against structural and cultural racism. And I stand by that.
It happens that, since Julie and my boyfriend (who are best friends) forced me to listen to Red (Taylor’s version), I have started warming up to our blondie. She grew on me when she said that he tossed the keychain on the ground and that… oh well… fuck the patriarchy!
Last week, when getting off my usual metro station, I passed by a vinyl shop and found myself impulsively asking if they had the blue disco version of Midnights. Not gonna lie, it was perhaps the most expensive album I ever acquired, but I do not regret it for a single moment. Not only it is a masterpiece, but it also represents my walking away from Kanye’s recent antisemitic and overall problematic statements. I am a new man, and that album was a turning point for me. I know I’m the problem, it’s me; I know that we were born to be the pawn; but, more than anything, I now know that karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend now.
Although a former Kanye stan (literally my Twitter bio), I am now going insane as I wait in line for the Eras Tour presale tickets. I grew, Taylor. I am not the same. But I understand if, as a medium for karma, you allowed me to be the only one in my friend group to be chosen as a verified fan on Ticketmaster just so that you could… at the last minute… not let me buy a ticket.
AHA! You thought I would be doing a funny album review over here, or perhaps sharing a new playlist, but I am genuinely just ranting about a blond woman whose concert I will probably miss.
Hugs from your (now publicly apologetic) blog bestie,
My name is Kennedy Hamblen, and I’m a ’23+1 majoring in English. If I’m not stomping all over campus wearing my big headphones, you’ll find me working at admissions, reading pretentious fiction, or cooking (probably a stew or soup). I’m relatively late to the indie music game, as I grew up listening to Kenny Chesney and Coldplay. Oh, so much Coldplay. I used to stream albums on shuffle, that’s how little I knew about music. When I was seventeen, an internet friend suggested I check out this band Sleater-Kinney. I listened to The Hot Rock front to back (yes, I’d figured out not to hit shuffle), and my world was blown open. How could music sound like this? So weird, yet so beautiful? It was as if someone had taken my angry seventeen-year-old heart and popped it into the car CD player.
You probably don’t know about Sleater-Kinney—but you should. An outgrowth of punk rock’s riot grrrl scene, the three-woman band’s shift into a more expansive genre has left them badly underrated by lovers of 90s music and contemporary rockers alike. Like all talented, flexible bands, their albums span a wide range of musical styles, themes, and production choices. Their earliest work, like their self-titled album, is classic Bikini Kill messiness with a twist of edgy duetting between Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker. When Janet Weiss of Quasi joins the band, the drums become intricate and powerful, a moving force that propels even the slow(er) songs. Earlier albums like 1999’s fantastic The Hot Rock feature two guitars and no bass, which creates a sparse yet glittering sound I’ve never heard anywhere else. And if you want to scream your feelings out, you’ll find a song (or probably several) for that from any point in Sleater-Kinney’s long career.
But today I want to talk about their best album: 2005’s The Woods. You can ask Anthony Fantano or Pitchfork, and for once they’re both right—everyone thinks this is a banger of a rock album. With immaculate production by Dave Fridmann, The Woods gives us crunchy, echoing guitar solos, the full reverberating power of Tucker’s powerful vocals, the momentum of a runaway train, and all the edge to satiate your inner teenaged goth. The Woods is not just loud—it’s musically sophisticated. It begins with a bang, as “The Fox” tests whether you have the metal mettle to withstand Sleater-Kinney’s sonic onslaught. “What’s Mine Is Yours” is an instant sing-along classic, with a back-and-forth between Tucker and Brownstein’s guitars and vocals, as well as an incredible guitar deconstruction. “Jumpers” and “Modern Girl” are both popular for their stand-alone power outside of the album, and rightfully so. But in my opinion, the star song is “Entertain,” with its booming drums and pointed vengeance against… well, honestly, I sing it whenever someone disagrees with my musical opinions on Reddit. But it’s multiuse against any and all enemies. From that emotional climax we go right into “Rollercoaster,” where Sleater-Kinney hits us with a comical love story too accurately flawed for my personal comfort, all without dropping a moment of their power and loudness. “Let’s Call It Love” is eleven minutes of incredible guitar playing, showmanship the likes of which we don’t normally get from women in rock. Sleater-Kinney knows they’re great, and in case you were still in doubt (for some reason), they will just keep proving it.
If you like gritted-teeth angst and intricate guitar and percussive work—if you wish My Chemical Romance was all women or that Mitski would really shred it on the drums—Sleater-Kinney is the distortion/overdrive using, C-sharp loving, wailing band for you. And in The Woods, they showcase all their best qualities. Musical talent rams headfirst into ear-splitting passion in this well-storied band’s best studio album to date.
Hello, friends! This is Antônio, speaking to you directly from WebDCR (just kidding, but I miss the station so much I wish it was true).
As we all embark on to week 7, no matter where you are, I bet you have been craving a new playlist to study listening to. It is never easy to discover new music, especially outside of anglophone North American Spotify bubbles. But don’t you worry! This is what WebDCR is here for! 😉🇺🇳❗
Today, I am pleased to share a custom-made playlist a very dear friend of mine cultivated for us. If you are familiar with the music scene at Dartmouth, you probably know our queen Sylvie Benson. But, did you know Sylvie is off to Japan this term? 👸🇯🇵
I had the pleasure of sharing the Strauss studio with this amazing human being every weekend for Dance Ensemble rehearsals, and couldn’t be happier to accompany her amazing work as a musician herself. For all those reasons, I blindly trust Sylvie to provide me with the best soundtrack the ASCL department has to offer.
I had to google it to be sure of how it goes exactly, but there is this quote that, at least for me, dictates many of my daily social interactions.
“Tell me who your friends are listen to, and I will tell you who you are.“
This echoes in my mind whenever I find myself having to get to know people. It happens in family gatherings; on the first week of classes; during a group project, or — as I recently learnt to be another challenge: at a study abroad program.
I am currently in Madrid for the Spanish FSP. Supposedly, the whole point of this is wrapping up my minor and getting to know a different culture and different people. But, to my own despair, my boyfriend (who could have taken the program requirements with me early in the year 😫) is on the other side of the world (ok,,, not so far): Buenos Aires! While I am in an FSP, Luka is in the department’s LSA+ program. How cool? Really cool! But really far…
Long-distance relationships have their quirks and perks, but that’s a story for another post. Music, undoubtedly, is part of our efforts to remain connected. And, today, I use our eight months anniversary (how gay 😫😫) as an excuse to kick off a much-awaited series on the WebDCR blog:
✨✨ Study abroad as playlists! ✨✨
As part of our blog’s hopes of representing and engaging our radio community to its best, we will be kickstarting a miniseries of soundtracks for FSPs, LSAs, and LSA+s our DJs (and adjacent friends) have to share!
These are not necessarily local songs, as I am gradually learning being abroad as well. In Madrid, we do not listen to only Spanish music; and I don’t think anyone would do that! Thus, I hereby present you our first episode/playlist/soundtrack/musical experience off-Hanover limits: a Buenos Aires playlist made by my loving and caring significant other, Luka Faccini!
I grew up going to flea markets. In Texas, we get mangos, corn, and watermelons. Plentiful enough to bury your family. Cheap enough to make heaven feel mundane, and fresh enough to make me feel shame when I buy cups from the Hop.
But our apples can’t hold a candle to New England’s.
I met them first at Riverview Farm. I met them last at Riverview Farm. My freshman year, FYSEP carted us there, and the orchard enamored me. I could step over the tree’s roots and reach into their crowns. I plucked and gnawed into varieties before I learned their names. It was havoc under the branches. I tore through row after row — until I drew this one particular apple. It stopped me. It was massive and it was yellow and it was juicy and it was sweet and it was tender. I could not design an apple I could want more.
I thought nothing of them. Filled my bag with them, then ate one a day until they were gone. I’ll go again next year, I thought. You know what happened the next year.
Now, I am a senior, and the season of Ginger Golds has passed me by. I forgot to return to them. Their skin is too gentle for transport. They wrinkle and rot quickly. They grow here, but I am unsure where else.
I think that last bite, in 2019, was our farewell.
Here is a song by Will Woods. It is about loss. It’s not really a salve. It’s anticipation, fear, and screaming disappointment. Then moving on.
My world is different now, and I have an X-hour at 12.
