VMP Magazine

Mark E. Smith, leader of the Fall, died yesterday at age 60. Here, revisit our list of the band's 10 best albums made for the band's 40th anniversary.

The metal remix album came of age at a time when heavy guitar-based music was broadening its horizons by absorbing ideas from a range of disparate genres. The results were, admittedly, sometimes rather dodgy. At other times, they were genuinely exciting, radical and groundbreaking. Subgenres like industrial metal and rap metal sprung into existence through the increased use of untraditional equipment including synthesizers, samplers and sequencers, coupled with the discovery of fresh ways to sing, roar and riff.

Covering another artist’s music is very much like babysitting someone else’s child. You can overfeed it, forget to change it, let it stay up past its normal bedtime, nurture it like your own, expose it to heretofore unknown influences, or neglect to give it the attention it deserves because you were too busy chugging tall ones and making out with the skinny adolescent from next door.

On the day of the release of EARTH, a new Neil Young live album he says is full of soundscapes and a "giant radio show," we celebrate an underrepre...

In 1996, shortly after completing their fourth album, Tarantula, the Oxford band Ride announced their split. From their earliest releases, Ride had effortlessly blended experimental axe noise with melodic Byrds-ish hooks and wistful songwriting. This rapidly earned them near-universal acclaim, with one journalist heralding Ride as “England’s Greatest Guitar Hopes.”

Music critics have a peculiar penchant for the prefix “post.” Post-punk. Post-hardcore. Post-”Please Mr. Postman”. We can’t get enough of it. In the early ‘90s Simon Reynolds coined the term “post-rock” for artists who were using “rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes.” It was applied to a wide array of broadly experimental musicians from Talk Talk to Tortoise whose deconstructed music valued textures and timbres over verse/chorus clichés. Such bands were influenced by non-rock genres such as jazz, classical and electronica. Incidentally, many of them favored biodegradable cardboard CD covers over ’orrible plastic cases.

Soon enough, “post-metal” was adopted to describe bands that remolded the boundaries of heavier music by eschewing traditional formulas of metal songwriting and incorporating ambient, psychedelic, avant-garde and drone influences into their extended compositions. Several of the post-rockers’ metal counterparts took similar exception to the genre label they’d been assigned. Despite their slowly unwinding, instrumental songs, Illinois’ Pelican considered themselves to be punk. Musician and Hydra Head label boss Aaron Turner, meanwhile, preferred to call it “thinking man’s metal.” You can headbang in slow-motion to these records if you like. Chin-stroking, philosophizing, studying, meditating, designing architecture or slumping in a beanbag are equally encouraged.

“I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name,” sang Dewey Bunnell of America in 1971. It was there that Bunnell saw “plants and birds and rocks and things.” Had he been wandering through the desert of Coachella Valley in, say, 1989 Bunnell might rather have seen “pot smoke and beards and amplifiers and things.” For it was here that bands such as Yawning Man and Kyuss were formed around generator parties where musicians could get high and jam through the night.

A world apart from LA’s glitzy and glamorous sunset strip scene, desert rock had more in common with the DIY ethics of punk rock. The desert environment isn’t particularly well suited to the frantic pace and urban politics of punk, so inspiration was found in 60s and 70s hard rock giants such as Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer, and enabled by distortion, amplification, alcohol, marijuana and psychedelics.

The fuzzy desert rock sound overlaps with similar genres such as stoner rock and doom metal, and not every band below comes from a region rich in coyotes and cacti. Does this branch of heaviness have to be performed by bona fide desert dwellers? Does it have to be recorded at studios like Rancho De La Luna, the makeshift home of Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions and birthplace of albums by Masters Of Reality, Fu Manchu and Keith Morris’ Midget Handjob? Not necessarily. No more than Witch House has to be made by card-carrying necromancers. Though Kyuss and their bearded brethren struggled for recognition back in the day, the influence of the relatively small Palm Desert Scene has since stretched far and wide. You’ll now find musicians practicing, refining and redefining the desert rock sound in locations across the world, while DesertFest and similar festivals take place in locations as gray and drizzly as London and Antwerp. After all, it does feel good to be out of the rain, as I’m sure Dewey Bunnell would agree.

Noise rock is about as difficult to define as it is for some people to listen to. Sure, you could say that it is noisy and it also rocks but those two fundamental factors also apply to AC/DC, who are hardly a noise-rock outfit. Noise rock is weirder than standard hard rock or the louder end of indie music but it doesn’t stray into identifiable heavy metal territory. In a punishing kind of way, it is arty, experimental and largely uncompromising, yet it isn’t as purely avant-garde as straight-up noise music. Its bands tend to have a DIY approach inherited from the punk and post-hardcore scenes and tend to be more concerned with creative expression than commercial success. Noise rock sometimes has an industrial edge or a bad-trippin’ brown-acid psychedelic tinge. It’s definitely slower than punk, messier than grunge and there’s often a dark humor in play. Naturally then, the following artists vary in style but are united in some vague sense by their spirit and volume.

My grandmother, who turns 90 this year, is a progressive person in many ways. She Skypes happily on her iPad and is helping the Chinese family that lives next door learn English. Nevertheless, she has never got to grips with popular (let alone alternative) music. To her, everything outside of the standard classical canon “just sounds like noise,” even something as innocuous as Coldplay. I’ve long wondered what she’d make of the items in my record collection that do actually sound like noise. I mean, it’s not even like noise music is a particularly recent invention, as you can trace its origins at least as far back as Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto L’arte dei Rumori (The Art Of Noises). Still, I’ve never dared risk playing her any, and you can forget about exposing her to the dubious titles of some of the compositions listed below. But for those who are so inclined, here are 10 of the best noise vinyl releases.

Coined by The Wire writer David Keenan in 2003, "New Weird America" was an umbrella term for various psychedelic folk and rock musicians who, though practicing a disparate range of styles, all shared a certain freaky outlook, which is why the most common phrase for the bands ended up being "freak folk." It could take most of a lifetime to sift through every New Weird release, from all the home-recorded cassettes and limited CD-Rs to widely distributed album releases so, to get you started, here are the best ones to own on vinyl.