Pop Culture

It is sometimes said that humor is at its best when a country is at its worst. So, in this time of No Kings protests, are we living through a golden age of comedy in America? Humor has always been at the heart of America’s culture wars, but those skirmishes have been more divisive and

Despite not fitting the tropical stereotype often attributed to (and intensely exploited by the Latin music industry, Argentina has always found ways to stand out. Historically known for tango and one of South America’s richest rock legacies (thanks to names like Fito Páez and Soda Stereo), the country is also an inexhaustible source of pop

Swiss label Bongo Joe has been an unstoppable force of cosmopolitan post-punk gems this year, and perhaps no single-artist release encapsulates their 2025 sound more cleanly than 2, the trilingual sophomore release from Yalla Miku. The lineup has shifted since their first album. However, the sonic scope remains very similar, as the group trace their

From synth-pop mimicry to thrash-industrial chaos, Ministry’s four-decade evolution is less a career arc and more a chemical reaction: unstable, volatile, and guided by the dark alchemy of Al Jourgensen. Even the band’s name, “Ministry”, evokes something both political and religious — a morphing symbol suited to whatever Jourgensen needs it to mean at the

English singer Dusty Springfield is best remembered for her blue-eyed soul recordings, especially her masterful Dusty in Memphis (1969) album with her sultry “Son of a Preacher Man”. However, Springfield’s career was much longer and varied than this release. The London chanteuse first achieved stardom in 1960, singing folk pop with her brother Dion and

Patricia Brennan is a master composer and improviser on mallet percussion, and her last album, Breaking Stretch, was a high-arcing highlight of 2024 in jazz. The follow-up, Of the Near and Far, is also one of the best and most exciting albums of this year in creative music. Although Breaking Stretch incorporated subtle electronic elements

Radiance does it again with their new box set, Daiei Gothic Vol. 2. The collection features two films from Tokuzō Tanaka – 1960’s The Demon of Mount Oe and 1969’s The Haunted Castle – and Kimiyoshi Yasuda‘s Ghost of Kasane Swamp from 1970. Together, the three Japanese horror films further secure Daei’s place in film

Begin to experience the music of Charlie Bruber by dropping the needle on the first track of his new record. You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by the sheer variety of everything that follows. Prized Burden, Burber’s second album, begins with the song “Charlie?”, a spacey, widescreen instrumental soundscape featuring Burber on an Oberheim OB8 synthesizer,

Shooting Star, the new album by Philadelphia-based band Golden Apples, begins and ends with its outlier songs. Opener “Another Grand Offering for the Swine” is a brief dirge that’s over before you’ve even had a chance to decide whether you like it or not. Meanwhile, the closing track, “How Long Must I Stay in This

Finally, there is a chill in the air in the Midwest, and it is Greet Death season. The Flint, Michigan-based band makes perfect music for that time of year when the days get shorter and you pull the hoodies out of the back of the closet. On the first day of winter last year, I

Terry Klein’s fifth studio album, Hill Country Folk Music, offers a moving meditation on aging and memory in intimate and environmental terms. He knows he’s getting older. Youth has passed him by, and the natural world has become a less lovely place, but he’s not old yet, just older, and the despoiled ecology still has

On April Fools’ Day 2014, Caravan Palace arrived in Boston for their first-ever standalone gig in the United States. From the stage of the Paradise Rock Club, singer Zoé Colotis excitedly told the crowd the good news: “We just arrived today. It’s our first gig in the US. So happy to stand around with you

The Berlin-based, multidisciplinary artist Lisa Harres brings their poetic sensibility to their debut album, Time As a Frame. Some albums are purely records, others are worlds—Time As a Frame is firmly in the second camp. Across nine songs and three interludes, Harres sets oblique imagery to sparse, classical-inspired arrangements, bolstered by orchestral flourishes—the result: a

It’s Friday, 1 August, in San Francisco, and the city is being taken over by music fans coming from all over for a three-day party (GD60) to celebrate 60 years of Grateful Dead music. It would’ve been guitarist Jerry Garcia’s 83rd birthday, making this weekend a logical time to honor the music that dates back

Champagne & Caviar: Four Weimar Comediesis a new Blu-ray release from Flicker Alley presenting four early German talkies marked by music and romance in the middle of the Great Depression. For the most part, these films were made by people who’d shortly be leaving the country, if they were lucky. Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar

A prolific recording artist since 2002, James Yorkston has once again found a new way of presenting his poetic songs. This is to add to his already lengthy list of collaborations that have taken in everyone from the Athletes and the Fence Collective to the Big Eyes Family Players, Kathryn Williams, Jon Thorne, and Suhail

I Wanna Be a Teen Again: North American Power Pop of the ’80s Various Artists Cherry Red 18 July 2025 Cherry Red Records are no strangers to this type of niche genre-specific, deep-dive collections. It’s surprising, then, that they’ve gotten the cover art for I Wanna Be a Teen Again so wrong. It is meant

At least the animals had time to pack when God flooded the world. That was not the case when missile shells fell upon Feldman Ecopark, a roughly 350-acre landscape park containing more than 5,000 animals, and the setting of the touching yet tense documentary film, Checkpoint Zoo. Located in the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine,

Ahead of the 2025 festival, Nathaniel Rateliff was announced as Newport Folk Festival Steward, a role previously held by the late, great Pete Seeger. The communiqué noted that Rateliff helped curate the three-day festival. Separately, the fest shared he would have an early slot on Friday, helping to draw in an audience for some of

Unlike the Spaghetti Westerns, the Red Westerns produced beyond the Iron Curtain are largely neglected by film researchers, and virtually unknown to American viewers. The East German and Romanian film industries adopted and adapted this classic American film genre to their ideological and national contexts during the Cold War. The Westward expansion has been mythologized

The Birthday Party immediately commands our attention with its moody and even haunting cinematography. It’s the dead of night, and a luxurious, if not decadent, island villa is besieged by a storm. The opening scene’s genuine, moody, or haunting presence is not due to the darkness, thunder, and lightning, but rather the heartbreaking sound of

It’s November 1947, and in a corner of a department store in lower Manhattan, a real-life married couple is about to make television history without knowing it. The set consists of three walls borrowed from the furniture displays downstairs. One camera operator is switching between two angles, and Johnny Stearns has written a 15-minute script

100. Gnarls Barkley – St. Elsewhere [Downtown] It begins with the click of a film reel. Then, it explodes into a manic gospel circus fronted by a multi-octave ringmaster. Two minutes later, 2006’s most infectious single cuts through the cacophony. In case you slept through 2006, that album isSt. Elsewhere,and that song is “Crazy” by

The frightening ubiquity of artificial intelligence can be enough to concern any artist who possesses even a modicum of creative dignity. However, acclaimed Canadian composer Andrew Staniland offers a refreshing deployment of innovations; one that, in the words of a recent press release, “emphasizes rather than approximates humanity”. In collaboration with the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research

Out of the gates, Wolf Alice were poised to make it big with a dynamic sound that straddled alternative and indie. Lead singer Ellie Roswell delivered intensity and beauty in equal measure, which set them apart from their peers. If they brandished a distinctly 1990s tendency toward loud-soft-loud, that was by intention. This approach continued

As you may be aware, America’s right-wing, fundamentalist Christians continue to work to not just cross, but eliminate, the long-established, constitutional division between church and state. This can be problematic for at least a couple of reasons. Most obviously, this divide protects both the state and religions from dominating or even taking the other over.

Sometimes referred to as the Breitbart Doctrine, far-right commentator Andrew Breitbart argues that politics flows downstream from culture. He has acolytes, including Steve Bannon, who recognize and advocate for cultural change as a prerequisite for political transformation. Considering that country music has functioned as a political bellwether in the US for over 100 years, could

There’s a phrase that captures a generalized Russian identity and its practically congenital suffering (and consequent gallows humor): “We thought we had hit rock bottom, and then someone knocked from below.” Originating in Soviet-era Poland, that little proverb could serve as a two-act logline for Julia Loktev‘s epic documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I –

The myth of America’s past is a strong and compelling one. A person doesn’t need to be a MAGA believer to feel seduced by the history of the United States as a golden age. Who doesn’t weep a metaphorical nostalgic tear when thinking of diesel-powered trains, cowboy heroes, baseball as the national pastime, black and

Calendar Year, the new album from Chicago-based psychedelic folk songwriter and musician Jessica Risker, evokes a timeless, dreamy vibe that sounds like it could have come from this year or maybe even 1972. The songs are impeccable, but the arrangements have an indefinable quality that is both comforting and mysterious. Coming off a seven-year hiatus