After years of negotiation with the national government, Ostinato Records released the first album ever produced in the Republic of Djibouti for international distribution: The Dancing Devils of Djibouti, a cosmopolitan masterpiece. Landmark that it was, it has only marked… Read More
Humbled by the 2016 EU referendum, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s made his resignation speech to Parliament, musing, “I was the future once.” It was a chastened reference to a moment some 11 years earlier when, as a rising star,… Read More
Weeks after the 2017 disappearance of University of Illinois graduate student Yingying Zhang, a psychic offers her services to the search crew. Her advice to the missing young woman’s distraught father, aunt, and boyfriend: “Think like the suspect.” This line… Read More
“…It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation after the events that constructed me as a public personality, I am remembered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to a… Read More
I present to you the 15 best songs by Judas Priest, expanded from the original idea of ten simply because the band’s legacy is too important, the discography too large, and — which may be surprising to neophytes — too… Read More
It will take a pair or two of solid elephant’s ears to hear the microscopic distinctions between Slint’s Spiderland, post-rock’s mighty Rosetta Stone, and the 1990 “alternate” mixes of two of its songs released 12 February as a limited 12-inch… Read More
10. “Angel Child (Demo)” (B-side to “D’You Know What I Mean?”) The seven-minute long “D’You Know What I Mean?” was an odd choice for the first single off Be Here Now, as its falsely epic structure is a microcosm of what… Read More
History is often not as judicious in granting sympathy to the album that follows a classic. As great as the Beatles’ “White Album” is, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is typically the starting off point for lists about the… Read More
In all the connections made and broken in Thai director Baz Poonpiriya’s Wong Kar-Wai-produced buddy film/romantic drama One for the Road, none are as complicated, toxic, and damaged as the turbulent brotherhood between its two central main characters—and that’s saying… Read More
I Comete: A Corsican Summer (2021) is the debut feature from actor and director Pascal Tagnati. With a feeling of life in a Corsican village passing by, the static camera observes the residents. The long takes and wide shots ask… Read More