20. Lee Jones – Down Into Light [Independent] If One Grain saw Jones tinkering with a more subdued approach, Down Into Light takes things a step further. This new LP, his first full-length since Electronic Frank, is lighter, more buoyant,… Read More
For so long, Taylor Swift has been the girl who sang her heart out about her string of celebrity boyfriends, seemingly to their eventual detriment. (As if a teenage girl writing award-winning songs about her feelings was unworthy of consideration… Read More
How many times, how many ways, could we tell the force and effect of the cultural-political winds throughout the years not by simply reading the news or the trends on social media, but by observing, and feeling, what is going… Read More
Susan Alcorn – Pedernal (Relative Pitch) By now, creative music folks know Susan Alcorn for her feat in bringing the pedal steel guitar to the downtown music scene, with guitarist Mary Halvorson’s Octet, and with other knotty improvising collectives. But… Read More
We Will Always Love You begins with what sounds like a teen girl in the throes of a breakup. “I will always love you,” she calls out through tears, and the Avalanches pick up her signal and broadcast it through… Read More
Pianist Bill Evans stands today as one of the two most influential jazz musicians on his instrument after Bud Powell. McCoy Tyner is the other towering figure from the 1960s and 1970s, and it is easy to think of them… Read More
In a different era, Darren Jessee’s career would seem perfectly normal. As things stand, it’s something of an anomaly. He’s best known as the drummer for Ben Folds Five, the North Carolina band with whom he achieved breakout success in… Read More
The Tate-LaBianca murders, commonly called the Charles Manson murders, have inspired countless films, some direct and some indirectly based on those events of August 1969. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019) proved the continuing cinematic viability of those… Read More
15. Love Fame Tragedy – Wherever I Go, I Want To Leave [Good Soldier] Matthew “Murph” Murphy of the Wombats somehow finds time to eat and sleep, which is honestly amazing given that it appears he spends 24 hours a day writing… Read More
Anyone familiar with PopMatters knows that, but for our playful moments (well, even within our playful moments) we put great emphasis on the matters of Culture. The political and economic forces of our times have shaped PopMatters since we first… Read More