Film Break: “The Uninvited”

My review of The Uninvited– the latest American remake of a Japanese suspense thriller, which is actually better than it looks– is posted at CT Movies.

The Bad Plus: “For All I Care”

The notion of taking a familiar pop or rock song and giving it a jazz makeover is nothing new, either for jazz or for The Bad Plus– if you haven’t heard their slow-burn, menacing take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” seek it out, and it’s doubtful that you’ll ever hear the original in the same [...]

Tom Waits: Rap Star

This is just too cool. On February 17, ANTI- Records is releasing Spirit of Apollo, a sprawling, ambitious hip-hop album with heavy doses of Brazilian funk, the label’s first offering from the N.A.S.A. collective. The list of guest vocalists on the album is a thing of wonder: David Byrne, Kanye West, M.I.A., George Clinton, Santogold, [...]

Ten Favorite Films from 2008

Any year in which a comic book movie sequel is heralded as the next great American epic, a trash-compacting robot takes the world by storm without ever uttering a word, Indiana Jones has a close encounter of the kitschy kind, and Clint Eastwood makes a comedy has got to be a landmark year for film, [...]

PPP [Platinum Pied Pipers]: “Abundance”

When DJs Waajeed and Ssadiq dubbed themselves the Platinum Pied Pipers, they donned what is surely one of the most awkward, stupid names in all of hip-hop. In 2008, they shortened it to simply PPP, which isn’t much better– shorter, but just as silly and arguably just as awkward to say. Mercifully, they’ve finally gotten [...]

Bruce Springsteen: “Working on a Dream”

For the last decade or so, Bruce Springsteen’s music has been inextricably tied to his politics, each new album feeling a bit like The Boss’ own State of the Union, a relfection of what’s happening in the country he loves, filtered through his own leftist populism. 2002’s reunion with the E-Street Band, The Rising, is, [...]

The Oscar-Nominated Peter Gabriel

Kudos to Peter Gabriel for his well-deserved Oscar nomination for “Down to Earth,” the song he wrote with Thomas Newman and performs over the end credits of Wall*E. This nomination demands to be celebrated for a few reasons. For one, it is one of the only honors given to the film, which was criminally robbed [...]

On Repeat: Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus is a runaway freight train of a band, a totally wild and uncaged fury of bar band rowdiness, rock and roll fervor, and existential mayhem. Any band as wild and wooly as this one can’t help but turn a few heads, and this particular group had the good fortune of having their self-released [...]

Antony and the Johnsons: “The Crying Light”

For as long as Anthony Hegarty has been making music– or at the very least, ever since he released the Mercury Prize-winning I Am a Bird Now– his music has been inseparable from his personal identity. That’s not so much because critics and fans have celebrated his persona over his art, but because he’s made [...]

A.C. Newman: “Get Guilty”

Carl Newman has said in interviews that the title of his latest LP, Get Guilty, was chosen less for whatever legal, moral, or spiritual connotations it might have and more for the sheer sound of it– the alliteration, the cadence of the words, the way they shape the mouth and roll off the tongue. And [...]