The only form CYR represents a return to is Corgan’s familiar, tedious navel-gazing and nostalgic rehash. The year is (was) 2020, and Billy Corgan,…
To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic…
Hamilton barely qualifies as a film, losing much of what makes it a stage success in translation, and its historical revisionism feels much murkier…
Describing Sofia Behrs Tolstaya, a diarist and photographer who remains better known as the wife of Leo Tolstoy, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote: “With her mangled…
In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he…
Johnny Jewel’s music is imbued with an eldritch air of nostalgia, the coupling of retro synth-pop and filmic ambiance bringing to mind images of…
When Miles Davis released his seminal 1969 album In a Silent Way, its newfangled, neoteric sound — which Lester Bangs described as “space music” —…
One of the horniest albums ever recorded, Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson is a 28-minute exhalation of libidinous longing. The album tells a Lolita-like tale, partially autobiographical,…
A man (bearded, crestfallen) traipses into the woods, where he holes up in a small cabin and writes music about his heartbreak — agonizingly…
Released in the summer of 1983, one year after Steven Spielberg’s E.T and four months after Ronald Reagan unveiled his plan for “Star Wars,” Brian…
“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” Philip K. Dick wrote in A Scanner Darkly. Thom Yorke, modern music’s paranoid soothsayer,…
Happiness is becoming of Bill Callahan. Well, maybe not happiness, at least not the rapturous, jump-for-joy kind, but a kind of serene happiness, mellow,…
The National have been making music for about 20 years, and, while their style has developed over those two decades — becoming more ornate,…
Ensconced in the forest, enfolded by lush, verdant foliage, a spider’s web glints, caught in the halation of the sun; the glistening, intricate pattern…
“Things are changing,” William Basinski told Pitchfork in 2012. “If the world ends on December 21, I’ll be perfectly happy with that. Who knows…
Purple Butterfly is a film of dreamy realism, sometimes insoluble and suffused with a haze that is, at once, sepulchral yet sultry — a film…
The recently released High Life is perhaps the first film by septuagenarian Claire Denis with a plot fit for an elevator pitch: “Robert Pattinson…
From its whispery, ethereal opener, “Contact,” Big Thief’s new album is permeated by an air of otherness. Adrianne Lenker’s voice is an aural phenomenon, Buck…