Widely hailed as a major turn in Emmylou Harris’s already illustrious career, the 1995 album Wrecking Ball found the beloved country artist exploring new avenues in production while reinforcing her ability to command the intricate arrangements — ultimately deepening her power to bring an…
#108: Excessive Force II: Force on Force Download episode here. Listen to episode here. Episode Description: It’s sequel month here on Summer Blockbuster!?!, where we tackle sequels to films previously covered on this podcast. This week, we’re taking on 1995’s Excessive Force II: Force…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
Had he not been murdered more than two decades ago, Tupac Shakur would have turned 48 this month; he would be in the third decade of his career, and probably still releasing an album every two years or so. He would also, very possibly,…
SoundCloud junkies Paul Attard and Joe Biglin run down some rap releases from the months of April and May in the latest What Would Meek Do?. This ninth official issue features takes on a few returning artists who’ve been covered by Meek in the…
The most striking aspect of Weekend Lover, the directorial debut of Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye, is its palpable sense of existence as a kind of ceaseless struggle. Indeed, the film itself feels practically willed into existence, exhibiting a preponderance of brash style…
PJ Harvey had already infiltrated the mainstream by 1995, thanks to two of her early singles (“Sheela Na Gig” and “50ft Queenie”) earning medium rotation on radio stations. Her clanging punk-rock trio were just accessible enough to appease fans of Pearl Jam, but just weird enough…
With a title sequence that references both Stan Brakhage and To Kill a Mockingbird, David Fincher’s Se7en announces itself as a decidedly progressive genre text. Throughout his career, but particularly in this early masterwork, Fincher’s consumed the fleeting styles of Hollywood and mainstream film — in this case, film noir — and…
“Let’s approach this like it’s our last album,” Billy Corgan claims to have said to his bandmates, in so many words, before work began on their supersized third record, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It wasn’t the last gasp of the Smashing Pumpkins, or even of…
The life-changing instance of reason defeating desire has been at the center of such great melodramatic moments as the airport climax of Casablancaand the railway station farewell of Brief Encounter, but for this viewer its most powerful incarnation comes towards the end of The Bridges of Madison…
