Listening: October 2026

After many years away, I’m back in the used-CD market, and it feels like home. This isn’t the Cars compilation I had on my wishlist—despite the title, this one is more than I needed—but I could hardly balk at two and a half hours of prime power pop for eight bucks, even if I’ve always been baffled by its product category: it collects the hits for the casual fans and B-sides and unreleased stuff for… See more →

More than a few moments in Marina Herlop’s Dja Dja tempt me to call it the best Björk album since Vespertine, but Herlop packs far too compelling a range of ideas into this record to just leave it at that. Among other things from my somewhat limited frame of reference for this sort of thing, I hear bits of the choir in Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell score, the abstract vocal experiments of Mike… See more →

I waited almost 30 years for this and it was basically perfect. Shudder to Think sounded amazing and was clearly having a blast, including Clint Walsh and Jherek Bischoff, the energetic new additions on rhythm guitar and bass. There were a few flubs here and there since this was the band’s first show of the year, all handled with grace and good humor. A 19-song set list drawn largely from Pony Express Record, as is… See more →

Fire Museum Presents started putting on events for adventurous arts lovers in Philly in 2007, but between my departure the following year and my return during Covid, I only just discovered them earlier this year, and I finally made it out to a show tonight. It was also my first visit to the Maas Building, a former brewery, which has carved out a charming upstairs event space among its artist studios. It was a perfect… See more →

In these early days of a post-BrooklynVegan world, who knows how long it would have taken for me to catch wind of Temptation to Exist, today’s surprise release from your best friend and mine, Andrew W.K., but thankfully my buddy Smo informed me via text early this afternoon, and I was spinning said release forthwith. Ever since Andrew cancelled all tour dates and deleted his website and social media almost immediately after releasing his last… See more →

The interviews get pretty repetitive in this rock doc about the post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy in Seattle, but they’re well worth sitting through for the film’s treasure trove of live footage of a ton of great bands from the scene who never hit the big time. Oddly enough, for as much as Hype! is about the Pacific Northwest, its most memorable moment for me is a bunch of Japanese rockabilly dudes with comically… See more →

Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →