Reviews of Music, Movies, Anime & More

An exhilarating of sampling, laptop electronica, glitch pop, and hip-hop.

Captain Yonder are at their best when Pfeiffer and Co. are busy drumming up a rollicking number.

Again, there’s a sense of vastness, and yet there’s none of the obligatory epic flourishes that one often hears in trance music.

When its firing on all cylinders, there’s nothing I love as much as Hong Kong cinema, and Sha Po Lang is a reminder of almost every reason why.

Not necessarily for the squeamish, but a surprisingly haunting treatise on death and memory.

This is Saint Etienne doing what they do best: writing breathless, effortless pop songs populated with stories of heartache and longing.

There’s an expansiveness to Bows’ music that it makes seem better suited to the silver screen than on a simple stereo.

This gloomily lush, opaque pop unfolds with every listen to reveal an amazing array of sonic details that consistently proves lovely and alluring.

An album that sounds as if it was composed only for long drives in the horizon’s general direction.

Tony Takitani is one of the more poignant and affecting films I’ve seen in a long time, a very powerful movie about longing and loss.

Rocinate is not without its weaknesses, but those only come as a result, I think, of being too ambitious.

Each note feels deliberate, planned, and unwasted, but the unconventional song structures and instrumentation keep the music from feeling artificial.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is not just my least favorite of the “Vengeance” trilogy, but also the weakest.

A collection of gorgeous and intimate piano recordings.

Warriors & Warlocks is far more fun than it has any right to be.

What I realized most watching Café Lumière was just how well Hou captures the inherent mystery of individual human beings.

All in all, a fabulous little gem that deserves much more attention than it’s probably received to this date.

It’s obvious that Ramifications is an album carefully and intricately constructed.

To say that Feist has one of the best voices I’ve heard all year would be an understatement, and a very obvious one at that.