Album Reviews

Marinero
La La La
Feb 14, 2025 Web Exclusive
The follow-up to Marinero’s (aka Jess Sylvester) sublime Hella Love hails from similar inspirations. While the previous album was a love letter to his longtime San Francisco home, La La La pays tribute to Sylvester’s more recent passion for his new home in Los Angeles.

Bartees Strange
Horror
Feb 13, 2025 Web Exclusive
What is it that binds people so tightly to horror? While a good chunk of the general population opt to avoid the full-body exhilaration of scary movies and stories, some of us are magnetized towards it.

Horsegirl
Phonetics On and On
Feb 12, 2025 Web Exclusive
Horsegirl’s sophomore album makes for a lovely little Valentine’s Day package.
News

20 Best Songs of the Week: The WAEVE, Anika, Deep Sea Diver, Destroyer, Andy Bell, Doves, and More
Feb 14, 2025
Welcome to the fourth Songs of the Week of 2025. We didn’t do a Songs of the Week last week, as I was out of town covering MegaCon, a comic-con in Orlando, FL. So this week’s supersized list covers the last two weeks. And what a couple of weeks they were for new tracks!
Interviews

Marinero on “La La La” and the Angeleno Life
Feb 14, 2025 Web Exclusive
Some four years and 400 miles from his boyhood home of San Francisco, Marinero’s Jess Sylvester finds himself in the middle of Los Angeles’ most horrific wildfires in memory. Connecting with Sylvester over Zoom at the mid-January peak of the devastation, he shares that he’s approximately 15 miles from the perimeter of the Eaton fire.

My Firsts: Heartworms
Feb 13, 2025 Web Exclusive
My Firsts is our email interview series where we ask musicians to tell us about their first life experiences, be it early childhood ones (first word, first concert, etc.) or their first tastes of being a musician (first band, first tour, etc.). For this My Firsts we talk to Heartworms (the project of Jojo Orme).
Pleased to meet you
HotWax: From School Corridors to Festival Stages
Jan 29, 2025
HotWax reflect on their journey from grassroots venues to major festival stages, the raw intensity of touring, and the power of collaboration on their debut album Hot Shock.
Lists

Seven Music Documentary Films and Series From the Second Half of 2024 to Watch (and Three To Skip)
Jan 08, 2025
Halfway through 2024, we published a list of “Seven Music Documentary Films and Series From 2024 to Watch (and Three to Skip).” Another glut of music documentaries and series have been released since then including the superstar projects Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words (Prime Video), Luther: Never Too Much (CNN), Melissa Etheridge: I’m Not Broken (Paramount+), Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band (Hulu), Olivia Rodrigo: Guts World Tour (Netflix), Elton John: Never Too Late (Disney+) and Yoshiki: Under the Sky (On Demand). If there is one takeaway from the overabundance of the biographical documentaries, it is that it’s best if the subject is not involved. The micromanaging of their story leaves viewers with a manicured and surface-level experience of the artist.
Although, the artist’s complete removal from the process can make a documentary spin into tabloid territory. There’s a lot of scandal on tap. Fallen Idols: Nick and Aaron Carter (Max) is the traumatic story of mental illness and sexual assault. While the latter is horrifying, the litigation is still underway. Why are the survivors on film talking about their experiences? Speaking of survivors, IMPACT x Nightline: Diddy’s Downfall (Hulu) is equally horrific and a far more disgusting explanation of the recent uncovering of Sean Combs’ abusive, and illegal actions during his entire time in the spotlight. Secret Life of Diddy: A Special Edition of 20/20 (Hulu) covers the exact same ground with many of the same talking heads journalists and individuals. On the positive side of hip hop, Tale of the Tape (Tubi) explores the world of mixtapes, the skill involved in making them, their impact on the culture and the legends of that scene. While the homemade quality of this short but deep unpacking is charming, it only speaks to people in that space and doesn’t go far in educating the uninitiated.
A brave director with a strong grasp on storytelling can create a compelling product that draws you in, whether or not you are interested in the artist or topic. But it feels like there is a positive correlation between the number of music documentaries released and how many of them aren’t worth pressing play on. Here are seven from the second half of 2024 that are worth watching and three not so much.—By Lily Moayeri
Live reviews

Toro Y Moi @ The Salt Shed, Chicago, US, February 7, 2025
Feb 12, 2025
Toro Y Moi brought his “Hole Erth” tour to Chicago last weekend
Blog

I Watched 416 Movies in 2024
Jan 31, 2025
As I did in 2023, in 2024 I kept a detailed log of every film I watched, all as part of my quest to watch as many movies I’d never seen before as possible. The ideal was to watch at least one film a day and adding it all up, it looks like I more than accomplished that. I watched 416 films in 2024—17 short films and 399 feature length films.
Media

- 20 Best Songs of the Week: The WAEVE, Anika, Deep Sea Diver, Destroyer, Andy Bell, Doves, and More
- 10 Best Songs of the Week: Bartees Strange, Miki Berenyi Trio, The Weather Station, and More
- 13 Best Songs of the Week: Blondshell, SPELLLING, Japanese Breakfast, Deep Sea Diver, and More
- 10 Best Songs of the Week: Father John Misty, The Weather Station, Horsegirl, Fat Dog, and More
Cinema Reviews

Like Father, Like Son
Feb 09, 2025 Web Exclusive
How something like this can be financed in the year 2025 is a mystery that only the producers of the film can explain.
DVD Reviews

A Certain Killer/A Killer’s Key
Studio: Arrow Video
Feb 13, 2025 Web Exclusive
Two underrated Kazuo Mori flicks receive their first English-language home video release.
Television Reviews

Disclaimer
Apple TV+, October 11, 2024
Oct 13, 2024 Web Exclusive
In the first two episodes with which it premiered, Disclaimer teeters between prestige drama and soapy psychological thriller, but writer/director Alfonso Cuaron’s ambition remains admirable.