Jul 01, 2008 By Chris Tinkham Web Exclusive

A week into last month’s Los Angeles Film Festival, Baghead gave filmgoers a laughably disorienting cinema experience when, during an early scene that’s set at a fictional underground film festival, a director fields sincere post-screening questions from the audience about his ridiculous indie film We Are Naked. More

Jul 01, 2008 By Chris Tinkham Courtney Hunt

While discussing her feature debut Frozen River, which won the Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category at Sundance in January, Hunt is serious, polite and soft-spoken, yet clearly enamored with the topic of conversation—cinema. More

Jul 01, 2008 By Mark Redfern Steven Moffat

“When the time is right to talk about series five, I’ll talk about series five, but I’m not talking about it now.” Steven Moffat is staying mum. More

Jun 02, 2008 By Matt Fink Portishead

Ten years. It’s not much more than a blip on the timeline of recorded history, but it’s a lifetime for the typical musical act. In the ten years since Portishead last had a new release, the music industry—if not the world—has changed several times over. More

Jun 02, 2008 By Matt Fink My Morning Jacket

Like similarly inartful musical identifiers “pop” and “rock,” “soul” is a term that elicits an intuitive response but that, in reality, has been denuded of any real meaning for modern listeners. Was it really created by Ray Charles in the early 1950s when he translated the energy of gospel music into a secular context? If James Brown is the “Godfather of Soul,” are his songs the template? What about Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, possibly the two most definitive artists in the genre? Do they belong categorized beside Jamie Lidell and Amy Winehouse? What is the essence of soul music? My Morning Jacket asks some of these questions on their fifth studio album, Evil Urges.
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Jun 02, 2008 By Matt Fink Summer 2008 - The Protest Issue

Given that the prospect of describing music is an inherently abstract process—entrusting words or images to capture the infinite permutations of rhythms, tones, and textures—it only makes sense that some artists who work in the sound medium would perceive these qualities differently than the rest of us. In technical terms, such folks are said to have “narrow band synesthesia,” a phenomenon where certain sounds or instruments consistently evoke a particular visual essence, and ideas for songs might only be intelligible as collages of color. In this case, A Thousand Shark’s Teeth is a shadowy landscape of grays and dark blues, graceful and brooding, an album created by someone who saw it all in her head. More

Jun 02, 2008 By Frank Valish Michael Stipe

For the better part of the last three decades, Michael Stipe has passionately melded his rock and roll with his activism. From R.E.M.’s early days as Athens, GA indie-rockers through their big ’90s hits and the subtler explorations of their later work, Stipe and company have always had their hands in politics, whether teaming with Rock the Vote in the early ’90s, playing the Vote for Change tour in 2004, or supporting causes from hunger relief to women’s rights and Greenpeace. More

Jun 02, 2008 By Chris Tinkham Lykke Li

In 2002, when indie kids in the U.S. looked to Sweden as a hotbed for new music upon the emergence of bands such as The Hives, 16-year-old Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson was devising her escape from Stockholm. More

Jun 02, 2008 By Laura Ferreiro Elbow

Given all the obstacles Elbow has faced over the past three years, it’s quite an accomplishment that the veteran Manchester, England, quintet were able to write an album at all, let alone one that is arguably the best of their decade-long career. The sinking of their long-time record label, V2, and ensuing legal battles left Elbow doubting the fate of their fourth album and contemplating getting day jobs in order to survive. More