He’s been doing it for years and years, but I must confess a little fatigue when it comes to Geoff Johns reinventing something for a modern audience. I’m not a big fan of Batman: Earth One, for instance, and I’ve grown very cool on his New 52 version of Justice League. However, the Shazam! feature that largely ran in the back pages of that Justice League title is surprising.

The highlights of day four of CMJ were two very different artists: Eleanor Friedberger and Willis Earl Beal. While both are incredibly talented musicians with idiosyncratic worldviews, their varying levels of commitment made for two very different sets.

Adèle is a voracious character, a high-school student absorbing her world with concentrated stares, oftentimes with her mouth agape.

On her recorded output to date, singer/songwriter Courtney Barnett has shaped an identity with too many edges to neatly define her.

In their own incongruous way, Psychic‘s two creators do an admirable job of defining the sound of Darkside‘s debut LP. While Nicolas Jaar believed he was making an electronic record, Dave Harrington thought he was involved in a rock record. It turns out they were both right-it’s an impressive combination of the two.

Luke Temple’s songwriting template has followed a decidedly circuitous path throughout the late ’00s and early ’10s.

Murray Lightburn’s debut solo album is something of a departure from his work with The Dears, the Montréal-based outfit he has headed for 18 years and five albums. Firstly, for MASS:LIGHT, Lightburn played all the instruments, constructing all the album’s sounds, save for some strings and brass.

By the third day of any festival, it takes a lot to get fans to come out to shows early.

Sometimes the best way to unpack a complicated historical event is to look at it from a smaller scale. That seems to be the goal of Boxers & Saints, the new two-volume graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, author of American Born Chinese.