If Yo La Tengo’s career were human, it would have been granted the right to vote shortly after their 1997 album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. (Feel old yet?) As they approach the end of their second decade together, it seems almost inevitable that the Hoboken, New Jersey band would start ruminating on the deeper stuff—chiefly life and death. Dark?

Halfway through the show, Father John Misty (aka J. Tillman) looked to the back of the venue, where there’s a bar lined with mirrors. He gazed at his reflection, wondering out loud, “Who is that anorexic homeless person dancing around in his long underwear?”

Wu-Tang’s quietest original member made a somewhat impromptu-feeling release of this third solo record in place of his long-anticipated Loyalty Is Royalty; that other feature-oriented album is still to come, while this one is billed as a more soul-inflected side project.

For a band known for their unique catalog of psych-pop, composing the soundtrack to a film like Berberian Sound Studio had to be seen as a plum job. Broadcast’s Trish Keenan and James Cargill worked together on the project prior to Keenan’s tragic passing in January of 2011.

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein are comedic live wires on the third season of Portlandia.

As the 1994 album Parklife was stirring America’s earliest interest in Blur, it blew up into what came to be seen as a for-the-ages classic in Britain.

Neil Young’s autobiography, although written in somewhat unconventional form, is a fascination portrait of a master.

If 2011 was the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, 2012 was the anniversary of emo. Purists will tell you that emo grew out of the hardcore scene years before, and some will argue that the genre didn’t really find its voice until 1994’s Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate.

Shot in sumptuous black and white, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’ new film, Tabu, is a delight to the visceral senses and to the mind.