I go to a lot of shows. But rarely—if ever—am I as fired up about an opener as I was about seeing Wildbirds & Peacedrums open for St. Vincent. Lighter already aloft (metaphorically anyway) but the end of their eight song set I was ready to quit my job and start following them around in a van.

Featuring his comic feature of the same name and storyboards from the associated animated IFC series, Dash Shaw’s The Unclothed Man In the 35th Century A.D. is a hell of a way to be introduced to a very special creator.

Toppling the band’s two previous EPs, Escape takes Moon Duo’s hyper-repetitive psych drone to a new level of rock. While the drum (drum machine?) beats may never change and the bass riffs are three notes at the most, Moon Duo gets by with layers of rhythm topped with deliriously overdriven guitar wankery—I mean that in a good way.

“If I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere.” Frank Sinatra’s statement in “New York, New York,” sums up HBO’s latest show, How to Make It in America, from the producers of Entourage. A group of 20-somethings, led by the lackluster Ben (Unscripted‘s Bryan Greenberg) and the terrier-like Cam (Raising Victor Vargas’ Victor Rasuk), are chasing their dreams, and being tripped by their foibles.

In a thoroughly modern genesis, Danica Novgorodoff’s Refresh, Refresh is based upon the screenplay of the same name by James Ponsoldt, which in turn was adapted from the short story by Benjamin Percy. Refresh, Refresh follows three boys in rural Oregon whose fathers have been sent off to war.

For their third studio album In This Light and On This Evening, Britain’s Editors have swapped guitars for synths and pessimism for nihilism. However, in their attempts to procure an oppressively dark ambience, they have bypassed heroes Depeche Mode and New Order, landing straight in standard-issue mall-Goth territory—a place with little thematic variance.

Simon Dark Vol. 3 collects the final issues of the series of the same name. The story centers on a mysterious youth living in a strange, Bat-Family-absent corner of Gotham City, and is far from a typical super hero tale, even as it incorporates its fair share of slugfests and action.

“I’ll lock the world away/Haunted by my better days,” Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, wheezes dejectedly on “Nowadays,” exhibiting the dignified sense of resignation that colors End Times, the second Eels album in less than 10 months, and light years away emotionally from his most recent, Hombre Lobo. Lobo found E assuming the fictional werewolf character “Dog Faced Boy,” waxing rapturously of unrequited love and desire. Here, he seems enmeshed in memory, consumed with the inevitable deterioration of relationships across time and distance, while still fitfully yearning for redemption.

The several plots in Forgetless swirl around an event: some sort of epic club in New York that’s about to open its doors for the last time. The book is rife with modern pop culture-isms—such as texting, tweeting, and viral video provocateurs—and age-old truisms—such as disaffected youth in search of counterfeit identification for the purposes of obtaining alcohol and such. Those elements, especially the pop culture stuff, can pretty easily muddle a story, let alone when you mix in the kickoff plot—that of a down and out model-turned-assassin coming to the event to commit her first kill.