Someone needs to cast of Montreal bandleader Kevin Barnes in a revival of Rocky Horror Picture Show revue. After 12 years of gender bending, Technicolor, costumed pop, this seems like the only logical career arc. It probably goes without saying that seeing of Montreal live in concert is a damn good time.

The Coral keep making the same record over and over again. If you’re into sea shanties with great harmonies, then you’re in luck. The Coral has turned that blueprint around for the sixth time on The Butterfly House. Instead of sounding stale, this group from the wrong side of Liverpool’s Mersey River, the Wirral, is getting better at their branded sound.

Deservedly back in print after several years, Reneé French’s The Ticking is damned clever and well done. There’s a certain fragility in both the art and the story that belie reader expectations: a deformed boy whose mother passes in childbirth could be played so many ways, most of them poorly and stereotypically.

Like the shark documentary it’s named after, this collaboration between Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart reveals a frightening menace lurking beneath a placid surface. The dulcet finger-picked acoustic guitar in “Song for the Greater Jihad,” for instance, is suddenly severed by what sounds like a vicious power tool

1988’s Big Thing is widely regarded as the worst Duran Duran album. But similar to Notorious, released two years earlier, the music on Big Thing sounds better now than it did 20 years ago.

Now that we’re a few decades out from the often terrible but always fun musical landscape of the 1980s, it’s easier to get some perspective on some of the era’s biggest bands and biggest releases.

One of the Vertigo Crime original hardcovers, A Sickness in the Family sets a compellingly creepy mood. The focus is on the Usher family, who may look normal and even enviable on the surface, but cracks in the family facade offer a view at selfishness, philandering, corruption, and disappointment.

Modern music is just as guilty of setting the stage for a mega ’80s comeback as are the artists who defined the era. The synthesizer has pushed its way back to the top of the mix and so it makes—musical—sense for the instrument’s masters to give things another go.

The hook of Superman: Earth One is that although both Clark Kent’s teenage adventures in his hometown of Smallville and his early years as Superman in Metropolis have been well chronicled, the time period between those two has been left largely unexplored.