Review: 'Nazz' Vinyl Reissue

In a post-John Wesley Harding/post-Music from Big Pink environment, most rock bands were leaving behind the potent influence of the British Invasion to embrace a more staunchly American, borderline rural sound.  Even British bands were following Dylan and The Band's leads, as The Beatles made the New Orleans-influenced "Lady Madonna" and the Stones channelled Delta country and blues into Beggars Banquet. 

Review: 'The Amplified Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana'

In late 1993, Nirvana was just two years into their global fame and had just three albums under their belts, but they'd already done and experienced enough for young journalist Michael Azerrad to fill a full and eventful biography. Ads for Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana were all over MTV, and for rock geeks of my generation, it became an immediate must read, especially after Kurt Cobain took his own life just a few months after publication. I guess we were a bit desperate to make some sense of what had happened.

Review: 'Withnail and I: From Cult to Classic '

If you've ever found you've gone on holiday by mistake, drank a bottle of lighter fluid, or recited Hamlet's soliloquy in the rain while your only friend in the world drifted off to a successful acting career, you can relate to Withnail. If you've ever had to endure the madness of someone like that, you can relate to I (not I as in Mike Segretto; I as in Marwood). 

If you have any idea what I'm talking about, you may now or ever have been a member of the Withnail and I cult. Bruce Robinson's 1987 film is famously a comedy without jokes, yet as Toby Benjamin's new book on the film accurately observes, "every single line of the screenplay is superb," which I'd slightly amend to "every single line of the screenplay is superbly funny." Vulgarly funny ("I fuck arses"? Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses!"), demandingly funny ("We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here, and we want them now!"), pathetically funny ("We've gone on holiday by mistake!"), insightfully funny ("They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man."), ominously funny ("If I medicined you, you'd think a brain tumor was a birthday present."), economically funny ("Scrubbers!").

Review: 'High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape'

In the age of streaming, entertainment has become so intangible and ephemeral that it makes sense there would be some pushback. In terms of music, this is most obvious in the vinyl revival, which I consider myself a small part of as both a devoted vinyl consumer and a reviewer of vinyl reissues who excludes other formats. There's no greater antidote to a tinny stream from a tiny phone than a slab of plastic you have to pull from a lovely 12-inch jacket, wipe down, slap onto a turntable, and flip halfway through. It may sound silly, certainly self-contradictory, but vinyl returns the soul to music by making it corporeal again.

Review: Lol Tolhurst's 'Goth: A History'

If you'd asked one of the original punk groups in the seventies--say, the Clash or the Sex Pistols--if they were punks, they would have sneered at you and damned the very idea of being labeled. Same goes for the original Goths--say, Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure. Lol Tolhurst, drummer of the latter group, says as much in Goth: A History. But with time comes a certain perspective, and today Tolhurst obviously embraces that old label, hence his new book celebrating some fifty years of pallor, gloomy songs, wiry hairstyles, black garb, and black moods. 

Review: 'The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book'

 

In 2019, Marvel artist Alex Ross created a mural of heroes for the comic giant's NY offices. A few years later he followed it up with the natural dark counterpart, and now Abrams ComicArts has compiled these portraits in The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book. 

Because Ross created each painting individually before situating it in the larger work, he is able to give each baddie his or her own page to be pulled out and pasted on your wall. With nothing but a plain white field for background, each colorful creep is free to pop from the book's 11" x 16" pages. 

Review: 'The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha' (Directors' Cuts series)

Paul Thomas Anderson's early career with such a clear and explosive style that you'd think he'd already been making films for decades. His debut, Hard Eight (aka: Sydney), was modest, but he went right from that to a sprawling epic (Boogie Nights) and an even more sprawling epic that was also ferociously outlandish and borderline supernatural (Magnolia). Everything about his filmmaking was so specific and consistent--from his rawly emotional and often juvenile dialogue to his actors' operatic performances to the details of his LA settings to his thrilling tonal shifts to his willingness to dive headlong into wild ideas--that Paul Thomas Anderson didn't seem as if he ever needed to stray from his wholly individual path.

Review: 'Werewolf Stories: Shape-Shifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts'

Werewolves are many things. They are scary and mystical. They are metaphors and metaphysical. They are the subjects of monsters movies, fairy tales, and folk lore. They are people who transform into four legged animals and furry two-legged weirdies that look suspiciously like Oliver Reed. They are fictions, and for a kooky few, non-fictions.