PopMatters

2 days ago | popmatters.com | Eoghan Lyng

Life, Death & Dennis Hopper Sun Records Although the Waterboys‘ past efforts, This Is the Sea and Fisherman’s Blues, were underpinned by emotional undercurrents, Life, Death & Dennis Hopper goes one step further, concocting a conceptual album detailing the highs, lows, and smirks enjoyed by the eponymous actor.

3 days ago | popmatters.com | Michael Barrett

Entertaining Mr. Sloane Severin Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970) is a British comedy directed by Douglas Hickox. What matters is the angle through which it’s presented in the extras festooning the new Blu-ray from Severin Films. Nowadays, this campy collision of swinging Swinging Sixties London, the sexual revolution, and cinema’s loosening censorship is perceived as a Joe Orton film.

4 days ago | popmatters.com | Rick Quinn

Hope We Have Fun Bloom Field / Futures With the release of their fourth studio album,  Hope We Have Fun, Mt. Joy have crafted a work that combines their penchant for what their advance press describes as “folk-rock textures with festival-sized hooks” with some bold experimentation. The band’s latest release is super-sized in ambition; big themes, big swings, and plenty of the aforementioned big hooks that have rendered them a live festival favorite.

1 week ago | popmatters.com | Chris Ingalls

interius/exterius greyfade The latest release from Joseph Branciforte‘s greyfade label doesn’t stray at all from the concepts of previous albums in its catalog. Founded in 2019, the label, according to its official website, “takes as its basic premise the idea of a music release as a complete conceptual universe, integrating sound, compositional architecture, visual design, and text into a single object worthy of sustained engagement”.

1 week ago | popmatters.com | Charles Switzer

Religion and spirituality bring many people comfort for those nagging existential questions they confront as they age. Chiefly, our demise and the visceral pain of watching those we love perish into an oblivion we can only access once we expire… perhaps. As David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds conveys, the jury is still out on any of those tidy little stories wrapped in cute bows and biased, reassuring platitudes.