Unlike the other songwriters mentioned, Linkous’s mortality was always ever-present. Fame came knocking early: Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot landed them on Radiohead’s radar, who were so enchanted with the record in their pre-OK Computer days that they asked Sparklehorse to open for them on tour in Europe. Near the end, he was found unconscious in his hotel room, his bloodstream polluted by a brutal combo of alcohol, prescription meds, and heroin (depending on which version of the story you’d hear him tell). When the paramedics moved his legs out from under his body, where they’d been trapped for 14 hours, it caused cardiac arrest, and he was clinically dead for several minutes. He would remain hospitalized for three months.

It was the beginning of a long, hard road for the singer, now temporarily wheelchair-bound, and worried that the ordeal had left him with brain damage and initially unable to play guitar, though he would, of course, regain that ability. The songs of Good Morning Spider were largely penned before that fateful night in London but recorded after the fact, meaning even the earlier songs are clouded, shaded and transformed by the fallout of the overdose.

It’s rare, though, for bitterness to be legible in the mix. “Pig” was one of the tracks Linkous wrote after his overdose, but even when he yowls “I want a new body that’s strong/ I’m a butchered cow” over the crunchy guitar onslaught, it sounds frustrated but far from resentful. Many lyrics, though, sound like they were written by an emotionally exhausted man. In “Sunshine,” he gently coos about the impermanence of everything that surrounds him: “There will come a time gigantic/ Waves will crush the junk that I have saved/ When the moon explodes or floats away/ I’ll lose the souvenirs I made,” he sings over a sluggish drum machine beat.

Plenty of stanzas are full of complicated feelings, but the single lines cut deepest. “Here come the painbirds” on “Painbirds” is full of resignation. “My bones wish to escape” on “Box of Stars (Part One)” longs for the peaceful oblivion he often seemed to be chasing. “Loneliness came kicking at my door,” his honey-sweet voice confesses on “Maria’s Little Elbow.” Easily the best distillation of all of Good Morning Spider’s broken and beaten worldview isn’t even Linkous’ writing, it’s Charles Laughton: “Hell, it’s a hard world for little things,” he sings on “Ghost of His Smile,” cribbing from The Night of the Hunter’s Rachel Cooper. If you can’t relate to any of these feelings, consider yourself lucky to have evaded the clutches of the dragons of depression and addiction. For anyone who winces when they listen to Linkous telling us that “All I want is to be a happy man,” though, Good Morning Spider (and the whole oeuvre of Sparklehorse) can make it easy to forget it wasn’t written just for you.

In spite of it all, Good Morning Spider teems with life and inventiveness. Unlike his largely studio-recorded Sparklehorse debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, Good Morning Spider was recorded in the tiny home studio Linkous built for himself in Virginia, full of junk keyboards, salvaged microphones, and an old telecom system, all fed into a 16-track home studio dubbed Static King. Many songs sound outstanding, like “Sick of Goodbyes” (co-written by Cracker songwriter David Lowery), “Hundreds of Sparrows” and “Maria’s Little Elbow.” Others, though, have the warped warmth of an album recorded with a bedroom scrapheap and a Speak-and-Spell. Many could have written songs as good as Linkous, but only Linkous’ mind could have produced an album like Good Morning Spider, where a song as beautiful as “Sunshine” is afflicted by a haunting and strange warble-garble that occasionally bubbles to the surface, audible enough to perplex you, but not enough to disrupt the song’s flow.

That flow and each song’s construction form a strange little mystery, defying conventional wisdom at every turn. The weird impulses Linkous began to entertain when Lowery left an eight-track at his house had mutated into clever ideas and self-trained techniques. The tape noise and hiss present throughout Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot have graduated from background player to supporting cast member. At one point, on “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man,” he even takes the song he’d written and makes it sound as though it’s coming through a distant radio station, legible enough to know the rest of the song probably sounds great, but mangled enough that when it finally emerges from its place between stations, you get a little mad to have not heard the rest. (PJ Harvey compatriot Eric Drew Feldman eventually convinced him to record a proper version of the song, thank goodness.)

Linkous dragged himself back from the jaws of death itself to create Good Morning Spider, not only giving him something to soldier on for, but giving him a tiny, fragile thing that only he could help birth and raise. The end result is not unlike every Sparklehorse album: a beautiful, long journey through pain and hope and sadness and misery and tender bliss. One album and three years later, he would distill all those feelings (and more) into It’s a Wonderful Life, a slower, more intentional record that didn’t even try to entertain the idea that Sparklehorse was capable of crossover appeal or radio hits. Hopefully, though, the recent vinyl reissue of the long out-of-print Good Morning Spider will help more people discover Sparklehorse’s soft, melancholy world. Linkous’s legacy may never escape the shadow of his sorrow, but even the smallest spotlight on his work will bring the focus back where it belongs: the brilliance of the songs he made during his too-short time on Earth.

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Right from the outset, Hila aims for something grander than anything that Rose has attempted before. Opener “Olo” announces itself as something cinematic, a cross between the synth film scores of Tangerine Dream and Peter Gabriel’s most adventurous Fairlight CMI experiments. It seeks to overwhelm the listener, to elevate them from this plane before being brought down to earth by the more approachable synth-pop of “Cant Be Wrong.” This is a trick that Rose pulls quite often throughout Hila, luring us in up to a certain point before taking us to places we weren’t expecting to go. Hila is a weaving journey of an album as a result, often taking strange turns that aren’t deliberate shocks to the system so much as they are instinctual leaps from one thought to another. Rose has stated in interviews that the goal behind Hila was to reflect her own processing of emotions (namely grief), and she succeeds in capturing the sort of illogical logic that the mind follows when trying to grapple with strong emotions.

Yet this isn’t really a bearing of the soul from Frankie Rose; for as upfront as she has been in discussing the motivations behind making Hila, the album itself still keeps the listener at a distance when it comes to directly grappling with these feelings. Much of this comes through Rose’s voice, which often appears distorted and treated with effects in such a way that the album veers towards dream-pop with just a few lines coming through amid the sea of synthesized sounds. This makes for some of the album’s strongest moments on pure surface level, such as how her layered voice pairs with the stomping drum machines on the Depeche Mode-inspired “Manifest” or on the wordless echoes of “Rainman,” a track that could have easily fit alongside Vangelis’ compositions for Blade Runner. Yet, even as the vocals become so swirling and dreamlike as to render the words incomprehensible, there’s still palpable feelings of sadness and a desire to move on to something different. As Frankie Rose has become more confident in her new method of working, her songs develop an impact that they hadn’t had before.

Hila isn’t Rose’s most approachable record. Putting aside the bleak subject matter, the album demands a certain level of attention paid to it. Each song feels layered with new ideas and meaning waiting to be discovered on follow-up listens. Rose attempted to capture something both grand and intimate with Hila, trying to depict personal tragedy on a vast scale while focusing on overall feeling rather than specific details. As a result, Hila is the sort of record that, in time, could engender a devotion among some listeners willing to stay on its wavelength and listen to it grow.

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The History of Concrete is much closer to Wilson’s initial show than anything Fielder has done, though Wilson’s film and his show could be compared to the differences between Nathan for You and Finding Frances. Still, an extended episode of How To is great stuff, showing Wilson’s formula has not worn thin yet. Many blurbs about this film misrepresent narrative elements (likely not on purpose—it’s difficult to give an elevator pitch for Wilson’s film), billing it as a film about concrete in the style of a Hallmark movie. If you squint, this is not the most unfair interpretation. Wilson does go to a class about the formula of Hallmark movies, and his film features numerous factoids about concrete (particularly as it relates to New York, of course). However, it’s hard to identify these elements as any more important than the film’s musings on a local transcendence marathon or aging musician.

Fans of How To are likely already familiar with Wilson’s sidewinding approach to narrative; the filmmaker’s talent has always been leading with an innocent question to explore something intimate soon after, such as in “How to Cover Your Furniture,” when Wilson pivots from protecting his couch from his cat to learning about foreskin restoration from an anti-circumcision activist in his dilapidated studio apartment. This continues in The History of Concrete: perhaps the funniest culmination is at a baffling influencer/celebrity party where he and Tim Robinson are esteemed guests. If The History of Concrete is “about” anything, it’s not New York City or concrete but rather how films are made and what audiences expect from them. Anyone with a Mubi account can peruse dozens, if not hundreds, of projects that have a similar jumping-off point, though few are as slick or as funny as this.

Another aspect consistent with the How To formula is Wilson’s frankness about the potential horrors that await us in the future, undercut by something mimicking optimism. When Wilson goes to a concrete convention, viewers see a bleak future. Environmental solutions seem secondary to undercutting the market for profit. Beyond that, the financial solution to concrete’s economic woes is awful-looking 3D-printed concrete, which hardly inspires hope. Still, Wilson gets a funny segment out of it, culminating in drone-shot footage he paid for of the first 3D-printed Starbucks—in, where else, but the concrete wasteland of Texas.

Some might find it disappointing that not too much differentiates The History of Concrete from the show that catapulted Wilson to fame. There is a limit to how much this kind of meandering one can take, even if the schtick is undoubtedly compelling. Can Wilson transcend this in his next project? What would he even do with a larger budget, or a different approach to filmmaking? It’s hard to imagine what a Wilson film would look like if it weren’t like this, and this might indicate future career longevity problems for the director. For now, though, a feature-length work of this nature is a welcome treasure, just as a fourth season of his series would have been.

If there’s a thesis in The History of Concrete, it’s probably something like: “the appeal to audiovisual entertainment is malleable, and it’s hard to know what makes something work or not work, so try to get the money to do what you want to and worry about everything else later.” Of course, Wilson rarely enunciates anything to this degree, and even in the more expositional segments, anything resembling truth-telling is hidden behind a visual gag or undercut by a wildly off-the-wall observation which, if anything, contradicts whatever point he was trying to make. It’s perhaps better to enjoy the ride while considering what the overarching “point” of Wilson’s work here is, rather than to wonder if he’s buying into whatever Hallmark bullshit he’s being fed.

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

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The band had discussed making a “countrified” version of their songs previously with Rolling Stone, namechecking Australia’s King of Country, Slim Dusty, as an influence, as well as goofball Aussie country legend Chad Morgan. To this end, they decided to set up shop in Los Angeles’ El Coyote Cafe (where Sharon Tate ate her last meal), invite a few friends, and have themselves a hoedown. The show spawned an album as well as a concert film. The setup is announced by Taylor at the beginning of the proceedings: “We’re gonna play some slowed-down Amyl covers and a couple of originals.” This is not entirely true; the “cover” of “Big Dreams” that opens the record is a stripped-down but sped-up version of the song, matching the tempo that they’ve adopted for the song in their standard live sets.

Elsewhere, though, the band stays true to Taylor’s original promise. Classic tracks like “Hertz” and “Jerkin'” (the latter dedicated to “some world leaders in some countries”) retain their hard-edged punk flavor while being presented as something quite a bit more intimately ramshackle. Both “Chewing Gum,” from their last album Cartoon Darkness, as well as the very early single “Caltex Cowgirl” benefit greatly from the slight rearrangement. The slowdown in pace and the downplaying of the instruments in favor of a greater focus on Taylor’s voice reveals a fragility and vulnerability that tends to get buried in a normal set, where the volume is cranked and everyone is drenched in sweat. Other songs are redone to fit the rustic theme, although only to a point. “Me and the Girls,” the mile-a-minute closer from Cartoon Darkness, is recast here as “Me and the Girls (Are Drunk at the Pig Farm),” although not much is altered beyond sticking the pig farm line into an appropriate part of the song. On the other hand, 2021’s “Don’t Need a Cunt (Like You to Love Me)” is more greatly reworked, becoming a stomping hand-clapper that sums up the whole ethos of the night: “Little Bit Punk, Little Bit Country.”

There are a couple of unreleased (or, as Taylor chuckles, “hopefully soon to be released”) songs included in the lineup. The first is “Fella,” a hilarious singalong about catching a man at knifepoint, making him marry you with a gun to his head and then tying him outside like a dog when he tries to run away. It’s the most country-fried moment on the record, Chad Morgan recast with a mohawk and a box of beer. The other is the closer, “Bag of Cocaine,” which ends everything at a rapid pace, tripping over itself to get out a typically off-kilter story about doing coke to stay awake while also being a garrulous asshole. They’re both excellent Sniffers tracks, although the band is unlikely to top the versions they’ve laid out here. The real highlight of the album, though, is the cover of Slim Dusty’s steel-wrapped death song “Lights on the Hill.” The band plays it marginally more reverently than their own material, digging into the song and wringing out the pathos inherent in it in a way that never once feels like they’re playing it on a lark.

Earlier this year, fellow Australians Pond put out a record in which they imitated their idea of the kind of band that hung out at an Australian pub in the early ’80s. It was a great-sounding failure, and Truth or Consequence shows why. Pond wanted to be that kind of band but aren’t; Amyl and the Sniffers are that kind of band, so they can pull off a change like this with aplomb. Their version of punk rock crosses over with Aussie country in such a way that shows the blurred lines between the two. It’s not as immediately fun as it would be to witness it live, but it’s as close as it could ever possibly come.

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Almereyda, a protégé of film critic and painter Manny Farber, chose to transplant the hip and glacial post-Hartley and post-Ferrara New York ethos onto the tragedy of the prince of Denmark while keeping the Bard’s verse intact. Before him, Orson Welles had come from a seasoned theatre background, a perspective that resonated less for Almereyda as a video artist, albeit with a background in art history, but Almereyda did indeed have a familiarity and real connection with the material – just see his essay in the companion booklet of Criterion’s The Bad Sleep Well to assuage any doubts. The more garishly 2000s setting updates would of course come to mark the film – as much as anything did – in the public consciousness: the “Denmark Corporation” based out of Hotel Elsinore; the infamous “to be or not to be” in a Manhattan Blockbuster; even the Osric fax machine. Such dressing would be both indicative and deceptive as to Almereyda’s approach, one both playful and thoughtful.

Semi-comically broody film student Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) mopes about the palatial estates of Hotel Elsinore as the death of his father (Sam Shepard) seems to bother his former proverbial court even less than in the usual Hamlet. Indeed, the Denmark Corporation and their affiliates seem bursting with life in a shocking variety of manners, as if Almereyda gave each complete free reign on their own angle; it’s a testament to the time and place that they all believably coexist. Karl Geary’s aimless (Irish!) expat Horatio, Steve Zahn and Dechen Thurman’s Bill & Ted-ish Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Bill Murray’s buffoonish corporate stiff Polonius – an uncharacteristically effective weaponization of his cloying screen presence in this era – and his sullen children (Julia Stiles, whose real pathos offsets some of her more risible antagonists, and a bafflingly-accented Liev Schreiber): all definitively putting on a show, but collectively forming a rich and cohesive portrait. Almereyda even underscores this game of dress-up by setting the film at Halloween.

Reveling most in the raucous court are the characters of Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) and Gertrude (Diane Venora), happy at the top, with a near grasp of the breadth of their dominion that the average executive probably wouldn’t have, but with the resident thoughtlessness of their positions. MacLachlan gives us an idiosyncratic but resonant “king,” a jockish people-pleaser, an amiable but vacuous public face servile to his own basest whims. Venora gives probably the most straightforwardly good and most ripped-from-the-text performance as MacLachlan’s “queen,” similarly vacuous yet believably conflicted, eventually driven to her wits’ end by her nitwit son’s multiple murders and Denmark’s antics. But their conviviality only further implies a distance from the court that Old King Hamlet must have shared with his son, who no one seems to much like here: this sulking, whining prince with aspirations to speaking truth to power can stumble upon existential truths and universal emotional resonance, but he’s not here to speak truth to power, because after all, he is power. The Hamlets are no heroes, Almereyda remembers, and thus the cold, cutthroat business setting and the shadowy urban locales end up less obvious than pertinent.

These shadows are used to the film’s advantage not just literally but figuratively; Almereyda juggles tons of ideas about his then-present, all deliberately obscured by the narrative at hand. From commercialism to systems of power (photos abound of Claudius chumming it up with the Clintons) to surveillance, he has plenty of fears about the new millennium, but none is dwelt upon, because each thematic angle has enough material for a whole new production. Such is the potential, such is performance.

In particular, Almereyda uses his beloved video less as an overt focus of the medium than as a glue, or as Jonathan Rosenbaum noted, almost a Greek chorus. Sam Shepard’s Ghost is first brought to Horatio, Marcella (Paula Malcomson) and the viewers’ attention via ominous CCTV – the implicit malevolence of the modern “guard” measure – but Almereyda and company stop short of going so far as to keep Shepard’s specter completely within the confines of the television screen.

The most integrated use of the format comes with Hamlet’s The Mousetrap, here a dialogue-free student film of his comprised of a wealth of archival footage, from Electrocuting an Elephant to adulterers from a more classically Shakespearean Antony & Cleopatra to Deep Throat. The Mousetrap elicits its intended reaction from Claudius, his sins laid bare for the world to see even if they know not, but all else present seem to regard the screening – in a corporate screening room for the Denmark Corporation – as not much more than an obligation, a bore that their nepo prince can subject them to and ask if they get it. This strangely is the most harrowing scene in the film as opposed to the climactic rooftop duel between Hawke’s Hamlet and Schreiber’s Laertes, a break from an open-minded portrait of Theme As Theme into a more personal and inescapable concern, of corporate interests sinking their hooks into the future of art and everyday life even as corporate stooges of various sorts deny it to themselves. The double whammy of sweeping corporate control literalized and the thought that our concerns will be brought to the surface subconsciously no matter how much we avoid them is practically smothering.

But even Hamlet Almereyda cannot treat with total contempt. Hawke would thank Almereyda years later as a formalist for making his performance compelling: “I’m just not that kind of actor,” although you certainly feel to some extent a connection to his Hamlet’s angst and isolation. But the thanks is well-earned: Hamlet’s Pixelvision camera is, after all, the same Almereyda has used on the likes of his vampire masterwork Nadja, and Hamlet is similarly suffocated by the thought of the future and the 21st century. There is value in a young student baring his soul on camera, no matter the origins, no matter the intent, no matter how annoying and dour he may or may not be, and there is value when that soul is eliminated.

From when Hamlet contemplates suicide as The Crow: City of Angels plays on the Blockbuster television screens to when Robert MacNeil delivers the closing lines on a live broadcast, Almereyda coats his fingers in irony, but remembers that irony and sincerity are alike in dignity: his soul is forever tangible. Performance is what life is after all, and the more variety the better. It’s a shaggy film, distant and perhaps too cute to some, but Almereyda is ultimately successful in becoming, as his mentor would say, the termite to the more bombastic Kenneth Branagh’s white elephant. He would continue poking his thumbs in the eyes of Shakespeare purists well into the new century (see his crack house Shakespeare mania in Cymbeline), his impishness but an envelope for his love letter to the amateur and to sheer possibility. Who among us can’t find value in that?

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This fact drives so much of the tortured and—though the film is only about 85 minutes, minus credits—prolonged conflict in Giselle Bonilla’s feature debut that any and all that follows the set-up suffers for the initial scenario’s inherent problems. The tone adopted by Bonilla, as director, and Brill, as lead actor, is one of detached quirk, as well of unquestioned loyalty to the perspective of its main character. That’s understandable, of course, because to split that perspective among any of the other characters wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it is still a pox on everything around it.

Doug is, simply put, a loser—a sore, sour and sardonic presence for anyone and everyone around him, and one spends the entire running time here wondering whether all of them would be better off if he received a certain, out-of-state opportunity that, in the opening scenes, he has been presented in his capacity as a playwright. That he doesn’t ultimately receive that opportunity is not actually surprising, since Bonilla and screenwriter Alexander Heller would obviously prefer to keep this story going at all costs. It does mean that the movie must happen, and our suspicion that it won’t go well is proven over and over again (and again, etc.).

The middle school, where Doug is also a drama teacher, is preparing for its big stage production for the end of the year, and while the consensus is that everyone will be doing West Side Story (again and alongside all the other schools in the district), the revelation of Abigail and Brady’s newfound relationship, displayed for everyone to see in the rooms and hallways, places a different sort of conviction in Doug’s heart. He goes through the motions of putting on the tale of the star-crossed lovers for a while, but ultimately, he changes tactics, suggesting a new sort of musical that’s kind of hodgepodge. The sole reason for it to exist is to embarrass and humiliate Brady in front of the school board and the students’ parents.

None of this is particularly funny or truthful, and once we get an idea of what this amateur student theater production is supposed to be about—for a hint, it’s a national tragedy that, just a week before the writing of this review, received its silver anniversary—all the wind has been knocked out of it by the slow degradation of nearly every character here. Doug does recruit some students with a modicum of personality—the main three played by Nevada Jose, Melanie Herrera and Chyler Emery Stern—and the sheer bravado of the play is, well, something to behold. That it’s presented as a montage, further exhibiting that quirky detachment, is a different sort of disappointment.

It’s a lot of unfunny nonsense, leading to a mildly funny bit of nonsense that comes far too late to resuscitate anything about this dead-on-arrival material. The Musical introduces us to a thoroughly disreputable protagonist, and then it has neither the conviction nor the courage to deal with him as he is: an incel.

Photo courtesy of Blue Harbor Entertainment

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The two-part “Portals” begins the album, with each section presenting a different aspect of Jacob’s method. “Portals I: In the Offing” is a dynamic exploration of percussive melody, filled with single-note piano and marimba lines, sometimes alternating, sometimes complementing each other. Traces of minimalism — more of the primal Charlemagne Palestine variety than the elegant Glass/Reich kind — can be found in the repetition, but Jacob mostly avoids hypnotic stasis. Instead of long, unspooling cycles, we get short, modulated motifs punctuated by sharp, bell-like accents, delivered by both the piano and various metallophones. The ringing quality of gamelan is evident for the first three minutes or so, but this tension ultimately segues, surprisingly smoothly, into chordal harmony. SHHH!! Ensemble’s Zac Pulak and Edana Higham interpret the piece with verve and sensitivity, never overdoing the staccato sections or making the softer passages too velvety.

“Portals II: The Verge” is a piece for a trio but is far less busy than its predecessor. At 11:48, it feels much longer than “Portals I,'” which is only a minute shorter. It mostly consists of bowed-cymbal drones, from Architek’s Noam Bierstone and Alexander Haupt, and elongated viola notes from Marilou Lepage, the metallic timbres of which increasingly grow to resemble each other. Some rustling shells add texture beginning around minute three, as the drones grow thinner and more piercing, nearing the pitch of feedback. It’s a haunting track, especially when Lepage begins to play real melodies on her viola, but it could stand to be a couple minutes shorter. In a performance context, where the musicians could be seen and vibration of their tones felt, the incremental flow of “Portals II” no doubt captivates; on record, it occasionally feels slack.

The even-longer title piece could also be condensed. Featuring vocals from Asitha Tennekoon, Lucien Durey, Danny Najjar and Eric Biskupski, it begins with a series of brushed drum whooshes, murmurs and rumbles from Architek, over which voices speak of pollutants and their effects in clipped phrases. It gradually becomes more musical, with eerie marimbas and understated choral singing, all in the service of describing industrial pollution’s long-term effects on the world. It’s a serious topic that’s treated with appropriate gravity, leavened with a hint of the unreality that contemplation of deep geological time brings, but the copious negative space sometimes stretches things too thin. For a piece about the pressure of time and the hard-to-fathom weight of human actions, it’s sometimes not heavy enough.

If the album tracks had been trimmed, perhaps the digital bonuses could have been included on the physical release. The relegation of “Collective Ungraspable” to digital only seems odd considering it’s played by NYC ensemble Sō Percussion, probably the most well-known group on the album, at least in the United States. After listening to its long, subtle, percussion-only stretches, though, the decision makes sense. Like “Portals II,” “Collective Ungraspable” probably fares better in a live setting. “Pith,” a piece for solo vibraphone played by Haupt, is another story. Relatively short (five minutes) and filled with strange colors and surprising tones, the aptly named “Pith” has a concentrated joie de vivre and an experimental flair. It’s an indication that Jacob can do immediacy at the same time as innovation. Hopefully, it’s a mode she continues to investigate, both as a musician and a composer.

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The album re-re-introduces the somber mode with expert players, assembling the roster of musicians from the first two outings, as well as 1998’s Mutations, another Nigel Godrich production superior to all these albums. Here, though, Beck settles into a lonely trip, doing little to justify another ride-along. Introspection and slowness can be antidotes to the chaos of the day, but much of Ride Lonesome so precisely echoes his earlier songs that the music is inescapably accompanied–haunted, even–by its former cycles.

To be fair, maybe this inescapability is the point? Perhaps, as Mark Wiener (the late Matthew Faber) said so memorably in Palindromes, an early-‘00s movie that shared serious-Beck’s fatalism of the period, “People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do, but they don’t.” The first track and single, “Ride Lonesome,” exists very much in the spirit of “The Golden Age” and swaps that song’s resignation or sense of futility for a wise elicitation of deep solitude that music cannot combat. The lyrics state this outright: “There’s no song that could tell your heart what it already knew.”

Beck leans into this perspective about self-knowledge in “Run Away,” suggesting that whatever one needs to confront is already within, not without. This is an intriguing theme for an album that outwardly seems to be about traveling somewhere or towards something. The penultimate song, “If You Don’t Know What Love Is,” concludes these threads by equating love and knowledge, presenting a drained figure unacquainted with love, and therefore knowing nothing and not needing to run at all. “Failed Words” likewise goes deep on the topic or feeling of futility. The piano’s rhythmic function in the song distinguishes it as a kind of modern classical composition, more dynamic or unexpected than much of what appears on this set of songs and their lineage.

Ride Lonesome is a plush album whose occasional hints of country and western modes, including harmonica on a couple of tracks in the second half, indicate some interesting roads not travelled. In many ways, this conservatism is the opposite of Mutations, which communicated a thing or two about being downcast but was never plodding. Beck neglects one of his main strengths, which is to be musically daring. Even the mischief on Ride Lonesome is regressive and unoriginal. Recall that the Morning Phase song “Wave” egregiously borrowed from Björk’s “Hunter.” Beck does it again here, biting the beginning of Björk’s “Jóga” in a way that is impossible to defend as coincidence considering the earlier lift. All this does is make the listener want to hear Homogenic again. That’s a far better example of an artist limiting her sonic palette and spinning those very constraints into gold.

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When the film begins, Samuel Murphy (Hawke) is a free man. He is a mechanic, living in Eugene during the Depression. Murphy’s wife has passed, leaving him as sole caretaker for their young daughter Penny (Avy Berry). After a series of unfortunate events, Murphy finds himself arrested and Penny is sent to a foster home. What begins like a kind-hearted version of Paper Moon turns into a nightmare for this father and daughter.

Murphy’s downfall happens quite quickly. McKinley seems eager to get us out of town and into the wilderness while establishing our goodwill toward his protagonists. The film may have been stronger if we begin when Murphy is on a work crew building a road in the mountains and then learning why he’s there over time. McKinley also introduces Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), whose role is little more than a glorified cameo. Clancy is one of those warm demander wardens often seen on film – he loves baseball and wants the men in the gang to play for him. But he also isn’t afraid to put his boot in someone’s ass.

Soon enough, Clancy recognizes that Murphy is talented and tough. The warden approaches him with a scheme that would pave the way to freedom: smuggle gold out of a nearby mine since the government is about to seize the resource for itself.

The bulk of The Weight follows Murphy, along with three other inmates and three people from the mining camp, as they navigate the harsh Oregon wilderness. Though the film is supposed to take place in the Pacific Northwest, it was filmed in Germany. Sure, the lush landscape there is a good stand-in for Oregon, but if you live in the region, you will notice that the trees are not quite right.

During the five-day journey, the men run into one peril after another, from a poorly constructed bridge to greedy mountain men hoping to steal the gold. Some of these scenes are truly harrowing, like when the party decides to ford a river right when a logjam is cleared upstream, sending tons of lumber directly at them. Others aren’t as well-constructed, such as the bridge scene, which is poorly shot and involves a solution that defies simple logic.

The film could have also benefited from better character development. Hawke does great work with what little is given to the noble Murphy, but the other members of his party feel one-note. Distrust and injury work to hamper the men, but there are only a few situations in which the characters feel like they are truly in peril.

Still, there is much to like about The Weight. Hawke continues to impress as an actor and McKinley makes a good choice about whether or not the men succeed in their quest for freedom. Still, McKinley leaves a lot of unexplored territory – emotional and physical, landscape that could have lent itself to a richer film.

Photo courtesy of Vertical

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Seven years ago, Lido Pimienta performed at the Lucky Barn, Pickathon’s more intimate, seated venue, where artists did Q&As between sets. It was also eight months before she released her phenomenal sophomore album, Miss Colombia, which she teased throughout her set. She wasn’t alone onstage, though her stage presence is such that everything else tends to fade away, her drummer and synth player receding from memory. It’s not that they weren’t good; it’s that the Colombian-Canadian songwriter is captivating enough that, even though her stage presence was still a little green, it eclipsed the rest of her band’s very existence. It’s not fair, but it’s true. Just listen, without watching, to her performing “Nada” in the Lucky Barn, and you’ll get it.

Seven years later, Pimienta is still performing with others — in Portland, it was with percussionist Brandon Valdivia and Argentinian DJ Chancha Via Circuito (who also opened). Valdivia and Circuito felt more visible when she took to the Wonder Ballroom stage, but her presence still looms large. That’s what can happen when the music you make is so powerful; Miss Colombia, 2025’s La Belleza and this year’s Caribenya are masterful albums, each one showing a different aspect of her taste and worldview, sometimes playful and hyper-catchy, sometimes ornate and resembling high art. Each one feels like a statement, carefully considered and crafted, each one a conversation with the others. When an artist makes music like that, where you can feel the weight of every song when you listen, it’s easy to forget that the person making it isn’t some superbeing, but a goofy, horny woman with three kids and an outfit assembled in the aftermath of a suitcase not showing up where it needed to.

Pimienta and her band came to the Wonder Ballroom straight from Seattle, where her short West Coast tour for Caribenya began, just a few days after she performed at Festival Cordillera in Bogotá, a grueling travel path that practically begs for something to go a little bit wrong. It didn’t slow Pimienta’s roll, though; after opener “Pelo Cucu” (one of the embarrassment of riches we’d get from Miss Colombia throughout the set), she took a moment to shout out the fresh black shoes their friends at Nike had given the trio, crediting years of watching Drag Race with the job she’d done making her giant, oversized shirt look cute. She admitted, though, that the only thing that really mattered to her was that her ass looked great. She took off the headscarf she’d come out in, revealing her braids and curls, and reveled in suddenly looking more like a tomboy again. Pimienta’s music still feels larger than life, but from that moment on, it was hard to forget that it was made by a supremely talented goofball.

In fact, it was as though she knew that after making an album as beautiful and ornate as La Belleza, she needed an album cycle that allowed her the chance to return to earth. Caribenya is constantly playful and effervescent, and while she showcased the lion’s share of the record (they played the entire record, save for “Así Nací”), she took every chance to lean into its spirit. Early on, she grabbed a fan’s Caribenya LP and posed with it while singing. She talked about motherhood and how it feels when your firstborn turns 18. Later, she twerked with her ass in the faces of concertgoers in the front row. During “Mango,” the sole La Belleza inclusion from the set, she opened by confessing that there is a reason the song sounds so suggestive: “It’s because IT IS!” she said, with a wide grin and a hungry look in her eyes, and before long she was pretending to jerk her mic off onto her face.

Valdivia and Circuito, to their credit, did a dynamite job of translating the music of Caribenya and beyond for the stage. Of course, every last song would have sounded even better with a full band, but having Valdivia, at very least, kept every beat feeling ultra-fresh, even adding a muscular edge to Circuito’s own beats. Watching Pimienta perform between the two, stalking the stage while singing, revealed why it’s easy for the duo to fade into the background: she’s a gifted singer and songwriter, but onstage, her swagger is unmistakable, the kind that rappers would buy by the case if she could bottle and sell it. Most of those rappers would still feel drawn to acting hard, mean-mugging an audience they had no interest in talking to. The fact that Pimienta could make the stage her own while pretending to rub hot mic-ejaculate onto her chest and face was a potent reminder that being a commanding presence doesn’t always require intensity. When you can do both so effortlessly, how is anyone else onstage supposed to compete?

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