Each of this week’s songs is built around little more than light twinkling piano and Bush’s warm, velvety vocals. Not even one would ever move big numbers outside of the faerie realm, as they sound more suitable for Hearts of Space then Top 40 radio, but that’s part of their charm. Bush is capable of working some real magic when no one’s looking. – J Simpson

115. “Prelude” [Aerial, 2005]

The 12 years after 1993’s The Red Shoes currently stand as the longest gap between Bush’s albums. That was a tumultuous time for her, marked by the end of one long-term romantic partnership and the start of another, the death of her mother, the birth of her son—as well as growing exhaustion with her career, as the title track of The Red Shoes attests. It wasn’t clear when, or whether, she’d be back.

So when Aerial dropped in late 2005, it was big deal in at least three senses: long-awaited, a lengthy double album and a project of vast conceptual scope. Bush’s ambitions are particularly evident on the 42-minute suite that makes up the album’s second half, which takes as its main subject the paradoxical relationship between the wonder of being alive in the world and the impulse to capture that wonder through art.

The suite kicks off with “Prelude”—the title recalls Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune, probably not by accident—which does a lot of work in 86 seconds: a keyboard drone, then the dawn songs of blackbirds, followed by the throaty coo of a wood pigeon, which provides the phrasing of the main piano melody. A young child speaks: “The day is full of birds. It sounds like they’re saying words.” (The voice belongs to Bush’s son, Bertie McIntosh, credited in the liner notes as “The Sun.” Get it?) The wood-pigeon song returns, now doubled by Bush’s voice, and it does indeed sound like words, just below the threshold of intelligibility.

Spectrum Culture’s panelists deduct points when a song isn’t good, obviously, but also when it’s not really a song, and that’s the case here. As a setup for complex musical ideas, “Prelude” is nearly perfect—but that’s not what we’re ranking. – Martin Seay

114. “Aerial Tal” [Aerial, 2005]

Like the lower-rated, blink-and-you-miss-it “Night Scented Stock” on Never for Ever, “Aerial Tal” works best as a link between two stronger tracks on Bush’s double album Aerial. On this album’s second disc, titled “A Sky of Honey,” “Aerial Tal” is featured in a disc-long conceptual piece about summer outdoor adventures during a 24-hour calendar day. Providing a transitional bridge from the previous track’s references to the setting sun (“Sunset”) to the subsequent track’s twilight hour (“Somewhere In Between”), the goal of “Aerial Tal” illustrates birds calling one last time before sleeping for the night.

Against atmospheric, moody keyboard riffage, Bush sings in unison with a Eurasian blackbird. It’s more intriguing when you realize that she’s structured the piece by using the birdsong’s pattern as a tal, or tala—a foundational element of Indian music analogous to meter.
However, without this context of the tracks that precede and succeed it, “Aerial Tal” is nothing more than a forgettable moment in Bush’s greater discography, lacking any sort of staying power at a little over a minute. Only just better than “Prelude,” the song beats this other bird-song-centric one because of Bush’s humor. Still, with Bush’s high-pitched, unique voice, one likely can’t help but smile a little at the singer/songwriter mimicking birds so effectively. You could even say she’s found her calling. – Bill Cooper

113. “Blow Away (For Bill)” [Never for Ever, 1980]

On April 2, 1979, Bush and her band had just finished a set at the Poole Arts Center in Dorset, the unofficial launch of what would later be called the “Tour of Life” which was to begin the following day. The band were offstage; the equipment was packed. Lighting director Bill Duffield was doing a final pass to make sure nothing had been forgotten when he fell through a hole in the stage to the concrete 17 feet below. He lingered a week in hospital before dying, only 21 years old. Bush subsequently wrote “Blow Away (For Bill),” performing it at the Royal Albert Hall that November.

The following year, in the Kate Bush newsletter, the musician explained, “‘Blow Away’ is a comfort for the fear of dying, and for those of us who believe that music is perhaps an exception to the ‘Never for Ever’ rule.” The song takes on themes of death and the afterlife, the lyrics crafting an evocative vision of a Heaven where Minnie Riperton, Keith Moon, Sid Vicious, Mark Bolan, Buddy Holly and Sandy Denny perform and “vibes in the sky invite you to dine” after you “put out the light.” But it ends with a clunky plea not to make that eventual concert-in-the-sky come too soon: “Please don’t thump me/ Don’t bump me/ I want to stay here.” The music itself sports a ’70s pop vibe, deeply anchored in Del Palmer’s fretless bass. Along with swooping strings courtesy of the Martyn Ford orchestra, this makes for a song that could almost be a lost Steely Dan B-side. If “Blow Away” isn’t particularly original in sound, Bush makes up for it with her shimmery harmonies on the title line. – Valerie Polichar

112. “Warm and Soothing” [December Will Be Magic Again” B-side, 1980]

There’s not much to “Warm and Soothing,” a spare piano ballad and demo-dweller that Bush supposedly set to tape in order to test out the room sound of Abbey Road, where she was recording her third album, Never for Ever. Just Bush and a piano, it begins with a piercing two-note alternation on the high keys and Bush indulging in some basic nostalgia: “Warm and soothing/ That’s how I remember home.” It would seem to pair naturally with its A-side, the likewise ambiguously wholesome “December Will Be Magic Again,” with visions of an idyllic childhood refuge just a-poppin’ up in the singer’s memory. But the harmonies and melody never settle into the simple joys that Bush describes, instead slipping between keening clarity and cloudy, minor-key complications. So it’s no surprise when the lyrics alter course as well, with Bush moving from the comfort of the past to a present that’s decidedly less reassuring and unquestionably more despondent: “Cold and boozy/ Our holiday in the Alps/ Sitting in the lobby, mostly smoking/ choking in the woozy afternoon.” Bush then lurches from forlorn piano ballad to cocky drinking anthem in the chorus, declaring “I’m reeling in the music/ But I’ve only had a few” in a savory purr. While a full-album version might have leaned too hard into the cabaret element, this stripped-down, off-the-cuff presentation suits the song’s gentle whiplash perfectly—it’s a shame that the next line, “I’m afraid at the way we grow old,” feels like stock filler, as does the turn to dramatic Elton John-style phrasing. Still, for what is essentially a tossed-off test run, “Warm and Soothing” has a tense electricity that points both to Bush’s natural musical gifts and her growing command of craft. – Reed Jackson

111. “Delius (Song of Summer)” [Never for Ever, 1980]

Television has inspired a surprising amount of Bush’s output. It’s well known that the songwriter was jolted into action after viewing an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, but “Delius (Song of Summer)” was similarly inspired by Ken Russell’s Song of Summer. Shown on BBC in 1968, this black-and-white drama portrayed English Impressionist composer Frederick Delius’ battle with syphilis in the final years of his life. Ballet dancer Christopher Gable co-starred as Eric Fenby, the amanuensis who helped Delius put unfinished melodies on paper. The movie is one of Russell’s more impactful works, just as “Wuthering Heights” is one of Bush’s. Only the most perverse of fans would say the same for “Delius (Song of Summer).”

Unwisely, this tune followed “Babooshka” on Never for Ever. Guided by a metronomic drum, “Delius (Song of Summer)” opens with nonsensical vocals and a bouncy piano line, before some indecipherable lyrics enter. A Gilmouresque guitar fattens the instrumental passage, and the samba percussion anchors the track, but Bush’s vocals sound strangely mouse-like amidst the labyrinth of instruments. Her lyrics read like a poem, and should scan against the harmonics; instead, they strain to be heard. Judged as a filler track, “Delius (Song of Summer)” is pleasant stuff. It’s hard not to feel slightly underwhelmed by this purported valedictory celebration of a Northern English composer, given Bush’s superlative compositional abilities—not forgetting Russell’s efforts either. – Eoghan Lyng

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Set in Chile just before the fall of Salvador Allende’s presidency in 1973, Wild Horse Nine stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA agents in the country, helping stage the coup d’état that would bring military dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. For context, Allende was the first Marxist chosen through an open democratic election in Latin America, and Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger feared that his rise would encourage other developing nations to adopt socialism.

An air of inevitable sadness hangs over Wild Horse Nine as CIA agents Chris (Malkovich) and Lee (Rockwell) decamp to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) now that they’ve laid the groundwork for the Chilean military to take out Allende. Though the characters in the film do not know what will unfold, more than 3,000 people would be killed or forcibly disappeared under Pinochet while more than 40,000 others were tortured. Even more would go into exile.

Like McDonagh’s other two-handers, Wild Horse Nine is a study of contrasts. Chris is a morphine addict and is suffering from a terminal disease. Once involved in planning the John F. Kennedy assassination, it is possible that Chris is also in the early stages of dementia. He is slipping up, telling people about the plan to overthrow Allende. Perhaps it’s memory loss. Perhaps it’s guilt.

People are beginning to worry that Chris is a liability, especially since he’s threatening to write a memoir. Chris’ boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi), decides to send Chris and Lee to Rapa Nui to get the problematic agent out of the way for a while. MJ worries about leaks, and Chris is spouting state secrets indiscriminately. While waiting at the airport, Chris tells two young women about the plan to depose Allende. Horrified, the women don’t believe Chris. “Enjoy while you can, ladies,” he smirks in return. Perhaps MJ’s fears are not unfounded.

McDonagh, also known for his plays, has a natural ear for dialogue. One of the pleasures of Wild Horse Nine is watching Malkovich and Rockwell sink into the juicy material the director/screenwriter has devised for them. In a McDonagh movie, it’s not uncommon to hear a trained killer soliloquize about not killing moths. The dialogue also adds a comedic jolt to what is ultimately a tragedy unfolding on both a personal and international scale.

Even though McDonagh’s other best films feature Irish characters and the Catholic guilt that consumes them, a similar shame threatens to destroy both Chris and Lee. Both men have been involved in awful machinations as CIA agents, and while McDonagh approaches these misdeeds with his typical gallows humor, there is no escaping the sins of the past. In a poignant scene late in the film, Chris reaches out to his estranged brother (Tom Waits). Both men know there is no way to right past wrongs. They don’t even bother. But sometimes it’s good just to acknowledge the fucked-up things you’ve done.

Wild Horse Nine is filled with laughs, but it’s impossible to shake the lingering sadness that envelops everything. We know how things are going to end. How they’re going to end for Chris. How they’re going to end for Chile. Once certain plots are set into motion, there is no way out for anyone.

There is much to love about Wild Horse Nine. Beyond the gorgeous on-location scenes from Rapa Nui, the film also features one of Malkovich’s best performances in years. He plays Chris as a man whose time has run out. Backed into a corner by a variety of threats, he has become completely unhinged. Though Rockwell and Buscemi both excel in their roles, Wild Horse Nine is Malkovich’s moment. In a world dancing on the precipice of fascism, Wild Horse Nine is an explicit warning, one that likely cannot be fixed, even by the power of friendship.

Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

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Now it is 1949, two years after the events of Godzilla Minus One, and an attack from a winged dragon interrupts any sense of peace. The opening sequence shows the monster King Ghidorah causing mayhem, which leads Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), the mild-mannered head of the government agency charged with stopping monster attacks, to spring into action. He recruits Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a former kamikaze pilot and the hero from the first Godzilla attack, to fly in an aerial offensive against King Ghidorah, but he is reluctant to leave his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and his adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani). Compelled by a larger sense of duty, as are many characters in the film, Kōichi finds himself in a cockpit again, only this time the operation is a disaster. King Ghidorah is now more dangerous than ever, and somehow the attack awakens Godzilla, who previously laid dormant in the deep ocean.

There are so many characters and subplots that sometimes it seems like Yamazaki directs traffic, rather than a disaster movie. Sometimes he pauses the action to check in with key characters, many who are given flashbacks that explain their current conduct. The most stirring flashbacks involve a new character named Dr. Murakami (Min Tanaka), a biologist who survived Hiroshima and craves vengeance against the Americans. We see Dr. Murakami on that fateful day, searching for his burnt family amidst the rubble, and Yamazaki uses intense imagery to deepen the trauma and guilt he, along with other survivors, must feel. Other characters like the plucky meteorologist Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa) have similar back stories, although they find a way to persevere through one calamity after another. Godzilla Minus Zero casts a wide net of emotional responses, not really judging or taking sides, a kind of milieu where collective action is the only valid response. It’s a thoughtful census of common attitudes from the period.

All this material would be dry, maybe even intolerable, if Godzilla Minus Zero did not understand why people see these types of film in the first place. There are several key action sequences, and like Minus One, Yamazaki always shoots them with clarity and an eye for widespread destruction. Maybe the best involves the first offensive against King Ghidorah, where an aircraft flies just above the dragon so it can be struck by lightning, while those on the ground struggle to survive. It is convenient how a meteorologist says storm clouds are optimal conditions for aerial – they make it easy to see the plane/monsters in motion – a kind of self-aware joke that suggests to longtime fans they are in good hands.

Yamazaki also deepens the suspense for his action sequences by withholding key information, often a secret part of the elaborate plans, so he can reveal them at the most crucial moment. But the most important action scene, the thing longtime Godzilla fans want most, is the climatic showdown between Godzilla and King Ghidorah. This does not disappoint, and is even surprising in how brutal the fight unfolds. These monsters literally tear each other apart, with Godzilla Minus Zero not cutting away from viscera and blood, to show how scary animalistic rage can be on that kind of scale. The special effects, including ones that show the regenerative properties of the monsters, are breathtaking and scary in equal measure.

What is interesting, even strange, about Godzilla Minus Zero is how the climatic fight barely resolves the tension among the characters. Most of their disagreements are emotional or ideological, with disputes on how they must handle post-disaster life. There is a long denouement, mostly through dialogue, complete with speeches and tearjerker scenes. This denouement is maybe a little too long: as an example, there is only so much we can tolerate Akiko crying before her sobs become tedious. It is hard to fault Yamazaki because he includes the back story to make us care about his characters, all while giving us the red meat of kaiju action.

In the end, American audiences in particular will not remember all the emotional goodbyes. Instead, they will probably focus on a fantasy sequence where Dr. Murakami imagines Godzilla attacking New York City. Once again, Godzilla Minus Zero does not cut away, depicting fire and mayhem that looks like, well, what two Japanese cities endured in August 1945. Wouldn’t that kind of horror make anyone go a little crazy? Now on a huge international stage with widespread appeal, Yamazaki makes the bracing, undeniable point that any country who dealt with atomic bombs would need their own Godzilla, too, just as a way to make sense of the unfathomable.

Photo courtesy of GKIDS

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A decade onward, Shauf has perfected the art of album-length storytelling, both in concrete form (The Neon Skyline) and in slightly looser form (Norm), and with the afterparty, Shauf celebrates a decade of The Party with a bit of a misnomer: an afterparty that’s actually the pre-party mixer. Everything is still a little janky and there’s people in the background who shouldn’t be, and there’s some loose ideas that’ll get discarded before even the earliest guest arrives, but you can still see the evening’s magic taking shape.

First thing’s first: though some of the songs on the afterparty are labeled as demos, it’s hard to ignore that many of them sound just as good as their album counterparts. You’ll notice this immediately, with “the magician (demo),” which isn’t quite as lush and fleshed-out as the version that opens The Party, but it’s just as easy to listen and forget that the guitar, piano, drums, bass and horns are all Shauf himself, layering everything together while a voice in the background chatters excitedly. Hell, how many of Shauf’s own songs on Darker Days or The Bearer of Bad News sound worse, sonically speaking, than “the magician (demo)”? More than a few, which either means Shauf is playing a trick on us, or his sketches are simply that good.

That’s not to say the demos aren’t great to listen to, though. “eyes of them all (demo)” is a neat little revelation, adding in flourishes of synthy twinkles alongside Shauf and the chorus’s drumbeats, which you’ll hear bubble quietly under the surface of “Twist Your Ankle” on The Party. Elsewhere, the demo of “twist your ankle” opens on grungier guitars as the perfect counterbalance of the beautiful piano line that plays before Shauf’s voice enters, and the vibe shifts. Shauf also treats us to an odd little hybrid with “my brother jeremy (demo),” a pre-completion version of “My Brother Jeremy,” which was released as a double-A-side, vinyl-only single with “Jenny Come Home” about a year before The Party came out. Its inclusion here is a lovely reminder that Shauf was working on The Party’s characters and concepts early enough to know some of its characters needed their own releases, showing us that the Jeremy who gives his own brother the cold shoulder is the same “half-wit” who isn’t afraid to cheat on his girlfriend or get too high to notice her misery on “Quite Like You.” While this demo version isn’t actually that much different from the 2015 version, it’s fun to hear the song again in the context of these early Party ideas.

We also get “v2” versions of “Begin Again” and closer “Martha Sways,” though admittedly, you can understand why these two tracks didn’t become the final version. “begin again (v2)” is just a little too bright and big, a sharp departure from the restraint of the Party version — not in a bad way, but it has just enough bombast that you’re practically left wondering where Shauf got it all from. It’s also hard to blame “martha sways (v2)” for being inferior to “Martha Sways”; you can understand where Shauf was coming from, making the closer feel more like a pretty (but a little bubbly) piano ballad, like something Elliott Smith might have recorded, right down to the multi-tracking of Shauf’s voice on the chorus and a clean little guitar solo. It’s a great little number, and in a vacuum, it’s pretty easy to love, even while you imagine Shauf (or the song’s narrator) standing, transfixed, by a woman who feels like a ghost from his own past.

The Party version of “Martha Sways” is none of these things, though: it’s Shauf and a gently picked acoustic guitar at first, and it’s one of the most arresting songs in his entire catalog. It’s quiet enough that you can hear his guitar strings rattling as he picks the low E and A strings. If you’re in the right (or wrong) headspace, the moment the violins come in after the first chorus can reduce you to tears. Many times, you could imagine alternate versions making their way to the album, but knowing there was a possibility that we could have needed to wait 10 years to hear the Party version of “Martha Sways,” instead of this one, is enough to make you say a prayer of thanks to the gods of Canadian music for guiding Shauf in the right direction.

The rest of the afterparty is made up of unpolished versions of tracks that didn’t make it to The Party at all, like the quietly funky “losing,” or the sparse and strangely noisy “the interrupter,” the most revelatory tracks of the bunch. “the interrupter” doesn’t really sound like anything on The Party, which abandons the rest of the album’s soft-rock atmosphere in favor of an off-kilter drum machine beat, moody synths, and some seriously dramatic strings. At one point, violin strains mingle with a phaser noise and electronic bird sounds, maybe one of the most cacophonous stretches of music in Shauf’s ultra-smooth catalog. “losing” feels like an odd fit as well, equally distant from the flavor of The Party and closer to an alternate reality where Shauf’s music was influenced by the downcast atmosphere of an Arab Strap record.

As with all collections of demos, outtakes and misfit tracks, the afterparty isn’t the kind of collection you’d recommend to someone who isn’t already indebted to The Party. In fact, even if you are already indebted to The Party, the afterparty is best viewed as a wonderful curio, a peek behind the streamer curtain at the ideas and sounds that Shauf was drawn to, sitting alone in the studio, surrounded by instruments. That’s him, long-haired and serious-faced, sitting in the background of the softly lit studio on the afterparty’s cover. The fact that he pulled of The Party so effortlessly feels like magic, but as the afterparty shows us, the man on the cover was far from “a shaking hand without a concrete plan” — if anything, his basket of tricks was too big for one party to hold.

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This chemistry is hardly a sudden development. The pair has crossed paths repeatedly over the years on a handful of standout singles, first striking gold on 2019’s buoyant “RNP” before reuniting for “Two Tens” and the breezy 2024 cut “Summer Drop.” Yet a full-length joint effort has long remained elusive, quietly deferred while both artists pursued sprawling solo ambitions. When Heavy Is the Crown finally arrives, it’s a lean, 11-track, near-32-minute statement rewarding years of fan anticipation with lighthearted, unforced charm. Rather than padding the runtime with bloated tracklists or high-profile cameos, the duo trades verses with effortless, low-ego fluidity. By eschewing guest vocalists entirely, the two capture the listener’s focus with their tight-knit back-and-forth lines, transforming a varied slate of outside producers into a cohesive stage for their shared theater.

Much of that cohesion stems from a shared reverence for vintage wax, beginning on the sunny lead single “A Good Day,” which pairs a radiant interpolation of Bill Withers’ 1977 soul classic “Lovely Day” with a laid-back rhythmic nod to Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” Rather than treating these familiar touchstones as mere nostalgia bait, the duo uses the warm, ’70s-steeped instrumentation to ground their playful trades in a rich, analog bounce. The crate-digging continues on the Conductor Williams-produced track “Crown,” built around a dusty soul loop lifted from Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr’s 1971 cut “You Can’t Blame Me.” Its unhurried drum break gives both emcees ample room to trade slick bars, establishing a structural blueprint: Cordae claims the opening verse with crisp, multisyllabic focus, while .Paak prowls the periphery with his percussion-bumping vocal rasp and commands the chorus.

This classic tag-team dynamic propels the entire record, accelerating into breathless, rapid-fire cadences over the early-’00s-inspired groove of Heavy Is the Crown’s “Airbender.” Still, their high-wire verbal acrobatics cannot salvage every cut. While “I’m On” rides a suitably grit-caked boom-bap beat, its momentum stalls under a glaring structural predictability. Here, the pair’s neglect of hook craft becomes a frustrating misstep, leaning on the repetitive, layered refrain of “I’m on/ I’m on/ I’m on” that slips out of sync and ultimately sells their dizzying verses short.

Even when a hook falters, the pair’s theatrical commitment never wavers, frequently channeling the anarchic, slapstick camaraderie of the film Step Brothers. On “58th Floor,” they stage a hilarious homage to the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning,” subverting the classic track’s paranoid street tension for pure farce. Rather than defending his turf against armed intruders, .Paak finds himself trapped inside a closet during an illicit tryst, frantically ringing Cordae for an escape route. After trading rapid-fire jabs over the phone, .Paak rashly leaps out the window, leaving a bewildered Cordae to ask, “But don’t she live on the 58th floor?” right as his partner’s fading scream trails off into the ether.

Yet beneath this comedic bravado, the record is regularly grounded by striking emotional gravity. The somber highlight “Helpless” serves as a sobering counterweight to the sunny optimism of “A Good Day,” forcing both emcees to reckon with their sharpest personal regrets. Cordae delivers a bruising, protective verse addressed to his young daughter, lamenting, “Gave your mom my all/ But the love she had for me dead and gone,” as he wrestles with the fallout of a fractured relationship. On the following verse, .Paak is equally unsparing, confessing to the humiliation of showing up inebriated to his own child’s birthday party while mourning corroded friendships: “When your day one start actin’ two-faced/ You run and you run, but you can’t get away.” By leaning into these raw, unvarnished admissions, they elevate what could have been a lightweight buddy-rap exercise into genuine human consequence.

While Heavy Is the Crown forgoes the lavish, velvet-lined retro spectacle of .Paak’s Silk Sonic era with Bruno Mars, it compensates with an unruly, live-wire immediacy that feels increasingly rare in contemporary hip-hop. Across its brisk runtime, the record threads the needle between block-party levity and late-night vulnerability without ever losing its sense of play. Hearing Cordae’s surgical lyricism loosen up beside such a charismatic, freewheeling foil reveals new dimensions in the younger rapper’s catalog, even as the album reaffirms .Paak’s status as modern music’s premier collaborative catalyst. Minor hook stumbles aside, Heavy Is the Crown triumphs by remembering a simple, vital truth: hip-hop hits hardest when two artists step into the booth not to cross-promote their brands, but to push each other toward something neither could build alone.

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The band’s contract with Geffen, initiated with Goo in 1990, came to an end in 2006, with the B-sides and rarities comp The Destroyed Room being the final Geffen album in December of 2006. What followed was a brief period of freedom, the kind underwritten in anxiety and uncertainty. Was there still a place for Sonic Youth in an era of glossy, shiny indie pop? What would such a Sonic Youth sound like? Given the band’s propensity for change, it was an open question. Their previous studio album, Rather Ripped, hadn’t so much pointed in a particular direction as it had tried to make the ultimate “Sonic Youth for beginners” album. Jim O’Rourke, who had been a fifth member of the band since 2000, had left and with him seemed to go the sense of gentle stretched-out experimentation that had characterized the band’s output from A Thousand Leaves through to Sonic Nurse. With him leaving to pursue his own musical vision in Japan, the band seemed to revert into safety, or at least something overly familiar.

The departure of O’Rourke left a hole in the band that needed to be filled, even though he had only been with the band for a relatively short period. When playing live, Kim Gordon had become accustomed to ditching the bass in order to free up her ability to sing and move unfettered. The answer came out of the past. Kim Gordon had been in a band called Free Kitten with Pussy Galore guitarist Julia Cafritz, which had released a pair of albums in the mid ’90s on Kill Rock Stars. Although he didn’t appear on the band’s 2008 reunion album Inherit, the bassist during the band’s initial run had been Mark Ibold, better known as the bassist for Pavement. Moore remembers Gordon suggesting him as a remarkably straightforward thing: “I have an idea for the perfect bass player,” she said. “Mark Ibold.” Moore thought the idea was also perfect, and when they called Ibold up, he agreed after about three seconds of thought.

Ibold joined the touring band during the Rather Ripped tour and Moore remembers him clicking with the band almost immediately. The move to bring him into the recording process therefore followed naturally, if somewhat gradually. Moore told Clash in 2011 that “His personality is really congenial, and he’s always been a good dude, so he immediately locked in, and had really prepared himself to the point where he knew the songs better than we did when we were relearning things.”

With Ibold fully aboard for the recording process, the band fell into a schedule that was different from the way they’d recorded Rather Ripped. That album had been jammed out in rapid fashion, with Moore bringing a riff into the studio and the rest of the band crafting songs around them. The sessions for The Eternal were a little looser. Ibold, Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley would drive up to Moore and Gordon’s house and spend a few days hashing out riffs and songs and, in an important difference from Rather Ripped, noisy mid-song jams. On the weekends the direction would reverse; Moore and Gordon would come into the city to record what they’d worked out at Echo Canyon West in Hoboken, NJ. Shelley likened it to recording a single every weekend, and the results of The Eternal tend to bear this idea out.

If the sound of Rather Ripped was that of the band putting together, unwittingly or otherwise, a “Sonic Youth for beginners” type of album, The Eternal is the same idea but with a sound that is more true-to-form for the latter half of Sonic Youth’s career. Rather Ripped was built on riffs that Moore had written for bank commercials that were self-consciously imitative of the work they’d done around the time of Daydream Nation and Goo. On The Eternal, the band again hops in a time machine, but this time it’s the band’s alternative era (Goo through Washing Machine) being revisited, and there’s much less of a sense that they’re purposefully imitating it. Rather, it feels often like it’s merely another album from the band as they were in 1995. Aside from the odd moment (like the outro of the otherwise Dirty/Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star-adjacent “Anti-Orgasm”), it’s as though the entire post-A Thousand Leaves era never happened.

The songs written by Gordon and Moore follow the tracks laid out by their work in the early to mid-’90s. “Sacred Trickster” begins the album with a song that could have been a B-side or EP number from the Goo/Dirty era, all punchy guitars with some but crucially not all of the abrasiveness they’d first founded the band on. Like their early major label period, songs like “Sacred Trickster” and “Antenna” have that grunge-level scuzz on the guitars; unlike the material they wrote for Rather Ripped, though, there isn’t much of the pillowy dream pop surreality that underwrote a good deal of the Sister/Daydream Nation present on these songs. The Gordon/Moore one-two punch of “Calming the Snake” and “Poison Arrow” outline this. Gordon’s track is pure Goo-style shouting and skronky guitar that stems from the early noise days but is sculpted into something far more resembling pop than anything else. It has the youthful punk energy of those old days, an impressive feat given the band’s relatively advanced age at the time (Moore recalls being pegged as a “heritage act — a gentle way of saying we were long in the sonic tooth”). “Poison Arrow” feels like a continuation of “Calming the Snake,” showing perhaps that even with all the internal troubles the pair were still writing closely together, a style that couldn’t be broken by anyone but themselves. Moore’s track is, perhaps predictably, a riff-driven noisy freakout for the first few moments before settling down into something more structured.

There are a lot of other moments that hearken back to older traditions of the band’s writing as well. The disquieting, eerie imagery that Moore spins up on “Antenna” is something the band often peppered previous albums with. When he sings, at the beginning, “My darling cruises the streets for pleasure/ Skyscrapers in the dead love dawn/ Throbbing blood mind selfless creature/ Forever yours and then she’s gone,” you can draw a line directly back to a track like “Hallowe’en” from Bad Moon Rising, where Gordon sings “There’s something shifting in the distance/ Don’t know what it is/ Day’s as dead as nights?/ Except for the feeling that’s/ Crawling up inside of me as you/ Sing your song as you/ Swing along and you’re/ It’s the devil in me.” Similarly, Ranaldo’s lyrics on “What We Know” find him walking with the creeps in the darkness: “I’m in a state of shock/ I’m creeping up and down your block/ I’m looking into you/ I’m trying to catch your view/ It’s not a quiet meditation.”

Like the creepy moments that veer back toward previous themes, songs like “Anti-Orgasm” and “Malibu Gas Station” go back to the exploration of the intersection of sex, politics and religion that they’ve always had more than a little interest in. The latter is Gordon close to her bump-and-grind filthiest, exhorting the listener to “Come on do it/ You gotta use it/ That a girl, don’t you blow it/ Come on move me/ Turn me on now.” “Leaky Lifeboat (for Gregory Corso)” continues the fascination with Beat writers, and “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn” (whose melodic structure bears more than a little resemblance to Goo‘s “Mary-Christ”) is a tribute to doomed Germs vocalist Darby Crash. That band’s guitarist, Pat Smear, was incidentally also name-checked in a Sonic Youth song, “Screaming Skull” from Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.

Perhaps most fittingly for an (unwittingly) final album, Ranaldo ended up with two songs on The Eternal rather than his usual one. “What We Know,” which has the same kind of punkish crawl and disquieting atmosphere as “Rats,” his Rather Ripped contribution, but also features a thick, groovy bassline courtesy of Ibold. “Walkin Blue,” coming in as the penultimate track on the record, parlays a feel-good indie rock intro riff into what ends up being a remarkably Beatles-esque melodic song. It fades out into a wandering noise guitar jam as well, making it the closest thing on the album to the work from A Thousand Leaves and Murray Street.

It is “Massage the History,” of course, that ends up defining the album’s legacy, for better or for worse. The only song written by Gordon to explicitly address the schism in her marriage with Moore, it occupies a somewhat ominous place at the very end of their last studio album. The song feels uncomfortable with itself, opening with a quiet jam before moving into verses that feel like haunted houses; Gordon’s breathy, emotional vocals constantly sound on the verge of falling apart into static noise, often making her feel like a ghost on her own song. The lines she weaves through the song, especially “All the money’s gone/ Funny it was never here” and “Not everyone makes it out alive,” are pointed and covered in blood. Taken together with its ultimate mid-song jam out, rivalling a track like Washing Machine‘s “The Diamond Sea” in intensity if not in length, it’s a fitting track for the band to go out on, even if it’s on a downer note.

The crack at the heart of “Massage the History” would be the end for the band. They would achieve one more recording project, 2011’s SYR9: Simon Werner a Disparu (a soundtrack for a French film) before the whole thing got too awkward and they called it a day. Ranaldo, in interviews since, doesn’t hold much hope for a Sonic Youth reunion, and judging by what Gordon wrote in her 2015 autobiography Girl in a Band you shouldn’t, either. As far as a final statement goes, The Eternal is not ideal. It’s the sound of a band finding their footing again after disappearing inside themselves for 10 years, and it is far more suited to being a harbinger of greater things to come than a conclusive last album. Still, as the last Sonic Youth record, it could have been worse. There are a lot of callbacks to older moments, as well as thematic similarities between it and previous records. It’s very much in step with the band as they were in the mid-’90s, if not the post-A Thousand Leaves era, more of a follow-up to Washing Machine than it is anything else. At the end, though, The Eternal leaves you like a child of divorce hoping in vain for Mommy and Daddy to get back together again, if only to see where they might have gone from here.

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LaFarge might not be a direct descendant of Woody Guthrie, but he’s a modern songwriter for the regular working person, and you can imagine him in front of a camp store. LaFarge doesn’t have much combativeness to him, and his take on the struggles of the working class comes with a dose of faith-influenced optimism and some existential considerations. The record opens with “The Thing” and its lesson, summed up wryly as: “The thing that I got ain’t the thing that I thought that I wanted.” LaFarge has tried all the sources of fulfillment, and discovered they don’t work. That opener pairs well with “My Baby Loves Me,” a blues number by way of British influences that considers the idea that no matter what happens or what people say about you, it will be okay if you remember that your family loves you.

Those sort of sentiments become necessary in a world of unending grind. The loping title track looks at a life in which “The good Lord giveth; the landlord taketh away.” “Work” dwells in a similar place, as LaFarge says, “Ah, it’s good to be back on the job, man/ I just had two days off, paid my bills/ Now I’m broke/ I got to get back to work.” “Big Boss Man” blames the owner — there are villains in our economic story, after all. LaFarge doesn’t overcomplicate the issue; he just gets down in the working world and acknowledges the challenges. He doesn’t, however, recognize futility. The gospel soul of “Stick Together” offers one way forward, in unity in order to share burdens and weather storms.

Another route out lies in spiritual considerations. While LaFarge brings people into community on “Stick Together,” he finds himself isolated in “Stranger,” far from his loved ones as he rolls through the “wilderness” (the typical rock ‘n’ roll troubadour lament). He turns the journey into a religious path, finding himself to be more like the classic wayfaring stranger, “Heaven bound.” That trip shouldn’t be taken alone (aside from the ultimate step, presumably), so LaFarge shares what he’s learned. The album closes with the brassy “On and On” and its simple message: “I got my eyes up.” We’re all going somewhere, LaFarge seems to say, so we need to recognize the ephemeral nature of our current life in preparation for what comes next. It’s direct, but LaFarge delivers it with a manner that maintains his previous concern. He’s aware of the world to come, but not dismissive of this one. Rent Money tackles some serious issues while typically sounding playful. LaFarge has an easy way about him, and it lets him enter a challenging world that sounds jovial but never frivolous.

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In Record of a Tenement Gentleman, Ozu focuses his lens on residents in an impoverished Tokyo district, damaged in the bombing raids of WWII. Shots show houses blasted to rubble, and trash blows through the streets. The scenery looks even more bleak and desolate in black and white.

As Akira Kurosawa did in his 1957 film The Lower Depths, Ozu focuses on a few characters in a run-down neighborhood, featuring roommates fortune teller Tashiro (Chishū Ryū) and pot mender Tamekichi (Reikichi Kawamura), who are roommates, along with neighboring widow Otane (Chōko Iida). Tashiro brings home a 7-year-old child named Kōhei (Hôhi Aoki). The child lives around 40 miles away and traveled with his father to Tokyo, but somewhere along the way, he lost his dad. After Tashiro realizes Kōhei’s predicament, he offers to give the child a place to stay for the night. However, Tamekichi is not amenable to this plan, calling Kōhei a “brat” and sending the child next door to the widow Otane. Otane doesn’t want the child either, but eventually she acquiesces until Kōhei wets the bed during the night. The three try to pass the kid around to each other and members of the surrounding community like a hot potato, before they decide someone must bring the child back to his father – by drawing lots. Otane loses and must take on the task.

However, Otane can’t find Kōhei’s father. So, for most of the film, these Tokyo residents of the poor district, and more specifically Otane, must deal with the boy. Often, residents become frustrated and upset at Kōhei, often just for existing. Generally, Kōhei is quiet, and other than his annoying bed-wetting habit, he isn’t necessarily doing anything out-of-the-ordinary for someone his age. To be fair, he’s better behaved than the children of another Ozu film Good Morning (1959), who act out deliberately to coerce their parents into buying a TV set. Though Record of a Tenement Gentleman doesn’t deliberately signal this, Ozu’s film suggests that the community’s rash and unjustified actions could be symbolic.

Children represent a society’s future. There’s likely a practical, economic reason two of the resident main characters don’t have kids, and even Tamekichi, who does have a child, has a complicated relationship with his daughter. These depictions show us how Japan is unsure about its future. This is further shown in the way Otane treats Kōhei. Often, Otane becomes irrationally angry at the boy, snapping and scolding him until he is brought to tears or runs away. Kōhei’s actions often aren’t deserving of Otane’s vituperation. At most, he isn’t polite, and when Otane accuses him of something that could be construed as wrong (eating her dried persimmons), she later finds out he didn’t do it. One of her friends, Kiku (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), berates Otane, saying she’s hasty and quick to fight. In this way, Otane represents old Japan, whereas Kōhei, a timid and quiet boy, represents the country’s meek, calmer future.

When combined with Kōhei’s bed-wetting incident, this extended metaphor becomes even more intriguing. The night after, we see an elongated shot of Kōhei’s stain on the quilt hung on a clothesline, and eerily enough, the quilt’s design is reminiscent of an American flag. In this way, Kōhei’s accident reveals a deeper connection to the United States — Japan is shameful about its past actions and its current connection to the world superpower. When other residents hear about Kōhei’s bedwetting, one could interpret the residents’ reactions as being ambiguously related to Japan’s new connection to the United States, who defeated them in WWII as well as caused lasting damage to their community. Despite their unwillingness to confront how they feel about their relationship with the United States, Kōhei forces other Tokyo citizens to do so.

Otane begrudgingly begins to accept Kōhei. Briefly, they bond, before Kōhei’s father shows up. The father takes Kōhei, and after a brief farewell, Otane is brought to tears, realizing the importance of family. She decides to adopt one of the homeless children in a park, several of which are shown hanging out, smoking and playing games before the film ends. Here, Ozu concludes his argument: Japan must accept its new future, despite the pains of moving forward as a country.

Despite this intriguing symbolism about post-WWII Japan, Ozu’s Record of a Tenement Gentleman is too simple and underdeveloped. At 72 minutes, it’s not very engaging, due to a repetitive plot structure: everyone doesn’t like Kōhei. They want to bring him home, but they can’t. So, they’re all frustrated at the kid’s presence, even while he isn’t doing that much to anger them. Although symbolically, this relationship between the adults and the boy makes sense, conflict becomes one-sided as a result. After a while, all you can think about is how terrible these adults are to a boy who can’t find his father. This bleakness, though intriguing, is better undercut with occasional Ozu humor. Quite frankly, it’s lacking in this film, and it’s sorely missed.

Clearly, Record of a Tenement Gentleman has the basics of good Ozu: family and societal commentary, but it lacks some of the more powerful writing, character development and humor of his other work. Although the film functions respectably as a morality tale, without Ozu’s typical depth, it falls flat when compared to other, greater entries in the director’s oeuvre.

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Cover bands are often ridiculed. So are bands featuring one original member surrounded by a cadre of hired guns. But there is nothing to laugh about when you see the Big Star Quintet, a group of professional musicians playing the songs of Big Star. Featuring Pat Sansone (Wilco), Jon Auer (The Posies), Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Chris Stamey (The dB’s) and Jody Stephens (the only surviving member of Big Star), the quintet not only paid tribute to the genius of Alex Chilton, Chris Bell and Andy Hummel, but also gave audiences the opportunity to hear these songs played live again.

The five men took turns on lead vocals, jostling around Mississippi Studios’ small stage as they traded off instruments. Each of the vocalists could handle Chilton’s higher register with little strain. At one point, before singing “In the Street,” Mills cracked that the song was going to hurt him.

Over the course of two sets and 31 songs, the quintet examined most of Big Star’s hard-rocking numbers and emotional ballads. One highlight was when Stephens came out from behind the drums to sing “Way Out West.” He also paid tribute to his departed friends while clearly reveling in the opportunity to play these songs again.

The group did eschew some of Big Star’s darker material. Mills joked about “Holocaust,” but didn’t play it. Other notable omissions included “O, Dana” and “Kanga Roo.” And while songs like “I Am the Cosmos” and “Thirteen” were certainly played, the quintet included some of the band’s more bizarre material like “The India Song.”

Big Star has always been considered a cult band, one that musicians and hipsters have loved, but never the mainstream. The usual members of Portland’s rock royalty turned out (such as members of The Minus 5, Drive-By Truckers, Camper Van Beethoven and more), the Big Star Quintet sold out two nights here. Much of the audience skewed 50+, but a good number of young people also came out.

The evening had a ramshackle feel, like a group of friends having fun playing some covers. The band proved that Big Star can run the gamut from barrel-chested rockers (“Feel”) to sentimental ballads (“The Ballad of El Goodo”). Some of the musicians told stories about certain songs and others told jokes. Before playing “Jesus Christ,” Mills called it a “Halloween song.”

The show lasted for two and a half hours with many of the favorites coming near the end. The night ended with “September Gurls,” a song that got the audience (one that the band commented was really “quiet”) dancing and singing along. The opportunity to see Big Star in concert burned out long ago. But if these songs are important to you, the Quintet will not disappoint, even if only one member of the original band is onstage.

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From the beginning, the Olivia Tremor Control felt like the most daring proposition of the various Elephant 6 groups; while every group affiliated with the label had an undeniable experimental streak, OTC made that experimental streak their ethos, eschewing the bubbly pop of Apples in Stereo or the grand narratives of Neutral Milk Hotel in favor of seeing what could be done. The Same Place is no different in this regard: the album is massive in length and scope, brimming with ideas that layer on top of each other. Theirs is a fraught psychedelia, one where melody and hooks are certainly present but always liable to get lost in a sea of effects that leave the listener unmoored. The Same Place seems to relish in doing this: early tracks “Begin Now!” and “Advice from the Oceans” are notable for the unease they create, a sense of dread of what could be on the other side of the beyond. It doesn’t take long for the things to fracture: “The Same Old Place” is the first indication of where the band could take things with its kaleidoscopic, carnivalesque arrangements, and it only gets more outlandish from there as the band seemingly grow into themselves.

If this sounds familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Dusk at Cubist Castle, that’s because it is. True to its name, The Same Place doesn’t stray too far from what the Olivia Tremor Control had established themselves to be decades prior. Yet that’s not necessarily a mark against the band or the album. Few artists working in a similar vein would produce anything like The Same Place in 2026, whether due to the lack of in-depth knowledge of these influences or through sheer timidity. Not many bands that could reasonably describe themselves as taking similar inspirations as OTC (and that’s a pretty small bunch as it is) could master the same balance of sonic exploration and songcraft, usually leaning very hard in one direction at the expense of the other. The Same Place strikes that balance perfectly, with tuneful earworms like “1/2 Way Down” and “Leaf” existing alongside the mad genius of the seven-part “Path of the Parallels” suite. The latter is the closest that The Same Place comes to addressing the looming shadow over the project in its repeated expressions of constant change passing us by on “It’s Obvious” to the considerations of temporality contained on “Universe Café.” While neither Doss nor Hart could have been aware of how little time they had left to create this, they seemed to be reaching a point where they were considering the finite nature of existence, which gives the whole album a poignancy greater than what was initially intended.

Indeed, a lot about The Same Place could be read as a final statement. Not only was this Doss and Hart’s final gift to a world they no longer inhabit, but the very collective they were a part of is less of a going concern, a thing of myth and legacy rather than one of present-day creative efforts. That such an album could come from unfortunate circumstances like these is pretty miraculous, but The Same Place would stand as a sterling effort regardless of context. Still, that context lends a further sense of importance to an album that was already ambitious in scope; it makes The Same Place into a last hurrah for the ages.

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