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My published work dating back to early 2022: interviews, essays, reviews, and features covering everything from TV retrospectives to political commentary, album reviews to art shows. To see coverage of a specific beat (i.e., music or film), use the "search by tags" feature to narrow down the results!

AV Club •

Lynyrd Skynyrd and Foreigner to attempt rock and roll con job in 2026

In roughly 100 CE, Plutarch first posed the now-infamous Ship of Theseus problem: If you replace every plank, every rope, every nail, at what point does the ship stop being itself? 2,000 years later, we have a modern update, courtesy of Live Nation: the newly announced Lynyrd Skynyrd and Foreigner joint tour, featuring none of the musicians who originally built either vessel, yet somehow still sailing under the same names.
Paste Magazine •

Electronic act African Imperial Wizard exposed as white guy in Africa-themed KKK cosplay

In news that suggests the industrial scene should have its festival lineups vetted by UNESCO, the experimental band Xiu Xiu revealed on Instagram that African Imperial Wizard—the “tribal industrial” act claiming Angolan liberation-war pedigree and an ancestral hotline to the spirit world—is actually just a middle-aged white man in a hood. A hood, of course, modeled after a Klan robe, but sewn from (what white people think of as) “African” fabrics and patterns, like a Spirit Halloween collaborati...
Paste Magazine •

The Mountain Goats, 'Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan' Album Review

The only thing literature loves more than a man facing the end of the world is a man stranded at sea. On his 23rd album, the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, ever the completist, gives us both. Weirdly, he’s not the first John to do so. The Bible’s John of Patmos got there first; alone on a shore, seeing visions of the end times. Darnielle, for his part, adds a rhythm section and, crucially, two witnesses.
Paste Magazine •

Saintseneca and the Art of Paying Attention

Mary Oliver once wrote a simple 3-step list of “Instructions for living a life: / Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” These days, attention is a market commodity, astonishment an algorithmic side effect, and telling about it mostly a means of content creation aimed at monopolizing what little focus remains. By Oliver’s metric, that’s a kind of living death—the erosion of the very faculties that make wonder possible; a life spent looking without really seeing.Zac Little—the Columbus...
Paste Magazine •

Wilco and Billy Bragg to Perform Mermaid Avenue Live Together For the First Time

Look, I know that calling Wilco “dad rock” is something of a cheap shot at this point, a rather lazy shorthand for one of the most influential bands of the twenty-first century. But somewhere out there, a dad really is punching the air right now—I know because that dad is mine, and I’m fist-pumping right along with him. For good reason, too: Jeff Tweedy and English folk-punk icon Billy Bragg are reuniting onstage to perform Mermaid Avenue live for the very first time next year, kicking off the 2...
Paste Magazine •

NYFF: Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? Keeps the Stage Small and the Feelings Big

What’s refreshing about Is This Thing On? is that it doesn’t actually treat stand-up as therapy—or therapy as stand-up. The movie has no illusions about Alex being good at comedy (which makes Arnett’s performance all the more impressive, considering he’s one of the funniest actors of the past few decades), nor does it frame him as humiliatingly bad. He’s not Mrs. Maisel, and he’s not Dee Reynolds either. He’s just a middle-aged guy in mild crisis who found a hobby. Not salvation, not a shortcut to fame, just something that brings him a small, stubborn, stupid joy in a year otherwise devoid of it.
Paste Magazine •

Courtney Barnett Returns With Ferocious New Single “Stay in Your Lane”

It is a great day for anyone who, like me, spent their formative years furiously scribbling “Pedestrian at Best” lyrics in the margins of composition notebooks—because after four long years, Courtney Barnett is back, voice and all. Her new single, “Stay in Your Lane,” is her first vocal release since 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time, considering her most recent project was the instrumental record End of the Day (2023). Where those projects leaned inward, “Stay in Your Lane” kicks the door down...
Paste Magazine •

NYFF: Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice Nails the Joke, Then Keeps Telling It

At the top of No Other Choice, Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, a paper industry expert stands in his immaculate garden, cooks a fresh eel on the grill, surveys his enviable house, and corrals his loving family into a brochure-perfect “one-minute hug.” He takes a beat, then sighs dreamily, “You know what I’m feeling now? I’ve got it all.” It’s the kind of moment that feels one “Temptation Sensation” needle-drop away from an It’s Always Sunny in Seoul title card...
Paste Magazine •

NYFF: In Father Mother Sister Brother, Jarmusch Equates Subtlety with Stillness

When I was in a college poetry class, a professor once gave us an oddly specific assignment: “Write an abecedarian that includes the scent of something pleasant, a body of water, a textile, something heard in the distance, a historical personage, the night sky, a delicious piece of fruit, and at least two named animals.” The next week, it was fascinating to see how many ways a single prompt could splinter, with each poem technically following the rules but expressing a different temperament, ton...
Paste Magazine •

Transmissions from POP Montréal: Part 2

I spent the first half of POP Montréal sprinting between venues, napping badly, and making financial decisions befitting my stature as a typical broke post-grad music critic. But waking up on Saturday morning, I couldn’t help but feel I wasn’t taking enough advantage of all that the festival and the city had to offer; after all, when’s the next time I’d be in Montréal, seeing all these different bands? What am I doing, going home at midnight like a loser? There are practically forty shows a nigh...
Paste Magazine •

Transmissions from POP Montréal: Part 1

To be honest, last week was probably not the best time for me to suddenly drop everything and take a last-minute flight to Canada. But when an opportunity falls into your lap to go to see dozens of incredible bands in a city you’ve always wanted to go to in a country you’ve never been to before, you’d be a fool not to snatch that bull by its metaphorical horns and ride it for all it’s worth, or at least until it bucks you off. And that is precisely how I ended up in Montréal, Canada last Thursda...
Paste Magazine •

COVER STORY | Neko Case Won't Be Tamed

By the mid-1800s, Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin decided he’d had enough of the Romantic penchant for sentimentality. He believed that all art ought to strive to capture nature as accurately as possible, and the poets of the era were spitting on that noble pursuit with every ridiculous metaphor they penned. In response to a line from Charles Kingsley’s “The Sands of Dee” that described sea foam as “cruel” and “crawling,” Ruskin scoffed: “The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The s...
Paste Magazine •

Golden Apples’ Shooting Star and the Art of Breaking Yourself Open

Shooting Star is a record of contradictions. It’s Golden Apples’ fourth album, but it’s the band’s fifth (counting Dumbness, released under the name Cherry). On paper, it’s the Philadelphia outfit’s “most collaborative” work to date; in practice, much of it was written alone, with singer and songwriter Russell Edling tinkering tirelessly in his room until the songs stopped fighting back. Reviews gush about how much “Edling appears to be thriving” on the record; by Edling’s own account, large swa...
Paste Magazine •

Guerilla Toss Remains the Exception to the Rule

99% of the time, if you get an unsolicited DM from one of your musical heroes asking you for a favor, the general rule of thumb should be to assume you are being scammed and immediately block the sender. But it just so happens that underground dance-punk legends Guerilla Toss were—as they so often are—the exception that proves the rule.“Stephen Malkmus just slid into our DMs on Twitter one day,” Kassie Carlson, Guerilla Toss frontwoman and all-around force of nature, tells me over FaceTime. “He...
Paste Magazine •

How Big Thief Found Itself Again

Buck Meek and Adrianne Lenker decided James Krivchenia belonged in Big Thief before they ever saw him touch a drumstick—at least, of the inedible variety. “James has this incredible way of enjoying a meal, where he’s, like, really vocal about it, and makes all these beautiful sounds,” Meek tells me over Zoom, eyes crinkling. It’s been more than a decade since Krivchenia engineered Big Thief’s studio debut, Masterpiece, but Meek, the band’s guitarist, clearly still relishes the memory. “We just r...
Paste Magazine •

Modest Mouse Talk Music Cruises, Time Travel, Rollercoasters and Hot Air Balloons, and Psychic Salamander Festival

25 years after The Moon & Antarctica expanded indie rock’s horizon lines, Isaac Brock is still finding new ways to stretch the world of Modest Mouse—and it feels, as he tells me the moment we connect, “good as shit.” This weekend, that expansion takes physical shape in the foothills outside Seattle, where the band will headline and host the inaugural Psychic Salamander Festival at Remlinger Farms. Co-presented with Seattle Theatre Group, the two-day gathering (September 13–14) doubles as both yo...
Paste Magazine •

Case Oats, 'Last Missouri Exit' Album Review

The life of a music critic is one of perpetual bombardment, so much so that scouring my inbox for new artists to check out can sometimes feel like a crapshoot. PR firms try to maximize that eye-catching potential in their subject headings, but the whims of a critic are unpredictable, fickle, and most importantly, self-centered. Case(y) in point: I discovered Chicago alt-country outfit Case Oats primarily because I saw the band was led by another female Casey (there are very few of us, and even...
Paste Magazine •

Time Capsule: The Wrens, The Meadowlands

In 2003, a group of mid-thirties men from New Jersey released an album seven years in the waiting: The Meadowlands, an exhaustion-ridden, last-ditch attempt at holding onto a rock career they were all but certain had ended before it began. With two well-received but largely unknown records out so far (1994’s Silver and 1996’s Secaucus), the quartet knew they needed their third album to break that mold, but had little faith it would. Perfectionism, writer’s block, and the unrelenting pressure of adult life plagued the process, their love for music and for each other buckling under the totalizing weight of living.
Paste Magazine •

Billie Marten Finds Control By Letting Go

The first time I saw British indie-folk wunderkind Billie Marten in the flesh, she was, ostensibly, being laughed at. By the midpoint of her set opening for Tennis at NYC’s Pier 17 last month, the audience had devolved into giggles. She made a valiant effort to ignore the bizarre reaction, but when she got a few lines into her quietly devastating song “Vanilla Baby” and could hardly hear herself over the laughter, she had to stop playing entirely. She looked out, baffled, at the crowd: “Why is e...
Paste Magazine •

Open Mike Eagle Picks Up the Pieces on Neighborhood Gods Unlimited

Open Mike Eagle’s discography, read as a whole, feels almost like a reluctant historical document of the adolescence of the internet rendered in miniature—from irritating novelty to totalizing force. That doesn’t mean, though, that his work feels detached or clinical. If anything, his hyper-personal writing, steeped in self-deprecation and a kind of everyday melancholy, has always made his observations sharper. He didn’t set out to capture technology, but humanity—and it just so happens that, along the way, the two became indistinguishable.
Paste Magazine •

It’s Frankie Cosmos’ Universe and We’re All Living In It

FRANKIE COSMOS’ SIXTH ALBUM, Different Talking, is not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about making the wheel you always wanted to make but never quite could—about returning to the vision you’ve spent your career approximating and, for the first time, bringing it fully to life. It’s Frankie Cosmos, with a full band and without fear; Frankie Cosmos, with both the maturity that comes only with age and the whimsy Kline should’ve felt at 19 but was forced, by circumstance, to grow out of too soon. (As she declares midway through our conversation: “It’s the summer of whimsy. Let’s make it happen. Hashtag it. #WhimsyGirlSummer.”)
Paste Magazine •

Dexys Midnight Runners, 'Searching for the Young Soul Rebels' | Time Capsule

45 years ago, the first iteration of Dexys Midnight Runners (Dexys Mark I, as they’re called in the band’s extensive lore) released Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, an exuberantly sincere and wholly inimitable album that remains one of a kind to this day. Northern soul in sound yet punk in affect, Young Soul Rebels is at once a lightning-in-the-bottle encapsulation of its time and place—early-’80s Britain post-punk at its most raw—and an utterly prescient record even four-score-and-five-years down the line.
Paste Magazine •

Time Capsule: Neutral Milk Hotel, On Avery Island

Most debut albums are remembered for what they became. On Avery Island, instead, is remembered for what it didn’t. Released in 1996, two years before In the Aeroplane Over the Sea would swallow the indie rock ecosystem whole, Neutral Milk Hotel’s first record has long lived in the shadow of its own future. Even its defenders tend to speak about it apologetically: it’s the rough draft, the proof-of-concept, the lo-fi larva that would one day metamorphose into a cult classic. It’s a convenient nar...
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