// Category Archive for: Best Of Lists

Best Of 2016: Kadhja Bonet

2016 sucked!! Honestly I think it was a shit year for everyone, especially on a global/political level. And still going… yay! It was very successful at driving me further into my fear of humans.

That being said, humans keep creating good art. Somewhere, right now, a masterpiece is being made.

Being more than slightly agoraphobic I can’t recommend any particular live/concert experiences, but I would recommend not being agoraphobic if you can help it. I’m starting to consider YouTube vloggers as legit friends.

Memorable Films

Divines: A French-Qatari project from director Uda Benyamina. I don’t remember the last time I had an art-induced cry quite like that. Super solid. The acting was maybe the freshest and realest I’ve ever seen. It’s that good.

Moonlight: Directed by Barry Jenkins. Tense, heavy, sincere, deserving of all its praise. Elegantly crafted, with awesome details in the cinematography as well as editing. It’s hard to watch films where the characters age and look like new people sometimes, but it’s worth it for the perfect meeting of content and style.

Under the Sun: Russian made, Directed by Vitaliy Mansky. This faux documentary (?) filmed in North Korea is technically from 2015, but I’m including it because it only reached US theaters in July of 2016 (I don’t know about everywhere else). This film will blow your brain open and give you some terrifying perspective about real-life social/political shit. You will understand the question mark once you are immersed in the film.

13th: A documentary by the scholar Ava DuVernay. Good reminders for those lucky enough to be in the know; good first exposure for those who accidentally ingested a full dose of US propaganda.

Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky laying it all out. (I think this is also from 2015 but I don’t care.) I had to watch it a couple of times to catch everything.

Memorable Albums:

I stay on Rihanna’s Anti. So much fire. I always wash dishes to it. I usually listen up to “Yeah I Said It” and then start it over, if the kitchen’s not clean yet.

Anderson Paak’s Malibu definitely felt like a musical revival, rebirth, and new birth, feeling fresh and familiar in all the good ways.

Kaytranada’s .0001 mixtape was super dope and I strongly prefer it over his more official album release of the year, 99.9%. It’s great for solo dance parties.

We reviewed Kadhja Bonet’s The Visitor on October 21.

Best Of 2015: JG Thirlwell

2015 was jam-packed with life events and huge amounts of work, but I barely left NYC.

Here is my bloated 2015 cultural year-in-review list.
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Best Of 2015: Carol Borden, The Cultural Gutter

List-making, especially lists of the best things, is not really my strong point. I can’t get past the fact that I haven’t read or seen everything. And then I have no idea how to rank things that seem so different. So when Popshifter asked me to participate again in the Best of 2015 lists, I decided to go rogue and offer my own idiosyncratic list of bests in comics and film this year.

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Fave Comics Of 2015: Sean Jordan (a.k.a. Wordburglar)

Photo © Peter Chapman

2015 was another amazing year for comics. To prove it, I’ve got a long-box brimming with floppy-covered gold sitting underneath a shelf of glossily coated gems. Thanks to my skilled comic book sorting methods, finding the comics I loved this year was easy. Selecting my absolute favourites? Well that’s tougher than giving Xemnu the Living Titan a lice inspection.

But I shall proceed!

Here then, in no particular order, for your reading pleasure (and potential debate) are ten of my personal favourite funnybooks from 2015*.
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Best Of 2015: Less Lee Moore

For more discussion about the items on my list, check out the Popshifter Best Of 2015 Podcast!

Many thanks to the following: All the writers at Popshifter but especially Melissa Bratcher, Brad Henderson, Tyler Hodg, Jeffery X Martin, and Tim Murr for being so generous with their time and talent; all the fantastic PR folks that help make everything possible (too many to list!); Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe at Spectacular Optical for graciously publishing my essay on Ricky Kasso in their Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s anthology; the kind people of Rue Morgue for publishing my music reviews in the magazine as well as my Frightful Flashback column on the blog; the good folks at all of the websites who invited me to write for them this year: Everything Is Scary, Nerdy Stuff, Modern Horrors, Dirge Magazine, and Biff Bam Pop; Colin Geddes and Carol Borden for being terrific and for letting me write for the TIFF Vanguard and Midnight Madness blogs again; and last but certainly NOT least, Shaun Hatton for being a generally awesome person.

And now, for the lists!
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The Official Popshifter Podcast, Episode #07, Best Of 2015 Edition

Welcome to Episode #07 of The Official Popshifter Podcast, Best Of 2015 Edition.

Let’s send 2015 out with a bang, not a whimper! Your hosts, Managing Editor Less Lee Moore and Featured Contributor Jeffery X Martin, welcome special guest, Featured Contributor Tim Murr, as we round up the favorite things of the entire Popshifter staff. Happy New Year from all of us in the penthouse corner office of the Popshifter International Headquarters!

Top 10 Things That Made Me Happy In 2015: Melissa Bratcher

By Melissa Bratcher

As it is every year, my Top 10 is a mix of things: music, TV, movies and one experience that rises above all others. While 2015 isn’t quite over, and awesome things might still happen, these are things I keep coming back to.

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Five Albums You May Have Not Heard in 2015: Tyler Hodg

By Tyler Hodg

Every year, certain albums fly under the radar despite their worth. It’s impossible to get around to listening to everything, so I’ve compiled a small list of my favorite records released in 2015 that deserve to be looked at more closely.

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Best Of 2015: Vetiver

Favorite 2015 Releases

Tom Furse, Digs

Meg Baird, Don’t Weigh Down The Light

Max Richter, Sleep

Monika, Secret In The Dark

Chris Weisman, The Holy Life That’s Coming

Palmbomen II, Palmbomen II

Kurt Vile, B’lieve I’m Going Down…

Joan Shelley, Over and Even

Floating Points, Elaenia

Róísín Murphy, “House of Glass (Maurice Fulton Remix)”

Vetiver’s Complete Strangers was released in March through Easy Sound.

Best Of 2015: Little Wings (a.k.a. Kyle Field)

Things Loved and Discovered in 2015:

1. Super Snark tuner with insurance: We only brought one on tour and would pass it around on stage. It became a game.

2. Patagonia “Houdini” windbreaker: Compacts into its own pocket. Wore it after the July 5 Dead show in Chicago as my phone was dying trying to meet up with our Uber. I felt like ! was in a new post-post-modern X-Men movie.

3. Playing Sou’wester with Michael Hurley in creepy October and getting a response in our room from the Lodge itself (lightbulb turned off) when we asked,” Do you think this place is haunted?”

4. Staying in a haunted house outside of Philly on our tour with Weyes Blood: The next morning the host asked if we had heard anything during the night like the little boy that stomps on the floor outside of your bedroom door.

5. Lee Baggett’s behind the head guitar solos: He actually plays better that way.

6. Danny Brown’s Noisey Vice video when he visits the Gathering of the Juggalos: It did not make me confident that I would fit in there as well as he did.

7. Meeting Doug from Built to Spill after seeing them cover a Michael Hurley song at the Treefort Music Festival (thanks Erik!).

9. Space Kamp’s “Red Hot Chili Peppers Fake Fan Fiction” zine (thanks Elverum!).

10. The Echovox EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) phone app and finding places on tour to use it! Such as that olde theatre in New Haven, Bard College Chapel, the haunted cave in Avila Beach, and the Big Sur Lighthouse.

10. Hydro Flask insulated canteen for keeping things hot or cold.

Little Wings’ latest album, Explains, was released by Woodsist in May.