// Category Archive for: Current Faves

Music Review: Hulaland: The Golden Age Of Hawaiian Music

By Melissa Bratcher

I don’t know that a lovelier box set than Hulaland: The Golden Age Of Hawaiian Music has ever crossed my desk. Four discs of carefully curated tracks (105! 105 tracks of Hawaiian music! Your luau could go on for ages!), collecting a vast range of music from the 1920s to the ’70s, are housed in a gorgeous, hardbound book. The book serves as liner notes, written by James Austin, as well as a collection of memorabilia from a time when the States went tiki crazy, and reproductions of vintage sheet music covers from the Hawaiian heyday. It’s compulsively readable, showcasing notable Hawaiian musicians, a brief history of the ukulele, and all kinds of lagniappe wrapped in a candy-colored package. It’s worth the price of admission alone.

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Concert Review: Zombi at The Hard Luck Bar

By Less Lee Moore

November 7, 2015
Toronto ON

You might think that two normal-looking guys with short hair wearing jeans and T-shirts and playing music with no vocals would make for an exceedingly boring evening, but you’d be wrong. Zombi is anything but pedestrian.

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Music Review: Swamp Thing, Planet Murk

By Tyler Hodg

Goddamn, Toronto is housing some insanely talented hip-hop artists.

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Music Review: Thor, Metal Avenger

By Tim Murr

After about 40 years of head banging and pumping iron, THOR is having a kick ass 2015. With the re-release of the landmark Unchained EP and a hit documentary (review), THOR is topping the year off with a new album called Metal Avenger that’s chock full of guest stars from members of The Dead Boys, Twisted Sister, Kix, DOA, Motorhead, and Black Flag! That’s right, Henry Rollins shares mic duties with the mighty one on “Master of Revenge.”

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Music Review: The Bottle Rockets, South Broadway Athletic Club

By Melissa Bratcher

True fact: your new favorite song is probably on new album from St. Louis’s indie-Americana stalwarts, the Bottle Rockets. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, because South Broadway Athletic Club is packed to the edges of the grooves with such great tracks (assuming you’re listening on vinyl).

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Music Review: Youth Decay, The Party’s Over

By Tyler Hodg

Vancouver punk rock band Youth Decay can officially say that they have a solid debut album under their belt. A follow-up to their 2014 EP Older Fatter Drunker, The Party’s Over has a comfortable, mature sound that knows what it wants to be: extremely energetic and in-your-face. A project the band members started for fun, Youth Decay has now become something seriously worth-while.

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DVD/Blu-Ray Review: Demonoid

By Jeffery X Martin

We provide many public services here at Popshifter, and we do our level best to be fair, accurate, and rigorous when testing entertainment products. We also try to anticipate the needs of our readers. For example, one morning during a high-powered meeting at the round table in the glass corner office of Popshifter International Headquarters, the question was posited: “Which movie about a demon-possessed sentient severed hand should we recommend to our readers, whom we love and cherish?”

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Blu-Ray Review: The Editor

By Brendan Ross

Those crazy Astron-6 kids have done it again! This time around the Winnipeg collective have made their most ambitious film yet: both a spoof and a love letter to giallo cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. For those not familiar, the term giallo refers to a very specific genre of arthouse-meets-grindhouse thrillers from Italy, recognizable just as much for their beautifully stylized aesthetics as for their bizarrely convoluted story lines and hysterically poor overdubbed dialogue. If you are familiar with the works of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, or Mario Bava then you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, go watch Deep Red, The Beyond, and Bay Of Blood right now. I’ll wait here…

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Book Review: Ray Wylie Hubbard, A Life… Well, Lived

By Melissa Bratcher

Nineteen pages into Ray Wylie Hubbard’s book, A LIfe… Well, Lived. I had teared up, laughed hard enough to snort, and planned on buying his back catalogue of music (which is extensive). Hubbard is a natural raconteur, and his memoir is loaded with witty, honest, closely observed stories that span his lifetime. A Life… Well, Lived is written in an non-linear fashion: there are straight-up autobiographical chapters, stream of consciousness stories written with a lack of respect for the constraints of “proper” punctuation and capitalization, plus his filmic song lyrics. Hubbard has a literate, biting style of writing, and it is incredibly enjoyable. Buckle up, it’s a hell of a ride.

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Blu-Ray Review: The Brood

By Less Lee Moore

Let’s get this out of the way first: whenever someone asks about my favorite David Cronenberg film, my knee-jerk response is, The Brood. Having seen almost all of Cronenberg’s pre-A History Of Violence movies, it still stands out. Perhaps it doesn’t have as much of the gruesome depravity of Videodrome or Dead Ringers (both excellent films in their own right), but there’s just something about it that continues to fascinate me.

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