Five Horror Movies For People Who Don’t Like Horror Movies

By Chelsea Spear

The autumnal season is upon us, and with it, the onslaught of Halloween in all its grease-painted, fun-sized glory. This is great news for the gorehounds and horror-movie fanatics . . . but what of us petite flowers who faint at the sight of blood? You, my friends, are in luck! Herewith are five feature films that eschew the viscera in favor of suspense and chills.
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Richard Thompson, Dream Attic

By Chelsea Spear

In the early 1990s, British folk music hero Richard Thompson found himself the subject of a surprise revival. While his instrumental and songwriting ability had remained at a consistently high level throughout his career, his signing to Capitol and subsequent MTV success (with “I Feel So Good,” which would later appear as Puck’s unofficial theme on The Real World: San Francisco) brought him a younger, more diverse audience.
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Apples in stereo, Travellers In Space And Time

By Chelsea Spear

It’s a typical Sunday morning in New England. The skies are overcast, precipitation is spitting, and a slight breeze has started to pick up and become a full-blown wind. To my Eustachian tubes, however, the weather is 85 degrees and sunny without a cloud in the sky. The music of the Apples in stereo can have that effect on listeners.

While Robert Schneider and his band of merry musicians lack the cathartic heft of their Elephant 6 buddies Neutral Milk Hotel, and were never as experimental as the Olivia Tremor Control, he’s always been adept at serving up a kind of musical comfort food to fans of 1960s bubblegum and power pop. He sets his stick-in-the-head melodies in lush, layered production, creating a satisfying sound for fans of a bygone era.
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Happy Birthday Elvis Perkins

By Chelsea Spear

In this day and age of bringing heroin to a court date and stripping on the red carpet, being the most endearing man in rock may seem kind of mundane. However, Elvis Perkins makes this underrated virtue an outstanding and distinguished asset.
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The Living Sisters, Love To Live

By Chelsea Spear

Listening to Love To Live on an iPod feels wrong. The maiden voyage by The Living Sisters requires the listener to lower a needle onto a fat slab of vinyl and listen to a brief overture of static before their music begins.
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When You’re In Trouble, Go Into Your Dance

By Less Lee Moore

Shortly before last Christmas, fellow pop culture enthusiast and Popshifter writer Chelsea Spear sent me a link to a YouTube video and referred to it as ” HOLY CRAP THIS IS THE MOST FACE-MELTINGLY AWESOME THING EVAR.” (This is a direct quote.)

Without even questioning her expert judgment, I clicked and found the oddly-named but utterly mesmerizing “Prisencolinensinainciusol.”
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Purl Britannia

By Chelsea Spear

For a land-locked American knitter, London seems like a fairyland of the fiber arts. Enterprising crafters hold impromptu knitting circles at pubs, on the Tube, and even at special cinema matinées where theatre owners keep the lights on for them (a practice poo-pooh’d by Alison Goldfrapp in a recent issue of Bust). Waggish knit-bloggers post self-written patterns for unusual objects from slices of cake to hand grenades to (blush) anatomically correct genitalia. While the cost of a round-trip plane ticket to Old Blighty could keep one in cashmere for a year, many of England’s finest yarn manufacturers make their products available to crafty Yanks with an Anglophilic streak.
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A Young Person’s Guide To: Powell & Pressburger*

By Chelsea Spear

Who They Are

In the late 1930s, Michael Powell had left banking to study film in the south of France, working his way from lowly production assistant to director of silent films and early talkies. Meanwhile, Emeric Pressburger—a Hungarian émigré—had written screenplays at the legendary Ufa Studio in Germany and in France before settling in London. The pair met as hired hands on Alexander Korda’s 1939 feature Contraband, and spent the following two decades crafting some of the best-loved features to come out of the UK, including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
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The Accidental Terrorist: Scary Songs Which Aren’t Meant To Be Scary

Idea by Matt Keeley
With contributions by. . .

In our last Halloween issue, we discussed morbid melodies and the music of the scares. But what of songs which horrify us accidentally? Some argue that songwriters who pair dark lyrics and bright melodies know exactly what they’re doing, but what about words and music which cause fright when they were only intended to delight?

For example, a few of our readers noted that “Mama” by Genesis was a bit squicky, but it’s unclear whether that creepiness was intentional or not. However, I think we can all assume that “Beep Beep” by The Playmates was probably not meant to panic small children, although it obviously has, judging on some of the replies we received.

Here are some examples of the various tunes that terrify. . .
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Pink Martini For A Blue Girl

By Chelsea Spear

Opera House, Boston MA
June 13, 2009

“Eclectic” doesn’t begin to describe the music of Pink Martini. For the better part of a decade, this twelve-piece “little big band” has beguiled indie hipsters, polyglots, blue-haired grannies, and NPR junkies alike with their interpretations of standards from America and around the world. Likewise, the original songs that appear on their albums draw inspiration from French poetry, transcendental literature, songs from beloved 1970s movies, and bad dates.
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