With one of the greatest convocations New Orleans has to offer, the first weekend of the 2011 Jazz & Heritage Fest provided everything from zydeco to Cajun to Americana – with a side of crawfish.

Gloss Drop is the sound of a band forging its own identity and delivering on the promise initially unveiled on its previous album.

An energetic return to form, proving once and for all that a goth's second wind is far mightier than that of a mortal's.

Heralded as a neorealist masterpiece, Shoeshine should be considered more of a precursor to the style in which Vittorio De Sica polished his technique for his later masterpieces.

Old horror comics were meant to shock, but these stories offered advice and instruction -- a much more dangerous form of influence.

About as pleasant as a trip to the dentist.

This doc provides a look at one of the most exciting figures in rock music at his creative peak. So, how is it that it is so painfully dull and free of insight?

You got the silver, you got the gold, you got the diamonds from the mine, but do you have Counterbalance? Klinger and Mendelsohn have a little to spare in this week's edition as they pick through the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed.

While X-Men: First Class does deliver spectacle when it needs to, it never forgets that while we dream of being like its mutants, they are dreaming of being like us.

The Witcher exists in a world that is strongly affected by wars, displaced persons and refugees, class strife and political turmoil, and most of all, vengeance and murder on a nation spanning scale.

Nine years after 2002's shameful reissues, Ozzy Obsourne's two best albums have been spruced up yet again, but this time with much more exciting results.

As before, the novelty of the new roads soon wears off and Ice Road Truckers is stuck trying to manufacture drama from small incidents.

The puzzle parts of Clash of Heroes allow the strategy parts to be shrunk down so they fit on a single game board.

There's a cognitive dissonance between Parker's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ridley Scott's BladeRunner, because Parker's adaptation is a direct adaptation of each word in Dick's original text.

Unlike games like Uncharted, in which players must willfully ignore ludo-narrative inconsistency, Vanquish acknowledges its mechanical challenges and lets them exist independently from the plot.

Peter Case is artful and anarchic: he speaks for the mudsills and the agitated, the weary and browbeaten; the dodgers and the doe-eyed; the prose behind the left-of-center politics; the words in-between the words. He is the intelligent listener, and the one emblazoned with free speech fortitude.

Phoebe seems to be part child, part neurotic, and part lost soul; she is simply a nicely layered character and reading about her is like eating a petit four—it’s both fun and potentially surprising.

Bobby Fischer Against the World doesn't smooth over his complexity, only makes it apparent, part of its own structure, its reflections on the world that made and continues to judge Fischer.

The free novel continues -- only at Popmatters.com.

A My Chemical Romance performance is a celebration of innocence, a wish for their admirers to never age bitterly.

Ukulele Songs shows us a Vedder with nothing to hide behind.

Forget trying to read Wikipedia for the articles. The real story of the human condition is found in their behind-the-scenes creation.

Matt Johnson of Matt & Kim tells PopMatters about the time that Kim punched him and how the duo accidentally became a band writing songs that write themselves ...

The applause of shattering glass, poetic touch under the raised banner, the rose held in the fist of socialist iconography, the thorn that pricks amid the beauty of a world that both embraces and alienates its people.

Ultimately, Blue Valentine isn’t something you merely watch: it’s something that you feel. Even though it proves to be one hell of a devastating experience, it’s worth the pain.

As the scripts counterpoint light with dark, threat with the elusive promise of contentment, Men of a Certain Age peers ever deeper into the men's psyches.

Woodward offered a rare, vicarious look into D.C., politics, history, and the craft of journalism to a captivated audience at the University of Kansas.

It's billed as being unique and different -- keyboards instead of guitars! -- but Codes & Keys is the sound of Death Cab at their most generic, disjointed, and disinterested.