Oh I'll go to bat for later Wilder. Kiss Me Stupid is gloriously smutty and maybe the most fun thing Wilder ever made—so much better than The Seven Year Itch. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes got maimed by being cut down, but still might be the best Sherlock Holmes film, there's nothing wrong at all with his…

Adjusted for inflation, Bert Williams was the first black actor to be a millionaire. Some of his records still sound pretty good, and do unexpected things like riff on Edgar Allan Poe poems. Decades before Fetchit.

You have no idea what you're talking about, and I say this as someone who spent a stint actually working at Matador in the mid aughts.

I think the record sounds pretty great from a recording point of view, and I think Tobias is hitting a sweet spot for pretty melodies and straightforward songwriting that not a lot of people these days even try for. With all the records records I've heard that sound like 4th generation Peter Gabriel xeroxes, this…

This is the worst record review I've read in a long time. It reads like a pretentious eleventh grader's comp paper.

There's actually a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas—most of M.R. James' work, and he was slightly like a British H.P. Lovecraft, was written to read to his students for Christmas, just to give one example.

I spent awhile this year listening to nearly all of the Motown Christmas albums (and boy, there are a lot of them), and while the J5 one is definitely on the good half of things, the hands-down best one is Stevie Wonder's Someday At Christmas. Not only does it contain the best Motown Xmas original, "What Christmas…

Disagree. And he writes worse lyrics too. Of course, that may be a minority opinion. When I asked the Walkmen guys why JFE broke up, they pinned it largely on their singer not being able to hit notes in the studio. I've seen Stewart's post-JFE act, The Child Ballads, though, and to these ears he sang fine. The Walkmen…