Gun Outfit Reach Higher Ground on ‘Process and Reality’
Gun Outfit’s Process and Reality imbues a cosmic existentialism in which celestial instrumentation coils and twists, like a serpentine trail in a canyon.
Jack Walters
Jack Walters is a staff writer for PopMatters. His latest book is Bob Dylan: Song by Song: Volume 1: 1962–1969 (2026). His essay, “The Philosophy of Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour”, is published in The Dylan Review. He can be reached by email: jackwalters [dot] lc [at] gmail [dot] com
Modern Woman Feel the Rage in ‘Johnny’s Dreamworld’
Modern Woman’s operatic Johnny’s Dreamworld offers a range of sounds, from post-punk to art rock to chamber pop.
Kyle Craft’s ‘Dolls of Highland’ Is Genuine Theater
Kyle Craft created high-drama with high-stakes, a Freudian fantasy, wherein sex and death interweave, or, rather, Thanatos and Eros commingle, like a seductive dance.
Kiki Cavazos Says ‘Goodbye Blues’ and Keeps on Travelin’
Kiki Cavazos uses the American landscape to measure the narrator’s life against: where she’s been and where she’s heading, or who she was and is.
Mildred Are Philosophically Listless on the ‘Fenceline’
Mildred show how our current ennui can be transcended by friends coming together to perform music, that boredom can be an impetus, not an obstruction, for creativity.
Brown Horse Get Loud and Bleak As They Drive On
Brown Horse have released their loudest and bleakest LP, where muscular guitars, walloping drums, and thumping pedal steels converge and erupt like a volcano.
Juni Habel Presents the Perilous Beauty of Nature
Juni Habel presents the perilous beauty of nature as both metaphor and fact, to enlarge and reduce emotions and inhabit a liminal space wherein poetry resides.
New German Cinema Goes in Search of Self
New German Cinema shows that pop, when rendered with elegance and depth, can be as weighty as a tome, and although pain is inevitable, it can be a form of succor.
Ora Cogan Is a ‘Hard Hearted Woman’
With Hard Hearted Woman, Ora Cogan showcases that, in a patriarchal world, you have to be literally and figuratively ready to fight, body and soul.
Cat Clyde Is Searching on ‘Mud Blood Bone’
Cat Clyde is immensely talented, but Mud Blood Bone is a frustrating listen due to occasional missteps and a questionable cowboy-pop aesthetic.
Morrissey Is an Incorrigible Sentimentalist
Morrissey’s Make-Up Is a Lie is a love letter to Paris: schmaltzy, befuddling, arresting, but, most of all, HIM.
The Band’s Rick Danko Possessed a Voice for the Ages
With his old-timey, soul-inflected voice, Rick Danko could sink like an anchor, plumbing the depths of existence that most singers would have to drown themselves to reach.