Wan­der­ing into Pan’s Labyrinth is not the same as try­ing to find Franken­stein’s mon­ster, but it’s close. I’m not real­ly sure why del Toro’s crit­ics would com­pare his work to a Span­ish film with super­fi­cial sim­i­lar­i­ties; I’m guess­ing that many of them, like myself, were only recent­ly made aware of Erice’s mas­ter­piece thanks to the…

Dear Cin­gu­lar, You’re com­mer­cials sug­gest that you have few dropped calls. This is wrong. Your ser­vice is so bad in my neigh­bor­hood [19125, hol­la at your boy] that I’ve con­sid­ered key­ing the Cin­gu­lar-brand­ed truck that’s often parked at the inter­sec­tion of York and Cedar. Your new music ser­vice is idi­ot­ic, and I think Apple made…

Here’s me prais­ing a band that’s fol­low­ing the same career arc as Guid­ed By Voic­es. I guess it’s nom­i­nal­ly “punk.” Times New Viking’s Present the Pais­ley Reich is the sort of album that will either pleas­ant­ly sur­prise you for sound­ing so fresh yet famil­iar or make you roll your eyes for seem­ing so derivative. The…

Hav­ing wok­en up late for break­fast the morn­ing indie rock was served, I total­ly missed out on Yo La Ten­go. By rights, Yo La Ten­go and the Mata­dor cohort should’ve been main­stays of WDRE playlists, yet some­how they were lost in a mias­ma of Mor­ris­sey, Bel­ly and oth­er ear­ly nineties alter­na­tive rock faves. Some say…

[Video via Angry Cit­i­zen] Remem­ber when I men­tioned that thing about David Cross and Stephen Malk­mus? Well, it was an effort in hunt­ing triv­ia for Mr. Cross to use dur­ing the Inside the Rock­er’s Stu­dio seg­ment of the 2007 PLUG Awards at which SM received a life­time achieve­ment award. Over­all, reac­tions seem mixed at best, rang­ing…