10.2.2012

Lizzy Caplan is having a moment, and not in the way her Mean Girls character Janis Ian, the mouthy high school sidekick, had moments opposite Lindsay Lohan. Lately, it seems as though critical praise...

The past 15 or so years have been a weird time for the music industry, to say the least. Napster sprung up in 1999, and along with other file-sharing outlets, completely changed the way we listen to...

You’ve probably known them your entire life: the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, the Battle of Bunker Hill, Ben Franklin’s Kite Experiment, George Washington and the Cherry Tree. They’re the stories of...

As a member of the Wolfgang’s Vault family, Paste has access to a rich archive of historic audio interviews from a variety of sources. Many of these interviews have never existed in text form. Our...

Zee Avi is just a wee young woman, but she doesn’t sound the part when she’s singing her lovesick songs of neglected feelings and soured spouses. She comes across as a woman who’s been married and...

During “Who Needs Who,” the title-track on Dark Dark Dark’s third studio album, a lovely straight-ahead piano ballad explodes into a chaotic New Orleans jazz-klezmer hybrid, with trumpets sighing...

Essentialist celebre-poppers Matt & Kim blew up with "Daylight” back in 2009, the Williamsburgian elation of their single washing over its listeners like, well, daylight. The rest of sophomore album...

Like many singers in the roots rock genre, New Yorker-by-way-of-North Carolina Tift Merritt aspires to write like Lucinda and sing like Emmylou. Her plainspoken songs are both straightforward and...

“Who needs the past? It just sticks to your shoe.” That’s Mark Eitzel singing on “The Bill Is Due,” from his solo album, Don’t Be a Stranger. He definitely has a lot of history caked on his soles: An...

John Darnielle and his Mountain Goats have frequently been at their best while capturing characters in dark situations, usually struggling to get through. Darnielle’s direct lyrics can pinpoint an...

If you’re looking for the “Hospital for Sinners,” Jakob Dylan has directions. “At the junction of right now and little too late,” the eternally-gruff-voiced frontman snarls over a gritty blues-rock...

Van Morrison’s latest, Born To Sing: No Plan B, seems to be a challenge in the game of cutting slack. I spent most of my first listen wincing—and also wincing about wincing. Morrison’s Moondance...

All the way back to Y Kan’t Tori Read, Tori Amos has always been the feral Kate Bush—slightly more muscular, possibly more grounded on terra firma, but absolutely given to an ethereal sense of melody,...

Bettye LaVette’s voice, sanded raw and consumed by emotion, is a powerful witness: strong, down and above all, real. Those attributes infuse Thankful N’ Thoughtful with a truth in being, a delivery...

For the recording of her last Taken By Trees album, 2009’s East of Eden, Swedish songstress Victoria Bergsman voyaged to the politically turbulent Pakistan, where she was abducted by a gang of locals...

Broken Kingdom, the writing and directorial debut of Daniel Gillies (perhaps best known form his role in The Vampire Diaries), finally gets unveiled to the world next week, along with its companion...

For a genre that thrives on gimmickry, horror is a natural fit for the ubiquitous found-footage method of filmmaking. Movies like the Paranormal Activity or [REC] series that have the camera and/or...

The Other Dream Team focuses on the role basketball has played in the Lithuanian community by helping them through bleak economic and social times, focusing specifically on the members of the first...

Owen Sleater only showed up for about two seconds this week, but it was long enough to unwittingly produce a brilliant phonetic misspelling of “buona fortuna,” which you’ll also recognize as this...

Homeland strutted its way to the Emmys for its first season, winning Best Actress in a Drama Series, Best Actor in a Drama Series and Best Drama Series. Shocked? I know I wasn’t. The chemistry between...

After having one of the most stressful season finales last May, The Good Wife kicked off its fourth season precisely where it left viewers: Kalinda (Archie Panjabi), in her empty apartment, staring at...

After a three-episode arc that was in my opinion the best thing Louie has done so far, the season ends on a bit more traditional note. Well, traditional for the show, which is to say it’s fragmented...

Last week, Parks and Recreation worked to set in place the show’s new dynamic, showing how well its story mechanics can work even with its characters in disparate locations and new positions. It’s a...

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Elementary is not BBC’s Sherlock by any stretch of the imagination. And it’s not trying to be. CBS’ take on the classic character tweaks the classic Sir...

Nine years is a long time: It’s nearly a decade. It’s at least two presidents. It’s the difference between an infant and a fourth-grader. It’s enough time for a brand-new car to rack up close to...

In addition to celebrating a third Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy, the Modern Family ensemble has another reason to party: Jay’s 65th birthday. His big day falls on the day after the season finale, so...

The New Normal is a deceptive show, one that touts itself as open to all kinds of people yet openly mocks people who are actually different. This is no more apparent than in “Obama Mama,” which, after...

The Sons’ prison time was always going to be short. They had an exit plan, but that plan didn’t involve Damon Pope’s sadistic ways. The One-Niner ringleader came in and offered Jax an ultimatum: kill...

Brickleberry is the type of program that immediately reveals what kind of show it is. Seconds after starting, the show cuts to two bears having sex. Then two foxes. Then three possums. Then an entire...

What does it take to be a drama these days? Period piece? Gangsters/mafia? Thrilling action? CBS’ Vegas seems to want to take the best aspects of the best dramas on television and become a breakout...

Go On is one of those shows that receives a lot of complaints: its premise is washed up, it’s not funny enough, it contains too much pathos, there are too many characters and none of them are...

Around the end of the last decade, comedies took a sharp turn from a more sarcastic, droll sense of humor, into lighter, happier fare. Once Jim and Pam became an item on The Office, shows like Glee,...

Throughout the first half of New Girl’s first season, the show had potential but was still fumbling to succeed in the ways it should. Stories didn’t really propel the characters forward and the...

One oddity of Treme has always been that the aspects of the show that most resemble David Simon’s masterpiece The Wire have also been, almost universally (I say almost because of Sonny), the most...

After next week’s season finale, we may never have another episode of Hell on Wheels, and I’ll be damned, if that’s the case, I’m actually going to miss it. At the beginning of the season, I was wary...

The Summer of Love 2012 was boring. So let’s skip ahead to the Autumn of Break-Ups. If there’s one thing How I Met Your Mother fans have learned over seven seasons, it’s that the timeline of the show...

For some reason, Fox has been holding us back from seeing new episodes of Bob’s Burgers. Instead of airing a longer season last year, Fox aired only nine of the episodes they ordered for their second...

Call Guild Wars 2 a kinder, gentler MMO. The massively multiplayer online game from ArenaNet exists to erase, address or ameliorate all the hassles, friction and headaches that seemed written into the...

“If you are reading this,” offers social critic and New Urbanist James Howard Kunstler about halfway through his 16th book, “then you may be doing it in the smoldering ruins of modernity.” Writing in...

Alt rockers Rah Rah are back with their third full-length album, The Poet’s Dead. The Canadian indie darlings have received accolades in their home country, being named “Best New Canadian Band” and...

Jason Collett has released a video for the track “The Song of the Silver Haired Hippie” which is featured on his new album Reckon.For years, Collett...

Last week, we premiered two videos from singer-songwriter Tift Merritt. This week, we’ve got one more acoustic treat from Merritt with a third video,...

Psychic Twin released the single “Gonna Get Her” earlier this year and now Paste has an exclusive music video premiere for the track.“Gonna Get Her”...

Earlier this summer we premiered the song “Naked” from Sera Cahoone’s upcoming album Deer Creek Canyon. Now we can acquaint the song with a different sense: sight.The video for lead single “Naked”...

Paste has partnered with Sennheiser to bring you exclusive performances from the Paste Ruins at Newport Folk Festival. This week, we’ve got a clip...