Matthew Culnane

I came to Axiom Verge late, and from the wrong direction. I’d been playing the post-Hollow Knight wave of Metroidvanias, the ones with their charm systems and stamina bars and cartographer NPCs, and worked backwards to the game that predates all of it. It came out in 2015, two years before Hollow Knight reset the genre’s reference point. Play it now and you can feel where it’s pointed: not at its descendants but back at 1994, at Super Metroid, which happens to be one of my favourite games. So I came to this predisposed to like it.

The map is good. Nine interlocking areas that expand in the mind the way the good ones do, where you’re navigating the corridor in front of you and plotting a route across the whole world at once. I got lost a few times, which I count as a point in its favour—getting lost is half of why I play these—and never for so long that it curdled. Only once did I reach for a clue: a lava pit you have to fire the address disruptor at to make it traversable. Obvious in hindsight, and apparently it stumps a lot of players. I’d walked through that room several times and it simply never occurred to me.

The weapons are where my reservations start. There are lots, and that’s the problem. I spent almost the whole game on Voranj, the low-power spread gun, and barely touched the rest. The flamethrower turns up and seems well regarded, but I found it situational at best, and I could never keep straight which weapon did what. Breadth standing in for depth.

The disruptor itself is the cleverest idea here, corrupting enemies, peeling back hidden passages, a riff on the out-of-bounds exploits speedrunners dig out of the actual NES Metroid. The lore leans the same way: deliberately strange, body-horror texture, an ancient world called Sudra. Intriguing for a while, and then somewhere around the midpoint I stopped following the plot and let it wash over me, with no real sense I’d lost anything.

What keeps pulling me back is that Tom Happ built nearly all of it alone—design, art, music, the lot. You can feel a single sensibility in each of those odd weapons and corrupted texture. It honours Super Metroid without hiding behind it, which is more than most of its successors manage in their Team Cherry reverence.

I won’t got for 100% but would happily replay it at some point.

The first Broken Social Scene album in 21 years to be produced by Dave Newfeld. With so many singers and instrumentalists in the fold, every new member is additive. Newfeld is multiplicative. No other producer does so much with so much: instruments fade in and out, emphasis shifts to a different part of the mix, of the band. His return is excellent news.

It also makes it hard to resist comparing Remember the Humans to the earlier masterworks. I’m not sure this one has an era-defining piece like “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”. It doesn’t open with the unbroken run of 10/10 songs that the self-titled album did.

So what do we have? The highlights are very strong. “Only the Good I Keep” arrives early, sung by new member Hannah Georgas (they had room for more?), full of forty-something nostalgia. Lisa Lobsinger brings “Relief”, a highly addictive piece of electro-pop with some great drumming. Feist turns up near the end on “What Happens Now”, a song that starts as a mantra and builds into something tender.

The consistency across the album is high, and the basslines are particularly good. BSS songs have always been melancholic. The specific flavour may have subtly changed, but it’s still there, still tangible through the densely layered arrangements.

Whether they’ve “grown” or “improved” is hard to say. They stretch the definition of a band. They arrived sui generis and have done what they do, well, across several albums, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking here. Expect an excellent Broken Social Scene album, which is a high watermark indeed.

The sort of high-concept swing nobody risks any more (which is of course a small tragedy). What struck me most was this: do this exact film with football and it’d be insufferable, yet with baseball it’s earnest and earned. The mundanities of another country’s sport arrive here as something close to myth. We don’t have that for football. Partly the game’s class baggage, partly a national suspicion of taking it too seriously, of being caught intellectualising a thing that’s meant to be felt. Costner stands in a cornfield talking to ghosts and it plays straight. Try the equivalent featuring a centre-half on a wet Tuesday in the Championship and you’re looking at something vastly different.

Three stories, each with a flicker of something that never quite holds. Jarmusch’s deadpan usually finds the warmth under the stillness; here the stillness is mostly just… still. Whatever thread runs through them (family as obligation? as performance?) is far too faint.

The book has three layers: the 1978 original, a brief 1985 update, and a more substantial 2022 one. The accretion does something historiographical. Each pass lets Leaf revisit his earlier claims, correct what time has disproved, adjust what had previously been legally neutered, and register how public perception of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys has shifted across four decades. You can watch the consensus reorganise itself around the man, edition by edition. For a fully paid-up Brian Wilson acolyte like me, it’s about as comprehensive as the literature gets. Forty-four years is a long time to keep returning to one man. Leaf makes a good case for why it was worth it.

It was today I realised that this and The Other Guys are different films. Cleverly written, sharply directed, and Gosling is, as ever, a delight. Keith David and Kim Basinger perhaps a little wasted.

Paolo Sorrentino gives us Toni Servillo as a president in his final months: a former judge who values truth and certainty above all, a man who ponders but does not dream. Several pressing decisions await him, but the film is less concerned with the verdicts than with the weighing. Underneath it all sits a grief he can’t resolve, for a wife whose infidelity he learned too late to confront. A straightforward premise, and a fascinating character study built on it. Servillo brings exactly the gravitas and indecision the part needs, holding the screen while doing, on the face of it, very little.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.

The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.

Big Long Sun started as Jamie Broughton on his own and is now an eight-piece, though you wouldn’t always guess it from the recordings. Broughton still tracks most of it himself in a Brighton bedroom on a Tascam 244, and the other seven turn up to add detail rather than thicken the mix. love songs and spiritual recollections is their third album in eighteen months, which would normally be cause for suspicion, but the songs don’t sound rushed.

It’s psych-pop with folk-pop instrumentation, and the eight members are used sparingly. ‘heavy (on your mind)’ is a good example: nothing it does is individually complicated, but the song slowly piles up until it sounds full without ever sounding crowded. That restraint runs through most of the record.

The warmth of the playing keeps pulling against the lyrics, which are not warm. Not always dark either: more often aloof and guarded, hinting at something rather than explaining it. Broughton has called one of the singles “a dark, paranoid folk anthem for the spiritually insecure mind,” which gives you the temperature, even when the arrangements are doing their best to disguise it.

I really do like this a lot. About as good as these things get (not intended to be faint praise). Half a star bump.

Cooper’s least showy film and for me his best. The stand-up scenes could have been a vanity exercise for everyone involved; instead they’re the most honest stretch of the film. I’ve enjoyed Arnett’s bluster for years but he’s doing something else here and it suits him. Dern matches him scene for scene and then some, especially in the back half once Tess stops absorbing and starts pushing back. They feel like two people who have actually been married. I really enjoyed this.