On a superficial level, the National should be relegated to cult status, critically-lauded and beloved by a core audience. Their unflinchingly honest portrayal of 21st Century malaise and despondence, social anxiety and regret should be a lead weight holding them back. And yet, what should be so limiting has conversely come to be the spark that launched them into the stratosphere. Perhaps it’s that whatever despair plagues their work is persistently tempered with a desire to persevere. And as shown throughout Trouble Will Find Me, the National maintains their modus operandi of zeroing in on individual alienation, the tales composing their sixth record standing as microcosmic examples of unfulfilled longing in a globalized, digital age. That pervasive feeling of isolation clearly resonates on a large scale, as proven by the National’s newly cemented status as a headlining, in-demand group.

Trouble Will Find Me, then, is the album of a band on the other end of a world conquered by 2010’s High Violet, and it is their declaration that such conquest was no fluke. Quieter overall than High Violet, in the same way Boxer was to predecessor Alligator, Trouble Will Find Me forgoes immediate reward for slow-rising simmer. As a result, the melodies are not as instantly recognizable. Instead, brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner create evocative mood pieces, the threads of which are woven together in a layered tapestry. Frequently, the songs start with minimal instrumentation, beguiling the listener as they subtly grow expansive. The tendency of the music to swell and break is underpinned by the rhythm section of the band’s second set of brothers, Scott and Bryan Devendorf. The latter’s unconventional drumming style is the National’s ace in the hole, going with a downplayed shuffle in “Fireproof” and one-two-three power blasts in “Sea of Love,” one of the album’s few avowed rockers. Such a pairing of the rhythmic Devendorfs with the more esoteric inclinations of the Dessners manifests in a marriage between dirges and hymnals, the seemingly oppositional forms most closely linked on “Heavenfaced.”

At the center as always is Matt Berninger and his insightful words delivered through rough yet consoling baritone pipes. As a lyricist, Berninger again makes his case as one of the finest in the indie realm, speaking from perspectives of the desolate and the insecure, reassuring the lonely that they are not as alone as they may believe. Opener “I Should Live in Salt” finds a meeker-than-usual Berninger providing a deprecating tale of two lovers living like planets orbiting the same sun, never managing to collide. The song starts like a whisper, epitomizing the paradigm employed so often on the record of building into a cathartic exhalation. As such, it is the first of several bedroom anthems of self-realization, wherein Berninger bemoans his decision to leave one behind, but is unable to keep from picking at the scab, repeating, “I should leave it alone/ But you’re not right.” He invokes the imagery of a desert of salt as what he believes to be a fitting punishment, implying the sucking of moisture from his body, leaving him a brittle husk. Such self-deprecation could be melodramatic, but the musical accompaniment of the Dessners and the Devendorfs saves Berninger’s words from that pitfall and leaves them genuinely moving.

With lead single “Demons,” Berninger begrudgingly champions the integrity of holding onto misery rather than compromising for relief. His narrator makes the case that it’s better to own your demons as essential to your identity instead of taking the chance of casting them out and winding up hollow. A theme of stagnancy, and of that stagnancy’s ability to become comforting and to supersede the drive to evolve, pervades the record. In particular, “Slipped” stands as a sequel to “Demons,” the speaker fixed to a pole in his past, the past itself a roadblock to personal development. “I keep coming back here where everything slipped,” Berninger sings mournfully, before declaring with recalcitrant pride, “But I won’t spill my guts out.”

Entwined with this theme of emotional fixation is that of demythologizing the sunshine-and-rainbows concept of love. The pinnacle of revered feelings is treated as an addiction in “This is the Last Time,” initial exhilaration leading to desensitized dependence. The protagonist has a masochistic bent as he repeatedly indulges in a surreptitious hookup. He seeks resolution to a fling that cannot end pleasantly, yet he can’t help but relapse when the song’s rising momentum collapses at the end. That debilitating quality of love flares up again on “I Need My Girl,” the music swirling as a whirlpool around Berninger as his character circles the drain with the repeated, “I keep feeling smaller and smaller.”

The record splits its zenith between “Graceless” and “Don’t Swallow the Cap.” The former, which is bound to be an encore staple when the National plays live, serves as Trouble Will Find Me’s equivalent to High Violet’s “Conversation 16.” There are some particularly clever turns of phrase here, in particular, “God loves everyone/ Don’t remind me” pointing out how vapid that trite attempt at comfort is, and “I’m trying but I’m gone/ Through the glass again,” a Lewis Carroll reference mirrored with that of alcoholism. Meanwhile, “Don’t Swallow the Cap” features Berninger giving a firsthand account of mental illness and institutionalization, numbly reciting a litany of observations as he details the hoops one must jump through to convince hospital staff that you are okay.

Trouble Will Find Me is in every way the logical continuation of the National’s previous offerings, and it marks their fourth success in a row. It’s virtually assured to top High Violet’s mainstream recognition, showing the National have proven in this era of technology-saturation and interpersonal disconnect that valid, artistic music can be appealing on a mass scale.

Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore) is a 40-something high school English teacher, and a good one. She loves her job and fine literature, inspires students and is well respected in her community. Former student Jason Sherwood (Michael Angarano) accidentally surprises her late one night at an ATM, and, after recovering from the pepper spray, manages to tell her how encouraging she had been in high school. In fact, he has just graduated from NYU, but, despite his best efforts, couldn’t get a production of his thesis play mounted. Linda reads his play, loves it and decides it should be presented by the high school theater troupe. Things quickly spiral out of control, as things tend to do in romantic screwball comedies, and Linda’s life takes a beating as she weathers the major changes brought on by this decision.

Despite its quirky stylization, complete with stuffy British narration provided by Fiona Shaw, The English Teacher is just another iteration of a common romantic cliche: a woman with standards is a woman destined to die alone. All the usual sitcom tropes are deployed to this end, including the running conceit of Linda silently grading every man she meets. By the time Linda pepper sprays Jason, the film has made it clear that she is judgmental and unduly suspicious, and these traits are dangerous to all around her. It’s a variation of the hysterical woman stereotype, and the film doesn’t even try to hide it; when Linda is told she just needs to get laid, she storms off in outrage, but a moment later is crying as she buys several pints of ice cream to nurse her loneliness.

Though the film’s judgment of Linda is unfair, she does make her share of mistakes. She embarks on an ill-advised fling with Jason, unaware that he is misleading her about his life and also dating Halle (Lily Collins), the high school lead of his play. Campy theater teacher Carl Kapinas (a typecast Nathan Lane) is an opportunistic liar, and the school wants to censor the play for content. Despite this being a situation where many people screwed up, Linda takes the brunt of the blame. Everything that goes wrong is laid at her feet, the result of her alleged need for a man.

Not that Jason gets any better treatment. He’s a whiny, crotch-scratching loser, though clearly seen in a sympathetic light, primarily because we go through most of the film without realizing the kind of person he is. Once we do realize it, he essentially disappears from the film, and the character is never made to suffer any kind of cinematic karma. Linda meanwhile is flattened by a 2-ton comedy-sized anvil full of cinematic karma — not to be confused with actual karma — that involves her accidentally rubbing pepper spray into her own eyes and crashing her car.

Much of the film is spent as major characters scold her for their perceptions of her misdeeds, perceptions that rarely match what actually happened. Dr. Tom Sherwood (Greg Kinnear) is intended to be a voice of reason, but Kinnear tones Tom’s moralizing down, and to great effect. His performance adds necessary realism that the film itself tries hard to avoid, but shouldn’t. There is also a really great moment with Jessica Hecht as Linda’s principal, who threatens and scolds, but you can tell in her eyes she knows she’s at least half wrong to do so. Though Moore gives a solid turn and never lets her character be demeaned — humiliated and embarrassed, yes, but never demeaned — one wishes she would have taken a lesson from her co-stars and toned down the hysterics, or maybe used one of her outsized facial expressions when confronted with obvious lies at her expense.

In the service of paralleling Jason learning to grow up and take criticism, Linda takes all the criticism she gets without comment, as though making decisions based on others’ lies is the same as an artist coming to terms with good faith critiques of their work. It’s presented as personal growth for her, and there is the germ of a point here, and an interesting discussion could be had on the roles of artists and critics, as well as directors and producers. But the film spends too much time metaphorically viewing the situation from Jason’s side of the story, wallowing in the unfairness of ill-informed criticism.

It’s a sulky artist’s revenge fantasy, subjecting a critic to criticism of their personal lives, even though the two types of critique are simply not parallel; a teacher being punished for serious breaches of conduct is in no way similar to a playwright receiving a terrible review, and it’s ridiculous, even in the highly stylized world of The English Teacher, to claim otherwise. There are entertaining moments and some fine performances, but ultimately, it’s difficult to see the film as anything but barely-disguised payback against critics and teachers, concealed inside a thick coating of safe sitcom humor and the stereotype of a lonely, hysterical middle-aged woman who just needs a man in her life.

Is this a not-so-secret message from Reggio, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it central nugget in a film named after a Hopi word that means “1. Crazy life. 2. Life in turmoil. 3. Life out of balance. 4. Life disintegrating. 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living”? For a movie that begins and ends with juxtaposed ancient paintings from Utah’s Horseshow Canyon and a rocket ship exploding into the night, Koyaanisqatsi is likely Reggio’s best approximation of the aboriginal idea of Dreamtime, an exploration of a planet careening towards obliteration.

Reggio has said that “it is up to the viewer to take for himself/herself” what Koyaanisqatsi means, that he set out to make a purely cinematic experience. But I think the director is being coy as his film has deliberate and separate movements that slide towards the idea of man-made extinction. Much of the film’s first segment is time-lapsed beauty of clouds roiling over the vacant deserts and canyons of the American Southwest. Demystified from the ghosts of Hollywood that surround the region, Reggio’s Southwest is a place of quiet desolation, one that is untouched by the ill effects of mechanization.

If Reggio’s long shots of natural pillars, swales and arroyos isn’t mesmerizing enough, Philip Glass’ mesmeric score plays as a haunting elegy to these haunting corners of the world. Shifting away from the splendor of this unspoiled wilderness, Koyaanisqatsi becomes a cacophony of urban images, belching smokestacks and spider veins of highway that are choking the life out of the planet. Reggio may wait until the end of the film to show us the definition of its title, but its images make it plain that there is a mission statement at play here.

Besides Glass’ score, Reggio is also armed with cinematographer Ron Fricke who would go on to director the similar Baraka. Much of Koyaanisqatsi’s cityscapes are shot in frenetic time-lapse, presumably to show all of the human cogs at work to keep the city alive and fed. Fricke would later re-use many of these motifs in Baraka, but the assembly lines, brokers scurrying across the floor of the Exchange and New York traffic in fast motion made their first appearances here.

Koyaanisqatsi features a mix of images both beautiful and horrific. Its final images are among its most haunting. A rocket ship hurtles upward into the sky, escaping a planet ridden with pollution and madness. But just a few seconds into its ascent, the rocket explodes (a combination of footage from the Saturn V launch and the explosion of an Atlas-Centaur rocket from the early ‘60s). As Glass’ score intones in the background, the camera remains transfixed on a piece of the rocket as it plummets back to the earth, a white plume of vapor cutting into the pureness of the azure sky. The piece of the rocket continues to spiral downwards, Reggio never allowing us to look away from its mad dance of death. Is this the Icarus effect? Have we gotten too close to the sun for our own good?

There are songs on the album that fall outside of the main topic area – the a capella lament on soldiering and war “Tender Comrade,” justice system takedown “Rotting on Remand” and, most notably, “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards,” one of Bragg’s signature songs – but the bulk of the album has a striking unity. This is the long, sorrowful story of a man who has fallen in love with the wrong woman and paid for it in misery. Bragg writes with a piercing honesty and perfect sense of insightful detail, making it the perfect album for wallowing in the sadness of dashed romance. On “Little Time Bomb,” he sings, “He holds your letters, but he can’t read them/ As he fights this loneliness that you call freedom,” cutting right to the core of the pain of being dumped, a pain that is heightened by the sense that the other party is moving on with an alarming sense of relief.

Befitting the downbeat subject matter, most of the music on the album is somber and slow (album opener “She’s Got a New Spell” is one of the few that has the stridency of Bragg’s anthemic protest songs), but that doesn’t mean it’s sparse, just a man and a guitar strumming out his anguish. Workers Playtime is co-produced by Joe Boyd, who’d done significant work with the likes of Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, bringing a sense of fullness and drama to the individual tracks. There’s a richness to the production that avoids becoming overly busy or intrusive, always highlighting Bragg’s emotive vocals. The clarity and directness of “Valentine’s Day Is Over” and “The Price I Pay” (“There’s something inside that hurts my foolish pride/ To visit the places we used to go together/ Not a day goes by that I don’t sit and wonder why/ Your feeling for me didn’t last forever”) is enhanced by the studio care that’s been brought to them, the kind attention that becomes the production equivalent of a sympathetic ear, always listening with the goal of complete understanding.

If it seems like this should add up to a grand bummer of an album, the end result is paradoxically the opposite. There’s such a sense of catharsis throughout the album that it becomes almost invigorating. It’s sadness worn with pride or at least a survivor’s strength. On “The Only One,” Bragg expresses his sense of isolation: “I long to let our love run free/ Yet here I am a victim of geography/ And oh you cannot hear me/ Oh you cannot hear me/ Can anybody hear me out there?” On Workers Playtime, Bragg is making sure he’s being heard, just as surely as he did before, when he was aiming his acoustic guitar and sing-along songs at the greater injustices of society. Making a similar impact when dwelling on far more personal matters of the heart showed that Bragg has greater range than was previously thought. Maybe the subtitle should have been “The Transformational Fourth Album.”

There’s been something of a resurgence of industrial music. It’s never gone away entirely, of course, but until recently it hasn’t enjoyed the same impact on popular culture that it did in the ‘90s. Trent Reznor’s all grown up and he’s got himself a nice haircut and a good job rubbing shoulders with Hollywood directors and legendary music moguls like Jimmy Iovine. Ministry’s Al Jorgensen is still doing his thing, but there are only so many times you can loop a metal riff over presidential speech samples before the formula gets a little tired. It would almost appear that there was just nothing to be angry about anymore. So if you’re an industrial music artist in 2013 and you’re looking for something to bark into a filtered vocal effect while a dance floor is attacked with an angry 140 BPM thumper, what do you complain about? Army of the Universe has decided to begin with hipsters.

Why are our pencil-mustachioed friends taking such a beating? I’ve never met a hipster who even had an opinion on dark electro music, and believe me, if they did, they’d give it to you. The title alone suggests an opportunistic attempt to render the band as a bunch of meanies. It’s not even a metaphor – this is really about hipsters. The truth is that it doesn’t matter much. The lyrics fade into insignificance rather quickly. Album opener “The Hipster Sacrifice” introduces us to an electro groove straight out of a techno toolbox before the accompaniment of metal guitar riff samples kick in. Littered throughout the song are rapid-fire squelches, which emerge to give the song some punch. The vocals are fairly typical of the genre and even more so of their home region – think Ramstein doing Willie Nelson’s “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”. It’s a weird thing to say but in all my years of listening to industrial and EBM music I can’t recall hearing a German band who didn’t sound, to some extent, inappropriately sinister while singing relatively mundane lines. “A Visionary Story” seems like a straight up pop rock track but for the requisite electro bass, then vocalist Lord K croons, “Why are you so afraid/ To become one with me?,” the latter half delivered with a cringe-inducing vocal emphasis. You can almost envision the band down-stroking their keytars and glaring stalker-like over some too-tiny opaque spectacles.

These days it’s artists like vProjekt, ESA and Die Sektor who are doing the innovating, and the scene, despite having crawled under a rock for the greater part of a decade, has actually evolved considerably. For this reason, The Hipster Sacrifice comes off more like a throwback record which fails as modern industrial but succeeds at electro-rock. There are undoubtedly some catchy, head nod-inducing rhythms on the title track, and the first single, “Until the End,” is equally appealing inasmuch as it’s easily mistaken for something by KMFDM. Also worth noting is the band’s heavy use of dubstep-style synths that have been increasingly bubbling up in other genres. While they’re not pioneers here (hat tip to Front Line Assembly’s AirMech and Die Sektor’s The Final Electro Solution), it definitely adds a refreshing update to the sound. A dark bass wobble here, a liquid warp over there – it all helps make what would otherwise be a mediocre record that much more appealing.

Fans of Lords of Acid, Stabbing Westward or Econoline Crush will find a lot to love here, possibly even the follow-up record they wished had been made. “Coin Operated Girl” is the most compelling track, if only because the band strips it down to barer components. The beat is minimal but consistently fast, and the vocals are buried a little deeper in the mix, peeking out from behind a great distortion-washed line. It’s merciful that there are no ballads on the record, particularly as the subject matter seems to hover around the usual pop tropes and relationships. “In Another Place” is a completely laid-back rock ‘n’ roll track which shows an uncanny aptitude for a powerful pop hook. “The Weight of the World,” in fact, throws down a sampled guitar hook that wouldn’t be out of place on a Rick Springfield single. Each of the tracks has obviously been given the same level of attention and the level of production quality shows.

While this won’t appeal to industrial or EBM purists in any way, it will undoubtedly fill a void for the in-betweeners who aren’t ready to dive into the gothic depths of the genre’s anger and despair. For those who prefer instead flirt with danger without straying too far from the club floor, they have The Hipster Sacrifice.

Mikal Cronin’s self-titled 2011 debut album was excellent and spontaneous, featuring some balls-out riffage and pounding drums, interrupted by bouncy garage surf-pop and even some jazz flute. It’s as if Cronin asked himself, “Have I covered all ‘70s pop stereotypes?” In comparison to his stunning follow-up, MCII, the songs felt unplanned.

The excellent new album begins with “Weight,” quickly consolidating Cronin the pop songsmith and Cronin the garage rocker into one brilliant song about getting older and reflection. “Take me from myself,” croons Cronin, as the word “myself” is eventually reduced to its basic sonic elements, the latter half of the word sounding a lot like the “ooohs” from “Is It Alright,” the lead-off song from his first record. Both songs cover a lot of ground, but in comparison, “Weight” sounds composed as opposed to herky-jerky. Second track “Shout It Out” is the catchiest song on the album, one with an irresistible chorus that contains more weight (no pun intended) than on its initial appearance: “Do I shout it out?/ Do I let it go?/ Do I even know what I’m waiting for?/ No, I want it no/ Do I need it, though?” Sure, it works as a summer sing-along, but in the context of the album’s subject matter in general, “Shout It Out” is Cronin lamenting the early mid-life crisis (quarter-life crisis?) he previewed in “Weight.”

Meanwhile, on “See It My Way,” Cronin is singing the relationship blues; he’s “dying to get along with” a girl while simultaneously asking her to come around to his way of thinking. “See It My Way” is the epitome of Cronin’s confusion. He’s constantly asking rhetorical questions, but ones that lead him in circles rather than ones that help him solve his problems. So how does he deal with uncertainty? By rocking the fuck out, for starters, but also by exploring new musical ideas. He seamlessly incorporates K. Dylan Edrich’s strings into “Peace of Mind,” though it sounds like he might not be able to find the peace of mind he sings about. With a gorgeous, Neil Young-like acoustic guitar introduction, Edrich’s violin and Cronin’s guitar provide a pacifying cure to Cronin’s woes.

Cronin’s instrumentation provides a stabilizing force to his aimless lyrical themes. And yet he presents this aimlessness clearly rather than singing about aimlessness aimlessly; the fact that his lyrics themselves are actually discernible allows his stories to be relatable. On “Change,” Cronin sings, “Faith is just a lover I don’t own/ Love is just an answer I don’t know.” He’s bummed out because “just a little bit goes a long way,” but he can’t even get that little bit of whatever it is: faith, love or even purpose. Again, Edrich’s strings help “Change” build up to a climax of instrumentation that seems deliberately planned despite sounding all-over-the-place.

And Cronin saves the most touching moment of the album for last, with the ballad “Piano Mantra,” a fully-fledged pop masterpiece, as Edrich’s strings and Ty Segall’s guitar add an emotional weight to the song, which still remains delicate even when incorporating elements of shoegaze. By the end of the album, Cronin has explored so many musical ideas that he leaves you wondering where he will go next. As long as Cronin churns out catchy garage pop and devastatingly good piano ballads, his music will provide a distraction to himself and to the many millennials who will take solace in knowing that they’re not the only ones out there who can’t find peace of mind.

A card flashes at the top of Pietà informing the audience that this is Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film. As the movie unfolds, this tidbit seems less a boast of the director’s prolificacy than a desperately needed assurance that this is the work of an established, experienced filmmaker and not a belligerent, immature enfant terrible. This film is so bad, so artless in its moralizing superiority and its naked desire to punish its viewers, that the posturing provocations of the Michael Hanekes and Lars von Triers of the world look as human as Jean Renoir by comparison.

The subject of Pietà, as tediously underscored with every stray piece of dialogue and every intentionally repellent aesthetic choice, is the toll of unchecked capitalism on the soul. Kim communicates this idea through the literally crippling exploits of Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), a ruthless loan shark who extracts unpayable interest rates from working-class schmoes by maiming them for insurance money. In case shots of Kang-do throwing men off buildings or feeding their hands to industrial machinery do not sufficiently clarify the debilitating effects of greed, the thug soon gets to prove how tattered his soul really is when confronted by a woman, Mi-son (Jo Min-su), who claims to be his long-lost mother. Mi-son’s presence forces Kang-do to take stock of his amoral life, but not before he explores new depths of repugnant behavior designed to make the soullessness of money yet more apparent.

Kang-do’s feelings of abandonment and resentment toward his mother slip out in his uncaring behavior toward the mothers and lovers who plead for their men’s health when Kang-do comes to collect, but Mi-son fully elicits those feelings. Subjecting her to tests to prove her connection to him, Kang-do forces Mi-son to eat a strip of flesh he cuts from his leg before reaching between her legs and subsequently raping her. “I came out of here?” he eagerly hisses, adding, “Can I go back in?” Kim and cinematographer Jo Young-jik shoot this moment with documentary zooms that dart toward and away from the action as dead air hangs at the edges of the frame and in the spaces between Mi-son’s agonized moaning.

This isn’t the only time Kim blends ascetic arthouse lecture with extreme Asian cinema into one sick parody, though it certainly stands out as the most obvious example. But the ostensible horror of such a scene only shows an unimaginative mind scrambling for the shortest distance to a shock. If Kim wanted to make an audience uncomfortable, he could have stopped at the cinematography and production design. The blotchy digital image smears a frame defined by metallic grays and rusted browns as Kang-do patrols run-down, grimy streets filled with trash and deteriorating machinery. It is an ugly, but ultimately banal view of capitalism’s effects, completely divorced from the aesthetic chops it would take to tackle capitalism as it actually infects people, the allure of its beautiful mirage. To critique capitalism honestly would require Kim to implicate himself and his profession as both products and vendors of that system, but every aspect of Pietà is designed to condescend to its audience while elevating its maker as the only man capable of seeing the truth of the world.

But as Kim surges forward with his plodding, artless lecture, it is him, not the viewer, who looks increasingly out of touch and blinded by myopia. Especially unnerving is the director’s treatment of disability, which he portrays not merely as an act of cruelty on Kang-do’s part but a life-ending setback from which no one could recover. Pietà’s first images show a wheelchair-bound man slinging a chain around his neck to commit suicide, and the rest of the film sprinkles in images of debtors on crutches or cradling destroyed hands. Reduced to homelessness, drink and the like, the tortured men morph into freakish set dressing around Kang-do, their image following from an assumed truth of the proverbial death sentence of the loss of an arm or leg. This profoundly ableist oversimplification creates a massive disconnect between Kim’s punishing sermons and the audience’s actual level of moral complicity in what they are watching.

Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture that lends the film its title, a depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling her crucified son, is a work of naturalism enhanced by precedent-defying interpretation. Kim’s idea of that balance is the corpse of a loved one stuffed in a fridge, or the glow of a cell phone screen illuminating an ashen cheek to highlight tears softly falling. The extent of Kim’s ironic appreciation of the mother-son pose depicted by Michelangelo does not become fully apparent until the film eventually dovetails into a shoddy revenge thriller, but by that point the director has long since disappeared in his solipsism. Kim isn’t even preaching to a choir. He’s holding forth to a basement of prop listeners, the arthouse equivalent of Rupert Pupkin. If Pietà were a person, it would insist, “I’m not cynical, I’m realistic,” but this is the most brazenly dishonest work of recent years. A note for directors: when Michael Bay makes a smarter zeitgeist movie about the recession, maybe your film isn’t so righteous after all.

Do you have a tightly-wound, Type A personality and need to take your OCD down a notch? Or are you naturally mellow, just looking to pad out your cozy den with another bit of fuzzy warmth? Perhaps you’re chemically altered and you don’t want to harsh your buzz. Rejoice, Pacific UV’s After the Dream You Are Awake may be just the chill pill you’re looking for. Their dreamy electro-pop is devoid of hard edges or sharp corners. The songs seem to drift in from the hazy distance at a zombie pace — the old-school slow kind, not the frantic ones. There’s little sense of anxiety, only an opiated dissociation that drains away all urgency.

On “I Think It’s Coming,” vocalist Laura Solomon’s cautiously gentle singing suggests late night confidences and heavy confessions. Rather than distance, her detachment imbues the lyrics with deep intensity, “I don’t believe in what I can’t see/ The way you climb right into me/ Let’s not pretend this is the end/ Just be still, it’s about to begin.” Sonic details collect as the tune unfolds with languid grace. Like a slow motion explosion, each isolated part finds its position in space. The song evolves into the shadow of a powerful, painful memory, one that was packed away for later perusal. With the insulation of time, the specifics can be pulled out and examined through a coating of gauzy reverb. “I think it goes without saying/ I think it goes/ Watch it go” – tumultuous loss has been polished down to a core truth that transcends the emotional impact.

Pacific UV’s electro-pop side bubbles through more strongly on tracks like “American Lovers.” Unlike “I Think It’s Coming,” there’s no sense of trauma, just a hopeful promise. The dance-friendly arrangement features a fanning shimmer of synths, organic highlights of guitar and Clay Jordan’s whispery voice. This love song gets its dreamy vibe from the cottony swaddle of echo as Jordan draws a preordained line of connection, “In a distant time and place, under moonlight cold and clear / With an ever-changing face, I will always meet you here.”

Despite the sedated flow of After the Dream You Are Awake, two songs offer a touch of surprise. One is the band’s cover of Billy Idol’s 1983 hit “Eyes Without a Face,” which updates the original’s synth-pop with more modern electronic sounds. Maintaining Pacific UV’s penchant for soft-focus, they edit Idol’s lyrics slightly to remove the sneering tag, “Got no human grace, your eyes without a face,” from the chorus and they leave the rocking bridge out altogether. By contrast, “Russians” throbs with a nervous, hypnotic oscillation. Jordan and Solomon retain detached on the verses, but the expressive chorus breaks the monotone and opens into expansive trippiness. This gap in their façade is a pleasant change, offering a memorable landmark in the play list.

Reflective but not soporific, the prevailing mellow groove on this album succeeds because it ornaments itself with fascinating electronica, subtle lyrics and a varying palette of songs. The title speaks of waking after the dream, but these songs suggests that dreamtime should linger a while longer. This is music best saved for the after-party or when its calming center is just what the doctor ordered.

Out of the Past begins with gas jockey Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) living in the small California town of Bridgeport. Jeff’s past, as cinematic pasts always do, comes calling, and through flashback while talking to his current girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston), we learn that not so long ago, he was a private investigator hired by high-powered gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to find his wayward girlfriend. The knockout brunette had shot Whit and run off with $40,000 cash, but Whit insists he only cares about getting Kathie back, not the money. Jeff finds Kathie (Jane Greer) in Acapulco, and amidst lazy hot days and torrential summer downpours, the two quickly fall in love. They run off together, hoping to escape the dangerous Whit, but he has hired Jeff’s former partner Jack Fisher to track them down. Kathie killed Fisher then disappeared. Jeff tells Ann as his flashback ends: “I never saw her again.”

Now, Whit has found Jeff and, with an unsettled score hanging between them, he wants to hire him again for one last job. Jeff tells Ann that he has agreed to it, if only so he can finally stop running. But a series of unpleasant revelations awaits Jeff: Kathie is once again Whit’s lover, and the new job Whit has hired him for is a frame-up. Like so many characters in classic film noir, Jeff is powerless to control either his obsessions or his fate, thus continues on with the job, dodging a dizzying series of double-crosses and betrayals along the way.

Jeff’s past life cinematically ends at the moment the flashback ends, and that moment almost immediately butts up against his present life, where he is standing outside Whit’s cabin at a gate that uncomfortably resembles the bars of a prison cell. No attempt is made to establish distance between his past and present; the players are all the same, neither their appearance nor ages changed a bit since he last saw them. It’s as if his time in Bridgeport never happened or, more probably, never mattered.

Mitchum epitomized the world-weary, existential cool of a man unable, or maybe just unwilling, to extricate himself from a fatal situation, because to get out of his particular cauldron of hot water would mean to leave behind his desire for Kathie. Greer dominates the film, her chilly demeanor never revealing even a hint of what she’s really thinking. She could appear as young and innocent as Judy Garland in some scenes, hard as an angry Barbara Stanwyck in others, and was always in control. When Kathie’s eyes catch tiny points of brilliant white light, expertly provided by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, it’s easy to see why Jeff walked right into what he must have known was a trap.

The story of Out of the Past is legendarily complicated due primarily to the nonlinear plotline, though that’s what gives the film its dreamlike quality, the feeling of floating through time rather than being anchored to one moment. With such fluidity, the difficulty in following the plot ceases to matter; it’s all one jumble in Jeff’s life anyway, so it’s only fair that it be a jumble in ours, too. This timelessness all but disappears if scenes are presented chronologically, as unfortunately illustrated in the slick, ill-advised remake Against All Odds (1984).

Against All Odds doesn’t think much of its audience, making changes to a 35-year-old plot the filmmakers apparently thought was too edgy for 1984. The character of Kathie, one of the best and most important femme fatales in cinematic history, was replaced with Jessie (Rachel Ward), a confused young heiress with a penchant for wearing revealing clothing in lieu of a personality. Jeff of Out of the Past became golden boy pro football player Terry Brogan (Jeff Bridges), hired to find Jessie, the missing girlfriend of big-league bookie Jake Wise (James Woods doing a fair to middling Kirk Douglas impression). The girlfriend stole $50,000, stabbed Jake in the junk and ran off, and now Jake wants her back. Terry takes the job after his new and apparently evil coach decided to deliberately re-injure him, leaving his bank account empty. “I’m having money problems, man,” says Terry. “I’m broke.”

So goes the dialogue in Against All Odds, as screenwriter Eric Hughes utterly fails to mimic the unadorned dialogue of film noir. In an attempt to create storyline as celebrated and convoluted as Out of the Past, some plot elements were re-imagined, such as the contrast between a harsh urban environment and the idyllic, peaceful life of small-town America, replaced in Against All Odds with a tepid environmental message. Plot holes abound, some becoming accidentally hilarious when throwaway lines were deployed to try to patch them up.

In fact, most of the film is either deadly dull or accidental camp. Jessie had rebelled against her real-estate investing mother by hooking up with a sleazy bookie, then ran away from him, using her trust fund to hide out in Cozumel in designer creations and a gorgeous, abandoned beach house. Terry finds Jessie in Mexico and they quickly become lovers, traveling to exotic locations like Chichen Itza and El Castillo to have hot, naked sex. Jake has them followed, and they soon become embroiled in a deadly real estate and gambling scheme. The situation spirals out of control, and Jessie, despite being well into her late 20s, is forced back home with her mother, Terry forbidden from seeing her again.

Against All Odds wants very much to be Out of the Past for a new generation, so much so that it cast Greer as Jessie’s mother, as well as Paul Valentine in a small role. Valentine gave an exemplary turn as Whit’s right hand man in Out of the Past, though the one moment where Valentine was reunited with Greer in Against All Odds occurs off screen, heard only as background noise during interminable dialogue about how Jessie and Terry are being ripped apart by forces they cannot control. Noir legend Richard Widmark was also cast, revealed in the film’s final act to be the villain, of course, because he is Richard Widmark.

What happened to Out of the Past} is exactly what one would expect to happen after a money-minded studio desperate to create a beach-based neo noir got hold of the story. Complicated emotions were dulled down and anything even remotely interesting removed, replaced instead with lurid sex scenes and so much profanity that filmmakers must have thought they were in an unofficial cussing competition with Repo Man (1984). The borrowed story was given the standard glossy 1980s Hollywood treatment, complete with glamorous occupations, a drag race on Sunset Blvd. and a hep musical guest star. Despite all its pretense, Against All Odds was neither film noir nor neo noir, just a base cash grab, the kind of cynical project a true film noir villain would consider beneath him.

Joe Kubert is a comics legend. His mature style is sketchy but detailed, with exquisite flowing linework that conveys movement and life; to my mind at least, it is the polar opposite of Jack Kirby’s clunky, chunky, often static style. Kubert is best known to fans for his work on such tentpole titles as Tarzan and Hawkman in the 1960s and ‘70s, but his career predates that work by decades. Like many of his peers, Kubert learned his craft in the 1940s and ’50s, drawing everything from war comics to crime stories to horror strips to humor. Weird Horrors is a handsome, heavy-duty hardback volume that collects 33 of Kubert’s earliest stories from 1944 to 1955—the bulk of them from before the advent of the draconian Comics Code in 1954. It’s a handsome package, and goes far to show just how diverse the young artist’s early output was.

There’s nothing to complain about concerning the format. Weird Horrors is a thick 8 x11” slab that is satisfyingly hefty in the hand, printed with heavy matte paper and bold, vibrant colors. Much of the artwork has been cleaned up in terms of color and alignment, but editor Bill Schelly has chosen not to go overboard, leaving a certain degree of imperfection intact. This was the correct choice.

A brief introduction sketches out Kubert’s early career, and an even briefer afterward places the included stories into the context of the man’s life; the vast bulk of the book, however—a full 227 pages—is given over to the stories themselves. The reader’s response to these will have much to do with his/her interest in Golden Age comics. This book is a collection of early work, not a sampling of Kubert’s later, polished masterpieces. What we see here is an artist working to establish his style, to convey meaning through line and composition and carefully-chosen detail, but there is little evidence of the fluid, evocative style of later years.

What is in evidence is a certain dynamism, even from the get-go. The splash page for “Bloody Yesterday” features a sweating, distraught figure haunted by ghostly figures swirling about his head; garish highlights point up the man’s sweaty terror. The layouts are equally dynamic for “The Golem,” a retelling of a Jewish folktale that at 18 pages comprises the longest entry in the book. The story also features a more involved and complex use of panel layouts than many of the others. Meanwhile, WWII tale “Cross and Double Cross” adds airplane dogfights into the mix, while “Death’s Pool” sees Kubert apparently trying to pack as many panels as possible into a page.

Other stories are equally engaging. “Iron Caravan of the Mojave” is one of a pair of Western stories, while “Star Pirate” is a Flash Gordon-style space opera that shows Kubert experimenting with a new style of shading, particularly in his figures’ faces. The book ends with a trio of stories from the Son of Sinbad title, in which Kubert’s signature style is growing recognizable: “Ransom of Shipwreck Shoals” and “The Curse of the Caliph’s Dancer” both benefit from the artist’s careful rendering of flowing robes, baggy pantaloons, raging seas—and scantily clad ladies.

Not every story here is a winner, though. The humorous tales are especially dire, inevitably so perhaps, but even early “serious” stories like “Murder at the Terminal” and “Gabriel Blows His Horn” offer evidence that the artist was not delivered unto the world fully formed. The stiffness to his characters, and predictability to his layouts, would become much improved within just a few years. There is also some nasty racial stereotyping in the World War II-era stories—perhaps understandable, given the situation, but off-putting nevertheless. (That said, it’s fascinating how a group of essentially Communist Greek resistance fighters is given the heroes’ treatment in “The Olive Press.”)

Comics readers with any interest at all in the history of the medium will feel compelled to take an interest in the history of Joe Kubert. This is the logical place to start. Aside from being the document of a young artist’s career, Weird Horrors provides a snapshot of the diversity of comics at the time. Before it became dominated by the superheroes that Kubert would grow famous drawing, the medium would encompass a broad range of genres and subject matter. That, as much as any other reason, is what makes this book so compelling and fun.