Friday, October 17, 2025
This week I profiled Yellowcard and Buddy Red for Spin. I also wrote a Deep Cut Friday column about Split Enz, ranked Van Halen's albums, and updated my ranking of Elton John's albums.
Thursday, October 16, 2025
I did an interview with John's Music Blog about Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music. The book is out now, I generally don't tell people who to buy, but I'll ask you to buy this, I'm proud of what I made and I'm proud of the city and the culture that it represents.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
I wrote a Baltimore Banner piece about the life of Darsombra's Ann Everton and spoke to several of her friends and collaborators, including her husband and bandmate Brian Daniloski. There's a GoFundMe for Brian here.
Movie Diary
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
It's always great to get Spike Lee and Denzel Washington together again, I really enjoyed it even as I rolled my eyes a little at certain plot points, depictions of the music industry, and A$AP Rocky's performance. Not Washington's best late period performance, but the one where his goofy big ass veneers feel the most suited to the character, and I loved all his scenes with Jeffrey Wright and Wendell Pierce.
b) The Lost Bus
I guess it's inevitable that there'd be a California wildfire movie from the director of United 93 and Captain Phillips, not bad for a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller but I kinda treated it as background noise.
c) Damsel
I checked out a lot of 2018 movies my recent list, and this was probably the biggest surprise in terms of movies I just watched on a whim. Directors David and Nathan Zellner both act in the movie, and David Zellner's role turns out to be much bigger than I expected after one of the (spoiler alert) putative main characters dies pretty early in the movie, which I think is a pretty risky thing for a not very famous actor-director to do but it really worked in terms of Damsel's dark comedy and subverted expectations.
A far more famous Robert Pattinson movie from 2018 that I was a little less impressed by, I thought by far the weakest of Robert Eggers's four features so far. I respect what he was trying to do with a minimal black and white movie with an atmosphere of growing dread, I mean Eraserhead is one of my favorite movies, but I don't think he entirely pulled it off.
e) Broke
I like Wyatt Russell a lot as a comedic actor but he was good in this more somber western drama, I feel like reviewers may have overrated it a little but it was fine.
This was pretty good, although I don't know if it lived up to how hyped as I was the first time I saw a trailer. Like it would've been really impressive as an episode of a horror anthology series, but as an 87-minute feature it was just okay, good atmosphere and a moderately well constructed story but not especially scary or memorable.
g) Pavements
One of my friends lives in Greenbelt and I'll hang out with him down there sometimes and do the trivia night at the New Deal Cafe. One night he invited me to go with him to see Pavements at Greenbelt Cinema and it was a pretty cool little spot, I didn't realize there was a theater down there that got some arthouse limited release movies that I'd usually expect to only see in a major city. So often rock documentaries and biopics are well made but don't feel true to the spirit of the band they're about, and Alex Ross Perry succeeded in making a movie about Pavement that really suits them with its sense of humor and ridicule of genre conventions. I particularly liked the way the 'five movies in one' format allowed them to just cram the movie with so many different versions of so many different Pavement songs, sometimes covered by other indie bands or done in a musical theater style. It makes sense that the band sees Lollapalooza '95 as a low point, but as someone whose favorite Pavement album is Wowee Zowee, I'm a little annoyed by how both the movie and their latest best-of compilation treat it.
h) Her Smell
After watching Pavements, I decided to check out Alex Ross Perry's previous movie about a fictional alternative rock band, and I had kind of mixed feelings about it. The way the story was told in five vignettes in different time periods was well done, but at some points the story felt a little drawn out and threadbare, I personally thought Elisabeth Moss was a little miscast as a Courtney Love-ish self-destructive rock star, I just didn't buy her in the role and thought the movie could've been great with the right lead actor. I also found Keegan DeWitt's score really irritating and unwelcome, it just felt it was trying to add unsettling tension to scenes and wound up feeling kind of distracting and taking away from the atmosphere.
I'm generally a big fan of Nicole Holofcener, she makes these deceptively 'small' films about difficult episodes in regular people's lives that have a lot more to say about modern relationships and material realities than most other movies. The characters in The Land of Steady Habits all felt like real people I could have met in my life, but I thought Ben Mendelsohn was another really miscast lead, his character was written so well as a kind of person I've known and somehow he wasn't believable in the role at all, just totally wrong for the part.
Two or three members of my family will sometimes go to the movies together, but it's fairly rare that all four of us will go to a movie, I think we've only done it three times: Moana 2, The Bad Guys, and The Bad Guys 2. My kids and I have read all of Aaron Blabey's Bad Guys books, and I have to say, I like the movies a lot more than the books, which are kind of forcefully wacky and rambling but seldom pay off with real laughs. Pierre Perifel's movies take lots of liberties with the plots, tighten them up and make them snappy little kid-friendly versions of heist movies, and the voice cast is great.
k) Wicked
I imagine this was probably pretty amazing on Broadway back in the day with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, and while Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are great vocalists, it kind of feels like they forcefully removed the stage musical energy from Wicked for this cathedral of pastel CGI puke and didn't replace it with much movie musical magic. It's not bad as spectacles go, but I'm sure a much better movie could have been made of Wicked.
l) Snow White
Rachel Zegler is so talented and makes such a perfect Snow White, I feel bad that her performance got wasted on this movie, the color scheme wasn't as annoying as Wicked but the overall look of the CGI was even worse.
An upcoming sequel reminded me that I never got around to seeing this one. It kinda felt like an uninspired offbrand Stephen King story with its supernatural twist on a serial killer story, wasn't impressed at all.
n) Devo
Devo are one of those bands I've always enjoyed but I think I love them more and more as time goes by and I learn more about them, and this documentary was really engrossing and well done. I knew a lot of the story but there was some amazing footage, and really interesting anecdotes I'd never heard (for instance, David Bowie and Brian Eno recording lots of overdubs for Devo's first album and the band just turning them down in the final mix). And it was interesting to see the members of the band explain how subversively infiltrating pop culture both did and didn't work out the way they planned, and wound them up in these unexpected places like "The Merv Griffin Show."
This documentary was really pretty moving, I was 15 when the first Lilith Fair happened and was still so totally entrenched in the male-dominated alternative rock mindset (although I had an enormous crush on Sarah McLachlan and loved all her singles), but now it's so clear that it was a really remarkable moment in time with so many artists who I appreciate more decades later. I loved just hearing how much the odds were stacked against them and how much they had to push against the music industry's conventional wisdom, and how even skeptics like Chrissie Hynde eventually joined the tour and had a great time. A huge bummer to be reminded, though, that they tried to revive the tour in 2010 and it kind of fell apart, the doc really made me wish it was something that just continued for decades.
p) Dig!
I had seen bits of this movie before but didn't sit down to watch the entire thing until I was preparing for my recent interview with Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. And it was interesting to take in that movie's famous, unflattering depiction of Newcombe and then get to talk to the actual guy and see how he feels about it and what context the last two decades of his life put that movie in now. A pretty entertaining movie, though, I enjoy any rock doc that feels a little like a real life Spinal Tap.
q) Shirkers
Shirkers really something special, Sandi Tan tried to make a film with her friends in the early '90s, and it took years and years for her to figure out why it never got finished, and that story became this documentary. It's bittersweet and frustrating to watch and you're left with a lot of unanswered questions, but I really enjoyed the journey of these passionate kids falling in love with film and music and art and trying to make something, even if it turned out in any way they could've expected.
I started reading Jeff Chang's great new book without really having seen any of Bruce Lee's movies so I've started to rectify that, and Fists of Fury was the only one of his major works that I was able to easily stream for free, which ended up feeling like a pretty great introduction. I really liked how the rest of the cast, especially Paul Wei, played off of Bruce Lee and made his charisma and physicality that much more powerful.
s) Suspiria
I wanted to watch the 2018 remake of Suspiria so I started with the 1977 original. And man, it's one thing to hear about how influential Dario Argento is but a whole other experience to see his work and see how much his use of color and camera movement and music has been interpreted or attempted in a million other things.
t) Suspiria
Watching Luca Guadagnino's remake right after the original really highlighted how a really professionally made modern film by an acclaimed director really has almost none of the juice or visual flair of a good '70s movie. Not a bad movie but it feels kind of pointless to use the original's story without any of its artful verve.
A really impressive debut by Kitty Green. I feel like a lot of post-'me too' fiction is kind of heavy handed, but this is a finley detailed fly-on-the-wall account of office life with these subtly ominous moments that drive home the point without overstating it.
I love Regina Hall and I wanted to check out this movie that I guess was a turning point in her career where she started to get a wider variety of roles that weren't full-on comedy. Great performance, Haley Lu Richardson is really funny in it too, and I guess Hall and Junglepussy hit it off on this movie and that's how they ended up working together again in One Battle After Another.
w) How It Ends
Most of the stuff I've seen Theo James in has been pretty good, but this apocalyptic action movie felt pretty generic.
I have slightly more mixed feelings about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy since she passed up the opportunity to step down from the Supreme Court while she was still alive. And this movie just feels like a poorly aged remnant of a widespread cultural effort to make people horny for RBG, which totally worked because I was absolutely feral watching Felicity Jones in this movie, good lord she's gorgeous.
y) Cam
I expected this horror movie about a camgirl to be one of those 'screenlife' movies where the entire thing takes place in various laptop windows, but it wasn't really that, and was pretty successfully eerie and original.
z) Extinction
I like Michael Pena and Lizzy Caplan a lot, but it feels like they got stuck in kind of a middling sci-fi spectacle movie that had been intended to have a much bigger budget and bigger stars before it was downsized.
Friday, October 10, 2025
I wrote about "Daffodil Lament" by the Cranberries for this week's Deep Cut Friday column on Spin. I also updated my Taylor Swift album ranking to include The Life of a Showgirl.
TV Diary
Monday, October 06, 2025 
"Reservation Dogs" is a modern classic and I wish it lasted more than 3 seasons, but I'm cool with FX picking up Sterlin Harjo's new series that takes place in the same fictional universe's Oklahoma (as confirmed by a Willie Jack cameo in the first episode). Ethan Hawke's Lee Raybon is a bit of a self-destructive fool and a little of a noble resourceful hero, getting beat up and nearly killed in every episode so far, a really entertaining protagonist to throw into a neo-noir story full of colorful characters, including great turns from Keith David and Abbie Cobb, and lots of needledrops from Tulsa's musical legends (The Gap Band, Leon Russell, J.J. Cale). I'm loving every minute of it.
The latest series from "Peaky Blinders" creator Steven Knight is a big lavish period piece about the family that founded the Guinness brewing company. I didn't realize that Jack Gleeson had mostly done theater in the decade since his great performance on "Game of Thrones" and I guess this is his most prominent screen role since then. Niamh McCormack is mostly who I remember from the first episode, though, wow.
c) "Wayward"
The first Netflix series Mae Martin created and starred in, "Feel Good," was kind of a typical standup comic's autobiographical sitcom, albeit a good one. "Wayward," however, is a much more original and intriguing drama, with Martin as a trans man who becomes a police officer in a small Vermont town where some odd stuff is going on an Toni Collette plays the sinister headmaster at a mysterious academy.
A pretty entertaining drama with Jason Bateman playing against type, as he seems to more and more these days, as a troubled fuckup whose debts endanger is brother (Jude Law)'s successful nightclub. Sometimes it feels like Netflix has completely abandoned any pretense of making scripted English-language shows that can compete with what HBO and Apple TV+ and Hulu are putting out, so to get a few shows like "Black Rabbit," "Wayward," and "House of Guinness" in the space of about a week gives me some hope that Netflix isn't fully resigned to cranking out slop.
Jesse Williams learned to speak Italian and attempts a breezy Will Smith-style leading man turn in this Amazon series that takes place in Italy, both with mixed results. Not bad, though, kinda fun.
The USA Network stopped making original series years ago, but given the streaming resurgence of "Suits" I guess they've decided to give the old fashioned legal drama game another go, starting with a John Grisham adaptation. I never saw the movie Coppola made of The Rainmaker, so I don't know the story or have a frame of reference to compare to, which is probably good, I can go into this cold. Lana Parrilla was always the best thing about "Once Upon A Time" in my opinion, happy to see her in something new.
g) "Invasion"
If the second and third seasons of "Invasion" have had budgets in the same ballpark as the first season, Apple TV+ has spent half a billion dollars on this show that I've virtually never seen anybody else ever acknowledge the existence of that has no real recognizable stars (outside of Sam Neill, who was only in the first episode). I love money pits like this, though, it's not a great show but it's visually very impressive and there's a good ensemble cast that gives me enough gripping scenes now and then to keep me invested in the story.
A pretty good new animated sitcom on Netflix created by a "Rick and Morty" writer that as a great voice cast (Will Fote, Eliza Coupe, Skyle Gisondo, etc.) and feels more like its own thing than yet another offbrand "Rick and Morty" like "Solar Opposites" or "Krapopolis."
My ten-year-old loves "The Owl House" and has watched every episode multiple times. So I was happy to hear that creator Dana Teace has a new show, although there's just the pilot on YouTube so far and I don't think I'll show it to my son anytime soon. It's not really more 'adult' than "The Owl House" in any meaningful way except language, but the characters say "shit" a lot (no other curses I can remember, just a lot of shit, to the point that it feels forced and unnecessary).
A Korean show on Netflix about first year residents in a hospital's OB-GYN department, feels surprisingly interchangeable with American medical dramas, which kinda just makes me less interested in watching it.
This Spanish series is pretty creepy and compelling, about a guy whose own mother trains him to become a hitman.
l) "The Royals"
I like this Indian series about power struggles in a luxury hotel, it's very soapy and everybody is really gorgeous.
m) "1 In 7641"
Netflix debuted two different docuseries celebrating the culture and history of the Philippines in the space of three months, which is just fine with me, it's a fascinating count, I checked out both. If you see only one, though, I might recommend "I Love Filipino," which has more of a native perspective than the tourist perspective of "1 In 7641."
The same Vice TV people who made "Dark Side of the Ring" produced this Hulu docuseries about some of the more tragic or violent stories from metal istory. I find that overarching theme a little lurid, but the stories are generally told sensitively with an appropriate amount of attention paid to the actual music.
o) "Taurasi"
I knew of Diana Taurasi as one of the WNBA's big names who retired earlier this year but I didn't really realize how long or impressive her career was until I watched this docuseries, which also gives an interesting perspective on the changes and growth of the league over the past 20 years.
I didn't know Ted Bundy gave extensive interviews in prison to an investigator who was trying to catch the Green River Killer, it's pretty chilling to hear audio of his voice in this docuseries, definitely reccomended to "Mindhunter" fans.
I hadn't heard of model Books Nader but this reality show is about her and her three sisters living together in New York City. A very transparently Kadashians-ish show but with a slightly more likeable family of beautiful people who are from Louisiana.
I will say that the title "Back To Reality" is clever: Todd and Julie Chrisley are returning to reality television, and 'normal' life, they're out of prison following President Trump pardoning their 2022 tax evasion and fraud conviction.I hate watched them a little back in the day before they were felons, so I felt like hate watching them a little again for old time's sake.
I feel like there's probably no American sports team that has fallen further in my lifetime than the Dallas Cowboys, even just making a docuseries that focuses on that '90s streak when they were Supe Bowl champs three out of four years just feels like a latent admission that the last thirty years are a story that they don't want to tell.
The Kansas City Chiefs are kind of the Cowboys of the modern NFL era, so it feels almost like an incomplete story arc to see a doc about their dominant years while they're still happening but it also allows you to get a more candid real time look behind the curtain.
"Lego Masters" is a fun show partly for the novelty of seeing adults get passionate about Legos, but it's just as much fun to watch the spinoff about kids. And they brought back my favorite person from the other show, the cute Scottish woman Brickmaster Amy.
Godon Ramsay's daughter Tilly hosts this Amazon show where chefs have to make dishes from a 'mystery box' of ingredients, a moderately fun little cooking show.
This is a more is pressure "Top Chef"-style show, but I like that it's explicitly about younger chefs who ae early in their careers. But I did cringe that the teams were named after famous deceased chefs like Julia Child and Anthony Bourdain, just a bit tacky.
w) "99 To Beat"
Ken Jeong hosts this American adaptation of a Belgium game show that stats with 100 contestants and keeps eliminating people though different challenges until the last person remaining wins it all. I love the concept although I doubt I'll watch it enough to get invested in who makes it to the end.
I recently watched the docuseies "Virgins" and found its depictions of people in their twenties, thirties and forties who'd never had sex to be touching and empathetic. This "Love Island"-style dating show about a resort full of virgins, not quite so sensitive, but it's still full of nice people that you can't help but root for and care about.
I never really watched this show when it was a ratings phenomenon but I suppose I'm not too surprised to learn that it's problematic.
Saturday, October 04, 2025
Nathan Evans invited me onto his Rinse FM show this week to talk about the 130bpm rhythmic common ground between Baltimore club music and UK Garage, and he wove our discussion into a really cool DJ set of tracks from or influenced by both genres. You can stream the whole program here.
I also had my event for Tough Breaks at Greedy Reads in Remington on Tuesday, and I had a really great discussion with moderator Catalina Byrd and Unruly's Shawn Caesar for about an hour. 8 minutes of footage were uploaded to YouTube, including Shawn telling stories about how K-Swift's mix CDs were at one point outselling Jay-Z and every other major label rapper in Baltimore stores. The book is out now! Buy it at Greedy Reads or online or wherever you can! I've literally never really asked people to buy anything and may never again! This is the one, spend those 15 dollars, baby!
Friday, October 03, 2025
This week on Spin, I interviewed Anna Canoni of Woody Guthrie Productions, Inc. and producer Steve Rosenthal about how some remarkable 73-year-old recordings became ready for release on the new album Woody at Home Vol. 1 + 2. I also wrote about "Cash Car Star" by Smashing Pumpkins for the Deep Cut Friday column.
Monthly Report: September 2025 Singles
Tuesday, September 30, 2025 
1. Megan Moroney - "6 Months Later"
I had a polite disagreement recently with Milwaukee music writer Evan Rytlewski, who thinks that "nobody dunks on godawful country music anymore" and that mainstream country has become a sacred cow among critics in the age of Cowboy Carter. Personally, I don't see it. Morgan Wallen and Jelly Roll are reviled about as much as Nickelback ever was, and most of the country stars who aren't at that level of crossover success are relatively invisible. There's a whole new generation of hot girls singing sad songs on country radio (Ella Langley, Megan Moroney, Lainey Wilson, Kassi Ashton), but they don't have a fraction of the same awareness among critics as Kacey Musgraves. who broke through well over a decade ago. Moroney got to sing her excellent current single for about 90 seconds at the MTV VMAs a few weeks ago, but I saw zero reaction to it on my social media feed that's full of critics and music lovers. Here's the 2025 singles Spotify playlist that I update every month.
2. Justin Bieber - "Daisies"
The day Justin Bieber released Swag, I heard "Daisies" on the radio before the album, because I wasn't in a rush to hear a Justin Bieber album named Swag. And was blown away by it, having no idea that Dijon and Mk.gee worked on it and that was why it had kind of a quirky lo-fi sound completely different from anything Bieber had released before. And after the element of surprise wore off, I just kept liking "Daisies" more and more, I crank it up every time it comes on in the car.
3. Clipse - "So Be It"
I think Let God Sort Em Out is a great album but I find all the talk of Clipse having 'the greatest album rollout ever' kind of silly, especially given what happened with "So Be It." Apparently Clipse and Pharrell made the song, with the Talal Maddah sample, then shot and released a video for arguably the best and most radio-friendly song from the album without clearing the sample, and were fully prepared to release the album with an inferior version of "So Be It" with a different beat until Swizz Beatz intervened at the last minute and helped get the sample cleared. Sounds kind of sloppy to me, but all's well that ends well, I love the song.
4. Turnstile - "Never Enough"
At this point Turnstile have had so many career milestones that few or zero other Baltimore bands can lay claim to that I wouldn't be able to list them all, but a #1 alternative radio hit is pretty cool. The radio stations cut the ending short but I like having the album version on my playlist with the long cool-down coda.
5. 414BigFrank f/ Sunny Lou and Run Along Forever - "There It Is"
My brother Zac has lived in Milwaukee for a long time, before people really started to care about the rap scene there, and he put me onto this song before I started to hear about it from other regional rap enthusiasts (or the other person I know in Milwaukee, Evan Rytlewski). 414BigFrank's previous song "Eat It Up" inspired Milwaukee's big breakout hit of 2024, J.P.'s "Bad Bitty," and it's fun to spot J.P. in the background in the really fun "There It Is" performance on YouTube.
6. Coco Jones - "On Sight"
I was irritated that "Taste" came and went without really being embraced by R&B radio because I really love that track, but I'm happy with "On Sight" becoming Coco Jones's current hit.
7. Haute & Freddy - "Shy Girl"
I enjoyed interviewing Haute & Freddy for Spin recently, they had 5 songs out at the time and now they have 6, and all are good, but I understand why "Shy Girl" is the biggest so far. If they're huge a few months from now, I imagine it will be because of this track, that's a real dynamite pop song.
8. KenTheMan - "First"
KenTheMan's been on the margins of the girl rap scene for the last few years, I already wrote about the version of "First" with Monaleo in the Remix Report Card but I like the solo version to, definitely feels like it could be a tipping point song for her career.
9. Flowerovlove - "I'm Your First"
This more recent song is a pop twist on the same premise as the KenTheMan song ("I'm his/your first bad bitch"), I imagine they're probably both quoting the same social media posts rather than one artist biting the other, but I like both songs and they otherwise sound completely different.
10. Lainey Wilson - "Somewhere Over Laredo"
Lainey Wilson recently released a deluxe version of Whirlwind, one of my favorite albums of 2024, and I wish the CD in my car would instantly update with the 5 new songs, they're all worthy additions. I kind of rolled my eyes the first time I listened to "Somewhere Over Laredo" and heard the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" interpolation in the chorus, but the way they wove it into a lovely new melody really works well, it grew on me.
The Worst Single of the Month: Hardy f/ Ernest - "Bro Country"
It kind of feels like Nashville has collectively decided that 'bro country' is an era that has come to an end, which I think is kind of bullshit. Country radio is even more heavily male than it was a decade ago, and even though bro country poster boys Florida Georgia Line broke up, FGL's Tyler Hubbard recently got his third solo #1 single, and the current biggest star, Morgan Wallen, got his first hit with an FGL collaboration. So this song playfully eulogizing bro country, from two people at the forefront of 2020s bro country, just feels like a self-serving narrative to me.
My Top 50 Movies of 2018
Monday, September 29, 2025 
1. Widows (Steve McQueen)
2. Hereditary (Ari Aster)
3. Thoroughbreds (Cory Finley)
4. Wild Rose (Tom Harper)
5. The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)
6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob
Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman)
7. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
8. Sorry To Bother You (Boots Riley)
9. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
10. A Simple Favor (Paul Feig)
11. Game Night (John Francis Daley and
Jonathan Goldstein)
12. Damsel (David Zellner and Nathan
Zellner)
13. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)
14. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)
15. Annihilation (Alex Garland)
16. Shirkers (Sandi Tan)
17. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)
18. Fast Color (Julia Hart)
19. Paddington 2 (Paul King)
20. A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)
21. Crazy Rich Asians (Jon M. Chu)
22. Support The Girls (Andrew Bujalski)
23. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle
Heller)
24. The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard)
25. Private Life (Tamara Jenkins)
26. The Landy of Steady Habits (Nicole Holofcener)
27. Upgrade (Leigh Whannell)
28. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)
29. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel
Cohen and Ethan Cohen)
30. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne
Ramsay)
31. Mandy (Panos Cosmatos)
32. Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo)
33. Bumblebee (Travis Knight)
34. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)
35. Parallel (Isaac Ezban)
36. Ocean’s 8 (Gary Ross)
37. The Post (Steven Spielberg)
38. Aquaman (James Wan)
39. Hotel Artemis (Drew Pearce)
40. Madeline’s Madeline (Josephine Decker)
41. Halloween (David Gordon Green)
42. The Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird)
43. Blame (Quinn Shephard)
44. Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson)
45. On The Basis of Sex (Mimi Leder)
46. Bird Box (Susanne Bier)
47. Cam (Daniel Goldhaber)
48. The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo)
49. Happy As Lazarro (Alice Rohrwacher)
50. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (Susan Johnson)
I think 2018 might be my favorite year of the ones I've looked at for this series so far, just a lot of stuff that really left a big impression on me. A great year for Black filmmakers, for superhero movies, and for two genres that are really close to my heart, horror and comedy. And let me just say, I think Wild Rose really should have won some Oscars but didn't because it had the bad fortune to come out the same year as A Star Is Born (which is good, but not nearly as good).
Previously:
Friday, September 26, 2025
I wrote features about Bones Owens and the Brian Jonestown Massacre for Spin this week, as well as a Deep Cut Friday column about The Cure's "Push."
Reading Diary
Thursday, September 25, 2025 
a) Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, by Jeff Chang
I had a really great time at the Baltimore Book Festival a couple weekends ago. One of my events was on the same stage immediately after my friend Lawrence Burney discussing his book with Jeff Chang, who also had a new book. Chang wrote one of the great hip hop books, Can't Stop Won't Stop, so I was excited to meet him and really flattered that he bought my book, and I bought his new one and got him to sign it. Water Mirror Echo actually only came out a couple days ago, I got it early. Chang really excels at giving you anything that might be in a straightforward Bruce Lee biography but threading it into a wider cultural narrative about Asians in America, and how the specific details of the life of the most famous Asian American (even now, 50 years after his death) have all these resonances and ripple effects right up through today. A lot of the subject matter, both about Bruce Lee's films and about midcentury China and Hong Kong and some of the nastier incidents of anti-Asian xenophobia in America, are relatively unfamiliar territory for me so it's been really engrossing and eye-opening. For instance, I had never heard of the term 'Sick Man of Asia,' so watching Fists of Fury for the first time hit a lot harder after reading Chang's explanation of how that film in particular and in some ways Lee's entire career were a refutation of that trope.
b) How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People, by Tim Paggi
On the second day of the Book Festival, I read from my book at Normal's Books and Records. A lot of the other writers at Normal's were poets, but the author who directly preceded me was Tim Paggi, a playwright who read from this entertaining recent satirical horror novella. On the cover Paggi shares a co-author credit with Jenny Johnston, who is the fictional protagonist and unreliable narrator of the book (or perhaps just the radically forthright narrator of a bizarre story). I enjoyed the way he started with an inherently over-the-top premise -- basically, someone climbing the corporate ladder by killing people and telling you about it in chipper self-help language -- but didn't just sit back and play up that contrast over and over. There's a mischievous whimsy to the writing that keeps it entertaining. And it takes place in Towson in the 1990s, a place and time I can think back to very vividly, which is fun for me.
c) All Things Crack... Some Endure: A Crack The Sky Biography, by Tyson Koska
Crack The Sky are a band that formed in West Virginia but, by a twist of fate, became enormously popular in the Baltimore area in the '70s and remain comparatively unknown in the rest of the country.
Tyson Koska, a professor at Towson University (my alma mater), wrote a book about Crack The Sky, and I stumbled upon it while strolling around the Book Festival checking out all the different book stores' displays and snapped up a copy. It's a playfully arranged book, a lot of it is just interviews with the band and associates, but it goes pretty deep into how the band formed, how they wrote and wound up with this unusual career, and how frontman John Palumbo wrote his lyrics -- at one point Palumbo refers to the band's sound as "a cross between King Crimson and Steely Dan and Jethro Tull," which I think gets pretty close to explaining their appeal. Sometimes Koska does something a bit like the Motley Crue book The Dirt where each member of the band remembers a story a little differently and he just presents everyone's recollections side by side, and leaves it up to you to believe what you want.
d) Max Meow: Cat Crusader, by John Gallagher
Yes, this is the Baltimore Book Festival edition of Reading Diary, all of these are things I bought that weekend. I am constantly on the lookout for books to read to my 10-year-old son every night and just fostering that love of books in him, and Max Meow is a sort of knowingly silly riff on superhero comic books that's right up the alley of some of my son's favorite books. He was into it, and there were a few good jokes that might have went over his head but made me chuckle, I'm probably gonna pick up some more books in this series, there are a few now.
Monthly Report: August 2025 Albums
Tuesday, September 23, 2025 
1. Pool Kids - Easier Said Than Done
I typically listen to at least 30 new releases from a given month before I do these posts, and lately I've been taking a little more time with them, partly because some months there's just so many albums I want to hear before picking the best. And this is a good example of why, Easier Said Than Done was like the 50th August album I listened to and I was instantly grateful that I got to it after checking out so many other releases. I didn't know much about the Florida band Pool Kids other than that their first album was championed by Hayley Williams, but this, their third album, is just impressive as hell. The third and fourth tracks, "Bad Bruise" and "Leona Street," were about the point I really fell in love with Christine Goodwyne's voice and Caden Clinton's drumming. I went back and checked out the earlier stuff and it's a little more intricate and math rock, but there's a real purposeful clarity to the songwriting and production on Easier Said Than Done, it's a huge step forward, "Which Is Worse?" is a really moving song about grief.
2. Hayley Williams - Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party
Speaking of Hayley Williams! She initially released 17 singles with no official sequence or album title, and encouraged other people to make their own playlists of the songs. As someone who loves to make playlists and dream up ideal running orders for albums, I relished the challenge and am really proud of my playlist. So when she finally released the proper album weeks later, my first thought was kind of 'well, my version flows better.' The official version has grown on me, though, she make some choices I really like -- "Ice In My OJ" is one of my favorite songs on the album but it didn't occur to me to make it the opener, that's a ballsy choice. And I struggled with finding a song "Disappearing Man" sounds good following, and "Martazapine" was absolutely the right song. The title track also hits nicely in the second half, I feel like most of the rest of us had it pretty early in the album. When I ranked all the Paramore and Hayley Williams albums for Spin, I put this right below Petals For Armor, but it's close, I think they're both really impressive, engrossing albums.
3. The Beths - Straight Line Was A Lie
Earlier this year I heard the New Zealand band The Beths' 2020 song "I'm Not Getting Excited" and instantly went oh fuck, I like this band, and shortly after that, they began releasing singles from their fourth album that really got me anticipating this record. I love the way Elizabeth Stokes writes lyrics and sings them, a bit of a dry wit but also some earnest sincerity, and the bands' arrangements are so generously detailed and creative within a familiar jangly power pop package, I especially love the guitar tones on "Ark of the Covenant" and "Best Laid Plans." "Mother, Pray Me" is an incredibly heavy yet quiet song to drop right in the middle of the album, and then they gradually bring the energy back up over the next couple tracks, really good sequencing. Between this and the new Balu Brigada and Royel Otis albums, August was a strong month for Antipodean indie rock.
4. Dijon - Baby
Dijon Duenas was a military brat who moved all over the place growing up and now lives in Los Angeles and does big deal shit like writing and producing all the best songs on the latest Justin Bieber album. But he went to high school in Ellicott City and to college at UMBC, and began his musical career in Baltimore, playing in local spots like The Crown as part of the duo Abhi//Dijon a decade ago. And it's pretty exciting that someone from this scene is making some of the most exciting and original mainstream-adjacent music out right now, I love the fidgety way his songs keep cracking open and revealing different layers, as if there's a lo-fi demo underneath the more polished synth R&B jams that keeps bleeding through.
5. Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones
Nourished By Time's Marcus Brown is another guy who's lived in both Baltimore and L.A. and other places and does idiosyncratic bedroom pop R&B that sounds completely different from what Dijon does but it is also really cool and justifiably acclaimed. The Passionate Ones is Brown's first full-length since signing to XL Recordings and it isn't entirely recorded in his parents' Baltimore basement like his last album, but it very much has that spontaneous, casual feeling to it. "It's Time" is my favorite track so far.
6. Superchunk - Songs In The Key of Yikes
My friend Anthony Miccio suggests that any aging band's longevity should be expressed in Rolling Stones terms to describe how far removed they are from their debut album. Superchunk is 35 years in, and thankfully they're doing a lot better than Bridges To Babylon. 2018's What A Time To Be Alive was, for me, the definitive angry punk album of the first Trump administration, and Mac McCaughan's palpable weariness at writing yet another set of protest songs for the second Trump administration is pretty relatable. Songs In the Key of Yikes is the band's first album since one of my favorite living drummers, Jon Wurster, stepped down to focus on his other gigs, and I'm happy to say that the new drummer Laura King is awesome and totally has that classic Superchunk bounce down, even if it's not a perfect match and there are occasionally moments where I miss Wurster's unique sense of forward momentum.
7. Sabrina Carpenter - Man's Best Friend
For a lot of people, Sabrina Carpenter kind of sprang into existence as a main pop girl last year with the release of "Espresso." But as someone who's listened to her singles since 2017 and to her albums since 2019, I got to enjoy Short n' Sweet as the hard-earned triumph of someone who'd been grinding it out on the lower rungs of pop stardom for ages, gradually becoming a better singer and writer with an individual perspective and sense of humor. I think she's still operating at a really high level -- "Manchild" is easily one of the best things she's ever done -- and I like this throwback Olivia Newton John/ABBA vibe she's heavily mining, but it's definitely not banger after banger like Short n' Sweet. Carpenter brought back most of the collaborators from her last two albums, but there's a notable absence of Julian Bunetta, who had a hand in a lot of the best songs on those records.
8. Enslow - Crush
Shazam is a pretty reliable app, as that kind of tech goes, rarely is it stumped. Every now and again, though, it'll falsely identify a song, and if I try again seconds later, it will change the result and tell me the correct song. One amusing example happened a few months ago when WTMD played a new song from the Baltimore singer-songwriter Enslow called "I Love You," and when I asked Shazam to ID it, I was told that it was Linda Ronstadt's 1995 cover of Tom Petty's "The Waiting." It felt like an appropriate glitch, given that Enslow has a voice as strong and clear and Ronstadt and covers a song by Petty's pals Fleetwood Mac on Crush. I put Enslow's debut Hello on my list of Baltimore's best albums of 2024, and was really happy to see her return with another great pop record on an indie budget, I think "Feels Like I'm Falling In Love" is my favorite on this one.
9. Metro Boomin - A Futuristic Summa
Metro Boomin may be the most ubiquitous rap producer of his generation, and he's parlayed his hitmaking acumen into two platinum all-star solo albums, which I found perfectly enjoyable but lacking in any kind of unifying sound or perspective, generic playlist rap for the Spotify era. A Futuristic Summa has a very specific and purposeful sound, though, throwing back to the 2008-2013 period of swag rap, full of beats that sound like "Swag Surfin'" or "Ain't Gon' Let Up," the Atlanta rap that kept the party going while 'blog era' rappers were crafting their brooding serious nu-Jay-Z images. A Futuristic Summa features plenty of superstars who shaped and/or were shaped by this period (Gucci Mane, Future, Young Thug, Lil Baby) but the album really feels like a celebration of the more marginal regional stars who just briefly thrived in those years -- J Money, Yung L.A., Skooly, Roscoe Dash, Travis Porter, guys like that. Young Dro is the MVP of several tracks, and Rocko's "Make It Make Sense" is far and away my favorite thing he's ever done.
10. Chance The Rapper - Star Line
I saw the Chance backlash coming and correctly predicted that people would hate The Big Day even if it was a perfectly good album, which in my opinion it was. But the damage was one and it took Chance six years to regain his confidence to release an album -- hilariously rebooting his image by simply trading out the fitted cap for a bucket hat but mostly making the same thoughtful, big-hearted, tightly written verses he always has. Like The Big Day, I think Star Line could've been better if he'd saved some of those great non-album singles for this, but that's just how hip hop is these days, go figure. I really appreciate Chance screaming "fuck ICE" on a track, although Beauty Pill still has the best song called "Drapetomania."
The Worst Album of the Month: Bailey Zimmerman - Different Night Same Rodeo
Mainstream country operates completely differently from the rest of popular music -- major stars often release albums before any of the singles have hit big, and it might take a year or two for radio to really start playing the record. That being said, nothing on Bailey Zimmerman's second album has hit remotely like his double platinum 2023 debut, and it sounds a lot like a sophomore slump from someone who wasn't that good to begin with. Extra demerits for a title reminiscent of one of the best country albums of the last 20 years, Same Trailer Different Park by Kacey Musgraves.
Saturday, September 20, 2025
I will be doing another event for Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music on Tuesday, September 30, this time at Greedy Reads in Remington. Catalina Byrd will be hosting and Shawn Caesar of Unruly Records will be joining us.
The Selector Series event is also coming up this Tuesday. Buy the book if you haven't already! I'm going to try to keep this streak of events and reviews and interviews going as long as I can, if you want to be involved in any way, or want help getting the book into a store, don't hesitate to reach out at shipley.al@gmail.com.
Friday, September 19, 2025
This week on Spin, I wrote a Deep Cut Friday column about Bob Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" and also revised my ranking of Paramore/Hayley Williams albums to include Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party.
TV Diary
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
a) "Task"
"Mare of Easttown" creator Brad Inglesby's new HBO miniseries once again has a cast full of actors, some of them not Americans, doing their best Pennsylvania accents. I loved "Mare" but so far this one is a lot compelling in terms of story, the strength of the cast, and the direction (Jeremiah Zagar doesn't build the ominous atmosphere as well as Craig Zobel did). The first two episodes had a handful of scenes that grabbed me, though, I'm hoping it's gonna grow on me.
Olivia Cooke is so gorgeous, I kind of lost enthusiasm for "Slow Horses" when she left after the first season, I guess to make time for that one "Game of Thrones" spinoff I haven't seen. But I guess she does have time to have a second gig, and this Amazon Prime miniseries is an entertaining rashomon about a woman (Cooke) and her boyfriend's mother (Robin Wright, who directed some of the episodes) who hate each other, and you're left constantly guessing about who's the real problem or if it's both of them. The story really escalates quickly in some interesting, unexpected ways, and it's probably the best and most complex performance of Cooke's career.
c) "Hostage"
Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy play heads of state caught up in kidnapping and blackmail in the Netflix series "Hostage." It kind of goes straight from introducing you to the characters to plunging you into the drama very quickly,
"The Runarounds" is a new show from the creator of the Netflix hit "Outer Banks" and it's another teen drama with a sunny North Carolina summer backdrop. But it's about an aspiring band, and I find it pretty charming -- it gave me a little of a Cameron Crowe vibe even before I got to the Say Anything plot parallels (male lead doesn't plan to go to college but is tirelessly wooing his graduating class's valedictorian). And as a drummer, I appreciate the storyline is basically that they suddenly becoming a good band when they find the right drummer, who's so talented that a music industry power player tries to hire him away for an established band. Occasionally the story gets silly, but the cast is pretty charming and some of the original songs are catchy, I like it.
Alicia Silverstone has kinda coasted for 30 years since her one undeniably great performance in Clueless. But she's really good in this new series where she plays an American lawyer who goes to Ireland looking for answers about her estranged Irish father.
Given that Amanda Knox lost years of her life to a false accusation, I can't fault her for chasing a bag and producing a cable series about her innocence, starring a suitably attractive lead actress. The episodes I've watched so far feel almost disconcertingly unconcerned with Knox's murdered roommate Meredith at the center of this whole thing, though, and sometimes the tone kind of feels a little too flippant.
g) "The Paper"
I was never really that into the U.S. version of "The Office" and liked the British original more, but obviously it remains enormously popular, gave virtually every cast member a career, and is enormously influential on the last 20 years of TV comedy. It feels a little odd for Greg Daniels to make an "Office" spinoff now, especially since "Parks & Recreation" was initially developed as a spinoff before they decided to make it into its own thing. "The Paper" almost makes it worth it for the first episode's hilarious introduction of the one character from the previous series, Oscar, but I still think the show would be better without that explicit connection, it just feels forced. I like the cast, particularly Melvin Gregg (from a mockumentary series I like better than "The Office," "American Vandal"), Chelsea Frei, and a sorely underused Tim Key.
"The Comic Shop" is an independently produced sitcom that just began releasing episodes on YouTube this month. It's very much a mockumentary-style workplace sitcom in the mold of "The Office," which again, isn't really my favorite kind of show to begin with, and it feels odd to see people adhering to that network-friendly formula outside the network system. It's got some potential, though, I think Shanae Cole stands out as the funniest member of the cash.
i) "Fisk"
The Australian Netflix series "Fisk" that just returned for its third season is probably the best 'awkward single camera workplace sitcom' going outside of "Abbott Elementary" right now. Julia Zemiro, Aaron Chen, and Marty Sheargold are such a good rogues gallery of baffling and ridiculous co-workers.
j) "Upload"
I'm not a huge fan of shows getting abbreviated final seasons just to affordably tie up loose ends and do a quick curtain call. But Greg Daniels's Amazon Prime tech satire "Upload" kind of felt like it was being dragged out too long by the end of the third season, so I'm fine with it returning for a fourth and final season of just four episodes. It felt kind of weird that the show got more and more credulous about its AI love story over the course of the series, even as we see how ludicrous it is for people to have AI boyfriends and girlfriends in real life, so it just kind of lost its comedic bite and became a weird high-concept romance a lot of the time, and they kind of lost their nerve about how mean Allegra Edwards's character was. Andy Allo is really one of the most stunning women on television, though, she's Prince protege hot (because she actually was a Prince protege).
k) "Peacemaker"
It's weird that we got The Suicide Squad and the first season of "Peacemaker" all in the space of 6 months but then had to wait three and a half years for the second season. I like it a lot, though, "Peacemaker" might be my favorite thing James Gunn has made do date (have not seen Superman yet). The new season's opening sequence is not nearly as good as the first season's, which is kind of a letdown (it's still a goofy song-and-dance, but with a different song and a different dance). It also feels like they've kinda moved too quickly into making Cena's character into a straightforwardly sympathetic protagonist instead of an over-the-top weirdo, which is an arc that would play better if it was gradual over a few seasons.
I'm not a big "BoJack Horseman" fan so I was pleasantly surprised that I like this new Netflix animated series from the same creator. It's a little earthbound and autobiographical, with no talking animals, and a great voice cast including Paul Reiser and Max Greenfield.
Adult Swim's first Spanish-language show is a stop-motion animated series about the battle between two businesswomen on whether guinea pigs should be considered pets or a delicacy, it's pretty original and excellent.
A pretty good Turkish Netflix show, feels like a more thoughtful version of the 'young woman moves to a big city' type of series that American TV loves making.
This Spanish-language Netflix show has a weird ridiculous plot about a guy being kidnapped and forced to impersonate a much richer guy, a corrupt casino owner, but they have fun with the premise, the show doesn't take itself very seriously.
I tried watching this uhhh Italian teen erotic prison drama recently, not really my thing.
This Korean show takes a very simple idea that we've probably all thought about and explores it as a drama: what if people in Heaven stay whatever age the died? And what if a man who died in this thirties is eventually reunited with his wife when she dies in her eighties?
The idea of a TV news anchor heroically going offscript to expose the truth feels so old-fashioned that I always had a hard time taking "The Newsroom" seriously, but this Japanese show does it earnestly enough to kinda work.
This primetime show kind of takes all the stuff I like about Kelly Clark's daytime talk show, her singing and talking about music with other artists, and makes it into its own show. Some of the guests are people I don't really care about like Teddy Swims or Lizzo, but the Gloria Estefan episode was great and the Jonas Brothers one had its moments. It's a little frustrating sometimes when they speed through just one verse and chorus of a song, though.
t) "KPopped"
This Apple TV+ series hosted by PSY and Megan Thee Stallion features old American or British pop stars remaking their old hits in a K-Pop style with young Korean groups. It's kind of fun to see everybody embrace this cultural conversation in a light, enthusiastic setting, the Spice Girls episode was particularly cool because they're such a blueprint for K-Pop girl groups. Usually it's all kind of goofy and forgettable, but hey, it's not like you're gonna ruin "Ice Ice Baby" by making a K-Pop version so why not?
This 2-part HBO Max doc about Black television feels like a great unintentional companion piece for Apple TV+'s recent 2-part doc about Black movie stardom, "Number One on the Call Sheet." The late Malcolm-Jamal Warner participated in some of the uncomfortable conversations about the legacy of "The Cosby Show," and the late Norman Lear also got to participate in the complicated conversation about being the white guy who created some of the most popular Black sitcoms of all time, but there's just a ton of great stories and insights in here.
Charlie Sheen is, surprisingly, really mellowed and reflective in this Netflix doc about his life. That leaves Heidi Fleiss, who has not mellowed out at all, to really steal the spotlight in all the interview segments filmed in her house, where she owns something like 25 parrots, it made me kind of wish the whole doc was about her.
Between my recent Cha Wa interview and the Nat Geo docuseries "Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time" and now this Netflix docuseries, I've really spent a lot of time thinking about Katrina lately. I think the Nat Geo doc is probably the better of the two as a panoramic portrait of the story, but "Come Hell and High Water" feels a little more visceral and emotional, there's some really intense footage from 2005.
I feel like one of the most unappealing things about these docs about the downfall of attention-hungry vloggers is that a lot of the talking head interviews are with other attention-hungry vloggers who don't even know them.
y) "Nexaca"
This isn't as consistently entertaining as "Welcome to Wrexham," but I kind of like that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have sort of created a growing franchise of shows about soccer with a celebrity hook to make it more accessible as a TV show, this one about the Mexican team co-owned by Eva Longoria
I watched a little of this docuseries but I dunno, I've never taken a huge interest in the Kennedy family and all this RFK Jr. shit going on has kind of repelled me further from romanticizing everything about the dynasty.
Monday, September 15, 2025
Tamara Palmer interviewed me about Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music for Music Book Club.
Charles Aaron, Oliver Wang, and Chuck Eddy all generously took the time to read the book and write blurbs about it, I've been meaning to share those here as well.
Friday, September 12, 2025
This week I interviewed Haute & Freddy and wrote a Deep Cut Friday column about Harry Nilsson for Spin.
Thursday, September 11, 2025
One of my editors from the Baltimore City Paper days, Lee Gardner, has a podcast called Essential Tremors, and they have a recurring event called the Selector Series, with a guest choosing an album for a hi-fi vinyl listening experience.
On September 24th, I'll be the guest for a Selector Series at Idle Hour, where we'll be listening to Think (About It), the 1972 debut album by Lyn Collins. The title track is sort of the Rosetta Stone of Baltimore club music, and I devote a chunk of my book to the importance of the "Think (About It)" breakbeat to the genre. But the whole thing is great, produced and primarily written by James Brown. Since the event has a cover charge, I'll have copies of Tough Breaks for a reduced price.
Reading Diary
Wednesday, September 10, 2025
a) No Sense in Wishing, by Lawrence Burney
Lawrence and I both started out our writing careers at Baltimore City Paper and did some cool shit together when he was on staff at the Baltimore Banner. There's always been lots of mutual respect there, so I love that his first book and my first book were published just a few weeks apart, we're both appearing at the Baltimore Book Festival this weekend so hopefully I'll see him there. Lawrence really excels at writing about music and Baltimore and Baltimore music from a personal perspective and explaining why he likes what he likes or how it shaped him, and this collection of essays really plays to that strength. You get these engrossing vignettes about how he became a Three 6 Mafia or Lupe Fiasco fan and what their music means both to him and to the rest of the world, or his personal memories of family crab feasts set against the context of Black history in Maryland and how slavery shaped the state. Nobody's ever written better about Young Moose and the late Lor Scoota and it's interesting to see how he looks back now on how they redefined Baltimore hip-hop in the 2010s and influenced what came after them.
b) Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, by Simon Reynolds
When I was working on Tough Breaks, I read a lot of books about dance music and house music, partly because I came to Baltimore club via hip-hop rather than dance music and wanted to make sure I had the right grounding and context. And this one is definitely deservedly regarded as one of the great dance music books, I really appreciated Reynolds giving this very detailed account of how the raves and club culture took over in the UK in the late '80s, the way all these different factions and legal and cultural forces shaped where people danced and what they danced to.
c) Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Since I was reading non-fiction books about music most of the time that I was working on mine, I was kind of ready to jump into fiction again, and when we went on vacation a few months ago I asked my wife, who reads over 50 novels every year, to recommend me a couple things to take. Children of Time is pretty good, although it's the first in a series and I don't know if I have the appetite to read the others, it has some pretty interesting ideas about how humanity could try to colonize the rest of the universe after the destruction of Earth by basically spreading intelligence as a virus to new species, including a race of large spiders. Tchaikovsky does a good job of jumping between the human plotline and the spider plotline and communicating how the cognition of an intelligent nonverbal spider would differ from ours.