BuzzRAG Culture Desk — 2026-09-25

Ninety-five years after its first appearance, the 1931 Frankenstein remains less a museum piece than a living piece of popular culture. A conversation with Sara Karloff, daughter of the film’s star, Boris Karloff, and composer Michael Shapiro accompanies the London presentation of a long-delayed orchestral score, giving the familiar story a fresh angle: not just how a monster was created, but how a performance became family history and cultural shorthand.

The film’s staying power lies partly in its visual economy. A bolt of electricity, a heavy silhouette, a laboratory assembled from shadows: these images still communicate instantly, even to people who have never watched the whole movie. Shapiro’s score also points to the way classic cinema keeps being reinterpreted through live performance. Revival here is not nostalgia alone; it is a test of whether old myths can acquire new emotional and musical dimensions without losing their strange, bruised power.

The Quietus’s September music roundup offers a snapshot of a month in which the album remains a useful container for unruly ideas. Rather than treating the season as a race toward consensus, its selection of records and tracks reflects a culture spread across textures, scenes and tempos—music that rewards immersion as much as instant recognition.

A monthly best-of list is inevitably a portrait of its editors as well as its artists, but that subjectivity is part of the point. The most valuable roundups create routes into unfamiliar work, placing the obvious alongside the overlooked and making room for records that resist neat genre language. As autumn’s release calendar gathers momentum, September’s strongest music suggests that adventurous listening is less about chasing novelty than paying attention to the forms artists are quietly bending.

The story of Catherine Corless, whose research exposed the deaths of almost 800 children at a mother and baby institution in Tuam, County Galway, is being brought to the screen with Liam Neeson’s involvement. The project takes shape around an individual campaigner who refused to let official indifference, institutional power or the sheer scale of the evidence make the story disappear.

That focus matters because the history of Ireland’s mother and baby homes is not simply a matter of past horror; it is a record of how religion, the state and social shame combined to make vulnerable women and children administratively invisible. A film can broaden the audience for Corless’s work, but it also carries a responsibility to preserve the specificity of the victims rather than turning trauma into prestige drama. The scrutiny will fall on whose perspective leads the story, and whether the production treats remembrance as an obligation rather than a plot device.

Michael Cragg’s biography of Kylie Minogue asks an apparently simple question: how has a pop star with five decades of chart success remained both ubiquitous and oddly underexamined? The answer, suggested by the book’s affectionate portrait, is not a secret formula but a rare ability to make reinvention feel welcoming rather than alienating.

Kylie’s cultural position is especially revealing because she has often occupied the space between critical seriousness and mass pleasure. That tension says more about the old hierarchies of taste than it does about her music. Her genius may be less about domination than connection: knowing when to disappear into a song, when to embrace camp, and how to turn survival in a volatile industry into a shared emotional language. A good pop biography does not merely defend a fan’s devotion; it explains the social machinery that makes a seemingly lightweight figure so durable.

Jon Buckland’s low-culture essay on Dumb & Dumber takes an unapologetic look at a comedy often dismissed as crude, juvenile or simply too silly to merit serious attention. That dismissal is precisely the invitation: what happens when we examine a supposedly disposable film for the mechanics of its timing, its physicality and its refusal to behave respectably?

Low comedy has always been a useful irritant to cultural gatekeepers because it exposes how arbitrary the boundary between bad taste and popular pleasure can be. The film’s stupidity is not accidental incompetence; it is a carefully engineered comic world in which logic buckles, friendship becomes a survival strategy and humiliation keeps mutating into delight. Reconsidering it does not require pretending every gag is profound. It means acknowledging that audiences often find freedom in art that asks them to stop performing intelligence for a while.

Godflesh’s “Decay” arrives as a reminder that industrial metal’s most potent subject is not destruction in the abstract but the physical pressure of living inside damaged systems. The track’s very title suggests erosion, yet the band’s enduring force comes from making that erosion feel active: machinery grinding, structures buckling and rhythm functioning like an engine that refuses to switch off.

What distinguishes this strain of heavy music is its refusal to separate atmosphere from argument. Distortion, repetition and brutal low-end are not decorative signs of darkness; they create a bodily experience of confinement and resistance. In an era saturated with polished, frictionless digital sound, that weight can feel almost confrontational. “Decay” belongs to a tradition that finds emotional truth in abrasion, making the listener inhabit the conditions its language describes rather than merely observe them from a safe distance.

Michael Kiwanuka’s first interview since suffering a devastating stroke turns the release of his delayed album into something more complicated than a comeback narrative. The Mercury Prize winner describes a life interrupted by illness and a prolonged inability to return home, while framing the music as a way of sharing pain rather than packaging it as inspiration.

That distinction is crucial. Artists are often expected to convert vulnerability into a clean story of triumph, but recovery is rarely so orderly, and Kiwanuka’s account keeps the uncertainty visible. His music has long carried a sense of historical weight and private searching; the experience of illness gives those qualities a sharper, more intimate context without reducing the songs to autobiography. The album’s eventual arrival will be heard alongside the knowledge of what it took to finish it, raising questions about care, work and the pressure to resume a public life before the body is ready.