Latest news with #Garbus
Irish Independent
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Pain, suffering and losing control: it sounds bleak but Ezra Furman's new album has plenty of playful giddiness
Ten albums into a wildly eclectic career and Goodbye Small Head is an eclectic song collection. From the off, it pays scant regard to genre, but what's impressive is how comfortable Furman is across a range of styles and influences. The Chicago-born, Massachusetts-raised artist suffered a period of ill-health — a mystery illness in 2023 — and that time inspired her to explore pain, suffering and losing control. Such a description sounds bleak, but the songs are anything but. There's a playful giddiness to proceedings that pulls the listener in, and even though the sharp lyrics may speak of troubles, the jauntiness of the music engages. It helps, too, that the tracks flit from indie to art rock, with room for everything from gospel to bossa nova too. It takes a particular talent to hopscotch from one one genre to another like that and still deliver a cohesive album and it's to Furman's credit that she does that. Sudden Storm is an arresting look at a breakdown: 'The lord keeps calling and my body's not responding.' It's notable that despite the weighty subject matter, a commercial sensibility informs several of the songs. Jump Out is typical of the radio-friendly fare, while the funky Veil Song bewitches. In California, meanwhile, Tune-Yards offer their own brand of eclecticism. The musical project of husband-and-wife team Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, the pair were initially lumped in with the 'freak folk' movement, a loose collective of lo-fi troubadours. Such a moniker always seemed to do the band a disservice. For one, there was much more going on, sonically, than most of their peers but even more than that, Garbus, is in possession of a vocal with real depth and range. There's a soulfulness to her singing that really comes into its own on new album Better Dreaming. While the pop sensibilities belie some dark subject matter a celebration of family life and the pleasures of the everyday make their mark time and again. The wonderfully engaging Limelight is inspired by Garbus and Brenner dancing along with their daughter to George Clinton and the three-year-old's vocals are included. What sounds corny on paper, is beautifully rendered in reality. Heartbreak, the album's most enduring track, puts Garbus's vocal front and centre. It's an affecting and lyrically smart song that easily gets under the skin. Both Ezra Furman and Tune-Yards demand work from the listener. In today's instant gratification age, some will recoil from that idea, but if given a proper airing, their latest albums will leave quite a mark.
Scoop
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Tune-Yards Share New Single Ahead Of New Album 'Better Dreaming'
Tune-Yards, the dynamic duo of Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner, have released their new single 'How Big Is The Rainbow', the final offering prior to the release of their upcoming album, Better Dreaming, out this Friday 16 May. The track is accompanied by a music video featuring comedian and actress, Star Amerasu, and directed by Dominic Mercurio. On the new track, Merrill shares 'The title lyric came out in a flash, and felt more sincere than I've ever been lyrically, maybe. But in this day and age, there is no room for subtlety when it comes to advocating for every single human being, for our trans family especially. And SHIT, how big IS the fucking rainbow?! It feels like the time to prove it to each other, to show each other how big it can be.' 'How Big Is The Rainbow' follows pre-release singles 'Limelight' and 'Heartbreak'. Distraction, depression, and heartbreak reign supreme in 2025. 'Making art in this day and age for me is a battle for focus; we're in an age of interruption,' says Garbus of Tune-Yards' sixth album Better Dreaming. Proudly waving an anti-fascist, liberation, freak flag, Better Dreaming contains some of Tune-Yards smoothest, funkiest, and most direct pop music to date, and yes, you can dance to it. And when you do dance to it, be prepared to sweat out something that's been long stuck inside, and pretty deep down. The songs of Better Dreaming came to Garbus and Brenner with unusual ease. They asked themselves what would happen if they simply let the songs come out, following any trail they wished - first thought, best thought style. There was a strong desire to move, to make music that would enter the ear and immediately loosen up the joints, get the whole body wiggling. After covid-isolation, and time away from touring and live shows, the desire to be moved by music was undeniable. The insane experience of growing an actual human being influenced this as well. The rhythms throughout the record carry a certain freshness, with deep pockets full of subtle idiosyncrasies that stem from Tune-Yards' return to making an album primarily as a duo. All but one of these songs are built around Garbus' drum looping and rhythm building, as they were on some of the early albums like Bird-Brains and W H O K I L L – no full kit drummer here, and the songs love it. Better Dreaming is ferocious in its invocation of self-love, of collective action, of dance floor liberation, ego-death deliverance, and a future we could all thrive in. When diving into the present darkness of the world, Tune-Yards asks themselves how much literal energy and joy can be conjured and pumped through the music. In its life-affirming art-pop of the apocalypse, Better Dreaming comes true. Better Dreaming is out on 16 May on all digital platforms, CD, standard black vinyl and clear blue wave vinyl (indie retail only). For more information, and to pre-order, head HERE.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Yahoo
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer' On Netflix, About The Stop-And-Start Search For The Gilgo Beach Killer
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer is a three-part docuseries, directed by Liz Garbus, that examines the case of the alleged Gilgo Beach Killer, Rex Heuermann, from the perspective of his victims and their families. Ten sets of remains were found in a relatively small area between December of 2010 and April of 2011, but Heuermann wasn't arrested for the murders until 2023. Opening Shot: 'May 1, 2010. Long Island, New York.' As we look at beach-side brush, we hear a 911 call from Shannan Gilbert. The Gist: The the search for Gilbert is what ended up being the catalyst that led law enforcement in Suffolk County on Long Island to find the remains of ten different women, all in the same area of brush alongside a highway on the southern shore of the island. But that search would not have happened without the constant pressure of Gilbert's mother Mari. Because Shannan Gilbert was a sex worker, finding her seemed like a low priority for the Suffolk County police. Mari Gilbert's consistent pressure via press conference and other media coverage finally prompted them to start looking. In December, 2010, a full skeletal set of remains were found, then in short order three other sets of skeletal remains were unearthed. None of them were Gilbert, though. Through DNA, officials were able to identify the 'Gilgo Four' as Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Melissa Barthelemy, Megan Waterman and Amber Lynn Costello, all of whom are sex workers who disappeared between 2007 and 2010. During the press conference where they were identified, the Suffolk County police commissioner wanted to allay fears by saying the women engaged in 'risky activity,' but all that did was offend the families that mourned their deaths. What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Garbus also directed Lost Girls, a 2020 scripted feature film about this case. The tone of Gone Girls is reminiscent of another Garbus project, I'll Be Gone In The Dark. Our Take: We approached Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer a little warily; as residents of the New York metropolitan area, we have read and heard the extensive coverage of the Gilgo Beach murders and know well how much law enforcement dragged their feet on the case because the victims — as well as Gilbert, whose body was found miles away and isn't a direct victim of the the killer — were sex workers. Garbus wanted to make sure the victims, especially Gilbert and the 'Gilgo Four' are given their proper due, which is why the first episode has friends and family of the five women discussing their lives and who they were as people. That approach is giving the docuseries a slant that's different than what we usually see in true-crime serial-killer genre. Too many times, the killer is the one who gets the biographical treatment, and the victims are given a momentary nod and little else. It's alarming but not surprising that law enforcement downplayed the victims because of what they did for a living, and Mari Gilbert's constant media presence pressuring Suffolk County law enforcement officials to act was a major component of this case. Without Mari's efforts, those remains might still be out there, and ten families of missing women might have never gotten the closure they deserved. The other two episodes in this series will concentrate on the search for Gilbert, as well as how law enforcement needed over a decade to pin most of these murders on Heuermann; he was an architect who hid in plain sight, working in Manhattan and living in Massapequa Park. What we hope, though, is that Garbus will continue to keep the victims in the front of the viewers' minds, because that's where they need to be in order to appreciate just how many people the killer's actions affected. Sex and Skin: Shot: A shot of Heuermann's house, with a prosecutor saying 'I learned [the killer] was living among us the whole time.' Sleeper Star: Long Island Press reporter Jaclyn Gallucci gives a really local viewpoint of the case, talking about how the area were the bodies were found shattered her sense that nothing bad could happen along the beaches on the south shore. Most Pilot-y Line: As always, we are not fans of reenactments, but they're merely annoying instead of distracting here. Our Call: STREAM IT. Because Liz Garbus incorporates stories about the victims in the narrative of the Gilgo Beach story, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer give viewers a much fuller picture of the horrors that the killer wrought. Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn't kid himself: he's a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Yahoo
‘Their voices had been overlooked for so long': the shocking hunt for the Gilgo Beach killer
The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer. Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker's book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help. Related: 'In a sense, he's like a curse': what can a new OJ Simpson docuseries teach us? It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called 'Gilgo Four' – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan's home. 'Amy was like, 'Liz, he was in my apartment,'' a still shocked Garbus recalled recently. 'To have this development, and then also to realize how close he was not just to people in Long Island, but people in New York City too, it was extraordinary.' Garbus immediately returned to the families of the Gilgo Four, whom she consulted for Lost Girls, to possibly film a series documenting not only the breakthrough in the long-open case but the legal and administrative environment that allowed it to stay cold for so long. The result is Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, a three-part docuseries for Netflix that brings the women and their families to the fore, and delves into the corruption within Long Island's Suffolk county that hampered the investigation for the better part of a decade. From the start, as the series shows, law enforcement deprioritized, and the media depersonalized, the disappearance of sex workers. 'It's just one excuse after another,' says Mari Gilbert in one of many archival news clips in the series. Contemporary coverage in the early 2010s most often didn't refer to the victims by name, or even as women – 'even the most storied publications would just refer to them as prostitutes,' said Garbus. Each family in the series tells a similar story: their sister, daughter, niece or mother goes missing; police are skeptical of a disappearance, given their line of work; the investigation is not a priority and drops off precipitously, if there is even one at all. The series includes several interviews with sex workers, either friends or co-workers with the victims or women who had frightening experiences with someone who matches the description of Heuermann, a 6ft 4in, 250lb man. One woman recalls being attacked at a house in Philadelphia, only escaping with the help of a hidden Taser. Another recounts a date with a man like Heuermann who went on about the Gilgo Beach murders in too much detail, referring to the victims by number in a way that was 'very dehumanizing'. Police never had this information, because law enforcement officers did not reach out to sex workers nor made reporting a safe activity for women who could potentially be charged with a crime. 'Their voices had been overlooked and disregarded for so long,' said Garbus. 'They couldn't go to the police because they felt that they would be arrested and also no one listens to them. But they were the people who had the best info.' What Suffolk county police did have, as early as winter 2010, was the description of a suspect from Costello's roommate. Dave Schaller recounts in Gone Girls how he went to police to describe a frightening incident a few weeks before her disappearance: Costello called him one night in a panic, locked in her bathroom after a sex work client threatened her. Schaller and another friend intervened, nearly releasing a pit bull on the man they both describe as a massive, 'Frankenstein-like' figure with an 'empty gaze' – 'imagine like a predator who's just tripped,' he recalls in the series. He also provided authorities with a description of his truck: a green, first-generation Chevy Avalanche. The description, along with most of the investigation files, languished in Suffolk county for years – the victim, as the second episode outlines, of an unusually corrupt arrangement between Suffolk county's then district attorney, Tom Spoda, and its police chief, Jimmy Burke. Spoda had initially tapped a teenage Burke as an informant in an infamous Long Island murder case of a 13-year-old boy. Burke's cooperation led to the likely false convictions (according to the series) of two other teenagers. Appointed by Spoda to the head of police in 2011, Burke barred officers from sharing information with the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, ending initial cooperation on the Gilgo Beach case. Burke, it later emerged, had subordinates conduct surveillance on his girlfriend or his girlfriend's exes; solicited sex workers; allegedly referred to the Gilgo Beach killings as 'misdemeanor murders'; and engaged in a cover-up after pornography and sex toys were stolen from his vehicle in 2012, including the police beating of the alleged thief. He was convicted in 2016 for assault and obstructing justice, and sentenced to 46 months in federal prison. Spoda was convicted of obstruction of justice in the scheme to protect Burke, and sentenced to five years. It wasn't until 2022 that the Gilgo Beach murders finally got an interagency taskforce, with full-time investigators sharing information. And it took only six weeks for the taskforce to identify a suspect: a man in Massapequa who matched Schaller's description and once owned a green 2003 Chevy Avalanche. They surveilled Heuermann for 10 months before obtaining a DNA sample that matched the killer. Since his arrest in July 2023, Heuermann has been charged with seven murders: the Gilgo Four, plus Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valeria Mack – but not Shannan Gilbert, whose death has still not been officially ruled a homicide. In the years before Heuermann's arrest, conspiracy theories of a police tie to the murders abounded online. Garbus does not give those credence, nor does she dismiss Suffolk county's role in prolonging potential justice. 'I don't predict that we'll be able to draw a straight line between the police and the Gilgo Beach murders, but I believe that it takes a lot of time and energy to run a criminal enterprise within a police department, and that certainly allowed a lot of people to take their eyes off the ball,' she said. 'The simple fact that once the Gilgo Beach taskforce was formed, it took six weeks to find the alleged perpetrator with evidence that had been sitting there for over a decade, tells you as much as you need to know.' Gone Girls does not linger on a potential motive or pathology. Said Garbus: 'I don't want to sensationalize and center the killer. But I do think there's a lot that we can learn from understanding patterns and what might have gone wrong in the search for him.' Chief among them was a lack of coordination among departments or imagination of potential other victims, owing in part to longstanding bias against sex workers. Brainard-Barnes's sister Melissa Cann couldn't even get her name on to the national missing persons registry – every known victim, Garbus noted, had a strong advocate keeping her name on the radar, searching for answers. 'How many people did not have that?' she wondered. 'I just think there are a lot more questions that need answering, and I hope that the system isn't so broken that even those track records aren't retraceable.' While Heuermann awaits trial, many questions remain in the case. What happened to Gilbert? How many victims? Did Heuermann really take a decade-long hiatus between his first alleged victim in 1993, and his second in 2003? 'I don't believe that we know the full contours of this case,' said Garbus. Still, the specter of a trial, probably including information known only to prosecutors, offers the possibility of answers. 'The hope is that the families get as many answers as they can possibly get,' said Garbus. 'And that we are able to close as many cases as possible and have some resolution for these missing young women.' Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer is available on Netflix on 31 March
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- The Guardian
‘Their voices had been overlooked for so long': the shocking hunt for the Gilgo Beach killer
The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer. Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker's book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help. It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called 'Gilgo Four' – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan's home. 'Amy was like, 'Liz, he was in my apartment,'' a still shocked Garbus recalled recently. 'To have this development, and then also to realize how close he was not just to people in Long Island, but people in New York City too, it was extraordinary.' Garbus immediately returned to the families of the Gilgo Four, whom she consulted for Lost Girls, to possibly film a series documenting not only the breakthrough in the long-open case but the legal and administrative environment that allowed it to stay cold for so long. The result is Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, a three-part docuseries for Netflix that brings the women and their families to the fore, and delves into the corruption within Long Island's Suffolk county that hampered the investigation for the better part of a decade. From the start, as the series shows, law enforcement deprioritized, and the media depersonalized, the disappearance of sex workers. 'It's just one excuse after another,' says Mari Gilbert in one of many archival news clips in the series. Contemporary coverage in the early 2010s most often didn't refer to the victims by name, or even as women – 'even the most storied publications would just refer to them as prostitutes,' said Garbus. Each family in the series tells a similar story: their sister, daughter, niece or mother goes missing; police are skeptical of a disappearance, given their line of work; the investigation is not a priority and drops off precipitously, if there is even one at all. The series includes several interviews with sex workers, either friends or co-workers with the victims or women who had frightening experiences with someone who matches the description of Heuermann, a 6ft 4in, 250lb man. One woman recalls being attacked at a house in Philadelphia, only escaping with the help of a hidden Taser. Another recounts a date with a man like Heuermann who went on about the Gilgo Beach murders in too much detail, referring to the victims by number in a way that was 'very dehumanizing'. Police never had this information, because law enforcement officers did not reach out to sex workers nor made reporting a safe activity for women who could potentially be charged with a crime. 'Their voices had been overlooked and disregarded for so long,' said Garbus. 'They couldn't go to the police because they felt that they would be arrested and also no one listens to them. But they were the people who had the best info.' What Suffolk county police did have, as early as winter 2010, was the description of a suspect from Costello's roommate. Dave Schaller recounts in Gone Girls how he went to police to describe a frightening incident a few weeks before her disappearance: Costello called him one night in a panic, locked in her bathroom after a sex work client threatened her. Schaller and another friend intervened, nearly releasing a pit bull on the man they both describe as a massive, 'Frankenstein-like' figure with an 'empty gaze' – 'imagine like a predator who's just tripped,' he recalls in the series. He also provided authorities with a description of his truck: a green, first-generation Chevy Avalanche. The description, along with most of the investigation files, languished in Suffolk county for years – the victim, as the second episode outlines, of an unusually corrupt arrangement between Suffolk county's then district attorney, Tom Spoda, and its police chief, Jimmy Burke. Spoda had initially tapped a teenage Burke as an informant in an infamous Long Island murder case of a 13-year-old boy. Burke's cooperation led to the likely false convictions (according to the series) of two other teenagers. Appointed by Spoda to the head of police in 2011, Burke barred officers from sharing information with the FBI or other law enforcement agencies, ending initial cooperation on the Gilgo Beach case. Burke, it later emerged, had subordinates conduct surveillance on his girlfriend or his girlfriend's exes; solicited sex workers; allegedly referred to the Gilgo Beach killings as 'misdemeanor murders'; and engaged in a cover-up after pornography and sex toys were stolen from his vehicle in 2012, including the police beating of the alleged thief. He was convicted in 2016 for assault and obstructing justice, and sentenced to 46 months in federal prison. Spoda was convicted of obstruction of justice in the scheme to protect Burke, and sentenced to five years. It wasn't until 2022 that the Gilgo Beach murders finally got an interagency taskforce, with full-time investigators sharing information. And it took only six weeks for the taskforce to identify a suspect: a man in Massapequa who matched Schaller's description and once owned a green 2003 Chevy Avalanche. They surveilled Heuermann for 10 months before obtaining a DNA sample that matched the killer. Since his arrest in July 2023, Heuermann has been charged with seven murders: the Gilgo Four, plus Jessica Taylor, Sandra Costilla and Valeria Mack – but not Shannan Gilbert, whose death has still not been officially ruled a homicide. In the years before Heuermann's arrest, conspiracy theories of a police tie to the murders abounded online. Garbus does not give those credence, nor does she dismiss Suffolk county's role in prolonging potential justice. 'I don't predict that we'll be able to draw a straight line between the police and the Gilgo Beach murders, but I believe that it takes a lot of time and energy to run a criminal enterprise within a police department, and that certainly allowed a lot of people to take their eyes off the ball,' she said. 'The simple fact that once the Gilgo Beach taskforce was formed, it took six weeks to find the alleged perpetrator with evidence that had been sitting there for over a decade, tells you as much as you need to know.' Gone Girls does not linger on a potential motive or pathology. Said Garbus: 'I don't want to sensationalize and center the killer. But I do think there's a lot that we can learn from understanding patterns and what might have gone wrong in the search for him.' Chief among them was a lack of coordination among departments or imagination of potential other victims, owing in part to longstanding bias against sex workers. Brainard-Barnes's sister Melissa Cann couldn't even get her name on to the national missing persons registry – every known victim, Garbus noted, had a strong advocate keeping her name on the radar, searching for answers. 'How many people did not have that?' she wondered. 'I just think there are a lot more questions that need answering, and I hope that the system isn't so broken that even those track records aren't retraceable.' While Heuermann awaits trial, many questions remain in the case. What happened to Gilbert? How many victims? Did Heuermann really take a decade-long hiatus between his first alleged victim in 1993, and his second in 2003? 'I don't believe that we know the full contours of this case,' said Garbus. Still, the specter of a trial, probably including information known only to prosecutors, offers the possibility of answers. 'The hope is that the families get as many answers as they can possibly get,' said Garbus. 'And that we are able to close as many cases as possible and have some resolution for these missing young women.' Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer is available on Netflix on 31 March
