By Stephanie King

Crashing into being with a punky surf drum intro that sounds like it should have Joey Ramone yelping “Hey Ho! Let’s Go!” over it, Golden Girls’s Amateur Teen Sex Attics is the kind of noisy, anarchic, fast pop-punk that gets played over compilation videos of boys wiping out on their skateboards.

By Estella Hung

In one image a mother wearing headphones breastfeeds her child sometime during the last decade. In another, a group of fakirs poses in regal surrounds sometime in the 1890s. In still another, a lone woman, her head bound in a khemar, stares penetratingly out amid waving flags of the Pakistan Muslim League during a protest against the newspaper cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in 2005.

By Stephanie King

It took Paparazzi and a sensational MTV Video Music Awards performance to convince me that Lady Gaga was for real. However, despite admiring her pop-meets-performance-art shtick, her music does little for me. But on The Fame Monster skulks a piece of trashy goth-Europop that’s the musical equivalent of smoking – dirty, guilt-ridden and utterly addictive.

By Laila Sumpton

It is 1948, Palestine, and forbidden lovers Ali and Nada are prevented from marrying because her father disapproves of Ali’s brother, “mad” Yusuf. Personal and political worlds collide as the British mandate ends, and the futures of Yusuf, Ali and Nada become “what ifs” that their older selves try to unravel. We are thrown into a tragic-comic world where poetry, pranks, politics and proverbs all interweave with the secrets and forced decisions that the Nakbah inflicted on the small community of Baissamoon in northern Palestine.