Reviews

The Boss lives up to his name on live concert film

High plains drifter is Clint Eastwood, the nascent director, at his most elemental. He's post-Leone and pre-Josey Wales here, working from a script by Ernest Shaft Tidyman, playing a "squinty-eyed son of a bitch"who saves a small town in the Old West from a sadistic group of escaped convicts. It's a harsh, frequently brutal amorality play. The credits have barely rolled before we're treated to callous multiple murders and a 'consenting rape'scene.

When Moby sampled Vera Ward Hall's "Trouble So Hard", he was merely the latest in a long line of musicians to use as a source the field recordings made in the Deep South between 1933 and 1959 by the folklorist Alan Lomax. The Popular Songbook collects together 22 such tracks and, perhaps to your surprise, you'll find you know almost every one of them—if not in these original versions then in covers by artists as diverse as Clapton, Miles Davis, Steve Miller, Dylan, Led Zep and The Grateful Dead. File alongside the Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music.

Limpid nocturnal longing on seventh album from shifting collective

The Tamworth shaman returns to the fray, heroically recharged

Important country-rock harbinger from Alabama siblings Vern and Rex

Stealthy romantics collate their non-hits

Debut album plus CD of previously unreleased demos from '70s Scots funkers

Taut, nasty German thriller

Australian comedy starring Billy Connolly as fisherman Steve Myers, whose boat is destroyed by a lightning bolt. When the insurance company refuses to pay up, claiming the incident was an "act of God", Myers decides to take God to court and sue Him for damages. Judi Davis plays a local reporter who champions Myers' case (and wins his heart). No surprises here, but it's amiable enough.