Reviews

The musical side project of Jack Black and his guitar-playing sidekick Kyle Gass, Tenacious D are a pomp-rocking hybrid of Spinal Tap, South Park and The Darkness. This meaty double-disc set contains a live Brixton concert, the duo's original HBO series, scatological short films and tons more. It's all strong stuff, with cameos by Spike Jonze and Dave Grohl as the Devil. A cult worth discovering.

The Old Weird America rediscovered in Chicago

Produced by T. Bone Burnett, and an essential purchase for White Stripes devotees as Jack White gives five brand new performances. By "brand new", we mean four of them are traditional, like "Sittin' On Top Of The World" and "Christmas Time Will Soon Be Over", interpreted by he of the tight trousers and eye for Renée Zellweger with minimal fiddles-and-mandolins support and a folksy vocal. "Never Far Away" is his own.

Bleakly beautiful drone-grooves from singer-songwriter tipped for greatness

First in series of reissued twofers from Nashville country giant

Entertaining trawl of WEA's rap vaults

Stevens launched Deram, Decca's off-shoot progressive label, in 1966 with "I Love My Dog", followed by further hits "Matthew & Son" and "I'm Gonna Get Me A Gun"—ingenious, idiosyncratic, albeit lightweight pop. Like label-mate Bowie, Stevens was clearly an unorthodox talent. Typically, the singles and B-sides then bolstered Stevens' debut album, an impressive, diverse collection despite Mike Hurst's archaic production and fussy arrangements. By New Masters, Hurst was deploying an even heavier trowel.

Haunting, well-judged biopic of Plath and Hughes

The closest that Jean-Luc Godard ever got to directing a star-studded blockbuster, Le Mépris, shot in Cinemascope and featuring Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance and Fritz Lang, follows the making of a crass adaptation of Homer's Odyssey while ridiculing commercial cinema and giving Palance some cracking lines: "You cheated me Fritz! That's not what's in the script!"

Fighting free from the monumental shadows of Woody Allen and Whit Stillman, Gary Winick's Tadpole—hewn from that same Upper East Side social milieu and following the vaguely familiar unrequited infatuations of Aaron Stanford's 15-year-old Voltaire-quoting, stepmom-fancying preppy—is 77 unapologetic and mostly witty minutes of romantic ephemera.