Reviews

It may not include Bohannon's mid-'70s hits "Footstompin'Music"and "Disco Stomp", but stick around. Play it—his best moments from five albums for Mercury between '77 and '80 —and you're doing your thing like a hammer, knowing you got to stay funky. With a rhythmic fire that burns like a blaze-up between James Brown, Barry White and Talking Heads, mixing African beat with disco heat, Bohannon—drummer and former Motown arranger—took dance to the point of zen, years before people redefined the noun "trance".

As clinical as plastic surgery in Florida. Gabriel & Dresden are DJs who've remixed Madonna and Britney and had a hit as Motorcycle. Presumably the producers of the already notorious Nip/Tuck required a musical sheen as deceptively pristine and callously effective as its anti-hero sex-addict surgeon, and they've got it. This rush of modern techno-chill drives through The Engine Room, Poloroid and Wax Poetic (featuring Norah Jones) before getting fleshy and flirty with Client, Kinky and then Bebel Gilberto working with Thievery Corporation. What must America think of us Europeans?

Anti-grunge heroine sticks, perhaps unwisely, to her guns

Heading up Kansas indie band Butterglory, Matt Suggs ended the '90s in disarray as first the band, then his relationship with its girl drummer, dissolved. Returning home to California, he cut countrified solo debut The Golden Days Before They End in 2000. Returning with Brooklyn's Thee Higher Burning Fire as back-up, its successor is harder, crusted in antsy guitars, though Suggs' slightly distracted vocals give it a homemade quality that pushes Amigo Row into Hayden territory rather than straight-ahead rock.

Big, bright, effervescent Peanuts pop from Brighton sextet

Texan renegade follows post-9/11 triumph Jerusalem with more political invective

Songwriting duo who made up the important bit of Crowded House

Broad comic remake of feminist chiller

The young Che Guevara's political awakening on a road trip through South America

Left limbless, deaf, dumb and blind by a WWI landmine, US GI Timothy Bottoms is locked away in a hospital. Considered beyond medical help, he drifts in memories and fantasies, until, years later, he finally finds a way to communicate—to little avail. Based on his 1939 novel, this 1971 anti-war parable was the only film directed by blacklisted scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo. At times awkward, it's nonetheless driven by an acute, angry intelligence. Hard to forget.