Reviews

Johnny Depp excels in highly entertaining Bruckheimer blockbuster

Look closely at the cover of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and you'll see a copy of Robert Johnson's King Of The Delta Blues Singers. Released in 1961 but recorded a quarter of a century earlier, the Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin all plundered it for source material, making it arguably the single most influential album on '60s rock. All 29 sides recorded by Johnson in his short lifetime are included here, and if you don't already own them, now's your chance. That they come with a second disc rounding up 25 of Johnson's contemporaries from Bessie Smith to Son House is a bonus.

Ex-Golden Rough mainman Walker is backed by a full band of buddies on his second solo album, Ashes & Wine, and sounds like someone snug in his own skin. Here he draws on his carpetbag of honky-tonk tricks ("Helpless Guy"), Stonesy strut ("Dissatisfaction"; "Letdown") and the rough-diamond rattle of early Son Volt ("Please Save Your Tears"). Walker's voice is equal parts whiskey and gravel—classic rawk and bottom-of-the-glass country-blues -somewhere between Jagger and Steve Earle. Expressive, literate and ballsy stuff.

Born out of Williamsburg's vibrant underground scene in 2000—and sounding not unlike the soundtrack to a painfully hip party there, Vic Thrill's debut is a fizzing cocktail of world music polyrhythms, camp theatrics and techno wizardry. The influence of Ziggy is evident throughout, but there are also strains of the kitsch disco of Pizzicato 5, the murky pop of The Frogs and snatches of the Happy Mondays and Underworld. Incessant and uptempo for much of the time, it is unmistakably danceable. As if entirely worn out, the record closes with the Grandaddy-esque "Zero Odds".

Beautifully sung, but too poppy for hardcore folkies

Twenty-eight tracks from influential '60s Chicago soul group

What a long strange trip it's been. Again

LaBute blasts back to his best form with sculpted firestarter

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.