Reviews

Nils Lofgren – Nils Lofgren Band Live

Double live album by perennial sideman with star quality

Chill Or Be Chilled

Debut album from French graphic designer and film-maker

Patrick Wolf – Lycanthropy

Emotive album from London-Irish laptop folkie

Jim Moray – Sweet England

Beats'n'ballads nu-folk fusion

Clowntime Is Over

The poet laureate of hooliganism returns

Captain Sensible – The Collection

To some, the Captain's 1982 No 1 romp through Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Happy Talk" was the ultimate punk sell-out. Silly beggars! It was, of course, a hilarious act of screwball subversion. Either way, its Goonish novelty was unrepresentative of the two albums that followed. As the best bits collated here show, solo Sensible traded in the same satirical Englishness as The Kinks and Madness ("Croydon", "A Nice Cup Of Tea").

Springtime In A Small Town

From Rickshaw With Love

The Bruck Stops Here

A 10-disc box set focusing on the modern master of dumb-but-fun action flicks

The Fall—Perverted By Language – Bis

The Fall are here brilliantly captured in their early-'80s heyday. First released on video in 1983, this is an amateurish but energetic send-up of pop promos, with Mark E Smith on hilarious form, whether skulking around an empty football ground, miming into a beer can on the video for "Kicker Conspiracy", or dancing like a basket case for "Eat Y'Self Fitter".

Minor Mishaps

Danish director Annette K Olesen's acutely observed tragicomedy about a morose widower (Jørgen Kill) struggling to cope with the sudden death of his wife and the messy sex lives of his grown-up children. Semi-improvised and shot docu-drama style, Minor Mishaps is another slight but engaging addition to Denmark's healthy school of bleakly comic post-Dogme realism.
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