Reviews

Only a perverse spoilsport could claim that Neil Young was not a giant among the North American singer-songwriters who emerged in the '60s. For this reviewer, he dwarfs all of them. Young is greater even than his hero Bob Dylan because he is more Heart than Head, more Body than Brain. There's something intuitive and primitively intense about Young's best music that Dylan rarely matches. More Dionysus than Apollo, Young puts music first, words second. And what music it is.

Four-disc overview of Dagenham Diva

Disappointing return from Creedence lynchpin

Two years on from first album Delicate Shades Of Grey, Anglo-American duo Cicero Buck return with a more confident set of folk-pop songs. Songwriter/vocalist Kris Wilkinson is particularly effervescent on the tough "Gonna Fly" and the rippling Nashville skiffle of "Little Songbird", while Muscle Shoals veteran Jack Peck adds brass to the dusty twang of "Black Road".

Sinewy side-project from leader of Washington DC heroes Canyon

Great debut from modern psychedelic primitives

First solo album from gospel legend in more than a decade

Engrossing, gritty, Shane Meadows-style debut from Chris Cooke, wherein three boozehounds on a rehab course scheme to scam portly tycoon Hywel Bennett. The lo-fi camerawork's iffy, but after starting slowly it tightens like a vice as cocktails, weed and violence kick in. Well written and acted, and surely the only film to argue that Jean-Michel Jarre's comeback gig was better than Glastonbury.

The second of George Romero's classic zombie trilogy, from 1978. This time the blood and guts were in full colour, the make-up and effects more inventive. Much of the action takes place in a shopping mall filled with zombies lurching mindlessly around?not the subtlest of satires on consumerism, but still highly effective, and as slyly funny as it is gory.

Whimsical Mexican comedy. With dope cakes