White lies

Hit the Norse! Latest comic book adapation, about a man and his hammer.

A nice list again this week, with a terrific new White Denim album arriving late yesterday afternoon.

After whingeing about the last couple of playlists, I think there’s a lot more good stuff arrived for this week’s effort.

I don’t mean to suggest “Let England Shake” is anything other than excellent, but I can’t help thinking that one supplementary reason why PJ Harvey’s latest album has had such laudatory reviews (better, mostly, than the equally good “White Chalk”) is that offers journalists so much to write about. “Let England Shake” is so full of imagery, content, allusion, it offers up boundless possibilities of meaning. Reductively, it has been called a protest album. Expansively, you can parse (or, maybe, project on) it for all manner of ideas about war and nationality.

The past few days I’ve been reading, on Rob Young’s recommendation, Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, an excellent survey of how British artists and writers in the mid-20th Century tried to reconcile a modernist impulse with the residual lure of English cultural traditions.

Last blog of the year, I suspect, so I thought it’d be useful to post my whole hundred in one place: apologies for the half-arsed obligation to get extra traffic which compelled me to post it in chunks, at least initially.

Dizzying third long-player from Dream Syndicate mainman’s main band...

From the mean streets of Nottingham, two formative Shane Meadows shorts from ’95 and ’96...

Pop genius tinkers with The Great American Songbook. Not bad, but not great...

Superior Argentinian police thriller