Reviews

Frontman of LA's The Negro Problem takes another solo splurge

K7! Given her wonderfully insolent and vital contributions to Matthew Herbert's previous musical endeavours (most notably on 2001's Bodily Functions), this debut album from singer Dani Siciliano is long overdue. Indeed, the record has taken some three years to come together, Siciliano having invested in a basic home studio and learnt from scratch how to assemble the 11 performances featured here. And how do they sound?

Seven-track EP with four brand new Wayne Coyne compositions

Re-release of '94 box with extra material

Best-of, plus two new recordings

Your basic Siamese twins vs Cher rom-com

In recent years John Landis' frat-boy farce has had much to answer for, its legacy spawning a glut of imitations with twice the gross-out factor but half the humour. The original, now 25 years old but still rampantly immature, has real comic gusto, and allowed the late, great John Belushi to belch out a memorably madcap performance. Set in 1962, it asks us to root for the scruffy, skiving outsiders (the term "slackers" still hadn't been coined) on a campus ruled by the monied, suave elite.

Horrible in theory, actually pretty funny in fact. Carrey and Daniels wouldn't do a sequel, so two lookalikes were contracted for a slung-together, conceptually tasteless prequel to the Farrelly brothers' hit farce. So they're at school, being heroically stupid, totting up comic misunderstandings and unwittingly doing good deeds. Sweet and titter-worthy, despite itself.

Second album from Top 40-scraping UK trio

Conceived as a black Woodstock in '72, an act of healing seven years after LA's Watts district had been all but burned down in race riots to the chanting of "burn, baby, burn", Wattstax was also, in truth, a masterful idea for a showcase of all the Stax acts of the time. Still, hell of a concert—112,000 people watched seven hours of Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas etc, and a legend was born.