Reviews

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.

When Moby sampled Vera Ward Hall's "Trouble So Hard", he was merely the latest in a long line of musicians to use as a source the field recordings made in the Deep South between 1933 and 1959 by the folklorist Alan Lomax. The Popular Songbook collects together 22 such tracks and, perhaps to your surprise, you'll find you know almost every one of them—if not in these original versions then in covers by artists as diverse as Clapton, Miles Davis, Steve Miller, Dylan, Led Zep and The Grateful Dead. File alongside the Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music.

Limpid nocturnal longing on seventh album from shifting collective

The Tamworth shaman returns to the fray, heroically recharged

Important country-rock harbinger from Alabama siblings Vern and Rex