After last year's disappointing Never Go Home, Brian Krumm's Illinois quartet seem to have rediscovered the last-gang-in-town swagger that made 2000's Damaged Goods such a riot. Guitars cranked up to 11, it's bulging roadhouse rock, with the added croak of Krumm's phlegmy Tom Waits-isms. But there's a leanness about these loser-through-a-shot-glass songs that suggests they've matured too, not least on the latter-day gunslinger ballad "November" and in the neon-splashed moodiness of "St Christopher Street".
Uncut catches up with Eric Goulden. The man behind 1977's anthemic 'Whole Wide World', the 80's Captains Of Industry, garage-punksters The Len Bright Combo and now, 'Bungalow Hi'.
Definitive mid-period Almodóvar (post-avant-garde tyro, preestablishment icon), this typically hysterical family melodrama pitches Carmen Maura's downtrodden amphetamine-addicted housewife, her two teenage dope-dealing hustler sons, her grizzled mother-in-law and her Nazi-obsessed husband together in an anonymous Madrid apartment block. Deadpan camp at its best.