Robust, insightful doc by Startup.com director Jehane Noujaim examining the role of Arabic news channel Al Jazeera during the recent Gulf War. Despite being damned by Donald Rumsfeld as the mouthpiece of Al-Qaeda, Al Jazeera emerges as the only honest voice, struggling to be heard above the clamour of misinformation, manipulation and deceit (most of it, ironically, from the US networks). A real David and Goliath story, expertly told.
Frank Black Francis: the beginning and the end. One could treat these two dramatically different discs as bookends to Pixies history if the band hadn't just completed a triumphant reunion tour, while talk of a new album continues.
This is much better than it has any right to be. Three decades after the Dolls first strutted their dimestore-Stones stuff on New York's wild side, David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Harold Kane shook London's RFH with punchy retakes of classics from their first two platters. When those included "Trash", "Babylon", "Jet Boy" and "Lookin' For A Kiss" , how could they miss? Naturally Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan are missed, but add-on axeman Steve Conte is a slicker player than Junkie Johnny ever was.
You can put your arms around this memory.
A solo vehicle for 16 Horsepower leader David Eugene Edwards, Woven Hand sacrifices his other outfit's thunderous bombast but retains the glowering intensity. This follow-up to 2002's self-titled debut is a masterstroke of creeping gothic: spectral percussion, skeletal guitar and Edwards' ominous voice, lent added weight by the religious significance of the lyrics (especially the startling "To Make A Ring"). Of his contemporaries, only Nick Cave and Willard Grant Conspiracy's Robert Fisher sound as eerily portentous.
