Previously available only at gigs or on the Internet (along with the similarly acoustic Weed), War Crime Blues is a masterclass in bottleneck guitar and mud-caked Mississippi stomp from this most distinctive of guitarists. There are similarities to contemporaries like Chris Smither in the wounded delivery, but the Texan's style is more aggressive, his accentuated strums—like sudden lightning forks—more akin to the late great Tucson guitarist Rainer Ptacek (see "Ghost Dance" and the title track).
Jim jarmusch's imminent set of dryly comic vignettes, filmed over the course of a decade, will pitch him to a new generation, as it features Jack and Meg White, Wu-Tang Clan (RZA scored Jarmusch's last film, Ghost Dog) and Steve Coogan among its cast. One of the better sequences sees Tom Waits and Iggy Pop mock-bickering over who's more famous, and both contribute to this studiously cool soundtrack.
Now that Oasis have been written into British rock history alongside The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and all those other elder statesmen they so publicly admired and absorbed, 1984's Definitely Maybe survives as a revered, although sometimes distant, memory. These days when Oasis play Glastonbury, there are waves of excitement but no huge hullabaloo about their perfunctory parade of greatest hits, and their albums have ceased to generate the expectation, the queues around the block in Oxford Street, that was once the norm.
