Month: October 2004

The odd-moment-out on Neko Case’s newest release is an outtake from an improvisational jam session she participated in at a cross-cultural arts conference. She threw it in, she says, to demonstrate the fluidity and facility of music-making, to invite listeners to join her in the fun. But any dreams of superstardom it might inspire are…

Even as on-again/off-again fans (let’s not talk about All That You Can’t Leave Behind), we’ve got a soft spot for U2. They were first ever rock band we saw live; the boys were barely out of their teens and we were simply enthralled. Twenty-some years later, it sounds like they’re channeling those youthful selves in…

American Music Club, a name chosen for its deliberately nondescript qualities, turned out to be perfect for a band that tied together so many strands of the American musical fabric—rock, folk, punk, country, even crappy lounge—into a remarkably distinctive sound that wove darkness into the shimmering light of pop choruses. The San Francisco band was…

Mike Hodges, who made one of the best British crime films of the seventies in Get Carter, reteams with his Croupier star Clive Owen for another dip in the same dark, icy pond. Like Carter, Sleep involves a hard-as-nails gangster antihero who returns to his old haunts to exact vengeance on those who killed his…

Yarr, mateys. Here be a movie far more clever and entertaining than you’d expect from something based on a Disneyland theme park ride, produced by Armageddon’s Jerry Bruckheimer, and written by the guys who scripted Godzilla. A lot of the credit goes to Johnny Depp, who runs wild with his role as Captain Jack Sparrow,…

Director Marc Forster’s follow-up to Monsters Ball is a tale of magic and fantasy set in turn-of-the-century London, and based on the life of James Barrie, author of Peter Pan. Johnny Depp stars as J.M. Barrie, a kind of Toys ‘R’ Us man-child who befriends Kate Winslet’s four fatherless boys and relives his lost youth,…