Month: September 2003

It was cosmically appropriate that our review copy of The Handsome Family’s sixth disc, Singing Bones, arrived the day that Johnny Cash died. The New Mexico husband-and-wife duo of Brett and Rennie Sparks are true artistic children of the Man in Black, mixing traditional roots music with postmodern macabre about haunted all-night chain stores and…

Born Clive Powell in Manchester, England, Georgie Fame rose to, er, fame as a footsoldier in the sixties British Invasion, fronting the Blue Flames on a string of modest hits including a cover of Mongo Santamaria’s “Yeh Yeh” that went to number one in England, knocking out the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” Admirably, he never…

Dido takes life at a slower, more deliberate pace than the rest of us—and it seems to work for her. Remember No Angel? That was her last (and first) record, the 1999 chartbusting album that featured, most prominently, the song “Thank You,” which the evil Eminem sampled improbably in 2000 on his psychopathic tune “Stan.”…

Back for their first proper album in three years, Glasgow’s finest exporters of sensitive, bespectacled pop have lost two founding members, switched labels and picked up a superstar producer in Trevor Horn, whose previous credits range from Rod Stewart to Yes to Tatu. None of these events has significantly changed the band’s sound, which is…

It’s not an uncommon irony in mystery fiction that a detective so brilliantly able to perceive the hidden connections of the world still can’t make sense out of his own personal life—in fact, it’s a difficult cliche to avoid. But Cracker’s criminal psychologist Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald—an alcoholic, sarcastic, arrogant gambler—is a surpassing example of the…

Roman Polanski’s first full-length movie got him so much attention worldwide that he was able to escape the stifling Polish studio system for France and Hollywood, where classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown still lay in his future. Between Knife’s language barrier and the higher profile of his later work, it’s no wonder that his…