Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT Keep this in mind for your Christmas stockings … 8/10 When it was released earlier this year I resisted ‘Sunday At Devil Dirt’, Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan’s well-received, rather tongue-in-cheek take on Americana, their second full-length collaboration. It seemed to me too studied, too contrived somehow, [...]

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Fine revisionist Western 8/10 ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford‘ is a thoughtful and atmospheric film about the American outlaw myth. A careful and occasionally brutal revisionist western in the mould of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece ‘Unforgiven‘, Andrew (‘Chopper‘) Dominik’s epic has been crafted with a painstaking, sometimes self-consciously meticulous eye. Like [...]

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Feast of fun 9/10 Calexico’s sound inhabits the frontier badlands of the American Southwest, a cinematic multi-instumental brew that takes in jazz, alt-country, Mariachi, folk and electronics. It’s a widescreen affair, a mixture of traditional rootsy Americana (‘Quattro’) and brooding instrumental mood pieces (‘Pepita’, ‘Across The Wire’) that evoke rust and dust choked border towns. [...]

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