Oddball troubadour Tom Waits remains a singular voice in music after all these years - as can be heard on his new album. He talks to Graham Reid.

Though she's been releasing albums for 20 years, stretching the boundaries of jazz and blues, fusing them with traditional Maori song forms and te reo, this is Whirimako Black's first album entirely in English.

Mostly-silent lonely guy takes a shine to apparently solo mum in apartment next door and her young son. Except her hubby comes back from prison.

Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried are a futuristic Bonnie and Clyde in this stylish sci-fi action thriller from New Zealand director Andrew Niccol.

It sometimes feels that a band with such huge worldwide presence and such mighty success as Coldplay have a disproportionate responsibility to blow your mind when they release an album.

Raw, melancholic and powerful in its unsettled grace, Metals proves that an 18-month break was exactly what Leslie Feist needed to rediscover her musical direction.

The world doesn't need another vampire flick, but when it's as entertaining as this remake of the 1985 comedy horror Fright Night, then why not?

Sort of "what I did on my vacation, part two" from this fine singer-songwriter who began so well with albums like Dressed Up Like Nebraska, Under Cold Blue Stars and Nashville, which took him from the late 90s into the middle of the last decade.

The thought of a play about the Rwandan genocide may make you uneasy, but don’t let it put you off this excellent, sensitive, unusual production.

The blurb on the back of Breton Dukes’ debut short-story collection, Bird North And Other Stories, adds him to an esteemed line of New Zealand exponents of the genre: Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan and Owen Marshall.

Reading this very long book is deep immersion in the horrors of the Holocaust, and after a prolonged session readers may have to lift themselves from a state of depression about the human condition.

Now in its 31st year, New York’s annual CMJ festival is an opportunity for industry types and musicians from all over the globe to perform, peruse and participate in a week of musical frivolity.

Less a film than an idea taking shape in front of the camera, the new offering from the director and stars of the dazzling Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story lacks the earlier movie's high concept.

The Fabulous/Arabia project, which finds James Milne, aka Lawrence Arabia, writing saucy, witty lyrics over the top of some fine, fruity music by Mike Fabulous aka Lord Echo (and also The Black Seeds), began as a musical penpal relationship.

If he's gone soft for his umpteenth album since 2000's solo debut Heartbreaker, it's perhaps not surprising.

No matter what DJ Shadow does he will always have 1996 classic Endtroducing ... as his benchmark. It's one of those albums that you imagine will never be beaten. So, at least on his latest album, he topples his patchy previous effort, The Outsider.

Just as Wilco and Billy Bragg teamed up in the 90s and set to music unrecorded lyrics by Woody Guthrie (the Mermaid Avenue albums), so here, unrecorded songs by country legend Hank Williams (1923-53) are given life.

A festival atmosphere pervaded the Aotea Centre as Sacre: The Auckland Dance Project showcased the achievements of 190 youngsters under the direction of British choreographer Royston Maldoom.

Mark Lynch does love his rugby. I remember once when Lynch and I and a few stragglers went to see the Waratahs play the Stormers in Sydney.