Good time listening, horn-driven party music mostly, and the stepping stone to that remarkable Palmer doco.

It's business as unusual for a band big on chords and enjoyably familiar progressions, hook-filled pop-rock, sometimes lazily obvious lyrics and the occasional sense of Cheap Trick-like irony.

A terrible thing happened, that day, up at Blackwoods' place, in The Secret River, the first of Grenville's historical novels set in the penal colony of New South Wales.

Every city can lay claim to its fair share of eccentrics. This book is about one of Melbourne's: Edward William Cole.

This book might more accurately have been titled In Love With Dante. It is a wholehearted piece of advocacy for the 14th century writer, of whom Wilson says it "could be argued that he was the greatest of all European poets, of any time or place".

This debut effort from the man who wrote the screenplay for Heath Ledger's 'Ned Kelly' is an enjoyable, if derivative, comic romp.

Currently on tour with the Foo Fighters, Mariachi El Bronx is the Latin-cum-mariachi guise of rowdy and reckless Los Angeles punk band the Bronx.

As debut soundtracks go, this one created for action-packed thriller and on-the-run film Hanna is a fittingly peppy, primed piece of sonic adrenaline.

Peter Calder reviews The Tree of Life, an enthralling but only sporadically engaging, new film by the American maestro Malick, which he says is an ambitious but disappointing work.

Although "surf rock" sounds a limiting description, echoing guitar twang can equally conjure up wide-open dry spaces or brooding spaghetti westerns.

The first comedy-drama to be produced by and starring Steve Carell since his exit from the television show The Office, features a fabulous cast doing their best with a script that's quietly amusing rather than laugh-out-loud funny.

A contemporary tale for this century, this is no longer just the fun story of a man randomly sent a penguin by an explorer, it's now the story of a man trying to reconnect with his family, and must learn there's more to life than working.

The thing about the movies that we've never got over is that they move. In doing so, they evoke a facsimile of life better than life itself. Even the "fractured flickers" of the early cinema commanded an instant suspension of disbelief.

This long out-of-print package - made up of a four-hour DVD, 16-track CD and 100-page book - gets a reissue eight years on and tells the story of Coxsone Dodd and Studio One, the Jamaican label he founded in 1963, all over again.

Featuring our own pop princess Kimbra on the stunning Something That I Used to Know, this is the third album by Belgian-born Australian one-man band and oddball producer Gotye.

This four-track EP by multi-instrumentalist Nick Gaffaney and former Weta frontman Aaron Tokona invokes the sound of instruments that are about to fall apart - but you can be sure they never will.

With the new album by nomadic Tuareg band Tinariwen (from Mali) released soon, this album by fellow Tuareg guitarist and songwriter Bombino (from Niger) is an ideal companion piece for fans of trancey and eerie African desert blues.