With pedal steel, banjo and a melancholy delivery, some songs come close to classic country-influenced songs by Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clarke and Butch Hancock.

Alongside his Alzheimer's diagnosis and a farewell tour comes this self-announced "final studio album" by the 75-year-old legend Glen Campbell.

The tranquility and rejuvenating quality of Tinariwen's desert blues tunes is remarkable. That might sound a little hippie dippy - far-fetched, even - but the Tuareg Malian band's minimal music really does have that healing power.

And so ends the reign of one of the most fearsome, flamboyant and innovative metal bands ever to walk the earth.

Anna Faris has developed a distinctive ditzy blond routine that can be an acquired taste. Francesca Rudkin reports.

It was tempting to expect that the first truly Samoan feature film might have been a small and precious thing, worth praising more for the promises it made for the future than for its achievement in its own right.

The transition of the Twilight stars on to the next stage of their careers will prove interesting over the next few years; in Abduction we get to see Taylor Lautner make his first attempt.

An at-times unusual blend of intense futuristic boxing and schmaltzy, predictable father and son drama, this science fiction adventure is a mixed bag but should find a keen audience these school holidays.

"Life is hard" is one of the Noble Truths and Yang Pao, as a young boy landing on the streets of Jamaica in the 1930s, learns that lesson quickly.

Playwright Albert Belz has earned considerable acclaim for his treatment of Maori subjects but his re-telling of the Jack the Ripper story seems to be making a statement about the perils of pigeon-holing writers according to their ethnicity.

If Wilco followers, especially those who signed on during their celebrated left-turn period of 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and 2004's A Ghost Is Born, might have felt the band's more recent albums were playing it safe, then help is at hand.

The greats of the grunge era are still vying for market share, 20 years on. Scott Kara dives in.

Wooden Shjips, out of San Francisco, once again serve up their particular brand of astral plane psychedelic drone-rock which sounds filtered through steel wool.

Posturing rockers Kasabian named their fourth album after a dinosaur, maintaining they are the current dinosaurs of the Brit-rock scene.

The music of Mastodon is perfect for a spot of hunting. It's pure blood sport music because when it's human against beast, and you're pumped up with scything and powerful tunes like Black Tongue and Spectrelight you will not back down.

While Auckland rapper and poet Tourettes (real name Dominic Hoey) is not so much of a smart aleck on fourth album Tiger Belly, he's just as clever, cutting, and hilarious.

Constructed in the manner of ensemble films such as Nashville, Grand Canyon and Crash, this novel by the award-winning Australian writer Carroll again refracts the lives of some characters who have populated his previous work.

In 1967 the great critic Frank Kermode published The Sense Of An Ending, a series of lectures that not only mined the apocalyptic theme in art, but reviewed the ways in which fiction carves order and pattern out of the chaotic flux of time.

While it’s easy to be sceptical about the side projects of well-established musicians, particularly when they consist of odd amalgams of collaborators, they can often emanate a certain charm.