On their third album, Twickenham band Noah and the Whale is slightly evangelistic in its take on life, and the way one can meander through it.

A couple of years ago, PNC's album Bazooka Kid set local hip-hop on a renaissance trip of sorts with its flashy and fun mix of styles, cheeky bravado and rhymes like "Looking for the chicks with Brooke Fraser lips".

Dunedin rock stalwart David Kilgour's previous album, 2009's Falling Debris, had him setting music to the words of Sam Hunt. That project has a slight hangover here.

When Herbie Hancock was last here in 2007 he played a show that spanned his classic work - and really, that's what you want to hear.

On May 27, 1942, two Czech parachutists ambushed and wounded SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich near Prague. Heydrich was not seriously wounded but a ricochet bullet had carried cloth, wire and wool into the wound.

Not a picture book, not a graphic novel, not anything easily pigeon-holed, Chris Slane and Matt Elliott's study-cum-evocation of life in World War I is a great resource and a great read.

The off-beat British singer is determined to keep at it, and so drags her voice through her 18th studio album, a collection made up mostly of covers.

Guitar hero B.B. King singing the blues with a chorus of sock puppets? What the ... ?

New Zealand popera star Hayley Westenra has teamed up with a legendary Italian composer for her latest album.

For those expecting the ear-splitting riffs similar to the ones J Mascis lets rip with in Dinosaur Jr. then take a chill pill.

The antagonism is still there and Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince let it ricochet off one another.

The sinewy riffs, slightly breathless beats, and squally Eastern psychedelia influence of Window Rattle off Distance From View is the perfect example of how instrumental music can take a mundane image and make it magical.

These New York art rock oddballs have quite a pedigree to uphold following three of the most twisted, yet captivating, albums of the past decade.

After the uncharacteristically sanguine Happy Go Lucky, the master of bleak British social realism returns to downbeat form in a film whose confusions of perspective are perhaps provocatively deliberate.