Singer in Texas punk bluegrass band The Bad Livers in strong new start. Bill Frisell guests, Marc Bolan's covered

Lazer-Guided Melodies for the laptop generation

He's The Man again

Cath Carroll's complete 'C86' years

First proper release in 40 years for landmark in American popular singing

Black artists reinterpret the Fabs

Sci-fi tosh with Christian Bale

Set at the death of the samurai age, Japanese master Nagisa Oshima's first feature in 13 years charts the disruption of a militia barracks by the arrival of Ryuhei Matsuda's androgynously beautiful young swordsman. A partial return to the erotic obsession of In The Realm Of The Senses, it's a bleak but mesmerically beautiful movie where realism balances with dreamy stylisation.

The clinically style-obsessed Tony Scott might not have been everybody's choice to helm a Tarantino script just as St Quentin was white-hot (seems a while ago now, huh?), but he made a splendid 1993 pulpy pot-boiler which, in sum, outshines its pithy but disjointed parts. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette are the doomed Detroit lovers-on-the-run with a suitcase of coke, negotiating baroque badlands after Slater kills sleazoid pimp Gary Oldman and his comedy dreadlocks. Everyone who's anyone turns up to harass the couple and their sad dad Dennis Hopper.

Glam's loveable Black Country bovver boyz expose the grim realities of the rock'n'roll lifestyle