CD: Sun Kil Moon - I Also Want to Die in New Orleans

Further musical and lyrical adventures of an American maverick

Like Dylan when he went electric, and Waits when he went Beefheartian, Mark Kozelek (aka Sun Kil Moon) divided his fans when he moved from jangly elegiac rock of standard proportions to expansive, digressive prose enquiries into the crumbling state of a nation, and the crumbling state of the man just trying to negotiate it all. But my advice to dissenters is to surrender rather than resist. No, Kozelek hasn’t "lost it". If anything he’s found it, and found it in abundance. 

CD: Circa Waves - What It's Like Over There

Power pop with a good mix of yin and yang

Circa Waves, the guitar-band from Liverpool, go over a storm at festivals and large venues. With simplicity, tightness and concentrated energy, they know how to play with the tension that can build between soft and hard, the yin and the yang of rock forms that continue to sound fresh because they're delivered with a sense of fun and the joy of making party music with catchy lyrics.

CD: Ruby Rushton - Ironside

★★★ RUBY RUSHTON - IRONSIDE Crisp, tough, and sometimes devastating jazz from London's young generation

Crisp, tough, and sometimes devastating jazz from London's young generation

It's kind of vertiginous to realise that the revivalism of acid jazz was way closer to its 1960s and '70s source material than we are to it now. But the patterns that were laid down by the DJ sessions of Gilles Peterson and people like him back in the 1980s abide. Jazz fusion, spiritual jazz, hard bop, obscure soundtracks, Blue Note records: all have continued to demonstrate their immediacy on dancefloors.

Blu-ray: Detour

Edgar G Ulmer's film noir road movie is a thing of sordid beauty

“Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you,” Al Roberts (Tom Neal) says in Detour (1945), as if his native pessimism and self-destructive choices had nothing to do with his inexorable descent into hell.

CD: Thee Telepaths – The Velvet Night

The psych-rock four piece's debut is a carefully crafted recipe for success

Kettering might not be the first place you’d associate with spaced-out psych-rock, but neither are Croydon or Rugby and they gave us Loop and Spacemen 3 respectively. Maybe it’s something to do with the need for escape that can make such prosaic surroundings the backdrop for wide-screen exploratory escape. Perhaps there’s just sod-all else to do there. Whatever the reason, four-piece psychedelic rock band Thee Telepaths have a sound that, while not original, manages to dwarf expectation by virtue of being pretty much perfectly executed. 

DVD/Blu-ray: The Wild Pear Tree

★★★★ DVD: THE WILD PEAR TREE Melancholy restraint from Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Melancholy restraint from Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan resounds

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a Cannes regular for almost two decades now, and one of the festival’s more frequent prize-winners: over his career he has come away with two Grand Prix (for 2003’s Distant and 2011’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia), the Best Director award in 200