Tunes!

Fantastic listening to be had this week, take your pick of these excellent new releases:

Album Streams!

Belle and Sebastian's rarities collection: The Third Eye Centre:
Neko Case's excellent new album: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You Links!
And over at NPR at the moment you can stream Volcano Choir's phenomenal new album, Repave.

And at Pitchfork Advance (if you can get it to work, I always have trouble), you can listen to the new Forest Swords record Engravings.

The Counselor trailer

As a huge admirer of Cormac McCarthy's writing, a fan of most of this stellar cast and a, let's say, conflicted relationship with Ridley Scott's output, I really, really want The Counselor to be great. I've no idea what it's about- other than a cast of shady characters becoming involved in shady dealings, but it thankfully bears more of the hallmarks of McCarthy's stripped-back brutality than Scott's recent grandiosity. So the signs are encouraging.

And if this film is done, it also hopefully indicates that new novel from McCarthy may be in the works. It's been too long since The Road was released, and there's only so many times you can read Blood Meridian before the rosiness of existence dims beyond repair. I joke, but it's true.

Check out The Counselor trailer below:

Spike Jonze's Her trailer

Four years after the great, misunderstood Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze returns with his latest feature Her, a film that seems to employs his usual adept handling of strangeness and heart in the story of a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johannsson).

I suppose it's the sort of concept that could have been turned into a wacky Vince Vaughn comedy (imagine: high jinks involving smart phones vibrating in trouser pockets, wireless networks sabotaging his date with a 'real' woman, browser histories popping up at inopportune moments etc. This thing writes itself! I need to get an agent and pitch this to a studio exec like now) but Jonze (in what is his first sole writing credit) is treating it in typically straight-faced fashion. It looks good.

And as a bonus- the music for the film is composed by Arcade Fire! Whether this is all new material or re-purposed tracks remains to be seen.

Here's hoping it's another winner from the endlessly interesting Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures! Keep 'em coming.