This Week

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This Week
This Week in Music, August 20, 2013: Enjoying John Mayer’s lighter things
Ken Richardson  |  Aug 20, 2013  | 

John Mayer: Paradise Valley

New release (Columbia; tour dates)
Photo by Sam Jones

John Mayer takes another journey into the Americana he explored on last year’s Born and Raised. No wonder. Paradise Valley is named for an area not far from his home in Montana, a refuge that obviously gives him great peace, inspiring him to create music that’s closer to the land. And in further evidence that Mayer has turned a new leaf after the hiatus that was necessitated by his throat surgery and his sometimes out-of-control verbal and physical behavior, this new album is all about understatement.

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This Week
This Week in Movies & TV, August 20, 2013: Killers With Kids
Josef Krebs  |  Aug 20, 2013  | 

Boardwalk Empire: Season 3

This is a story of fathers and sons. As previous seasons have shown, every gangster, it seems, starts as a kid with a difficult relationship with their dad and every hood has an equally important relationship with their boy. James "Jimmy" Darmody (Michael Pitt) stabs his father, Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman).

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This Week
This Week in Music, August 27, 2013: Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait,” naked
Ken Richardson  |  Aug 27, 2013  | 

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 —
Another Self Portrait (1969–1971)

Archival release (Columbia)
Photos by John Cohen

Music publicity is kinda like medical ethics, in these four words: “First, do no harm.” Which makes Columbia’s campaign for the latest Bob Dylan official-bootleg extravaganza all the more remarkable. Self Portrait, you see, was almost universally derided by critics when it appeared in 1970. You might think Columbia would want to avoid that negative history in the press release for The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 — Another Self Portrait (1969–1971). Instead, the headline brandishes these four words:

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This Week
This Week in Movies & TV, August 27, 2013: Razzle Dazzle
Josef Krebs  |  Aug 27, 2013  | 

The Great Gatsby

As with Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, with this adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel set during the Roaring Twenties, the writer-producer-director creates a series of set pieces of bravura filmmaking with careering camerawork of huge zoom-ins and acrobatic fly-arounds all tied together with rapid montages.

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This Week
This Week in Music, September 3, 2013: Nine Inch Nails, with fewer teeth
Ken Richardson  |  Sep 03, 2013  | 

Nine Inch Nails: Hesitation Marks

New release (Columbia; tour dates)
Photo of Trent Reznor by Baldur Bragson

Trent Reznor already came back haunted in March with the release of Welcome oblivion by How to destroy angels. That side project with Atticus Ross and (Reznor’s wife) Mariqueen Maandig took post-industrial/ambient music and made it sound fresh. By contrast, Hesitation Marks, Reznor’s first album in five years under the Nine Inch Nails moniker, seems beset by run-of-the-mill electronica. Ross and another veteran collaborator, Alan Moulder, return as co-producers with Reznor, but together they’re often just busy little techno-bees buzzing around Reznor’s generally average material.

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Music ReviewsThis Week
This Week in Music, October 22, 2013: Woody Guthrie, “American Radical Patriot”
Ken Richardson  |  Oct 22, 2013  | 
Also: Van Morrison’s Moondance in 5.1 on Blu-ray, Santana’s third album on audiophile vinyl, and ’80s tunes revamped by The Big Bright. Plus, let’s see…oh, yeah, Katy Perry.

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