Last week I bought the DVD of David Lynch’s new film, Inland Empire, and I still haven’t unwrapped the bloody thing. Finding time to watch a three-hour arthouse film in one sitting is a pretty big ask.

But I really want to see it!

Maybe next week…

Patched together partly from tracks dropped from The Wall (1979), The Final Cut (1983) is the logical conclusion to where Pink Floyd had been heading since Animals in 1977: Roger Waters’ creative domination was now absolute, writing all songs and providing vocals for all tracks bar one (i.e. “Not Now John”, itself a duet between Waters and David Gilmour).

I’m not a huge fan of The Wall — while it contains a handful of great tracks (including the sublime “Comfortably Numb”), the album as a whole sounds to me like a collection of underdeveloped musical ideas. Meanwhile, the teenage angst factor is off the charts: the teachers were mean, my father’s dead, my mother was overprotective and suffocating, etc., etc. Overall, it’s just not to my taste.

The Final Cut, on the other hand, is half the length, and the angst is considerably reduced. Furthermore, there’s a welcome return of the saxophone, giving the album a sense of real soul that recalls Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975), two of Floyd’s finest albums. This is great stuff — in effect, it’s like a Dark Side of the Moon/Wall hybrid.

Significantly, the 2004 remaster adds “When the Tigers Broke Free” to the mix, a track that initially appeared in the film Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), further reinforcing the perception that The Final Cut is more-or-less a companion piece to the Wall project.

I may not be a fan of The Wall per se, but when combined with The Final Cut, any flaws are easily forgiven. Highly recommended.

I’ve owned Avalon (1982) for years — it’s got some of my favourite songs on it, and the whole album has a lushness to the arrangements that creates an aurally seductive experience. But it ain’t the full story.

I’ve heard some of the early Roxy Music, so I was aware that, as a group featuring Brian Eno, they were a very different beast to what they became. To hear the entirety of their career summarised in 74 minutes, however, is something else, and the compilation The Best of Roxy Music seems to achieve that. (I’ll leave the final verdict to the fans.)

In the tracks on this album, I can hear Talking Heads, Devo, Duran Duran, Icehouse (obviously), and pretty much every development in punk, post-punk, New Wave and New Romantic from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s; Bryan Ferry’s vocals in particular run the gamut from David Bowie to David Byrne. They were true innovators.

Here’s an excellent article on Roxy Music’s incredible influence on the development of rock.

Last week I bought David Bowie’s Low (1977). Okay, it’s 30 years old, but I take my time getting around to these things…

My Bowie collection is rather limited: Station to Station (1976) and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) are the only two studio albums I own of his, and while I certainly enjoy both, I wouldn’t consider either to be favourites of mine. Low, on the other hand, is something different…

The first thing that’s immediately apparent is how clearly demarcated the two vinyl sides are: Side 1 consists of mostly songs, though the lyrics are often sparse and impressionistic, whereas Side 2 features ambient instrumentals with Brian Eno’s involvement written all over them.

Wow, this is a great album. Had I bought Low over Scary Monsters… initially, I might have had more incentive to explore Bowie’s back-catalogue. Both vinyl sides are strong for very different reasons, but as a whole, I find the album to be compelling listening.

Such a wonderful person
But you’ve got problems