Doom Berg

Is this really a Christmas album? The Oddgeir Berg Trio are still playing the same familiar melodies that have accompanied us throughout the years. But this time, they’re performing them with a dedicated, trance-inducing slowness wilfully out of tune with the typical cheeriness of Christmas eve. This may not be the weirdest Christmas album ever recorded – but it most certainly ranks among the most radical ones.

The piercing intelligence and dry registered ardour of Peter Schreier's particular qualities as a Lieder singer are ideally suited to the impulsive, dramatic, often melancholy spirit of Schumann's idiom, which itself found fullest expression in the songs that he wrote throughout his life and which this set so usefully surveys, from the total identification of the Romantic artist with his life and loves in the Liederkreis Op.24 to elliptical and ruminative settings of Lenau, the last work that Schumann composed in Dresden before his move to Düsseldorf, now less well-known than they should be but touched by circumstantial tragedy: Lenau's death was announced on the day of the first performance. The composer felt 'as if I were a tolling-bell all unawares and later wrote to his publisher, urging a speedy release of the cycle: 'I should be pleased if you would help me create a modest monument to the great but unfortunate poet'.

There have been many pretty and sorrowful pieces written for cello in recent years, yet Alder & Ash seem discontent in this mild approach, opting instead to purge the demons with a more unsettling and destructive aural palette. Not to say it’s all doom and gloom, as the moments of tension do give way to some resolve and enlightenment, but the true genius of Alder & Ash’s music lies in the balance of these extremes.

A frantic and frequently amusing cocktail of Tarantino cool and Hong Kong bullet ballet, Joe (Narc) Carnahan's Smokin' Aces delivers some inspired moments of action and dark comedy in its dizzying-comic book plot about a rogue's gallery of killers on the hunt for a mob informer. At the core of Carnahan's bloody shaggy-dog tale is Buddy Israel (Jeremy Piven, offering a more desperate take on his standard hustler persona), a Vegas magician who's turned informant against the mobsters who have treated him as their personal entertainment……