It's About Damn Time

Peter Weir's haunting and evocative mystery is set in the Australia of 1900, a mystical place where the British have attempted to impose their Christian culture with such tweedy refinements as a girls' boarding school. After gauzily-photographed, nicely underplayed scenes of the girls' budding sexuality being restrained in Victorian corsets, the uptight headmistress (Rachel Roberts) takes them on a Valentine's Day picnic into the countryside, and several of the girls, led by the lovely Miranda (Anne Lambert) decide to explore a nearby volcanic rock formation. It's a desolate, primitive, vaguely menacing place, where one can almost feel the presence of ancient pagan spirits. Something – and there is an unspoken but palpable emphasis on the inherent carnality of the place – draws four of the girls to explore the rock. Three never return. No one ever finds out why. The repercussions for the school are tragic, and of course Roberts reacts with near-crazed anger, but what really happened? Weir gives enough clues to suggest any number of explanations, both physical and supernatural.

Anyone hoping that Hank Williams III's "Hellbilly" metal band Assjack would finally make it onto one of his albums is still out of luck, but Hank III's third solo effort Straight to Hell comes close to getting their no-quarter spirit onto plastic, if not their sound. Taking the no-frills hard-country sound of 2002's Lovesick, Broke & Driftin' as a starting point, Straight to Hell pumps a good bit more darkness into the mix; mostly recorded at home on a digital portastudio, Straight to Hell begins with a sample of the Louvin Brothers' "Satan Is Real" interrupted by a burst of demonic laughter, which then segues into the title tune, a testimony to a life of cheap thrills and dangerous living that sounds like a classic string band rounding the corners at 90-miles-an-hour with empty bottles of bourbon propping open the windows….

Doreen Carwithen is better known as the devoted wife, Mary, of the composer William Alwyn. When Chandos brought out this CD in the mid-1990s, it revealed her to be a substantial creative personality in her own right: she emerged as a warmly communicative composer, the style of her work owing more to Walton than to her husband. Her writing is strong and purposeful, sometimes adopting syncopated rhythms and stirring melodies, and always enhanced with brilliant and inventive orchestration. We are therefore delighted to reissue these works and at mid-price for the first time.

Rushed out in 1970 as a way to bide time as the Who toiled away on their follow-up to Tommy, Live at Leeds wasn't intended to be the definitive Who live album, and many collectors maintain that the band had better shows available on bootlegs. But those shows weren't easily available whereas Live at Leeds was, and even if this show may not have been the absolute best, it's so damn close to it that it would be impossible for anybody but aficionados to argue…