From Budapest to Vegas
For a touch of grave robbing

Newcomers Budapest impress with their debut Too Blind To Hear, while old hands the Rolling Stones roll out the hits for Forty Licks. Death In Vegas return with Scorpio Rising, Underworld take A Hundred Days Off and Theory Of A Deadman do their Nickelback thing.
    All this plus Murderdolls live in Manchester . . . more than enough to keep you busy until we return with new CDs from Richard Ashcroft, Graham Coxon and a whole lot more . . .

Signs, signs . . .
Everywhere the signs

With The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable still fresh in our minds, we had high hopes for M Night Shyamalan's latest outing. Check out the verdict on Signs.
    In print we've got Crisis On Multiple Earths, The Authority - Earth Inferno And Other Stories, Shaun Hutson's Hybrid and Mark Billingham's debut Sleepyhead.
    Rounding things off there are albums from Our Lady Peace and Ted Nugent, and a new interview with So Cal punkers Strung Out.

You think I ain't worth a dollar
But I feel like a millionaire

Over the speakers we've got reviews of Coldplay's A Rush Of Blood To The Head, Def Leppard's X, Queens Of The Stone Age's Songs For The Deaf, Stone Sour's self-titled debut and a return to the valley of the surreal with Tom's take on Halford's Crucible.

Keep the albums
I have a whole bucketful!

The Black Crowes, Counting Crows, Linkin Park, Murderdolls, New Found Glory, Papa Roach, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sixty Watt Shaman and W.A.S.P. . . . new CDs all reviewed by the counterculture team.
    DC Comics and Titan Books bring us 100 Bullets: A Foregone Tomorrow, Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch outing arrives in the form of City Of Bones and Mark Manning opens up his alter-ego's journals in Collateral Damage: The Zodiac Mindwarp American Tour Diaries.

International magazine of mystery
Scots, Scooby snacks and skateboards

New album reviews of Idlewild's The Remote Part, Morcheeba's Charango and Nelly's Nellyville.
    And we've been back to the movies to check out Austin Powers In Goldmember, Scooby-Doo and the sublime skate documentary Dogtown And Z-Boys.

From Robert Plant to The Streets
Albums, books and live concerts

A handful of 'vintage' album reviews in the form of Hundred Reasons, The Promise Ring, Weezer and The Streets' Original Pirate Material. Bringing things bang up-to-date we've got brand new CDs from Robert Plant, Geoff Tate and L.A. Guns.
    Today's literary section is made up of Mandrake; the second outing for Paul Eddy's Grace Flint, and Batman | Bruce Wayne: Murderer?.
    Live in London: No Doubt at the Brixton Academy and the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the London Arena. Live in Manchester: White Stripes endorsed singer-songwriter Brendan Benson.