VARIOUS
Can You Dig It? The Music and Politics of Black Action FilmsSoul Jazz ****

For Hollywood, the Blaxploitation era was as much about the hustle as the films themselves. In the early and mid 1970s, the studios churned out a rake of action flicks featuring characters and yarns they thought would appeal to a largely black and urban audience. Though the film’s reliance on pimps, hustlers, dealers and pushers was one-dimensional in the extreme, these larger-than- life flicks (Shaft, Superfly, Black Caesar, etc) did provide musical stars and newcomers with an outlet for their wares. Along with a 100-page book detailing Blaxploitation’s peaks and troughs, this expansive collection includes musical contributions from Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, Willie Hutch, Curtis Mayfield, The Impressions and many other stars of the era. It’s an compilation that oozes funk from every crevice and pore. www. souljazzrecords.co.uk

Download tracks:Marvin Gaye, 'T' Plays It Cool; Willie Hutch, Brother's Gonna Work It Out; Curtis Mayfield, Freddie's Dead

NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS

The RoadMute *****

Nick Cave and fellow Grinderman Warren Ellis first collaborated on the exquisite score to director John Hillcoat's 2005 award-winning The Proposition. Five years and five scores later (including the luminous The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) find them writing another extraordinary score for The Road, Hillcoat's film of Cormac McCarthy postapocalyptic odyssey. Combining simple melodies and spare orchestration with folk and pastoral motifs, this extraordinary score moves ineluctably from the elegiac through the eerie and terrifying (jittery strings, shrieking guitars, driving percussion) to eventually reach the sublime – in the haunted drones of The Boy – to create a dramatic and intimate musical journey of sustained force and power. The Roadis quietly magnificent. www.mute.com

Download tracks:The Road, The Boy