THIS WEEK

The Life of Oharu

The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952), from director Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, A Geisha), tells of a 50-year-old prostitute no longer able to attract men looking back on her tragic life.

In the days around the Fourth of July, the people who run record companies take a lot of time off. They assume you’re more interested in having picnics and watching fireworks than in buying music. Accordingly, this is a customarily light week on the album-release schedule.

Of course, you could always celebrate the holiday by cueing up some “American” albums that have already been released this year, such as Patty Griffin’s American Kid, the Putumayo label’s American Playground, and Willie Nile’s American Ride. Then there’s Wings over America. And don’t forget that bree is an All American Girl.

Yolanda Kondonassis is another American girl (born in Norman, Oklahoma), and if you’d like to hear some American music, you could (with a nod to Tom Petty) listen to her harp:

Help!

The title song, Help!, kicks in beautifully - thrillingly - with snaredrums somewhere in the room up left, vocals in center, lead guitar in the surrounds - glorious. Whenever the film launches into one of its seven classic numbers (only seven?) in 5.1 channels the band leaps into the room filling the soundstage and bringing everything to life.

Lifeforce

With a great sci-fi/horror pedigree - directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Salem's Lot, Poltergeist), screenplay co-written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Total Recall, and Dark Star) and Don Jakoby from the 1976 novel The Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, special effects supervised by Oscar-winner John Dy

Black Sabbath: 13

New release (Vertigo/Republic; tour dates)

“What is this that stands before me — again?”

That’s the unavoidable question you’ll ask yourself when you hear “End of the Beginning,” the first track on 13. After all, this song isn’t just Black Sabbath; it’s “Black Sabbath,” the first track on Black Sabbath. That opening to the band’s 1970 debut had quiet, three-plucked-note verses alternating with massive, three-power-chord choruses, all taken at a slow pace until a choppy riff sped us away. “End of the Beginning,” from the original band’s first album together in 35 years, has quiet, four-plucked-note verses alternating with massive, four-power-chord choruses, all taken at a slow pace until a choppy riff speeds us away.

Various Artists: Ghost Brothers of Darkland County

New release (Hear Music/Concord; tour dates)
Photo of Burnett, Mellencamp, and King by Kevin Mazur

Indiana cabin, mid-1900s: Two brothers argue over a girl. One brother accidentally kills the other, and then the fleeing brother and the girl accidentally drive into a lake and drown.

True story. John Mellencamp learned it after buying the cabin in the early 1990s.

Soon after, Mellencamp got the idea for a musical based on that story. By 2000, he had begun work on the score (both music and lyrics), and he asked Stephen King to write the book.

Cleopatra

For its 50th anniversary - along with the hoopla of a Cannes Film Festival re-release, a limited theatrical engagement in more than 200 theaters, and Richard Burton's posthumously receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to Elizabeth Taylor's - Cleopatra has been newly digitally restored in a 243-minute original theatrical cut.