Reviews

Music

Secret, Profane & Sugarcane *** (3 stars)

Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello has never been one to shrink from a challenge, and on his new album, he has taken on a big one, a song cycle of sorts incorporating themes that wind like the muddy Mississippi through the cultural legacy of the American South and the tragic secrets and varied stripes of love - obsessive, unrequited and misfired. Some songs can be as straightforward as classic country.

With country queen Loretta Lynn, Costello wrote "I Felt the Chill Before the Winter Came," a dark scenario of a faithless man losing his grip on the woman he sinned for. Others are as art-song sophisticated as "She Was No Good," inspired by 19th-century European singing star Jenny Lind's tour of the U.S. Mystery abounds in oblique stories such as "Hidden Shame." "Red Cotton" is powerful, a dramatic example of the price of human greed.

The highlights are "Sulphur to Sugarcane," the kind of bawdy blues Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith would have loved, and "The Crooked Line" that Costello describes as "the only song I've ever written about fidelity that is without irony."

- Randy Lewis, Tribune Newspapers

Games

Klonoa *** 1/2 (3 1/2 stars)

Available on Nintendo Wii. Released by Namco. Rated 10+. $29.99.

Klonoa, a remake of a PlayStation game from 1998, is a pretty piece of work and one of the best platform games on the Wii - and that includes the classics available on the Virtual Console.

The game play is strictly 2-D in Klonoa's journey to stop an evil lord. The levels twist and turn into themselves and are riddled with split pathways and switchbacks, but the action is always centered on Klonoa, and part of the fun is figuring out how he can get to a seemingly out-of-reach area within the strictures of a left-to-right platformer.

Klonoa has a fairly simple set of moves: He can jump and glide; grab enemies and throw them as an attack or summon a whirlwind to slow down foes.

- Justin Hoeger, McClatchy-Tribune

Books

The Strain ** (2 stars)

By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. 401 Pages. Released by William Morrow. $26.99.

Just in time for summer - and presciently perhaps, for the swine flu outbreak - comes The Strain, a sort of Twilight for the testosterone set, swapping romance for thrills and gore.