[ world/blues ]

Eric Bibb is a North American folk/blues picker/singer who makes his home in Europe and travels the world picking and singing, which is how he met Malian griot Habib Koité. Brothers in Bamako (Stony Plain) is an audio snapshot of their friendship, and you can’t help but grin from the first track, Bibb’s praise song, “On My Way to Bamako,” anticipating a trip to Mali to visit his friend’s family. It suggests Mississippi John Hurt with Koité’s guitar showering cascades of kora-evoking high notes here and there. —Mary Armstrong

[ pop ]

Taylor Swift is (feeling) 22 and playing dress-up. Her fourth album tries on Unforgettable Fire-with-banjos anthemics; a couple slices of prime, Max Martin-guided girl-pop; a yawny Snow Patrol duet-ballad; even T-Swizz-goes-dubstep (for a few seconds). Red (Big Machine) is too long by half, bogged down by weepy strummers that are neither as catchy nor as personal as the ones she wrote at 15 (and it misses a fine opportunity to rhyme “stay stay stay” with “OK, Tay-Tay”), but it skirts — at all costs — the mortal pop sin of being boring. —K. Ross Hoffman

[ dvd/close-up ]

Replacing their notoriously smoothed-out 2002 DVD with a vastly improved Blu-ray, Paramount’s new Sunset Boulevard restores Billy Wilder’s Gothic drama to its natural state. Wilder’s poison-pen letter to Hollywood is in many ways the first metafilm, casting washed-up silent-film star Gloria Swanson as a washed-up silent-film star, and Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille as themselves. Anchored by William Holden’s bitterly sardonic turn as a faltering screenwriter, the film gave Wilder a chance to indulge the high style of silent cinema and savage the industry’s habit of eating its own. It’s as close as the director of Double Indemnity and Some Like It Hot ever got to a horror movie. —Sam Adams

[ pop/witchcraft ]

We’ve had more Kate Bush-alikes than you can wave a wand at but none has matched the art-pop faerie queen’s emotional complexity and sonic expanse quite like Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan. The Haunted Man (Capitol) finds Khan and a cast of dozens enacting an opulent pageant of windswept pagan rituals, dark electro-gilded reveries and heart-stoppingly majestic ballads; it’s a big-screen sweep that’s at once a richly wrought and seductively intimate. —K. Ross Hoffman