Album: Jeff Tweedy

Chelsea Walls, Rykodisc

Fabled in song by Dylan and Cohen, famed for Sid'n'Nancy's fatal denouement, and favoured by romantic guttersnipes of every stripe, New York's Chelsea Hotel is without doubt the most ghastly, depressing place I've ever stayed in – and I once stayed in Aberystwyth. For all its manifold shortcomings, the place (the Chelsea, not Aberystwyth) exerts a powerful attraction on film-makers, the latest being Ethan Hawke, who's chosen Nicole Burdette's play Chelsea Walls, an ensemble piece about the lives of its residents, for his first outing as director. Despite the sizeable cast including several able composers – among them Isaac Hayes and Kris Kristofferson, neither a stranger to soundtrack work – Hawke has awarded scoring duties to Wilco's songwriter Jeff Tweedy, who in turn has roped in Robert Sean Leonard and Little Jimmy Scott (both featured in the film) to sing a song or two apiece, added a couple of Wilco out-takes and topped it up with incidental instrumentals performed by himself and the percussionist Glenn Kotche. Surprisingly for such a mixed bag, it all hangs together quite well. "Opening Titles", in which guitar feedback resolves occasionally into a quizzical arpeggiated hook, has the desultory, extempore air of Neil Young's score to Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, while elsewhere various combinations of vibes, organ, xylophone, guitar, piano, harmonica and kalimba are sculpted into equally evocative forms. Sometimes hypnotic, sometimes startling (not least in the application of Jimmy Scott's peculiar timbre to Lennon's "Jealous Guy"), the meditative, exploratory mood is nevertheless sustained throughout.