Director's Cut was greeted with reactions ranging between disappointment, bafflement and ridicule, before anyone had heard a note.

Back to basics time for the Foo Fighters. Well, kinda.

Just because it was recorded in Dave Grohl's garage doesn't make Wasting Light garage-rock, even if it was captured on analogue tape by Nirvana producer Butch Vig.

The recent history of hotly-tipped Alabaman sisters The Pierces contains nearly every conceivable peak and trough, from the depths of being dropped by their record label to the heights of touring with Coldplay. Their story borders on cinematic cliché at times, but it seems that experience has brought the best out of Catherine and Allison; a decade after their first album was released, they're grabbing the attention their perseverance richly merits.

Band reformations are a depressing lottery. They're rarely done for the purest of reasons: the money from a reunion tour has got to be pretty tempting for people whose creative profitability is years over. Couple that with the fact that pop stars in their 40s are rarely as vigorous as in their 20s, and it's all too easy for a group to lose sight of what it was that made them special in the first place.

More of a stopgap collection of incidental music and rudimentary beatscapes than a fully-considered follow-up to 2007's epochal I'll Sleep When You're Dead, this is nonetheless infused with El-P's characteristic dystopian sci-fi mood and edgy, paranoiac tone.

I Am Kloot are the very definition of a cult band, a critically adored three-piece who've never made waves much outside of a tiny but fervent fanbase.

I had high hopes for Like a Fishbone, the new play by Anthony Weigh. His previous piece at the Bush, 2,000 Feet Away, was a sharp, thoughtfully balanced look at how a society's over-reaction to paedophilia can be strikingly counter-productive. So it's particularly dismaying to find him trading now in his own brand of melodramatic extremities in this latest work, which arranges a heated but enlightening scrap between religious faith and rational humanism.

John Hurt has said that he had long been reluctant to reprise the part that made him famous - that of gay raconteur Quentin Crisp in Jack Gold’s 1975 biopic The Naked Civil Servant - that he preferred “to let sleeping dogs lie”. The dogs in this case were presumably those who might bark about cherished memories of such an iconic television drama being sullied by a potentially inferior sequel. To some it must have been seemed as if John Cleese had suddenly announced that he was going to write a new series of Fawlty Towers. Tantalising but horrifying at the same time.

Prior to hooking up with Jack White in The Raconteurs, Brendan Benson was a classic case of a cult artist in search of an audience – which is to say, a small coterie of fans treasured his recordings of polite, learned pop, which steadfastly refused to reach a commercial tipping-point.

"Hurt" – a song on Nine Inch Nails' 1994 release The Downward Spiral – came to the attention of the country legend Johnny Cash in 2002, through a mutual friend, the producer Rick Rubin. Cash listened to Trent Reznor's song more than 100 times, hailing it as "the best anti-drug song I ever heard", before recording it for the Rubin-produced American IV: The Man Comes Around. Reznor was unsure at first that a Cash cover would be a good thing. "I listened to it, and it seemed incredibly strange and wrong to me to hear that voice with my song," he said.