Album reviews

Marah "Angels of Destruction!" ★★★ For a ragged but right rock band whose impassioned cult is built on the strength of many a beery bar blowout, sobriety turns out to suit Marah surprisingly well. The Dylan-y opening title, "Coughing Up Blood," suggests what it took to clear the head of Dave Bielanko, lead singer of the South Philadelphia-bred and Brooklyn-based outfit. The sextet, boosted significantly by the addition of keyboard player Christine Smith, confidently moves through the Bowie-esque rocker "Old Time Tickin' Away," the breezy road song "Songbird" (sung by Dave's brother Serge), and the horn-happy swing of "Can't Take It With You ..." In fact, the ensemble sounds as sharp as it has in the decade since its auspicious 1998 debut. "Where does the time go?" Dave Bielanko wonders in the swaggering title cut. But rather than licking his wounds, he's cheerily informing the seraphs in question that "the angel of redemption's got you beat."

Sondheim's usual orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, did this film score's arrangements with a brooding atmosphere - grandly gothic and sweepingly dusky but not without light. This dramatic shading allows Burton's cast of mostly untrained voices to ease into Sondheim's complex opera of mayhem with an ear toward softly intoning the sad truths of the lyrics without having to show off. Though that makes magic for Alan Rickman (the pernicious, predatory Judge Turpin) and Helena Bonham Carter (the licentious, lovesick Mrs. Lovett), it's Johnny Depp's title character that's best rewarded. When Depp stretches vowel sounds on a line like "the cruelty of man is as wondrous as Peru" during "No Place Like London" - a song whose spite-driven words are repeated growlingly in the glorious "Epiphany" - it's in a creaking baritone with phrasing reminiscent of David Bowie. Depp's a dashing choice as Todd because his popularity brings hipster cachet. But his subtly mad mannerisms (those too of Bonham Carter) and uneasy croon drive Sweeney Todd to bloody brilliance.