TUESDAY TASTE: Sleater-Kinney, Decemberists and Gandolfini's last role among week's new releases

Every week at Tuesday Taste, we scour the new releases in music and home video to point you toward the best of the best. Here's what we found for this week: 

MUSIC
We are living large in new music releases this week, friends. Fall Out Boy, Hanni El Khatib, The Waterboys, Marilyn Manson,Lupe Fiasco and Ryan Bingham all are putting out new stuff. These albums, though, are likely the best of the lot: 

SLEATER-KINNEY, No Cities to Love. The long-awaited return of Sleater-Kinney is well under way as the band hit David Letterman last week and continues making the TV rounds this week on Conan. No Cities to Love is a potent blast of the thoughtful punk the band is known for, and we should get a good dose of it when SK opens their reunion tour in Spokane Feb. 8. Here's a taste from the album: 
THE DECEMBERISTS, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. These guys didn't take a decade off like their fellow Portlanders in Sleater-Kinney, but they did take a long break since their last release to do things like write children's books before coming back together for this one. 
BELLE AND SEBASTIAN, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance. Stuart Murdoch and Co. create some the best pop-rock most Americans have sadly ignored. There's no reason to think the new set will be a big breakthrough, either, but for those already in the know, it's a great addition to a stellar catalog by the Scots. 

MOVIES & TV
Among the mainstream flicks out this week, Lucy will get the most attention thanks to Scarlett Johansson going into ass-kicking mode after some drugs seep into her system and turn her into a hyper-smart action star. 

I'll be passing on that in favor of watching one of these efforts: 

The Boxtrolls comes from the same animators as Coraline, and while it's not as winning overall as that one, the adaptation of graphic novel Here Be Monsters! is pretty amazing, visually anyway. The story is simple, but it's helped by voice jobs by the likes of Simon Pegg and Ben Kingsley. 
The Drop is the first screenplay by novelist Dennis Lehane, whose seen some of his writing turned into pretty great movies (Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone). This one is based on one of his short stories, and stars Tom Hardy and the late, great James Gandolfini in his final role.