The Floating Egg

It seems futile to attempt to parse this state­ment out any fur­ther. Such an exer­cise would only serve to high­light the inad­e­quacy of mere words to address the mag­ni­tude of this event: the first album of new mate­r­ial from this group in eleven very long years. Of course, it is hor­ri­bly likely that such antic­i­pa­tion will …

Garbage is beau­ti­ful; we all know that. While I com­pletely missed their 2001 release Beau­ti­ful Garbage I am sure that it lived up to the title, espe­cially if there was a pic­ture of Shirley Man­son any­where in the book­let. I never tire of either their epony­mous 1995 debut album, nor the 1998 sopho­more dynamo Ver­sion …

I have never been what you could call a Beck fan. (As for Beck’s, well, that would be a dif­fer­ent mat­ter.) Ever since the day in my fresh­man year at col­lege when a fel­low stu­dent told me that I looked like Beck (whom I had not pre­vi­ously even heard of) I have a bit of …

I knew I was dan­ger­ously short of sleep when I broke down weep­ing while read­ing an arti­cle about Leinenkugel Brewing’s newest prod­uct, a 8.9% ABV India Pale Ale. As excit­ing as it is that this ven­er­a­ble middle-of-the-road brew­ery is ven­tur­ing into some more adven­tur­ous and higher-quality ter­ri­tory, it hardly mer­ited water­works. When I was a …

I am occa­sion­ally reminded more or less forcibly why I can never be a critic. I like things. I can be a fan, a gushy fan even. But I can’t quib­ble the way that seems to be the bread and but­ter of the critic. I can only enthuse. And now I must enthuse a bit. …

The turkeys. The turkeys are gob­bling some­thing fierce this morn­ing. Up in the nar­row strip of woods between the urban high­way I walk along and the upscale res­i­den­tial street at the top of the rise a sur­pris­ing num­ber of Melea­gris gal­lopavo are evi­dently lurk­ing bravely. The vigourous gob­bles fol­lowed fast one upon the other; at …

I am known to be — at least by myself — a par­tic­u­larly for­giv­ing (or undis­cern­ing) con­sumer of both music and movies. I have never, for exam­ple, walked out of a movie, either in the the­atre or — per­haps more tellingly — in what might loosely be described as the ‘home view­ing expe­ri­ence’ regard­less of …

The final track on Semisonic’s 1998 release Feel­ing Strangely Fine is a superb con­clu­sion to a superb album. And espe­cially appro­pri­ate for a snowy day like today. It makes me want very badly to learn to play it on the gui­tar, and to start play­ing gui­tar again, period. I won­der if any­thing will come of that.

The prim yet manic melior­ism of this most-British theme, the car­viva­lesque mad­cap­pery of it all, make this the per­fect coun­ter­point to my work­day, which con­tains none of the afore­men­tioned qual­i­ties. I have been hum­ming Julian Nott’s music for three solid days now.