new noise

bunch of new music coming out - today zero 7 drop the garden, which features a bevy of guest artists including disco-not-disco fave jose gonzales. album is a pretty solid chunk of laid back pop that luckily never slides into cliched electronic fiddlings. reminds me a lot of the beta band at certain points.

zero 7 feat. jose gonzales - left behind

zero 7 - this fine social scene

the beta band - broke

click here for a full album stream of the garden

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almost finished with gary shteyngart's new novel, absurdistan, and am thoroughly enjoying it. he handles issues as diverse as post-soviet russian identity, judaism, filial piety, caspian sea oil, sex, and halliburton with deft and quick prose that is a pleaseure to read. i also like it because he namechecks wburg on a surprisingly regular basis, and this passage hit fairly close to home:

All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I've been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired bitch. (p. 230)

alls i'm saying is that i've definitely played to crowds at galapagos comprised mostly of mid-thirties brooklynites, and i've definitely been known to drop "under the sea" to great approval.

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fuck. fine. here you go:

thom yorke - atoms for peace

thom yorke - harrowdown hill

yeah, so i got my hands on an advance copy of the eraser the other day, and after a few cursory listens, it's not bad. i am nowhere close to being a huge radiohead fan (i certainly know enough of them...) but i found this album to be a charming piece of lo-fi pop. little touches of synthy electro here and there, but nothing revolutionary. quite nice. even though i know that rabid radiohead peeps out there would decry "nice" as blasphemy, that's just how i found the album to be. i mean, how different are the above tracks than this one (from four years ago)?

schneider tm - frogtoise

no offense to thom, but i'll stick with the classics

radiohead - high and dry

radiohead - street spirit (fade out)