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Continue reading →: T-shirt and tie combinations: The Arctic Monkeys 4/1/2010
I looked forward to last night’s Arctic Monkeys show, my first. Ninety minutes revealed the limitations of their chord structures as well as a bewildering fascination with stopping and starting songs (classic Pretenders were the only band capable of doing so with some variety, as far as I know). The…
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Continue reading →: Singles 3/31
Also known as the “I Gave My First Zero!” edition. Miranda Lambert – The House That Built Me (8) Kenny Chesney – Ain’t Back Yet (5) Tim McGraw – Still (6) Hot Chip – I Feel Better (5) Rihanna – Rude Boy (4) Tim McGraw – Reverse Cowgirl (4) Gabriella…
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Continue reading →: Hello, April
I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made…
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Continue reading →: Unspooled: the older brother problem
What kind of profile do Neil Finn and co. boast? I fell in love with Crowded House the way Matos did with Marshall Crenshaw’s Field Day. For reasons I don’t know, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” experienced a revival in the fall of 1992. It was all over the radio, its…
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Continue reading →: Yick.
For a lot of us in South Florida the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Adam Walsh in the summer of 1981 was our first exposure to what we call now “the news cycle”: the drip-drip-drip of coverage that begins with the known facts of the abduction, followed by steady updates…
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Continue reading →: Mongrel hearts
James Mercer has the tunes, Danger Mouse has the beats, so you’d think they’d make lots of hooks if not quite lots of money (even in this chart climate). But their Broken Bells collaboration offers plenty of hooks and beats yet no justification for the effort. An abstruse lyricist in…
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Continue reading →: Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long
I’m a sucker for any song that samples Wings’ “Arrow Through Me.” Here’s a track from Erykah Badu’s new album.
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Continue reading →: Singles 3/25
In descending order. After two months of living with it I’m slightly nauseated by the chimes on “Giving Up The Gun,” but I still adore it, like a beloved roommate who leaves his dirty socks on the kitchen counter. Vampire Weekend – Giving Up the Gun (8) Corinne Bailey Rae…
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Continue reading →: Point and shoot
Brothers confirms three things: (1) while Natalie Portman has gotten so gangly-gorgeous that I considered reparative therapy, she recites lines like an assistant director keeps walking out of her line of vision with the cue card; (2) Jake Gyllenhaal, after a series of somnolent do-gooder performances, delivers his best work…
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Continue reading →: Remembering ‘Don’t Try This at Home’
Johnny Marr earned so much good will from his work with The Smiths and on Electronic’s eponymous album that his participation on Billy Bragg’s “Sexuality” persuaded me to trust him one more time (I avoided his work on The The’s Mind Bomb). Propelled by a sequencer track and Marr’s foregrounded…
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Continue reading →: News flash: Western civilization “a slowly sinking ship”
John Derbyshire, whose crankiness fails to amuse, proves why conservatism has had trouble attracting the young. He also sounds, oddly, like Gore Vidal: It’ll be over soon. We’ll be down in the cold, lightless depths of imperial despotism — in which, after all, the great majority of human beings, throughout…
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Continue reading →: Too much information
So long as it sticks to its roots as a nasty political comedy with a few thrills instead of a suspense film, The Ghost Writer justifies the accolades heaped on it by critics eager to support Roman Polanski’s art yet willing to scratch their heads at his moral and legal…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 