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Surrender to the Void (Nine Songs from 2009)
I haven’t a clue about apophatic theology, and have still not read the tattered copy of the Cloud of Unknowing I picked up in a California bookshop three years ago, so I’m once again finding my ontological footing through pop music. A theme has been moving through my life this year, which, if I had to put a name to it, might be....
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Love and Hate and Lists
My favorite display of the paradoxical inner life of the music critic comes from Anthony Barr-Jeffrey, who did a series of funny and insightful blog posts for the now-defunct CCM Magazine several years ago. In one, he wrote, “I have an unusually big....
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Everything All of the Time
Perhaps above all else, ["Idioteque"] captures the philosophical essence of Radiohead—oblique existentialist lyrics that nonetheless unmistakably suggest confusion, helplessness and menace, wedded to a song structure that....
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She Says It’s All Right
One exciting thing about loving the music of the 1990s is that my favorite bands keep getting back together. They disappear for a while, bewildered by the new pop landscape from which MTV, CDs, and super-thick, chorus-heavy, distorted guitars have gone, and then re-emerge on the other side of the century, fresh-faced and....
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The End of Musical Memory
I don’t own any Deep Purple records, but I can get from Sixpence None the Richer to the Squirrel Nut Zippers in only four moves, and those moves involve almost everything that was important to me during the years I acquired those records: magazines, MTV, the radio, church, girls, school, and playing in bands....
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Current Issue
Issue 63
Art by Agnes Martin, James MacMillan on music, interview with Tim Gautreaux, poems by John F. Deane.
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