Nude

Momentum, it can catch a boy off guard. Just when you thought it was safe to grab a beer, kick back in your little hole in the ground and not get off your ass for the foreseeable future.

New Radiohead album, In Rainbows out today. I happened to be awake at 2:45AM for other reasons, when they sent out the email...needless to say I jumped on it in the blink of an eye, delaying my bedtime even further, discussing the music with Andrew and Caroline who were sleepless in New York. Halfway through my second run-through this morning, I think I can safely say I rank it above Hail to the Thief, and possibly even above Amnesiac (a fire engine just drove by during one of the vocal dropouts in Weird Fishes/Arpeggi--it actually would've been the perfect place for a short fire engine siren solo), though it would be pretty hard for me to admit any album was superior to the The Bends/OK Computer/Kid A trinity, even if it really were.

Anyway, I can't get over how good the guitar on this album is; like Johnny Marr with radioactive superpowers. (Maybe radioactive Mancunians broke into the studio and bit them all on the neck.) It makes me want to turn off my delay and distortion pedals (!) and make up weird chords. After seeing them at Tower Theater in June of 2006 I predicted that the new songs would comprise the next Great Guitar Album, and I was right. I hereby make two more predictions: that some dude on Myspace will have sampled "15 Step" and rapped over it before the end of the week, and the beat from Weird Fishes/Arpeggi will snake its way into indie dance parties everywhere...or something. Wonder what the devil imagery is though...first "Mephistopheles is just beneath" and now "Faust Arp." I'll figure that one out later.

Yesterday, just before checking out to the Deli for Jess and Jordan's reading, I called a friend up on the phone, and heard some interesting news--by "interesting," I mean I yelled "What!?" into my battered Sony-Ericsson more than once, and felt a deluge of blankness wash through my mind. Nevermind the yawning seven-year-wide gap that'll never be bridged, nevermind I'll be leaving town within the year (for Boston, ironically, God willing), nevermind that I don't and never have liked it when people I care about get hurt, much less their life plans flushed down the drain after the time for such cataclysms has long since come and gone--something jolted and turned, ponderously and painstakingly, a giant waterwheel that's slept for years above a river everyone thought had run dry, breaking off rust, shrugging off dust, and in a darkened underpass I thought, oh--I'll go to hell for what my dirty mind is thinking.

So maybe I've been bombed out of my foxhole. The question is real, but at least I have the rest of the week to think about it, until some dude on Myspace raps over 15 Step. Be ready to run, but don't get any big ideas; they're not gonna happen.