I just downloaded the new Radiohead album - available digitally from their site - In Rainbows. It was a painless process - I decided to pay £5.00 and they added a £.45 fee for credit card handling - so, about half what you'd spend on a physical album in HMV in London - which seems fair. The download took about 5 minutes. The album itself sounds very good - more immediately pop-oriented than recent more gloomy work. "Reckoner" is my early favourite, with its Zooropa stylings, as is peppy opener "15 Step". "Bodysnatchers" really rocks, and is Revolver in a way Oasis would die to do. Much of the album suggests their influences - aside from Aphex Twin and Pink Floyd, are early-90s U2 and The Beatles - but mainly they sound like themselves - this is out ten years post-OK Computer and sounds like that works' zeitgeisty cousin, with a little more sunshine on the windscreen, and a little less shattering of glass. Good work if you can get it. And you can.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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