SOUNDTRACK: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS-Euphoria (2014).
I found out about Around the World in 80 Days when they started following me on Instagram. I’m not sure which photo it was that interested them, or if they just follow lots of people, but I was intrigued that they are a post-rock band from Yekaterinburg, Russia. They formed in 2009 and have a few releases out (EPs, mostly). You can hear all of them on their soundcloud page (and other places). This was their first full length album.
Their bio says
Around the World in 80 Days is a three-piece band formed in 2009. It’s impossible to compare their music with anything. The guys just play whatever they want and don’t care about genres, styles and cliches.
I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s not impossible to compare them. They have elements of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky in their swirling post-rock instrumentals. But they definitely add elements that those bands don’t. There’s some heavy metal riffs in “Racing the Light” and some more poppy elements in “Inside Me.”
I typically try to listen to an album a few more times before I post about it, but I was so interested in this band that i wanted to get the word out right away. I’ll certainly be listening more intently to their output over the next few days.
[READ: May 24, 2015] “Mislaid”
I read an excerpt from this book in Harper’s a few months ago. And then I found the full book at work. Huzzah!
I had said that I didn’t know how long this novel could be because the excerpt seemed so complete. And in a sense I was right. Except that the book went so much further than the excerpt led me to imagine.
The excerpt was about Peggy Vaillancourt. She was born in 1948 in Virginia. A transformative event leads her to believe she must be a lesbian (something unspoken of at the time).
She winds up going to Stillwater College, a female-only school in the middle of nowhere Virginia. She loves poetry and wants to be a writer. She meets the poet-in-residence Lee Fleming. Fleming was a local boy with wealthy parents. His father believed himself to be as “queer as a three dollar bill.” It was his father who put him in a cottage on the family’s property across the lake from Stillwater College. Everyone in town also assumed he was gay, and there was much talk and consternation about it, although everyone assumed he was fine while he was by himself in that cottage.
The college asked Fleming to be a teacher (he canoed to work every day). Instead of a salary he asked them to create a literary magazine called Stillwater Review, which became a success. Many other famous New York poets came to Stillwater to be charmed by the idyllic Stillwater (and all the young girls). (more…)
I Just Read About That... 