SOUNDTRACK: DEATHSPELL OMEGA-“Abscission” (2010).
This album, Paracletus, came in at number 6 on Viking’s Top Ten album list. The song is pretty straight ahead black metal. It is noisy and growly and everything you might expect from the genre. The first surprise here is that the band is French. The bigger surprise is how after a bout two minutes of pounding noise, a melody comes out of the darkness and brings a real structure to the bludgeoning.
Although I enjoyed the sing as far as black metal goes, I feel like the praise that he heaps on the album doesn’t seem deserved by this track. It’s a strong black metal song but it doesn’t seem either brilliant or confounding to me.
[READ: December 30, 2010] “Sweet Charity”
This is the fifth and final Something Borrowed story in this issue of The New Yorker. I felt like this story provided a lot of personal background information about Zadie Smith. The other short articles were certainly personal, but I feel like this one revealed things about her that I don’t know about most authors.
It seems that as a young lady, Smith was a total geek, playing the cello, dressing crazily (relatively) and often not really appropriate for her body size. She also admits that she was financially very lucky, more so than many of the girls she went to school with.
In Zadie’s account, it is a friend who borrows money from her. The friend is a fellow cello geek from school. They agreed to be strong and not fall to the stereotypes of black teenage girls. But their pledge to not get pregnant was not kept by the friend. She had the child and had to work very hard to make ends meet. Finally, as she is about to be kicked out of her flat, she swallows her pride and asks Zadie for a loan. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 