SOUNDTRACK: FOALS-“Inhaler” (2013).
I really really liked Foals debut album. It was weird and off-kilter and was one of my favorite albums of that year. I had heard that their follow-up was very different, less weird, more conventional, and I have yet to hear it (narrow-minded, I know). But then I heard that their new album was really great. “Inhaler” was the first song I heard.
Man, do I love it. The song opens kind of funky with some noisy echoed guitars. After a few verses the bridge comes in and the big excitement of the song comes when he gets to the chorus, “I can’t get enough SPACE!” It’s not so much that he yells “space,” which he does, it’s more the way the whole song explodes with a new exciting riff and it just seems to get bigger and bigger. It blows me away every time.
After the first chorus we drop right back to that falsettoed slow verse delivery. And the song slowly builds back up again. The length of the bridge as you anticipate the big chorus is just excruciatingly wonderful.
[READ: April 5, 2013] Cousin K
I found this book when I was cataloging it at my job. I don’t know what grabbed me about it (there’s nothing special about the cover). I think it may have been the French Voices label in the corner (and its brevity). I thought, hey why not read a contemporary French novella for something different.
Well, to my surprise, that is not what I got. Indeed, nothing in this book is as it seems.
Yasminia Khadra is a pseudonym for Mohammed Moulesshoul. He chose the name to avoid military censorship (that’s all the book says, I don’t really understand what that means). Moulesshoul was born in the Algerian Sahara. He is now retired from the military and is living in France.
But so, instead of this being a story from a French woman, the story is actually from a Male Algerian. Which doesn’t really matter in the long run, but I assumed that the narrator was a girl (based on the “author = narrator” theory that is an easy shortcut in fiction. This was really only confusing because the narrator is unnamed for quite a while in the book.
But what a book. In just 80 some pages, Khadra turns in a fascinating psychological picture of neglect and psychological abuse. But it is such an elliptical book that there are almost as many questions as there are answers. It is this elliptical style which provides some of the confusion, but a lot of the interesting structure of the story. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 