Wednesday 20 February 2008

Reading The Heart Of The Matter, I have a theory that Greene was really a nihilist who embraced Catholicism so that he could believe in hell, and sin, and feel even more nihilistic.

I should point out I've previously only read Brighton Rock, Travels With My Aunt, Lord Rochester's Monkey and his collected essays, and all of these several years ago (I re-read some of the essays a year back, and Travels three years back, but everything else dates to about a decade ago).

Also reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, and other bits and pieces.

Now listening to: 10,000 Days which is indeed a good album, but perhaps a little too similar to Lateralus, which put me off a bit after the quantum leap from AEnima to Lateralus. Upon sober reflection, a good album with much to recommend, but largely cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. This is also true of Queen's first 4 or 5 albums, but there is more diversity and relative evolution within the idiom there, although I'll have to wait for Tool to release another 2 or 3 albums in this vein before I can really compare. That ought to take, let's see, a decade or three. Ho-hum.

Note to Tool: Kindly increase productivity.

Other current ear candy: The Ocean's Precambrian and Earth's The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull, two of the best things I've heard in recent times. The Ocean's album is of course ambitious and sprawling, while Earth has reached new levels of expansive, meditative iteration.

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