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The Bon Iver sound.

Dark Shades of Blue finds Rudd at his most assertive, heavy and psychedelic. Dusky and cool, the disc’s guitar-driven jams expand on a sound only hinted at on previous releases, as distortion often supplants the pretty jangly guitars heard on earlier work, like 2007’s White Moth. While Rudd’s signature didgeridoo remains, along with the myriad of instruments and voices featured on other records, the results are less “world music” than they are the makings of a truly global record.

After immersing myself a long time in Bach, I was reworking some familiar Beethoven Sonatas, and from the first moments of playing them I had a odd, unsettled feeling. Even the most revolutionary passages seemed somewhat quaint, like the customs of another era. I blinked and tried again, but the feeling persisted; I was being roughly jolted from one culture to another. And further: the Bach (in my mind) seemed to be, in a reversal of the “actual” chronology, more modern, while the enunciated phrases of Beethoven seemed outmoded… like a style to be shedded … how can this happen with the “eternally modern” Beethoven?

Patrol is a post-evangelical journal of culture and politics.

But after a week of fitful sleep, dreamscapes and nightmares of lists and catalogs, the constant fretful consideration of nomenclature, etymologies, ancestries, astrologies, and the like, I came up with absolute zilch! Nothing sounded quite right. Nothing sounded personal. Nothing looked me right in the eye and said, “Hey you with the buck teeth and the feathered hair and the stitches in your lip and the corduroys tight-rolled in your tube socks, here I am, first name, middle name, last name, I’m all yours!” Nothing! What a cosmic tragedy! What a waste of fate! My parents were baffled: how could their mouthy, precocious, spiteful youngest child pass up such an opportunity? I shrugged my shoulders and resigned myself to the same silly foreign name, a sequence of odd letters stitched together like a crazy quilt, easily misspelled, misread, mispronounced, teased and squeezed and tickled and jabbed at during recess...

"[The tour] was actually a pretty great way to meet people," Nebeker says, "because then they'd ask about what we were doing. We'd tell them we were playing music down the coast."

While the band had a number of shows lined up in bigger cities, many of its performances weren't planned in advance, a decision Nebeker attributes to the uncertainties surrounding traveling by bike — like flat tires and getting lost. Other bands may cringe at the thought of such a tour, but the recipe seemed to work for Blind Pilot.

"It's more appealing to us," Dobrowski says. "I'm sure a lot of people still want the drugs and the women and the tour bus, but we like our campfires and our lakeside biking friends."

I hear the album falling into basically three parts — the first 4 epic songs, which has got to be the most blockbuster U2 beginning since Joshua Tree; then the more domestic/pop/personal unit of “Crazy-Boots-Comedy”; and then the last 4 with “Fez” as the entryway into the intimate yet sonically and thematically expansive “White-Breathe-Cedars.” (In a sense it’s hard to come up with a description for that set that fits “Breathe,” but I do think “Breathe” is more intentional here than just being a change-up between the two slow numbers. There is something very reflective about it and its collage verses marry with the specificity of the two slower numbers. Any comments on this?)

When the subject of "No Line" isn't love, lust and assorted other good times -- still the meat of the rock 'n' roll vocabulary -- it's not geopolitics. It's spiritual exploration, even if the song's subject is derived from a geopolitical event, as in "Cedars of Lebanon" and "White as Snow." Throughout the band's career, U2's songs have referenced a spiritual journey inspired by its members' Christianity.

Here, the exploration continues. In "White as Snow," based on a hymn inspired by Isaiah 1:18 and with new lyrics by Bono, Mr. Eno and Mr. Lanois, Bono sings: "Once I knew there was a love divine/Then came a time I thought it knew me not/Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not/Only the lamb as white as snow." Said to be the thoughts of a dying soldier in Afghanistan, the song concludes with "If only a heart could be as white as snow." In "Breathe," he writes: "Sing your heart out, sing my heart out/I've found grace inside a sound."

and also on the Clara-Robert-Brahms triangle

In most of the great cities of the West, museums now dominate the lists of most popular tourist attractions. More people go to the Louvre each year than to the Eiffel Tower; in London, three museums--the Tate, the British Museum and the National Gallery--each attract more visitors than the London Eye.

music game. this game puts you on the stage, play and sing in front of an audience, let's rock.

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