My feature on Liars is now live at ALARM Magazine for your perusal. I had an interesting discussion with their singer, Angus Andrew, who gave me some insight into the inspiration for the album’s dark, moody theme. You can find some audio clips from our conversation here. This feature will appear in ALARM #38 – Invisible, which is out on September 7th, and will also include my feature on Matmos. [09.01.10]

My review of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch ran today at PopMatters.

This thousand-page behemoth neatly fits in three thousand years of Greco-Judeo-Christian theology, touching on every sect, schism, and segment of Christianity and their place in the world. That’s a rate of roughly three years per page! Though single-volume treatments of such large topics can be troublesome, MacCulloch is a deft writer, and infuses enough good humor and personality into his prose to keep things moving along smoothly.

Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years is respectful but not reverent, a clear-eyed and illuminating investigation that is packed with surprises, and an excellent resource for the believer and non-believer alike.

When I first met Menomena’s Danny Seim back in 2006, I thought he was an exceptionally nice guy. It was the first interview I was doing for ALARM Magazine; the only other interview I had done at that point had been three years earlier for another publication, and was such a bad experience (largely due to an uncooperative subject) that I’ve excised it from my portfolio and refuse to acknowledge it. But this time was a lot different, largely due to the friendliness of Danny and his bandmates, Justin Harris and Brent Knopf. I left that interview genuinely thrilled and feeling really great about Menomena.

Here we are almost four years later, and I’ve been lucky enough to get to speak with Seim again for ALARM about Menomena’s new record, Mines. The short profile will appear in print several months from now, but for the time being, enjoy these quick audio clips lifted from our phone conversation. In the first, Seim talks about what it’s like to be in his early thirties and performing for audiences much, much younger. In the second, he discusses the song “TAOS” and how his bandmate Justin Harris has grown as a singer and songwriter. The third is about discovering that Mines leaked to the internet two months prior to the release date.

On the perils of having an audience half your age

On bandmate Justin Harris and his song “TAOS”

On having your album leaked on the Internet

Mines comes out July 27th, and it’s truly excellent, a great follow up to Friend and Foe that demonstrates a lot of maturity and progress.

Buy Menomena’s Mines at Amazon.com

My review of The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge ran today at PopMatters.

This thick book covers the full two-hundred plus year span of the crusades, and while its comprehensiveness is admirable, it’s lacking in some respects. There’s lots of descriptive, expository writing on the battles, figures, and issues that drove these conflicts, but not a lot of the kind of colorful, imaginative prose that can truly bring a subject to life. That’s one of the drawbacks of writing such an all-inclusive book. There are so many details to cram in, it’s not easy to linger a bit and conjure up a rich, immersive atmosphere. The one exception is Asbridge’s treatment of Saladin, a significant enough figure to warrant an in-depth, quasi-biographical treatment. That said, as long as you know what you’re in for, The Crusades is a great way to become acquainted with what is a very complex history, where religion, politics, and culture inform the motivations of those involved in ways that contemporary readers may find surprising.

Buy The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge at Amazon.

The paperback edition of Christopher Potter’s You Are Here is in stores now and if you flip to the second or third page of the book, you’ll find a short blurb taken from my review of the book at PopMatters. I really enjoyed this book; it’s a masterful exploration of the universe that manages to explain extraordinarily complicated concepts, both scientific and philosophical, in a way that makes sense. It’s nice to have my commentary on the book excerpted for the new edition, and I’m in some good company, with reviewers from The Guardian, NPR, New York Magazine, and The Boston Globe represented. If you’re at all interested in the origins of the universe, the inner workings of quantum mechanics, or the evolution of human philosophy into the modern scientific method, I strongly suggest you pick up You Are Here, it’s remarkably slim but packs in quite a bit of information.

My review of The Friends of Eddie Coyle ran today at PopMatters.

As a guy who tends to love elaborate sentences and the aimless meandering of literary fiction, the plot-heavy minimalism of crime and genre fiction can be a little irritating at times. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is incredibly spartan, driven almost entirely by dialogue, but with a tough verisimilitude that has earned it a reputation as the definitive Boston crime novel since its publication 40 years ago. And it’s definitely good, but Higgins is determined to dispel the glamorous aura and sensationalism that often shrouds crime in fiction and does so with extreme force and efficacy. The criminals, cops, and everyone in between come off like dreadful dead-enders, struggling to survive in a system that helps no one and solves nothing. It’s a short book, and very focused, never wandering into tangents or losing sight of its goal. Very compelling, occasionally frustrating, and definitely disheartening, The Friends of Eddie Coyle makes no effort to make readers feel comfortable or uplifted. It doesn’t show the criminal underworld as full of adventure and intrigue, but rather as it truly is, the last refuge of the disturbed and damaged.

Buy The Friends of Eddie Coyle at Amazon.com

My review of The Fall’s 28th album, Your Future Our Clutter, ran today in the Boston Phoenix.

There are few discographies as daunting as The Fall’s. Guided by Voices and Mountain Goats come to mind. Mark E. Smith’s prodigious output and penchant for switching band members and styles make it difficult to get a grasp of where to begin with The Fall, but the longer you put it off, the more you feel like you’re missing out. If you haven’t managed to get a foothold with the Fall, Your Future Our Clutter is a good enough place to start. It’s a very solid album thanks to the tightness of the backing band, who are carried over from the last Fall record, Imperial Wax Solvent. They know when to kick up a storm and when to let Smith rant and rave his way through the track. I highly recommend “Hot Cakes” as the standout from this album, a track that’s full of smug swagger and brashness that would fit in well on any of their classic albums.

Buy Your Future Our Clutter at Amazon.com

From Supreme Balloon (2008)

I had the privilege of talking with M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel of Matmos this weekend, for an upcoming feature in ALARM Magazine. I was not at all surprised to find that they’re very intelligent, thoughtful artists — their work is evidence enough of their depth and creativity — but I was happy to also discover that they’re genuinely nice guys who seem to enjoy talking about what they do. It makes my job a whole lot easier and more pleasant.

We discussed their upcoming albums Treasure State, which they recorded with the Brooklyn-based group So Percussion, and Simultaneous Quodlibet. From what I’ve heard of the new material, they’re a solid addition to an already daring experimental catalog. I’m inspired by Matmos’ ability to find inspiration and new sounds in the most mundane and unlikely objects. I learned a lot from my discussion with Schmidt and Daniel: how to play a cactus as a musical instrument, what it’s like to be publicly dressed down by your experimental music idols, and why an excess of black bile is preventing Daniel from releasing a new Soft Pink Truth record.

Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt on The Soft Pink Truth [50s]

On their unrequited desire for high school cheerleaders [57s]

On the Baltimore music scene, of which they are now a part [2m 12s]

I, for one, wouldn’t mind another set of Soft Pink Truth covers in the vein of Do You Want New Wave Or…, but the prospect of fresh, original material from Daniel is also pretty exciting. It’s nice to know, at least, that the side project isn’t defunct; it’s been almost six years since the last release.

So stay tuned to ALARM for what’s sure to be an enthralling feature; my piece on Liars and Sisterworld is still on deck, hopefully out soon. And pick up the new Matmos discs when they come out, support experimental art.

My review of the new Sam Amidon album, I See The Sign, ran today in the Boston Phoenix.

I was first introduced to Sam Amidon through his performance on the latter third of Nico Muhly’s Mothertongue, where he let the composer play with his twangy, dry voice on their revisionist take on the folk ballad “The Only One.” The pair is reunited on I See The Sign and once again Muhly provides the sumptuous, modern classical backdrop to Amidon’s folk warbling, though this time, Amidon steers the ship. They somehow manage to be both faithful to the original songs while radically augmenting them with modern instrumentation and experimental phrasing and arrangements. It’s a quiet, yet bold album.

Buy Sam Amidon’s I See The Sign at Amazon.com

My review of Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs and the Rise of Modern Mathematics ran today at Forbes.com.

This was a book that made me wish I had learned more about mathematics, or at least been taught it better. Alexander does an excellent job of making this often challenging field engrossing, telling the story of math’s evolution from a grounded, mechanical science to a pure, theoretical artform at the turn of the 19th century. He makes a compelling philosophical argument about this transformation, with the mathematicians of the late 18th century cleaving to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the new young upstarts of the early 19th century embodying the spirit of Romanticism more commonly associated with artists and poets. Alexander revels in both discussing the myth of the legendary Evariste Galois and in tearing it down, but even though the book is titled for the tragic it’s the story of Janos Bolyai and his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry that I found most compelling.

Buy Duel at Dawn at Amazon.com

My review of American Lives: A Reader, an anthology of short stories excerpted from a series of memoirs, ran today at PopMatters.

By and large, this collection was very spotty, full of the kind of self-indulgent, melodramatic material that you’ll often find in memoirs. Murder, kidnapping, suicide, alcoholism, terminal illness, all rendered in tedious, eye-rolling prose. There were, however, a few strong exceptions. Brenda Serotte’s “Fortuna” from her book The Fortune Teller’s Kiss was so excellent I didn’t want it to end. In it, she tells the story of her grandmother Nona, an Old World fortune teller making a living in her ethnically diverse mid-century Lower East Side neighborhood. Serotte expertly defines this unique character and pieces together her compelling narrative from shards of memory and stories from her parents. Eli Hastings’ “Good, Alright, Fine” from Falling Room is another highlight, managing to discuss addiction and familial obligations with good humor and a wry sense of the story’s inherent absurdity. Hastings avoids the easy path of self-pity and overwhelming grimness that many of the other entries in this book fall into and emerges with a touching, humorous story about serious matters.