Cross Collision.

My apologies for the absence -- in my defense, you haven't been missing out on much. Primarily, I've been sleeping in until 15h00 each day, and then spending the remainder of the weekend under a blanket, coughing pathetically.

But, eventually the illness comes to pass. You step into the shower, and all of a sudden, you can feel the clammy sweat and spittle and vaporized mucous wash away, and you realize that's the last of it -- your body is no longer in the business of making you feel weak and miserable. And then you step outside into the drizzling rain, and it's as sweet a spring day as you ever could have hoped.

And then you realize you haven't blogged anything in a week, and that brings us to today. (On the bright side, you also got a week without political commentary from me. You're welcome!)

(Side note: This may also -- fingers crossed -- be the weekend that the last of my surgery side effects have finally healed up and gone away, after ten months of nether-region anxiety. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about that.)

So, what have I been doing while recuperating? Listening to music! And fortunately for guys, it's the sort of music I want to share with others. So... let's get started!






First of all, an easy recommendation: Sloan's new album, The Double Cross. These guys are nothing if not consistent, and throughout a perfectly solid album, you catch little snippets of genre transitions and lyrics that rise above the genre, which speaks to their expertise.

Re-reading that, it sounds like I'm damning them with faint praise. Perhaps instead, I'll describe the album this way... There's club music, and lounge music, and road music, and fireplace music. This is garage music. This is what's playing loud enough that you can hear it while your head's under the hood, and this is what plays in the background when your friends come to visit and you pull some deck chairs out onto the concrete floor, and you enjoy a drink while looking at to the world beyond the back alley. And when they're gone and you're cleaning up the tools afterward, you'll notice a lyric playing over the silence that you hadn't heard before, and it'll be like Sloan's filling the gap in the conversation. It's an album that's "one of the guys".

If you only want to hear a bit, I humbly recommend Tracks 2 and 3 ("The Answer Is You" and "Unkind") back to back. I can only find a YouTube link to the latter, but you can still hear that bridge trailing in from the previous song, part of a larger album. The term "concept album" gets thrown around a little too much, but let's use it once more here, if only to salute albums which are constructed to be a full listening experience, more than just a collection of singles.

Well done, Sloan.

Next up, we have the new album by Sam Roberts, The Collider. Also, we'll have less talking about me being sick, which should delight you all. Tune in tomorrow!