TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Joff Winterhart's Days of the Bagnold Summer Days of the Bagnold Summer, by Joff Winterhart, a hilarious tale of a teenage boy's summer of discontent, is the runner-up in this year's Observer/Cape graphic short story prize. feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A New Nation An account of America’s first quarter-century, presented with great insight and scholarship. feeds.nytimes.com |
Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind EP | CD review The leaders of America's underground scene end the year with a dose of panpipes and a nod to the Grateful Dead, writes Kitty EmpireLady Gaga dominated pop's spotlit uplands in 2009. Having released her Fame album in January, she ended the year with eight new tracks in The Fame Monster. As above, so below. Animal Collective, the underground sector's pre-eminent movers of 2009, released their ninth album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, back in January too. It was a landmark work that has topped the end-of-year lists of many critics and reached No 13 in the US Billboard charts, quite a feat for a band who craft experimental pop out of oscillations, loops and chants.So stitched into the zeitgeist were Animal Collective this year that Twilight writer Stephenie Meyer enthused about them on her blog; an appearance on the Twilight soundtrack followed, much to the bemusement of the happily margin-dwelling Collective. Fall Be Kind is their triumphant end-of-year postscript, crowning 12 months in which AC and fellow travellers like Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear cemented an American underground resurgence. Fans won over by Merriweather's hazy, tribal euphorics won't be disappointed. The five songs here continue to be beamed in from a less-defined place, one that beguiles and frustrates in equal measure."Graze", for instance, begins with an uncharacteristically audible vocal from Dave "Avey Tare" Portner, describing the feeling of waking. The effect is like the Beach Boys in a stoner stupor – one of the chief appeals of Animal Collective. A few Disneyish shimmers sustain Merriweather's restless optimism, but at the three-minute mark a flurry of panpipes marks the point where the track takes leaves of its senses and not in a good way.Stitched into the ebb and flow of "What Would I Want? Sky" is the first-ever sample sanctioned by the Grateful Dead, that other endless, amorphous outsider phenomenon of American rock. Panpipes and the Dead – these questionable steals indicate, you hope, a band completely unconcerned with convention, rather than hippies revealing their true colours.Thereafter, "Bleed" flips the comfort and succour of Animal Collective's cotton-wool world into a more menacing prospect, as ghostly vocals declare: "I must bleed." The bad trip theme is taken up by "On a Highway", which reveals a mortal band going mad on a tour bus, bemoaning the endless miles. Like Animal Collective themselves, the song is saved by its technical brilliance, interlocking harmonies, clatters and analogue drones. Some avant-garde DJ should splice "On a Highway" with Mercury Rev's "Goddess on a Hiway", proving that they, and not the Dead, are Animal Collective's most obvious forebears.Pop and rockAnimal CollectiveLady GagaStephenie MeyerKitty Empireguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The decade in books From Zadie Smith to the first tweeted novel: the biggest literary stories of the last 10 yearsAlastair Dant feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Linklog: Angry Susan Hill, prize smackdown, and more A proposal for an anonymous exhibition of short stories, mixing amateurs and big names, has made Susan Hill very, very angry. It sounds like a literary version of the Royal College of Art's RCA Secret postcard sale, which so far as I know doesn't generate any great outrage among artists. But when the names behind the works are revealed there, Tracey Emin has the comfort of knowing that her work will re-sell for a lot of money; order will be restored. Hill is offered no such comfort.• Still making money from literature: the owners of the copyright in Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and the people who claim to own it but don't. Whichever those turn out to be.• Garth Risk Hallberg proposes a tournament of literary prizewinners. It wouldn't be nearly as bloody as the accompanying tournament of literary prize sponsors. • The other Winston Churchill was also a novelist.Peter Robinsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |