New Brutalism

It's been an interesting month here at Drinks-After-Work. There hasn't been much blogging goin' on, that's fer sure. I've been on holiday for about a month and there's been no damn time, you know? There's been a hell of a lot going on which I'll cover off in another post, shortly, if I can find a dignified way of doing so. But suffice it to say that I've spent most of that time getting drunk, and the rest of the time sleeping.

Otherwise I've spent a lot of time looking at pictures of Brutalist architecture, inspired in part by Robyn (also see pic here).

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I thought we'd better have a song, so here's one* from Chris Whitley:

Chris Whitley - New Machine (3.80 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

It's off Din of Ecstasy from 1995, and his most-hated album/least well-regarded on Allmusic.com out of about a dozen efforts. For example, here's the Allmusic review:

On his second album, Whitley abandons the atmospheric acoustic blues-rock of his debut for a hard-hitting, grungy guitar attack. Appropriately, the songs are all about losers and hard times -- it's a dark, bleak album, twisting through its songs with a grim determination. The problem is, it doesn't always work. Whitley's lyrics are still rooted in the folk-blues storytelling tradition, while his music follows the rules of contemporary hard rock, complete with start-stop dynamics and thick layers of distortion. However, he can't write riffs that equal the best of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, nor does he have melodies to rival theirs. His music works best a lyrical level and the musical approach on Din of Ecstasy obscures his lyrics, making the record a muddled affair.

See, aside from the first two sentences which are correct, that's complete and utter bullshit. It's a sensationally, exceedingly-cool record, and at some point I'm going to write about it a bit more.

And why does Allmusic.com have such trouble with awesome albums about being/getting fucked up?


* Anyone get the connection?

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There's also probably gonna be a few minor changes to DAW, too. In my 4th year, at well over 500 posts now, I'm approaching 40,000 reads and I decided to have a wee overhaul, both to the layout and to the content. Some of the changes are immediate -- for example the "tag-cloud" in the left side-bar (I can't have a real tag cloud because *cough* Blogger is a *cough* ass), and the broken archives navigation (sorry about that) -- and others will be coming as I find time to get them sorted out.