As usual, I'm about a year behind the times, but I feel compelled to state the obvious: if you haven't bought—or at least borrowed—the album Funeral by the Arcade Fire, you really ought to do something about that. I was apparently in some sort of coma circa 1997, when OK Computer first came out, but I imagine that the feeling of discovery, or recognition, or whatever, must have been similar. This is the album that I've always wanted to find, without quite knowing what I was looking for. It's sort of like Berlin-era Bowie, but not really, and sort of like Radiohead, but only to the extent that every band is sort of like Radiohead, depending on which Radiohead you mean. (In fact, I've found that the "sort of like Radiohead" observation, which has been applied to bands as diverse as Keane, Coldplay, and Sigur Ros, is a great cop-out whenever I'm asked my opinion of an artist that I know nothing about. As long as the listener doesn't try to pin me down to a particular phase in Radiohead's career, I'm rarely, if ever, wrong.)

Anyway, this is a great album that you all should buy. (This means you, A.D.) It's hard to single out particular songs here, but I'm particuarly fond of "The Backseat," which I find really moving, and also expressive of what Pitchfork calls "a common phenomenon—a love of backseat window-gazing, inextricably linked to an intense fear of driving—that ultimately suggests a conclusive optimism through ongoing self-examination." Well, right. It's always nice when a hip music website tells you something about yourself that you didn't know before.