The White Book//Han Kang

I bought this on a whim, as I buy almost all things and virtually nothing. Everything is deeply considered and then suddenly, radically, impulsive. So I bought this knowing that I found The Vegetarian frequently beguiling, ultimately kind of frustrating. And knowing that I have Human Acts sitting on my desk, part of a ‘To Read’ pile that’s been gathering dust for months now, left trailing impulse buys like the aforementioned. And The White Book was in the Man Booker Shortlist section, so I knew that it was probably good. And the quotes seemed almost excessively laudatory. And it was short. Really short. 161 pages short. That’s the dream.

HOORAY FOR PARQUET COURTS!

“Expansion, not a compromise…warm, angry, and thoughtful, confident, melodic, and hard-rocking…”. It’s a big comparison, but it fits to me. That above is how Robert Christgau described The Clash’s London Calling.

Arcade Fire//Everything Now Review

“We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human…and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines.” – David Foster Wallace to Larry McCaffrey

How about “Infinite content/We’re infinitely content”?

Arcade Fire have never sounded so shallow, tired or cynical. It’s been coming for a while – their three most recent albums have all featured a track or two dedicated almost solely to Win bitching about the youth – but it’s never seemed so fatal.

The relentless ‘message’-ness and moralising of Everything Now – it’s about how we have everything now and infinite content has not made us happier – makes for pretty poor company most of the time, made worse by a smug sense of superiority and half-baked experimentation.

Animal Collective//The Painters & Meeting of the Waters EPs

The perception of an artist’s’ prolonged excellence can often thank gradually reduced expectations for that longevity; same applies for Animal Collective. After the underwhelming but still compelling Centipede HZ. and the largely uninteresting Painting With, this year’s EPs have seemed like a resurgence – even if they’re not.

Michael Kiwanuka // Limelight, 15 October

For an album whose mode is most often melancholic, Michael Kiwanuka’s Love and Hate translates into a surprisingly energetic, even joyous live experience. These aren’t radical reconstructions of the album’s original tracks, but they are injected with a vitality and momentum that unearths the latent funk buried in the album’s slow-build introspection.