Daily Download: "The Music Lovers," Destroyer, from "Notorious Lightning and Other Works"
After recording last year's brilliant bedroom-glam MIDI-fantasia "Your Blues" (which would have gotten at least an honorable mention on my year-end top 10 list if I'd remembered), Destroyer's Dan Bejar made the strange, Dylanesque decision to tour the record accompanied by Frog Eyes, an abrasive, punky Victoria band. I heard their New York show and thought it was dreadful, an unpleasant mess of noise. But now that I've heard "Notorious Lightning and Other Works," a post-tour rerecording of six "Your Blues" songs with Frog Eyes, I'm sure they were either having an off night, or that (more likely) the Mercury Lounge sound man was making a hash of the mix. Bejar's songs are extraordinarily robust, and they take a bruising here but come out lean and fierce and completely reinvented. My favorite is "The Music Lovers," which is now a slow 6/8 tune. Bejar still sounds like Bowie, but this time he's Bowie backed by the world's first punk-Motown ensemble. A free download of "An Actor's Revenge" is also available.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
Walter Cronkite
"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
Robert Frost
"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
Sylvia Plath
"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
"Everything"
Henry Rollins
"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
"Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas
"Slaughterhouse Five"
Kurt Vonnegut
"Hooking Up"
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
