Interesting post by Alex on the Wild Beasts. Quite like the new one, but still long for some of that wildness of yore (yore these days being approx 2 years)

The thing here is that it IS enlarging to listen to something recommended/advocated to you because it takes on a certain colouration from another persons life, in a way it stimulates a kind of empathetic echo, ahh! so this is what moves them, this is an exteriorization in a way of their inner world, this is a part of what their soul looks like (please note absence of scare quotes around soul). It forces a kind of imaginative investment in the listener, a listening through the other, in this sense when you listen you listen together. This is why I think there was such a sense of communion and communication around the music press. You read (and re-read) the same writers week after week, often hundreds of thousands of words of prose over a few years and you got to know them, you felt familiar, intimacy developed, you listened often out of respect, in a spirit of friendship, often you struggled to like things, to see what they had seen in it.

Meanwhile, Wayne takes an elliptically autobiographical swerve.

I say, more! Less elliptically.