The Lemon Table, by Julian Barnes. Alfred A. Knopf, 241 pages, $22.95.
“Novelists either go in for padding or else philosophizing, what we were told to regard as ‘generalizations,’chez Balzac.” These are the words of an 81-year-old deafspinsternamed Sylvia Winstanley, a recent resident of an “Old Folkery,” as she calls her rest home. Winstanley’s Read More
It’s not everyday you run across fun party music made by a couple of French psychologists. But that’s Installation Sonore (V2), an album of imaginative, razor-sharp dance tunes done by Jean-Philippe and Patou, two ex-indie rockers based in Montpellier, France.
Jean-Philippe and Patou came up with the name Rinôçérôse–which has expanded on stage at home Read More
A quiet string of guitar eighth-notes rises and falls as drums brush along, and “Smoke Rings in the Dark,” a tune by Nashville singer Gary Allan, takes off in its starlit way. The guy’s romance-he understands it’s past denying-has collapsed. “Eye-ah-eye-ah-ah-eye,” as Mr. Allan phrases it, “know I must be going/ ‘Cause love’s already gone.” Read More
A supernatural-looking CD entitled Playing by Heart is billed to John Barry, Chris Botti and, weirdly enough, Chet Baker. On the black-and-white CD cover, in fact, Mr. Barry-the peerless English inventor of James Bond music, as well the scorer of films like Body Heat , Out of Africa , Dances With Wolves and many others-sits Read More
Crossover tenors are full-grown men in good clothes who often behave like naughty students. They do the things conventional instructors forbid high-minded tenors to do, like making decisions regarding repertoire and presentation that place them off the radar of stern commentators. Yet, by operating in the world of the middlebrow, the crossover tenors march on, Read More
The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs (Merge).
Stephin Merritt, a 30-ish Yonkers-born resident of the East Village, pals around with a close-knit group of followers and collaborators, always carrying with him, these days, a Chihuahua named Irving, as in Berlin. Right now, his work inspires sane pop insiders to make enormous claims for him as Read More
True at First Light , by Ernest Hemingway. Scribner, 320 pages, $26.
“Honey, you are a little lion-wacky,” the narrator tells his wife. She answers: “Who has more right to be? Of course I am. But I take lions seriously.” This exchange of Tracy-and-Hepburn banter occurs roughly a third of the way through the new Read More
For the last 10 years, David Byrne has run Luaka Bop, the Manhattan-based record label that specializes in international pop, with Yale Evelev, formerly of the Icon world music imprint, which is now defunct. The label, a Warner Brothers affiliate, has felt some buzz and heat, as with the 1989 release of Brazil Classics 1: Read More
Just as publications everywhere are doing their damnedest to grasp the suddenly galloping sensibility of America’s teenagers, massive quantities of a CD titled Millennium (Jive) are plastering the walls of record stores. It’s the follow-up to an infrequently analyzed, freely sobbed-about music release from 1997 entitled Backstreet Boys , an album by five Lexington, Ky.-via-Florida Read More
There’s always been something different about Underworld, the three cunning Englishmen who in the 90′s have had their way with U.K. beat culture, recasting it as their own aloof, sexy playground. In public and the press, they’ve done a good impersonation of casually acquainted chaps who only happen to work together as celebrated bandmates and Read More
