CD | VIVA LA VIDA OR DEATH AND ALL HIS FRIENDS
Coldplay / EMI
Holy goat balls, Batman! I love this album! I’m just as surprised as everyone else. But I gotta give credit where credit’s due, and Martin and company have managed to pull their asses out of Mediocrity Lane to reach for some ineffable quality that approaches greatness. Welcome to Coldplay’s official we-no-longer-give-a-fuck album, wherein they toss the patently inoffensive emo-lite wailings of their previous efforts for a leaner, meaner, and exponentially more experimental sound. I’m not certain if this album would be as consistently and delightfully surprising were it written by a band like, say, Sonic Youth, but it’s a welcome change from the formulaic drivel that England’s most innocuous sons have produced thus far.

CD | LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN, LOOKOUT SEA
Silver Jews / Drag City
You know, I’d never thought I’d ever rate a Coldplay album higher than a Silver Jews album, but here we are. Hunh. Berman’s follow-up to 2005’s excellent Tanglewood Numbers treads the same territory he’s been pushing ever since we entered the new millenium--it’s a pleasing mix of eclectic folk/60’s pop, married to some of the best lyrics ever set to song. The new one has a minor Spector-esque sheen to the production, but it’s still classic Silver Jews at heart, and well worth a listen.

BOOK | THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE
Salman Rushdie / Random House
Salman Rushdie—still not dead. While he might be more infamous for having a fatwa slapped on his ass, Rushdie is a very good novelist, and his latest is the strongest book he’s written since his mid-’90s high. This reads like a classic fairy tale as written by a schizophrenic meth-addled historian, ably dancing between different narrative modes and dreamily blurring the line between myth and fact. It’s over way too soon.

BOOK | MONSIEUR
Jean-Philippe Toussaint / Dalkey Archive
Fuck France. I don’t know why so many French writers have latched on so desperately to the Beckett/Proust one-two combo punch, but this shit has got to STOP. RIGHT. NOW. This piddling little trifle of a novella yearns for some strange type of absurd modernist glory, recasting À la recherche du temps perdu with a hackneyed Estragon-cum-Leopold everyman, but it just ends up feeling trite and contrived. A great book to read if you feel like being angry about literature.

BOOK | I HAVEN’T DREAMED OF FLYING FOR A WHILE
Yamada Taichi / Faber & Faber
What a lovely little novel. Taichi is reminiscent of Haruki Murakami’s best works, seamlessly melding the mind-numbing tedium of modern domestic life with a strange form of unsettling magical realism. While the plot essentially revolves around a doomed love affair, the startlingly subtle touches and the laugh-out-loud silliness of the protagonist’s minor existential crisis makes this tale shine.

It’s no wonder the new Coldplay album is good… Brian Eno emptied his magic bladder all over it (it did wonders for Devo, Talking Heads and U2, He made Roxy Music great and his solo pop albums are top notch).