The debut from British band Chapel Club - Palace - seems designed for Eyewear's aural pleasure. Ricocheting from the dream-pop sounds of early Nick Heyward/Haircut 100, to the lighter side of Echo & The Bunnymen, with a bit of shoegazing thrown in for good measure, this is a moody, new romantic jangly-guitar indie circa 1981 album that makes a nonsense of the passing of three decades. The style holds up, and while this will either sound (to come-again ears such as mine) like immaculate retro, or simply good pop for first-timers too young to care about forebears, it won't win any prizes for moving music ahead one iota. Still, it joins Hurts, and the recent White Lies albums, as keeping the 80s sounds alive and kicking.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
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