E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The XX are a new British band of two boys and two girls that are getting great press for their debut, titled XX . I bought it the other day and it is lovely. I am sure it's going to be ignored as Humbug is released today (more on that later I suppose). One of the things that's not true about the reviews is the claim that their sound is original. It isn't - but it is a clever melange of Sonic Youth, Pixies, Lou Reed, Interpol , and perhaps most of all, Joy Division - that is, the post-punk guitars and spare arrangements, and horse-calmed vocals - most remind one of the artier end of indie. Some of the music even seems like Glasvegas , but one austerely pruned. It's haunting, sweet, sometimes eerie, and often moving - and intelligent in an understated way. It'll be an album of the year. My favourite track is 7.

The new Interpol album is recently out, with stuffed and mounted (extinct?) animals from kitsch dioaramas on the cover and inside the lyricless booklet. As is well-known, it is their third, but first on a big label. The question that arises on first hearing this moody, slow-burning, sometimes exquisite, even morose album, is: what exactly does this foursome think they're doing? Labelled under the genre "alternative", American, New Yorkers, and based in the terrorised first decade of the 21st century, Interpol (their name itself is a sign of the times), is a weird cultural throwback. Oddly, the style Interpol have adopted is derived from Joy Division (from a post-industrial town in the North of England) with a hint of The B-52s (listen to those herky-jerky vocals again). Interpol seem like poseurs in this lineage. But they do not parody, but perform a pastiche of a style, and thereby refresh it for the current age. That is, they sound like Joy Division, if Joy Divis...

Editors (pictured) burst onto the scene in the last few years as the band that sounded most like Joy Division , other than Interpol . Their highly-anticipated second album was recently released. Eyewear had been very hopeful it would be even better than their haunting, morbid first album. The current English guitar band style is, broadly-speaking, to be angular and anguished - and always anthemic - this period style starting with Radiohead , moving to Coldplay , and then erupting in a variety of bands like Franz Ferdinand , Snow Patrol , and now Editors. This English Line of moody, introspective, yet ringing bands is perhaps inspired by U2 (though often borrowing heavily from great unsung Simple Minds ). The new album under discussion here, is ten songs that each lay claim to being stirring and existential. Most are about air disasters, imminent death of loved ones and one's self, and the general morbidity of late capitalist society. The songs are propelled by dramatic drums and...

"I feel it closing in / Day in, day out ..." Ian Curtis (pictured) sang on "Digital" - a curiously futuristic title in the late 70s. Now he is one of the true digital icons. The band he led, Joy Division , blooded the new post-punk era in May 1980, when Curtis - most famously - killed himself before embarking for America - indeed, the 27th anniversary was yesterday. One wants to write Amerika . For Curtis is the Kafka of popular independent music - or its Van Gogh , maybe - a European figure of strange tormented, imaginative frequencies, whose antennae were tuned to isolated, icy cold black transmissions. His radio played the depths of German feeling, angst, and history. The enduring fascination with Curtis - a new film debuted to acclaim at Cannes yesterday, with the three remaining members of the band ( New Order ) present - is entirely morbid and entirely justified. Like Sylvia Plath before him, and Ms. Kane after, his is an English Suicide underwritten by ex...

Eyewear often writes about popular music - sometimes reviewing "pop music" - and this might strike some readers as less serious writing than that which considers, say, poetry, or even film. They might be right. Little popular music bears the same weight of scrutiny as a first-rate poem, or great film. Indeed, the names of those composers, lyricists, performers and singer-songwriters who have distinguished themselves as being artists, while arguably large, may truly include only a few creators of genius - Cole Porter, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, The Beatles / George Martin, The Beach Boys, Leonard Cohen, The Doors, Patti Smith, Joy Division, The Smiths, Nirvana, Elliott Smith - and the perennial Bob Dylan , for instance. There are others, but not too many more. Why this is so, no one can say - but it may have something to do with the fact that while intelligent pop music is open to the full resources and strictures that also mark and shape poetry - music and me...

The year 2007 presents several satisfying options for anniversaries. 25 years since The Smiths were formed (1982) or, more gloomily, 20 since they broke up (1987). The Smiths, in the opinion of Eyewear , are one of the two most significant British bands of the last quarter century or so (the other is Joy Division , whose uncanny dark sublimity is inexplicable in a popular, albeit alternative, music context). Radiohead, Oasis , Coldplay , Arctic Monkeys - whatever - they ain't The Beatles , they ain't The Smiths. Strangeways, Here We Come , their fourth and final studio album, charted in the US of A at #55. So it comes as something of a welcome surprise that, recently, one half of the duo that defined Smithean genius, Johnny Marr , joined an alternative American band, Modest Mouse (pictured) - and then went on to have, with his new group, the US #1 album. Is this album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank , worthy of such heights? Is it a curiosity, coasting on Marr's...