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all of the forgotten bruises and pain that I brushed beneath the rug of time’s passage when I left years back crawls out like a slithering monster and you try to kick them back under there, but it still peeks out a lot.

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It is easy to forget that behind top artists is a record label, and that record label has a marketing department and PR teams which employ managers and directors to conceive witty ways to convince you to still BUY music.

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I know we’ve been down this road before (not only here but here), but I think it’s also worth mentioning that if Radiohead’s “2+2=5” is criticism — a badgering and well-deserved wallop to the upside of the head — then…

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Anyone who’s taken the time to listen to Arcade Fire’s “Normal Person” will hear lyrics pertaining to middlebrow culture forever seeking its zone of comfort (i.e., “And they will break you down ’til everything is normal now”; think — for instance — of the running critique of how The Daily Show and The Colbert Report may satirize X or Y, but they never actually change X or Y)…

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“Bring it down, bring it on. This is what it feels like.”

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Finally, with “Reflektor,” the first cut off the eponymous new album, we can begin to hear what this quasi-supergroup sounds like. Murphy’s touches — the throbbing bass, the squawk of scratchy needles — are unmistakable.

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It is no longer a question of if you should listen to the new My Bloody Valentine album. It’s a question of what you will say about it, and whose side you’ll be on.

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I came to feel as if the city was only vaguely aware of its party brand, possibly, even, in denial about the true nature of it, as if choosing to perceive the inexhaustible art scene as some sort of “accident” or “coincidence.”