Simon on the age-old authenticity question nails several points squarely on the head & all the way into the wall, really quite brilliant; makes me hope for more general-critical-response occasions that rub Simon the wrong way, since he, when he disagrees with someone, zeros right in on the issues in play - none of the stale ad-hom junk that characterizes a lot of the debates around, say, hip-hop.

Got sick and had to miss the Enon show the other night, which is a dirty shame twice over; first, because it was Enon, who're one of the best bands in America, and second, because it was the second time this week that the Duke Coffeehouse had brought some great music in from out of town.

Cohesive almost to a fault, meanwhile, is the LCD Soundsystem record that everyone seems to have been talking about forever. It's just as good as anyone says it is, I think, though I'm reporting to you from the belly of First-Response. I only fired up the Moveable Type so as to say before I forget: I think Enon and LCD Soundsystem are treading not just similar ground but the exact same path. It's just that John Schmersal's feelings about the journey differ from James Murphy's. Reportedly, Murphy references Bloom's "Anxiety of Influence" in interviews; in practice, Schmersal opts instead for what I'd call the romance of influence, or maybe for a long late summer in one of influence's dirty emotional backwaters: that place where such anxiety as there is impels the puported "influencee" (which, as Mark Sinker would hasten to add & rightly too, is an inversion of the relationship that actually occurs) not to react with shame or defiance, but to submit to absolute pollution, ravishment, dissolution, thence to report what that felt like.

The hype, which has gotten pretty huge at this point, is true: the new Fiona Apple is a fascinating and unique document that also happens to be a damned good listen, every bit as adventurous and playful and daring and brimming with its own personality as everybody says it is; the title track by itself is worth your fourteen clams, should the album ever be released. I am as surprised as everybody else is about the album's high quality, because I really hated Apple's debut, and her public bitching about her label woes shouldn't earn her any sympathy from even her most dedicated fans: if she didn't read her contract, or have someone explain it to her, then she deserves what she got. Nobody forced her to take what I'd guess was a rather huge advance. The title of the follow-up is such an easy target that we must, despite ourselves, decline to punish it further.

I hope to write a longer piece that does it some justice at some point, but before any of us get any older I wanted to let everybody know: there's a new album by Origin, who're a death metal band from Kansas. It's called Echoes of Decimation. If you have any love for death metal, it's totally crucial. Right now I am too slack-jawed to say anything besides "wow." And maybe "Jesus Christ." This is the good, hard, cosmic stuff.

Amazon asked me to write a list of twenty albums I'm listening to lately. I was so happy to be asked for this instead of "the twenty best albums of all time!" that I went ahead and wrote it. Click here to read it - next time you see me, I'll be in Texas.