Holy holy holy, all the saints adore thee, casting down their crowns around the glassy sea. Holy holy holy, merciful and mighty, God in three persons, blessed trinity. Once long ago, if I were to leave the house in the early evening with the intention of driving toward Los Angeles, I must needs drive directly toward the sun, which was the orange of a very ripe tangerine. Factory-installed AM radio in a manual-transmission Isuzu I-Mark, books and newspapers and random trash filtering and wax-comb-effecting the speakers in the back. Heading west, flipping the dial and finding "It Takes Two" by Rob Base & DJ EZ-Rock, that benign-Jerry-Lewis groove ("You don't like it? So what, I don't care") and the California heat and the stinky painful smoggy air and the super-high treble brightened by that cheap-ass radio. KDAY 1580. Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In God I know all things are possible. Park someplace a couple of blocks from the spot to save on parking, stroll through streets that look familiar because they are in fact the true saints, which nobody will ever recognize, so that when they're buried and the last of their faithful have passed they will be the deadest and most perfect of saints. There is a new Dr. Octagon album. It has a song called "Ants" on it, and I am trying to tell you what it did to me. All the other songs on the album are also great and very very deep, summer jams stem to stern, but "Ants" is the one that first split my skull so that I had to hold both sides of my head just to keep it together, whereupon I began to testify like a guy with a busted head testifying. Heavy electro groove though this whole record, not ultra-bass electro though on the other hand I ain't got a subwoofer so it could be a good bit deeper than I'm hearing and I'm guessing it is. If you liked the last Prodigy album like I did then I can't see how you won't love this and I mean really love this. If you didn't like the last Prodigy album then swing from my nuts like a monkey on a vine. In the jungle. Baby. Sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na knees. Knees.

Old footage of doomed people always hits me pretty hard anyhow: it's my weakness for narrative, my inherent vulnerability toward decided-upon endings. Something to do with childhood, I think. But beyond my personal feeling for such stories, I think there's a sadness no sensitive person could miss in this clip of Syd Barrett and Roger Waters on British television. Here is Barrett as all his friends say they remember him: bright, soft-spoken, a little shy, passionate in a very muted and hesitant way. Practically everyone who thinks about Syd Barrett at all has a preferred version of the story: either he was a madman who chased his madness out past the point of return, or he was an "acid casualty," or his vision consumed him, or he was chewed up by fame. These, and admixtures of these, make up the going versions of The Syd Story. The probable truth is that schizophrenia travels on the gene, and somewhere within the unpredictable workings of Barrett's brain chemistry, a switch went off. Whether it might have been helped along by LSD or personal pressure is more or less beside the point. The facts as we have them are enough: he was a young man with a distinct voice, and then that voice disintegrated, never to be found whole again. It is almost unbearably sad to hear that young man speak his mind - to hear, with foreknowledge of what will follow, a uniquely creative mind at work. The loss begs huge questions for me, practically tabling all others, the essential one being "why," which opens onto several knottier versions of itself. Good luck.

I have more love and respect for Tom Breihan than I do for almost any other critic working, so I was totally bummed out to read his dismissal of the new Dr. Octagon in the pole position at Pitchfork this morning. His complaints, in order, are as follows: